Eric Rosen

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Here's how to produce superior e-learning more efficiently with collaborative storyboard technology. Many e-learning practitioners express the sentiment of feeling trapped by the traditional process of producing content. They bristle at how it consumes excessive manpower, and they share a common desire to reform the process. However,...

Why Collaborative Storyboard Technology Is Mission Critical

I admit it. I love when people seek my opinion. That happened a lot in Denver, at ASTD 2012:I am entering the field. What do I do to make a success of it?Let’s pretend that somebody asked me to deliver a commencement speech in response to that question, preferably on a lush, ivy covered campus, near amiable watering holes.Thank you for inviting me to share this wonderful occasion with the workforce learning graduates of 2012....Let me begin by congratulating you on your career choice. I am sure you and your family are delighted—after all you could have chosen to go to law school. After years of clamoring for a seat at the table, C-levels are increasingly intrigued by what we can do for them. Pressure for growth, technology, and a competitive landscape create abundance and opportunity for workplace learning people. Every sector, from higher ed to pharma, is seeking candidates whose heads are screwed on right. What do I mean by right? I am talking about heads with an unrelenting focus on performance and results.Everything I say then is from the vantage point of celebration. I think this is a bountiful time to be in our field. I think you can get in the door. That's not the primary challenge. What's difficult is to make the most of it once you are in place.My advice to you as you commence this tasty career….·        It’s not about how. It’s about why. Several years ago, I served on a committee to review submissions for awards at an international conference. We considered a four-day course for engineers soon to be tasked with serving as instructors. The course devoted itself to teaching them Instructional Design 101, with half of the first day spent writing letter-perfect, four-part objectives. And so on and so forth. My eyes glazed over. The engineers’ eyes would close entirely. Wrong stuff.A more recent example came from online compliance training I was dragooned into taking. The topic was information security. Screen 3 listed the objectives. Only three of the eight had anything to do with my work and life. How would I endure the next 73 screens? Even animated pandas could not make this e-learning successful. Wrong stuff.In our business, we begin with the end in mind. Heaven help us when those ends are wrong-headed.·        It’s not about us. It’s about them. Sounds obvious, I know. But I can’t tell you how often I hear people say they want to put the program in the classroom because they themselves like to learn in the classroom. Or they are going to try out avatars because they are engaging. (Are they?)One twenty-something told me that she intended to do coaching for supervisors and managers. I asked why. She said she thought she would be good at it and that coaching was a good way to help people. While eloquent about her preferences and capabilities, she never mentioned evidence. Would coaching work in this case? Shouldn’t she review the literature on that matter? And what of her lack of experience as a supervisor and manager? The fact that she likes people is good but by no means sufficient.It isn’t what you want to do. It’s what the work, worker and workplace demand. There’s the challenge and the opportunity.·        It’s not any one thing. It’s many things, aligned, in systems. Forget shiny pennies. Mobile learning is an example of just such a penny. ASTD’s chief Tony Bingham loves it. I love it too. I’ve written about it. I see ample potential. But it is no slam dunk in and of itself. No single solution, not mobile or webinars or games or even gamification, is the answer. The value of each emerges within systems. Our goal is strategic benefit, such as making information available on demand, tracking performance, reminding of expectations, enabling tons of practice, or helping new customer service reps communicate with peers or coaches.Take the job of retirement specialist. Consider the stress the topic provokes in customers. Think about how much there is to know to do this job, and then extend your vision to the attention that regulators pay to it. If you are tasked with developing and supporting these professionals, best not throw a single solution at it, no matter how nifty that solution is. Your program must involve intense and graduated lessons, lots of practice with diverse cases, coaching and feedback, assessments and self-assessment—and that’s the development part of it. Surely you would want to provide human and automated resources available on demand to deal with infrequent questions, lengthy procedures and updates.Mobile? Games? Perhaps. Why not? What’s for sure is that there must be a concerted system. There’s the challenge and the opportunity.·        The soft stuff is the hard stuff. A few weeks ago I visited Deloitte University with 75 learning leaders. Our focus was leader development. Eric Paul from Dell said to nods all around, "The soft stuff is the hard stuff."And not just for leader development. The retirement specialist can’t just know about retirement, she must want to help. Same for the USPS. My postal deliverers know their job and then they do it with gusto. They stop back, wait a moment or two to get a signature, or brighten my day with a howdy. It’s knowing and doing and caring to exert effort. How do we influence that through training and development?How will you systematize the development of minds AND hearts and bellies? There’s the challenge and the opportunity.·         No matter how much you know today, success depends on your ability to learn continuously, forever . In the opening keynote at ASTD 2012, Jim Collins reminded us of the importance of humility.Now, as you launch your career, it’s time to weigh the value of humility. If you are humble, you know that you do not know it all. Your humility opens you up to lessons, messages, ideas and surprises. You seek them.Don’t just nod at me, graduates. What are you going to do to systematically assess and develop? How will you push yourself beyond your comfort zone? For starters, let me suggest that you join a local professional association, and an international too. ASTD is a great choice, but not the only one. Consider ISPI and eLearning Guild. Find one I don’t know about.Take advantage of the idea of a personal learning network. Tour regularly in domains with which you are not familiar, where you will encounter approaches that are not old hat to you. I did it yesterday. This morning I contemplated all that went into the development and mobile support that enabled a British tree surgeon to save a tiny finch.As you refresh your skills and perspectives, you will also inoculate yourself against burn out. There’s the challenge and the opportunity.I think commencement addresses are supposed to conclude with an inspirational quote from someone like John Kennedy or Martin Luther King.   Instead, I’ll turn to baseball. First, Pete Rose: “You owe it to yourself to be the best you can possible be—in baseball and in life.” Then there’s the speedy Lou Brock: “No one wants to hear about the labor pains, they just want to see the baby.” And finally, Yogi Berra, “I wish I had an answer to that because I'm tired of answering that question.”  Actually, I’m glad I got to answer a question about advice for new grads-- and I hope my thoughts will also be useful for the old grads who stumble upon these words. That’s what I hope you will be in your career—useful. Just a word, and within it is both the challenge and the opportunity.

My Commencement Address for the Workforce Learning Class of 2012

Erica Dhawan is a leading expert on 21st century collaboration, CEO of Cotential, and co-author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence. Prior to her keynote session, Dhawan spoke with Connection Point about her background and experience and what she’ll share with ATD Virtual Conference attendees.Please share a bit about your research on digital body language. Why and how did you decide to pursue that?After authoring my book, Get Big Things Done, I traveled the world, speaking and consulting on the subject of collaboration. My mission was to help organizations bring people closer together on teams no matter the distance. Everywhere I went, the same issue kept popping up. The same tools that enabled swifter, more ideal connections—email, text messaging, Slack, Zoom, and so on—were in fact eroding the very thing leaders were trying to improve: effective human collaboration.The more I worked with leaders to forge new, improved connections in their businesses, the more obvious it was that the digital tools that had set us free in so many ways had also led to widespread miscommunication and conflict. And all of that was lowering employee engagement and creating across-the-board anxiety.If you’ve ever read an email from a colleague that would read as professional to one person but was clearly passive-aggressive to you, you know what I’m talking about. Digital body language is the new cues and signals that make up the subtext of our messages, and it is a critical leadership skill to master to drive silo-breaking collaboration, inclusion, and engagement—just like traditional body language in the past. Signals such as our timing, choice of medium, punctuation, who we CC and BCC, and our words indicate our tone and underlying meaning. I love this topic because it’s so prevalent in our everyday lives that most people don’t even think about it. When I start breaking down digital body language signals, people’s faces light up, or they laugh and say “Yes, that happens to me!”Can you provide some quick tips as to what professionals should take into account before hitting the “send” button on digital messaging?I think most mistakes and miscommunications can be preempted by simply resisting the urge to hit send as fast as possible. Here are a few tips:Think before you type. We live in a very fast-paced world, but we need to take a step back and proofread our messages, not just for grammar or correctness but for tone and clarity as well. Before you hit send, take a quick read and ask, “Is my message clear?” and “How could my language and punctuation—or even medium—choice be misinterpreted?”Choose clarity over brevity. The pressure to communicate quickly is making us take shortcuts that can be confusing. A short message is not inherently a clear message. And many times leaders come across as sloppy when they send the shortest message possible—at the very least, you need to make sure that each message is clear on what you’re asking, why, and by when.Less haste equals more speed. The rapid pace at which communication happens via digital means pushes all of us into a mindset where immediate responses and multitasking seem to be mandatory. Develop the digital communication skill of patient and careful responses. This will enable you to avoid the re-dos necessary to make up for mistakes that you made through haste.As recipients of so many electronic communications, what should we be keeping in mind about the person and context surrounding the message so we’re better able to understand?Your manager reminds you of an upcoming deadline. Is he just being helpful, or is he showcasing his hierarchical dominance? Are you making the whole thing up, is it a little of both, or is it neither? How can you tell? To better understand digital body language, you must understand that inherent in any communications you are answering two questions: Who between us has more power? How much do you and I trust each other?In any two-way or group communication, people may use digital body language signals and cues to subconsciously attempt to answer those two questions. We may prioritize speed, clarity, and substantive messages with our bosses and clients yet choose to deliver one-liners with no subject line to a junior report. If you email a close colleague and the trust between you is high, they may assume you are busy if you respond in brief or take several days to reply. But if the trust is low, your colleague may interpret your silence as deliberate and your brevity as an expression of simmering resentment or even anger. When dealing with confusing messages, assess how much power and trust you have, and assume the best intent.What do you hope participants will take away from your keynote session?I hope they walk away with really practical tools to eliminate the challenges of remote work and establish trust, empowerment, and motivation in today’s digital workplace. For the past six years, I’ve studied a wide array of exchanges—from large virtual conferences and Zoom meetings to daily emails, instant messages, and conference calls. I believe simple, specific digital body language changes invigorate any work relationship. Participants will walk away with an understanding of the digital body language signals they broadcast, even if they don’t intend to, and how to build trust and connection, no matter the distance.ATD’s Virtual Conference was designed to provide a safe space for TD pros to come together to learn. What one thing have you learned that has made the greatest impact in your life?I grew up in a family of Indian immigrants, where I was taught that learning and developing yourself is everything. But I’ve also learned that you need to upgrade your capabilities when an existing way of thinking doesn’t apply anymore. My book Get Big Things Done seeks to upgrade our skillsets from emotional intelligence in the 1990s to the digital world of connectional intelligence. My second book on the topic of Digital Body Language (to be released in 2021) seeks to help us thrive by mastering the upgrade from traditional to digital body language. I hope to keep learning and growing myself, while upgrading 21st century leadership skills like connectional intelligence and digital body language to organizations everywhere.Share your ATD Virtual Conference experience on social media. #ATDVirtualConference

Eric Rosen

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