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Walter D. Storey

WHICH WAY MANAGERDIRECTED OR PERSONCENTERED CAREER PATHING

One of the unique products to emerge in an increasingly crowded field of social tools is Pinterest, a fun combination of social bookmarking, images, commenting, and public sharing.  It’s a great place for connecting with and sharing resources for your own professional development.But that doesn’t mean everyone is ready—or knows how—to use Pinterest. Here is some help.Lead them to waterI’ve been dealing with introducing new techs and tools for a long time now.  The best way I’ve found of encouraging acceptance and use is introducing a tool at the moment it will solve someone’s problem. A lot there depends on serendipity and hearing opportunity when it knocks. And one of the easiest ways to teach people to use (and like) a tool is to give them something fun to do with it.I’ve tricked (er, I mean led) lots of people to Pinterest by asking them to share photos of their favorite holiday decorations (even better if they tell a short story with it).  We’ve even developed a few Pinterest traditions, including the fabulous annual collaborative Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide . I hadn’t intended to do it this year, but demand from people on Twitter I don’t even know prompted me to again host the Thanksgiving Gallery of Hand Turkeys. Some 42 people contributed, from age 5 up, individually and as families, and some from other countries where they don’t even celebrate Thanksgiving. Is it silly? Sure. But it builds connection and community, and it is fun. More important, it helps people understand and use the tool. And when I ask some of them later to find and share an image they’d include on a virtual tour of their workplace, well, they’ll already know how to do that. Now, here are some ideas for L&D practitioners looking for ways to incorporate Pinterest into practice. Collaborative bookmarkingCheck out this collaborative board from Tracy Parish. She invited industry friends to pin their suggestions for good books about instructional design. Most include a comment from the pinner about why they chose it, and link directly to Amazon so they can be purchased.  Note the number of comments, including some from authors of the books pinned. Building a narrative/backchannel learningI recently attended the pilot of Mike Rohde’s new Sketchnote Workshop.  While I tweeted it, as usual, I realized the visual nature of it might be better suited to Pinterest.I began documenting my day and uploading photos and comments as we switched activities or shared what we were doing. It built a nice narrative of the day and offered a place for quick conversation.  This also supported backchannel learning for colleagues who were unable to attend the workshop. A friend, intrigued by the tweets, visited the Pinterest board and ended up sketchnoting the meeting she was in that day. She’s now bringing Mike in to deliver the workshop for the Atlanta ASTD chapter (February 11: check back on the chapter’s event page for details coming soon).Board: My Day at Mike Rohde’s Pilot of His New Sketchnote WorkshopVirtual field trips Offer tours of facilities to new hires; tours of your training center to first-time visitors; tours of a conference site. You can use these for recruiting to show potential hires how the workplace looks, such as pictures of areas where defibrillators are installed. You might include pictures of company extras; a friend who’s worked at a local big company for years didn’t know there was a meditation garden until I posted a photo of it.Overview of topic or area of interest and handout replacementAlthough I’ve been offering it in webinar format for years, my “Tips for the Positive Deviant” session suddenly caught fire last May. There was so much interest in it I finally set up a Pinterest board with highlights and key points from the session, additional resources with links for easy access, and a link to the ASTD webinar recording. This also serves as a much more robust takeaway than a copy of my slides or other usual event handout.Prework or snapshot of planned conversationAs one of the moderators of the weekly Twitter-based #lrnchat sessions, I often see the problem of having a chat catch someone’s eye after it’s underway. They want to join in, but they are coming into the conversation late, sometimes to a topic that’s a bit esoteric. Or—and I’m guilty too—they didn’t read an article we suggested for prereading. So, we’ve started using a Pinterest board to support some of these chats. Participants can check in quickly and get an overview of the topic—just the gist of it, sometimes, but enough to help them participate more fully. Here’s one we created to support a #lrnchat conversation focused on our own beliefs and metaphors about learning and teaching, and what those beliefs mean to one’s practice.Course resources and supportAssistant Professor Steven Bickmore uses Pinterests boards to create reading lists for each of his courses.  They’re easy to update, more enticing than a list of typed titles, and available for the rest of us to peruse.Encouraging reflectionI’ve reused the “metaphor” board described above as a reflective activity for students in instructional design and train-the-trainer sessions. They are asked to review it and then provide a verbal or written description of their own metaphors and how they are borne out in their own practice.Job aidsWhile I prefer Snapguide for preparing job aids these days, you could easily build a guide in Pinterest. Be sure to add images in reverse order.  As comments can alter layout and size, you might want to number them, too.  Post pictures of equipment repairs and workarounds. And remember: You don’t have to be the one doing all the pinning.Collaborative class activitiesHere are some ideas:Invite pinners to share images of customer service issues (like stained carpets and water cooler with no cups). Have a conversation about corporate culture based on pinned images of company furnishings and signage. Post pictures of the different ways a classroom can be set up, and ask participants in a train-the-trainer course to describe how each setup might affect interaction and social activities.Have learners share images of final projects.Did you have groups discuss an issue and create a flip chart report?  Post pictures of the charts.Host a Pinterest Appy Hour: Invite pinners to share their favorite new app from the past year; their favorite productivity app; their favorite photography app, their favorite app for travel, and so on.Have learners create a class book recapping activities and takeaways.Reaching other learnersOne of my historical concerns about many social tools is that so many of them are heavily text-based: blogs, microblogs, text chats, and so forth. In my world this can marginalize those with low-literacy skills or those with English as a second language.  We’re in a world in which the vast majority of our workforces own some kind of mobile phone or device—most of them with cameras.  The potential for user-generated images to support and include these workers is tremendous.Logistical tips and advice for using PinterestHere’s how Pinterest works:Pinterest is free. It is available on desktop or via a free mobile app.Pinterest allows you to pin images from a website and, from other Pinterest boards. You can also pin by uploading images from your own computer or mobile device.Pinterest boards are public to view; anyone can see them without an account.In order to create boards and pin to them, you need your own account.At this time, Pinterest doesn’t allow for moving pins around a board. To build a chronology—like a story from start to finish—you need to upload in order you want them to be viewed.You can set up “secret” boards to work on until you are ready to publish them. At this time only the board owner can work with the secret boards; they can’t be shared with other pinners.You need to issue invitations to other pinners. While some complain that Pinterest doesn’t offer users public boards on which everyone can pin, it also means that spammers can’t just pin on any board. It makes it a bit safer for those concerned about material inappropriate for some audiences.Sometimes for the sake of speed or including people who for whatever reason don’t have or want a Pinterest account, I just ask people to send me images and I upload them myself.

Pinterest for L&D

December 2022 - TD Magazine

Reduce the friction that is preventing learners from engaging with your learning.Businesses spend billions of dollars trying to understand consumer behavior, resulting in marketing strategies that aim to get consumers to buy their products. However, in those companies, many L&D functions are not leveraging the same insights and strategies to reach their learners. Treat your learning solutions like products, and minimize the friction between the solutions and learners. One way to do so is using BJ Fogg's behavior model to evaluate your learning initiatives.Identify the frictionThe Fogg behavior model looks at three conditions that must be present for someone to engage in a behavior: motivation, ability, and a prompt. When one of them is absent or diminished, so is the likelihood that the desired behavior will occur.For example, let's say you have a missed call on your cell phone. Why didn't you answer the phone? Maybe you heard it ring, looked down and saw who was calling, and decided you didn't want to talk to that person right now. You heard the ring—that was the prompt. Nothing was keeping your from answering the call (that is to say, you had the ability). You just didn't want to—you didn't have the motivation to engage in the behavior.Now let's say the phone rings, and you're expecting the call and want to take it. But you can't find your phone, or it's in another room and you can't get there in time. Again, you heard the ring (the prompt), and this time you wanted to take the call (motivation), but you weren't able to get to the phone in time (ability).Finally, let's say you're expecting the call, and your phone is right next to you. However, the ringer is set to silent. The phone rings, you want to answer and are able to do so, but you never hear the ring—you received no prompt to answer it.That's how Fogg's behavior model works. The presence or absence of any of the variables can contribute directly to the likelihood that you'll engage in a given behavior.What if we look at learner behavior through that lens? You've created a great learning initiative and spent a lot of time and money on the learning ecosystem. However, you don't seem to be getting the traction you're hoping for. Here are some questions to consider:Are learners aware of the learning solution? Are there prompts that alert learners to its availability?Are learners motivated? Do they want to engage in learning?Are they able to engage with the learning solution?Is there anything preventing them or making it more difficult for them to access it?If you have opportunities in any of those areas, then you have friction between learners and the learning solution. Friction, in this context, is the absence of prompts or is anything that impedes motivation or ability when it comes to a learning initiative.PromptsIf learners don't know about your learning initiative, it may as well not exist. These days, people are inundated with prompts—pop-ups on smartphones, ads on social media, digital billboards, and the like. How can we ensure that learners are prompted to our initiatives? The traditional methods are static and push prompts.A static prompt is one that is in a fixed physical location, such as a poster in a breakroom. It works fine when your audience tends to be isolated in one particular location. But if someone is not in that exact location, they won't see it.A push prompt is much more targeted. It entails identifying your audience members and sending a prompt to them, such as an email reminder that a course is available. However, you often can't customize that prompt by audience member—everyone gets the same message. And you can't time the prompt so that it reaches an individual right when they need it most. Thus, there are some limitations to what we have traditionally used as prompts in our learning ecosystems.This is an area we should pay close attention to because it has the potential to change rapidly. Imagine if we could activate a prompt for a specific learner at a specific time and in a specific location with a learning solution that is designed precisely for the activity that they are engaging in in that moment? It would be similar to finding an exclusive offer from Starbucks popping up on your phone whenever you're within 50 yards of a store.MotivationMotivation should be the easiest variable in this equation. If your initiative meets a learning need, learners should be inherently motivated to engage with it. However, that isn't always the case. In my experience, there are two major reasons. The first is that the solution does not meet a learning need (which is a subject for another article). The second, and more egregious, reason is that learning solutions get bogged down with demotivators that dilute learners' eagerness.Given the massive increase in video use for learning, there are some lessons to be learned from how people engage with YouTube and how we think about the videos and other learning initiatives we create.I often use the example of having a hole in my drywall and turning to YouTube to see how to fix it. Not surprisingly, there are numerous options from which to choose. We've all become accustomed to using filters to narrow down internet search results, although we often do our own visual filtering first. For example, I can take a quick look at a results list on YouTube for drywall repair and immediately rule out, or at least deprioritize, some of the videos. The first thing I'll look at is time. I expect that this should be a relatively simple task, so I'm not looking for a long video. The shorter the better.Likewise, learners have an expectation of how simple or complex a task is and at least some sense of how long it should take to learn. If they see that a video is 30 minutes long, and their perception of the task doesn't line up with that amount of time, you may lose them right away.I start playing a six-minute video from the list. After a lengthy introduction, a bio of the host, and several examples that don't apply to what I'm looking for, the host eventually starts the process of explaining how to execute the repair. It took over one minute to get there. That is an informal measurement I call "time to learning"—or how long it takes before I get to the actual learning. Time to learning is especially important when considering whether our goal is knowledge retention or knowledge acquisition. In other words, are learners in this for the long haul, or do they just need a quick one-off fix that they will rarely if ever need again?When looking at learning from a knowledge retention standpoint, time to learning is slightly less important. We know we're going to get deep, and participants learning about the instructor's credibility can be helpful to set the tone. But if we seek knowledge acquisition, or disposable knowledge, time to learning matters a lot—especially if there are several options from which to choose.For example, imagine I need to generate a report for my manager, who is out sick. I've never done the task before, and it's highly unlikely that I'll ever have to do it again. After some digging, I find a few videos that will help me figure out what to do. However, the videos don't cover only the report I need to generate; they cover all the reports in the entire program and explain where the data from those reports comes from and why they're important to the business.Are those bad things for me to know? Of course not. But they're not relevant to what I need to do right now. Getting what I need is like searching for that how-to needle in a haystack of video instruction. I may resort to other options, such as trial and error (risky) or asking a colleague (now two of us are wasting time trying to figure this out).Going back to the drywall video: I stuck with it for more than a minute only to see how long it would take for the purposes of this example. If I had a real need, I doubt I would have held out for more than 10–15 seconds.We can and should apply the same lessons to our video content libraries and consider where we are adding friction that we should remove. In most cases, those are demotivators that don't reflect the quality of our instructional design yet may deter learners from ever finding that out.AbilityAnother go-to source for information in people's nonwork lives is Google. Here's what happens if I search for "how to repair drywall"—let's count the clicks: I open the browser to Google and type the search term, then click Search. One click. What I see first are a few links to associated terms like "water damage" and "peeling" that enable me to refine my search. Below that is a frame from a video already queued to a specific timecode that is likely to address my need. Below that are links to a few more videos, all with descriptions and timecodes of key moments in the videos. Next up is the "People also ask" section, which displays several ways that others have posed their question that may be more in alignment with my need. And finally, I get a list of results that I would normally expect to see on Google. All from one click.Now think about your learners and, more importantly, your learning ecosystem. Most likely your version of Google is some sort of learning management system or learning experience platform. How many clicks does it take learners to get there? Once someone arrives at your version of Google, how many of the features described above does it have? How easy is it for learners to find what they need?Many of us are presumably still in a situation where learners must go through six, eight, or even 10-plus clicks to find what they need. Number of clicks and speed to solution are ways we can assess learners' ability to engage in the desired behavior.Nobody wants to click through a never-ending menu. Individuals have been conditioned that they shouldn't have to, and they are far more likely to give up somewhere along the way than they are to reach the end.Other ability barriers include bandwidth and hardware. Sometimes our instructional design comes with ability barriers. If you have motivated learners who know about your initiatives, make it as easy as possible for them to access and engage with learning.Enhance learning's impactThis article has numerous questions you can ask about any given learning solution. It's going to be difficult to get satisfactory answers to all of them. But what you can do is identify an area that you believe may be causing friction for your learners and is something that you can influence.In other words, we all want better bandwidth, but you probably have an extremely limited ability to influence that yourself. You may have a better chance implementing some prompts for learners that can move the needle. Or you may be able to reduce the number of clicks required to access content with some adjustments to your internal websites or portals. Start small by looking for areas to reduce friction with existing learning solutions, and then incorporate the ideas into the design phase of future ones.If you treat your learning program like a product and view your learning ecosystem as a mechanism for reaching your audience and providing that product, it may change your perspective.

Are You Driving Learners Away!

A participant in a workshop we were teaching in Canada told us an amazing story. His company had sponsored him to complete an executive MBA program at Harvard. Over the course of a year, they paid to fly him back and forth between Alberta and Boston, plus his salary, lodging, tuition, and other expenses. The day he returned to work after completing the program, his boss called him into the office and said, “Welcome back. I don’t want to hear any of the crap you learned at Harvard.We were dumbfounded. What a terrible waste of time and money! A hundred thousand dollars down the drain because the manager was not on board. And then we realized that while this was a single, dramatic example, the same kind of thing happens all the time.Employees attend training and come back enthused about using what they learned, only to have their managers throw cold water on it. It may be overt (“that may be what they taught you, but that is not how we do it in my department”), or it may be through simple neglect. Regardless, the total cost of the learning scrap generated runs into the millions of dollars, not just hundreds of thousands.Why does this happen and what can we, as learning professionals, do to prevent it?Root CausesThe vital role that managers play in making sure training pays off has long been recognized. Rob Brinkerhoff, in Telling Training’s Story (2006), put it succinctly: “When managers support training and learners, it works. When they do not, it does not.”So why don’t managers do more to support learning and learners? We think there are three root causes:insufficient buy-in to the goals and processignorance of the impact (positive and negative) that they have on training’s return on investmentuncertainty about what they can do to be sure the company gets its money’s worth.Pre-Emptive ActionSo what can we do to avoid having managers intentionally or unintentionally undermine the benefits of training? We need to take pre-emptive action to be sure that all the time and effort invested in learning and development (L&D) opportunities pay a return by:ensuring managerial buy-inmaking sure that managers understand their impact on training outcomesproviding managers with short, simple, effective things they can do to maximize the value.Ensure Buy-In. If managers don’t understand the business value and rationale for the training, they won’t actively support it. Ensure buy-in by including managers in the targeting and design of the training—not just senior managers, but also those who supervise the attendees; they are critical for implementation. Also, be sure that when you describe L&D initiatives, you always stress the business outcomes, not just the learning objectives. Explain the Impact. Most managers have no idea how large an impact their action—or inaction—has on whether their department benefits from training. A study at American Express concluded that managers “can make or break the success of any training initiative.” It isn’t enough for managers to just not be negative; they need to be visibly and actively supportive. When managers say nothing one way or another about training, employees interpret that to mean that it is not important. Educate managers about the impact they have. For instance, when Pfizer shared the results of a study on the impact of managers with their line leaders, coaching went up. Provide Suggestions. One reason managers don’t do more coaching post-training is that they are not exactly sure what they are supposed to so. We have found that if you provide managers with specific, short, and effective things they can do to maximize training, many of them will, and to good effect. Bottom Line The best training in the world will have limited impact unless its use is actively supported by participants’ managers back on the job. A manager can undo months of effort in a single conversation, as in the story we started with. Conversely, managers can amplify, extend, and multiply the beneficial effects of training. In other words, the success of L&D depends to a great extent on participants’ managers, and smart organizations have learned how to encourage and support managers.Want to Learn More?This article is based on the third edition of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development Into Business Results, which will be available from ATD Press in April 2015. Every participant in the preconference Learning Transfer Certificate program will receive a copy. Sign up now and learn how to make your training and development efforts even more effective.

I Don’t Want to Hear Any of That Stuff You Learned at Harvard!

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