Last week on November 15th, I had the pleasure of addressing a small but very enthusiastic group of members of the Upstate South Carolina ASTD Chapter at their very nice meeting space in Greenville, SC. A large percentage of the audience were practicing instructional designers so we enjoyed a great deal of discussion during the presentation, "Instructional Design—How to Sell the Real Value." Of course, the presentation really isn’t about selling the value of instructional design at all. The whole idea is to create real value and let the results sell themselves. The Upstate members offered the best Southern hospitality. We had such a good meeting that we decided that to reconvene in March for a workshop. My thanks to Beth Freeman, Vice President of Programs, for her attention to detail in the planning and execution of this event. I also want to thank Beth and her husband for joining me for dinner after the meeting.  Beth and her husband Ben used to be neighbors of mine in Charlotte before I even started Handshaw, Inc.  If you do the math, that means we go back about thirty years. It was great catching up.  I look forward to seeing Beth and the great folks of Upstate ASTD again in 2012.

I’ve never written about Virtual Instructor Lead Training (VILT) before. I didn’t think I really knew much about it other than attending a few sessions about it at conferences. But after finishing my 27th one yesterday, and all since November 7th, I think I know something about them now. One thing I know is they work better than I thought they would.  In fact, I think the learning in the virtual session was every bit as effective as the live sessions I have conducted. I wish I had some data to back that statement up. I am merely stating an opinion at this point. The one aspect of these sessions that intrigued me the most was the use of webcams. I conducted these sessions with two different clients: one of whom used webcams and another who did not. Both clients were taking the exact same classes. The topic was divided into four two to three hour sessions with a limit of six learners for role play sessions and fifteen learners for the explanation and demonstration sessions. The explanation took place with a few slides and lots of discussion and questions. The demonstrations were done with short videos to show good and bad examples of consulting meetings. Fortunately, the video presentations worked flawlessly in both virtual presentations, using a different system for each client.  Role plays were conducted with one learner playing the part of a client and the other playing the role of the consultant.  Upon completion of the ten to fifteen minute role plays, feedback was given by other participants and by me based on an eight principle check list.  Although I had done this hundreds of times in face to face classes, I had never tried this instructional strategy in a virtual environment before. It is my contention that the group with the webcams more closely simulated the face to face experience. I would propose that as human beings, we are still conditioned to look at faces when conversing for any length of time. Sure, we can stay focused for a short phone conversation of twenty minutes or so, but what about staring at slides for an hour or two, listening to a voice or voices, but never seeing the speakers? Again, my expectations of the webcam’s ability to bridge this gap were low. I found myself staring at the different faces and being completely involved in the conversations for two and sometimes even three hours. I was amazed. Is anyone out there familiar with any research done on the topic of webcam use in virtual classes and its effectiveness?  Or have you had any similar experiences you would like to share?

This will be my last blog entry for this year. I’m sure I will think of lots of new things to write about next year, but for this year, I would like to say thank you to some special people. First of all, thank you to all of our clients who have supported us this year and in years past. I hope we have been able to make your lives better and I hope we have helped to make your organizations work smarter and better.I also want to thank the wonderful people I am privileged to work with here at Handshaw. You are hard-working, talented and dedicated. Your passion for your profession and your clients shows through in everything you do. We have had a very successful year in 2011 and we are all grateful. We are working right now on strategic plans for an even better 2012. I know I have my clients and my colleagues here to thank for that success. Here’s wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a very prosperous New Year. Sincerely,Dick Handshaw

I had a good year last year teaching performance consulting skills to a few hundred people within my client base and at conferences and professional societies. By far the most common reason anyone attends these classes is because they are dissatisfied being order takers for training requests and they want to have a measurable impact on the business. Another possible motivation for improving skills in performance consulting should be the current economic situation. One would think that with increasing layoffs and tightening budgets, two factors would come into play: Given the cost of both taking and developing training, corporations would be motivated to eliminate training that is not needed, of poor quality, or redundant. Given that fewer employees are left to do the work of many, those key remaining employees must be valued and trained to achieve maximum productivity. I just finished reading an article in the November/December issue of Performance Improvement, titled "The Effects of the Recession on Worker’s Moral, Ethical and Interpersonal Behavior" by Joan Marques and Nancy R. Luna. It seems that at the very time when economic needs dictate a move towards performance consulting based on the reasons cited above, the effects of the economic recession on workers themselves may be discouraging the practice of performance consulting. Here’s how the article supports my hypothesis that while recessionary times may dictate a greater economic need for performance consulting, potential performance consultants may be less inclined to adopt performance consulting as a practice. There were two hypotheses in the study that got me thinking about the adoption of performance consulting in the workplace: "As the effects of the economic recession increase, positive perceptions among workers decrease." "Greater job security contributes to worker’s levels of happiness on the job." Since practicing performance consulting requires an optimistic view that your actions can make a positive outcome in business for your organization, increased negative perceptions of your organization and its prospects for success does not contribute to making potential consultants take up the practice. Furthermore, since there is some level of risk involved, not many would be performance consultants want to risk a good job by taking unnecessary chances. So, at the very time when we need more performance consultants to speak up, there may be human factors working against the possible solution. The only antidote I can find to this conundrum is leadership. Would be performance consultants need to know that someone in a leadership position will value their efforts and support them when the going gets difficult. Jim Robinson once told me that once he and Dana successfully built a strong performance consulting practice within an organization, many times the leader of that group would leave and business often returned to the prior reactive state. So it seems that the need for building performance consulting practices within organizations could last in Jim’s mind at least, "for about the next one thousand years." This is the part where I ask for your opinion. Is the economic recession making it more difficult to introduce performance consulting to our organizations? Or will the economic needs of the recession ultimately make it easier for us to implement performance consulting?

On Thursday evening, January 12, ISPI Charlotte’s 2012 year got off to a great start with an outstanding program.  We met in our new location in the UNC Charlotte building uptown with a great turnout.  It appears the new location will be a healthy change for us.  Our presenter Cal Wick told us a story about a learning solution that his company designed for one of his clients that appeared to be a great success.  The only problem was that when he visited the company a few months later, everything seemed to have reverted back to the behavior that was causing problems before the learning event.  Now who hasn’t been there?  Cal promised himself that he would figure out how to make the learning transfer stick and he would do it before he died.  Cal looked pretty healthy and I think he has figured out the answer to this problem for all of us.  For me, the take away of the evening was his Application Scorecard.  This scorecard is made up of ten events that should occur before, during, and after the learning event to make the learning stick.  Each of the ten events is scored on a five point Likert scale.  Like most good learning plans today, it starts with the business needs and then it goes on to make sure managers are involved and held accountable.  It measures how learners learn from each other and measures on-the-job results.  The entire process is easy to understand and easy to use. I highly recommend you visit Cal’s website at www.forthillcompany.com or email him at Wick@forthillcompany.com.  Thank you Cal for getting ISPI Charlotte off to a great start in 2012.

It appears to be widely accepted that performance objectives are a good thing because most instructional designers write them and most organizations use them. But since their introduction by the likes of Mager and Gagne decades ago, I find many instructional designers are unsure of the many things for which they can be used. As an advanced organizer for learners:  Gagne says that objectives help learning by giving learners an advanced organizer, or a cue for what’s coming up in the course they are about to attempt. While I do not dispute Dr. Gagne, I did conduct some research of my own in the early 90s when I had the opportunity to track whether several hundred users of an online course opted to read the first page of a course that contained objectives, or if they opted to skip the page. In my sample, only 10% of learners opted to view the page, which means that 90 % felt no need to even view the learning objectives for the course. Upon interviewing some of those learners to see if they would mind not having the option to view objectives, the 10% who opted to view them strongly stated their preference for always seeing objectives before beginning a lesson.  My attempt at getting out of doing some work failed. Score one for Dr. Gagne. As a contract among everyone on the design team to describe required outcomes:  Here is one use for objectives from which a number of parties can benefit.  This would be an example of Franklin Covey’s concept of starting with the end in mind. The primary parties to benefit here are the client or project sponsor and the lead instructional designer. The objectives serve as a concise and definitive description of the required behavior of the learners upon successful completion of the instruction. If the objectives are well-written, they also serve instructional designers to better understand the required level of learned capability, and ultimately help facilitators to understand exactly what is required of their learners.  Well written objectives are your best tool to manage expectations among all members of the project team. As a means for formulating assessment strategies:  This is my favorite outcome of good performance objectives. It is also somewhat dependent on using my favorite format for writing objectives, and that is to use Gagne’s five part format. The key is in the Action portion of the objective that describes how to perform the required task.  At Handshaw, we write one objective for each main task on our task analysis. Writing the Action portion becomes very easy because we simply use the sub-tasks from the task analysis to describe exactly what steps a learner takes to perform the task, which becomes a detailed and accurate way to describe how the task should be performed. Once you read a couple of sample learning objectives written in Gagne’s format, you will easily see how they describe exactly how the task should be measured, which tells you everything you need to know about how you will assess that learners have met your objectives. And, once you know how the task should be measured, it becomes clearly obvious how the task should be taught. This in turn defines your instructional strategy and often media selection without having to guess what might work. This is certainly one of my favorite parts in the instructional design process where the outcome of one step becomes the input to the next. Well written objectives will help you select and construct good testing instruments every time. Future blog entries will deal with how to write good objectives efficiently and how to use your objectives to get the most benefit out of the time you spent writing them.  We will also look at how referring to your objectives can help you handle scope changes.

Last week we looked at some pros and cons of why we should even spend time writing Performance Objectives. I think the evidence is certainly stacked in favor of having them, whether learners use them or not. Now let’s talk about how to write them so that they benefit your design efforts. We can all agree that we don’t have time for anything that doesn’t benefit our learning solution design. Last week we discussed Gagne’s five part format. While there are many other experts on objectives, this one is still my favorite. The five parts are: Situation - The stimulus for why the task should be performed. Learned Capability - The verb that describes the level of learned capability. Object - The object or the "what" of the capability verb. Action - Describes "how" the learner will perform the task. Tools/Constraints - Describes specific tools or methods that must be used and any constraints such as time or mastery level. This may be considered an optional part if tools and constraints don’t apply. Here is an example: Main task:  Recommend the best product mix. Situation - Given a prospective customer Learned Capability - the learner will be able to recommend Object - the best product mix Action - by asking probing questions, presenting related benefits and handling objections Tools/Constraints - in every sales transaction. At Handshaw, Inc. we write our performance objectives exactly as you see the example above. This format makes it easier for us to write objectives and it makes it easier for our clients to read and understand them. One thing you have to know is where to get the information. We always do a task analysis and that is what makes it easy. Here is how we do it: The situation comes from whatever event prompts the learner to have to perform the task, which in this case is the presence of a prospective customer. The capability verb and the object come directly from the main tasks in the task analysis, which in this case is "Recommend the best product mix." The action portion comes from the sub tasks underneath the main task, which in the case were: ask probing questions, present related benefits and handle objections. Note that each sub task also contains a verb and an object. The relevant constraint in this case is that the task must be performed as described "in every sales transaction." The most common mistake we see is that some people try to write performance objectives without first completing a task analysis. You may be able to identify things that are important, and may be important, but without analyzing the task first you are likely to leave something out or make mistakes. Making up performance objectives without the aid of a task analysis does not guarantee that learning will be linked to business needs or to performance on the job. Another common mistake is in the use of capability verbs. Gagne calls it a capability verb because it should be linked to one of his levels of Learned Capability. This could be a topic for another blog, but let’s just say that the verb "understand" is not one of them. It is difficult to measure one’s level of understanding. Many tasks require the performance of a procedure which Gagne defines as Rule Use. In order to perform a procedure you use a set of operating rules to complete the task. He recommends using the verb "demonstrates" as a capability verb which accurately describes the required level of Learned Capability. Next time, we’ll discuss how to get the most value out of our performance objectives once we have written them.

Two thousand people made their way to Atlanta this week for this excellent conference. The conference host and master of ceremonies again this year is North Carolina’s own Tony O’Driscoll.  The keynote sessions were even more plentiful and as entertaining and informative as last year. Each session includes two to three interesting thought leaders who present their topics and then chat with each other at the end of the session. It’s nice to see this combination of scripted and unscripted exchange of information expertly facilitated by Tony. There are so many breakout sessions that it’s harder than ever to decide which one to go to. There are the usual master presenters like Thiagi, Judy Hale, Jane Bozarth and Darryl Sink, along with many practitioners with great case studies and best practices in everything from performance consulting, to learning design, to technology related topics. There is definitely something for everyone. Something new for the conference this year was the creative social media campaign to promote speakers. Speakers were asked to write short articles in topics related to their presentations which were tweeted and published in the weeks leading up to the conference. I have never done a version of my session on reframing training requests in an hour before, but I managed to do it here on Monday morning. I had a good time slot right after the first keynote and it was well attended. If you haven’t been to this conference, put it on your list for next year. It will be in Orlando and I’ll see you there.

If you practice writing objectives in this five part format for a while, it becomes a relatively easy and efficient process—that is if you start with a task analysis. Now that you have them, let’s make sure you get the most benefit out of your performance objectives. Can your learners use your five part objectives as an advance organizer? Probably not in their current format. If they are done correctly, using all the sub tasks from your task analysis in the action portion, they don’t exactly roll off the tongue.  So they may need a little editing to make them learner friendly. Performance objectives are most valuable as a design tool. They help you define and verify exactly what the learning outcome should be and they help you design your measurement strategy. Your five part objectives are just what you need for Subject Matter Experts and project sponsors. While a task analysis is useful for many SMEs, the performance objective is another way to present the information contained in a task analysis. If people don’t always respond well to your task analysis, they will almost always be able to understand and relate to your performance objectives. These five part objectives are your best shot at getting everyone on your design team to agree on exactly what the learner outcomes should be. I often hear designers complain about scope creep and that clients keep changing their minds about what the learning should contain and how things should be done. When I ask them if they use performance objectives tied to a task analysis, they usually say, "No, I don’t have time for that." This is where I like to quote my good friend Damon Hearne, who has been doing this as long as I have, by saying, "If you don’t do analysis, be prepared to do design over and over again." The best use of your performance objectives is as a design tool to help you design your measurement strategy and to select and create your testing instruments. The action portion of the objective practically designs your tests for you. Consider the following example:Main task:  Write a five part performance objective. Situation - Given a list of incomplete objectives Learned Capability - the learner will demonstrate Object - the rules for writing five-part objectives Action - by rewriting each objective Tool/Constraint - in a five-part format. By looking at the action portion which explains how the learner should perform the task, it becomes obvious how to measure mastery of that task. A Multiple-Choice question won’t do; neither will a True/False question. You must give the learner a list of incomplete objectives and evaluate how well the learner can actually write them into a five-part format. This is an actual objective from my workshop on how to write performance objectives. Here is another another example from teaching a class on scuba diving. Main task: Perform buddy equipment check. Situation - Before entering the water Learned Capability - the learner will demonstrate the procedure  Object - for checking your buddy’s dive gear Action - by testing the bladder inflate button, testing the bladder air release button, checking all buckles and fasteners, checking the regulator for air flow, checking the safe second regulator for air flow and checking for proper weights Tools/Constraints - with 100% accuracy. You don’t really have to know anything about scuba diving to know how to test this important performance objective. We have a saying around our dive shop, "it’s only life support." Obviously we are going to observe the person performing this equipment check and grade the results with a checklist. And yes, they have to get them all. It is easy to write this objective, even if you know nothing about diving. You would observe an expert performing this equipment check, write down all the steps you observed as sub tasks under the main task of performing an equipment-check, and then use the task analysis to write the objective. It works every time. Let me know how you write objectives. There must be somebody out there who has a few good tips for me.

I get to do two of my favorite workshops during the month of March. I guess that’s sort of a birthday present for me. This Friday, the 16th I will be at my home ASTD chapter, the ASTD Research Triangle Area. I visited them last spring for an evening meeting and was fortunate enough to be invited back to present a full day workshop entitled, "Learning Analysis?  You Can’t Afford Not To." The morning will start off with our popular Task Analysis Game, which will give participants a fun way to learn how to do task analysis the Handshaw way. Teams of three to five participants will then have the opportunity to develop a task analysis for a project they are currently working on. Just before or after lunch, they will receive feedback from the group on their outcomes. The workshop will conclude with more hands-on practice with Audience Analysis, Learning Culture Analysis and Delivery Systems Analysis. All participants will receive a 30 page workbook which will help them put their new skills to work on the job. On Thursday, March 22, I will be with the Upstate South Carolina ASTD in Greenville, SC. I visited their chapter last November and was delighted to be invited back for a workshop. They chose the half day workshop entitled, "Training Request?  Ask Questions First." In this session participants will see a short video demonstration of how to successfully reframe a training request. They will see how eight principles can be applied to help the client see his or her request from a different point of view and give permission to gather more information when appropriate, instead of jumping to a quick solution. Next, they will see short video samples showing somewhat comical, but identifiable common mistakes that could be made. The bulk of the workshop will feature role plays from each of the participants as they practice reframing requests with a client partner. The real learning opportunity is when they each receive feedback from the group and the instructor according to how effectively they used the eight principles to reframe the training request. If you would like to sign up for either of these two workshops, send me a quick email. There isn’t a lot of time, but as of now both programs are still accepting registrations. Dick.handshaw@handshaw.com