A design for design Part 1

Last week I spent a highly enjoyable afternoon with a client designing a 2 day training session around a very specific process. For many years one of their specialisms has been around “Change”. They have developed a really robust process but now wanted to develop a training programme to roll the process out to their clients. This needed to not just be about the steps in the process but also the behaviours, skills and attributes that come into play during the change process.

We already had a flow chart for the process and traditionally the way people design a session for something like this would be to run through the steps in the process one by one. So the design would look a bit like this:

1. Whats going on here?
2. Why is this step important?
3. What are the skills needed to complete the step?
4. What behaviours are important during this step?
5. What barriers can we predict and what solutions can we come up with?

This design is very linear and it can be challenging to keep it interesting by step 4. It can also be a bit tricky to make the learning brain friendly.

So, this is what we did instead:

Firstly we wrote down the learning objectives for the session as a whole. We did this by completing this sentence as many times as we could while staying relevant to the process.

“By the end of this programme the participants will be able to……..”

These were a mix of “they need to understand the steps in the process and the actions behind each step” and “the behaviours and skills needed during each step”. In many cases these were common for several steps.

We were very careful about our language, avoiding phrases like:

“By the end of this programme the participants will be able to understand the steps in the process”.

This isn’t measurable so we aimed for things like:

By the end of this programme the participants will be able to list the steps in the process

By the end of this programme the participants will be able to tell you what actions are behind each step

These objectives are based on the thinking described in one of my favourite books: “Preparing Instructional Objectives” by Robert F Mager as well as previous posts on BFT (especially When F1 drivers need driving lessons)

I think this book is a must have if you design training.

To help us ‘see’ how the objectives might fit with the proven process we wrote down each step on the left hand side of a couple of sheets of flip.

Then we went through the process step by step.

Every time a training objective was relevant to a step in the process we wrote a post-it of the objective and added it to the step across the flip.

At the end each step in the process had a line of training objectives that related to it. Needless to say, some training objectives cropped up several times.

By doing this we were able to have complete confidence that the objectives were aligned to the steps in the process.

In Part Two, Paul explains the ways in which the process is like the Olympic Games and explores how this metaphor can help sequence the content and layer the learning.

skiing image by Cedric's pics>

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