E. A. Puffer

I feel that all of us are searching for ways and means to increase the effective-ness of the whole training job. Industry is spending increasing sums of money on training courses every year.

Who Does The Training

You’re a manager, an executive, a leader of men. Your company depends on you, and you know it. You also know that in order to succeed in today’s tough competitive climate, you need to do one thing before all others. You need to innovate. You know this because, well, all the magazines are telling you this. Oh, and all the books. And all those speakers at the last corporate event. It’s “Innovate or die!”, and you got the t-shirt to prove it (literally, they gave them out at the event). Sure, you have some suspicions about it all, particularly as the term seems to be everywhere, but since everyone else seems to be doing it, you do it too – you believe. And as any true believer, you go to your flock and you preach the gospel. The only problem? They don’t look very happy. You expect energy, purpose, passion. You get… tired looks. What happened?Well, there is a problem in innovation-land, and the name of this problem is innovation fatigue. It is born out of the overuse of the word “innovation”, out of the relentlessness with which managers repeat it’s mantras, and out of the emptying out of meaning that this has caused. Innovation used to be a concept filled with meaning and joy, but its overuse (particularly) in the corporate world has created a situation where many employees see the word as either an empty cliché or as shorthand for “we’re going to pressure you for something new, without guidance, resources or support”. So those tired looks do mean something – they mean you need to become serious about making innovation meaningful again.Innovation fatigue, as I use the term, is what happens when a group of people – e.g. a team in an organization – is subjected to vague innovation talk and badly explicated innovation projects to the point where the very reference to “innovation” triggers feelings of boredom and meaninglessness. It can emerge after a company runs a series of innovation projects that fail to generate anything particularly innovative, or from managers repeating pointless clichés like “think outside the box” or “let’s innovate our way out of this”. Regardless of how it emerges, it builds on managers and leaders propagating a vague and far too general perspective on innovation and thereby emptying it of meaning.Although this happens in subtly different ways in different organizations, there are similarities and things to look out for. For the practicing manager afraid of creating innovation fatigue, or suspecting his organization may be suffering from it, here’s a checklist for some warning signs:It all becomes a joke. Clichés and chestnuts are near and dear to many a manager’s heart, but they can also be deadly in an organizational setting. If you notice that talk of innovation makes people roll their eyes or snigger, this can mean that people no longer believe the talk about innovation, and have mentally fled the field when you’re trying to inspire them.New initiatives are met with old solutions. Organizations often run too many innovation initiatives to dedicate themselves fully to any one of them, and thus try to replace quantity with quality. Employees get wise to this, and know that there’s no point putting in their best work – there’ll be another project roll-out soon. When your team pulls out a comfortable and predictable routine process at the very mention of a new innovation project, you know that fatigue may be setting in.They beg you to stop. Yes, I know you’ve been taught that there is resistance to change, and you’re probably very keen to combat this. But resistance can also mean that people no longer see any meaning in the processes you propose, and the smart leader listens to such complaints and takes them seriously.They’ve given up. The tired looks can also signal that people will no longer even try to engage with innovation. Instead, your employees may go through the motions, maybe even state some generalities about innovation, but in reality they’ve given up on even the dream of creating something transformative. So people will sit in on the meetings, even fake participation, but nothing comes out of it – because they see it all as a charade, and drop the pretense once the meeting is over.And it may be you, yes you, who is causing this. You probably didn’t mean to, but innovation is hard, and easy to get wrong. Innovation fatigue is however a treatable affliction, where the first step towards healing is accepting the illness. Ask yourself: Am I making innovation a meaningful concept for us, or is it just a word I throw around? Am I getting people fired up, or just plain fatigued?

Are You Creating “Innovation Fatigue”?

Can the number of “experience points” a student earns in a “gamified” learning experience be used to predict their achievement in final exams? This was the question a part of a research project conducted at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom recently set out to answer. Does More Experience Equals Exam Achievement?For the purposes of the experiment, we used an executive-level course at the Business School as our benchmark. Students would access a gamified learning platform, in which viewing, commenting, and contributing back to the platform would help them earn experience points and permissions to progress (or “level up”) to the next stage. We could then compare these results with the final assignment grades they achieved, which were completed offline and double-blind marked by accredited examiners.The results confirmed what we believed might be true: students who earned more experience points went on to get higher marks in the final assignments. The relationship between experience points and exam results, however, wasn’t entirely straightforward. Earning the most experience points didn’t guarantee you the top grade, but it was a fair indicator that you would pass.  Interestingly enough, the most consistent result was seen in those students who didn’t play the game.  This small group of students who failed to engage with the platform went on to struggle with the final assignment. How Does Contribution Quality Relate to Performance?Experience points gave us a general pointer as to performance, but the relationship wasn’t always clear.  We needed to investigate the quality of student’s contributions further to learn more about the effect of gamification. We started a new experiment to account for quality.  We used the same audience, doing the same course as our benchmark.  For this analysis we used a model called Cognitive Presence.  Developed by Randy Garrison in 2001, Cognitive Presence is part of what Garrison calls the Community of Inquiry framework, and it gives us a tool by which we can measure the quality of a contribution to an online learning environment.The model runs from level 1 to level 4, with level 4 being the highest level of Cognitive Presence, signifying that the student has reached a point of critical thought that is demonstrative of higher-order learning.  Not all contributions make the scale. For example, a simple “nice article” doesn’t add much to the experience from a cognitive point of view.For this part of the research, we split the class into two separate experiences. For one group, gamification encouraged participation; for the other group gamification demanded participation.  For the second group to progress, a student would have to contribute and comment to earn enough experience points to “level-up.” At intervals throughout each experience, we asked students to respond critically to discussion questions. It was these answers that we put through the Cognitive Presence content analysis.The results were compelling. In the first group, where participation was encouraged, students contributed 734 times in class discussion and submitted 182 responses to discussion questions. Of these answers, 53 (29 percent) reached level 4—the highest level of critical thought.  In the second group, where participation was mandatory, students contributed 2239 times in class discussion, and submitted 178 responses to discussion questions. Of these answers, zero reached the highest level of critical thought.  Not one.  Only three answers made it to level 3.What Does All This Mean?Our “hard” gamification had meant a large amount of discussion was generated; in fact, three times more than when our gamification had been less demanding.  But the quality of this discussion seemed to be totally lacking; it actually hindered critical thought rather than enhancing it. Students anecdotally reported being exhausted from the whole experience. They played the game, but frankly, it was too much.The irony is that if we’d simply measured the participation figures from our experiment, we would have come to the conclusion that our gamification was having a huge positive impact. We did triple the amount of contributions, after all!But as the saying does, the devil is in the details. Gamification can be good for learning, but you have to get the game setup right. When the gamification aspect is overly demanding—and when participation in everything is contingent on passing the course—then we quality can have a tendency to drop severely. These findings tally with previous research into the effect of intrinsic/extrinsic motivators for learning activities. Bottom line: When an extrinsic motivator is adopted by a user autonomously choosing to go for an objective, engagement increases; when the goal is forced upon the user and completion is contingent on participation, motivation often suffers.Additional information about this research can be found in a forthcoming article in the April 2013 issue of  Inside Learning Technologies & Skills magazine  or in the peer-reviewed paper, “Gamification as a Tool for Increasing the Depth of Student Understanding Using a Collaborative E-Learning Environment,” included in the April special edition of the International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning.

E. A. Puffer

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