This blog
is excerpted from episode
40 of the Performance Matters
Podcast where Bob Mosher reflects on the episodes to-date and curates a list of
experiences that truly do matter when planning, building, and implementing a 5
Moments of Need solution.
Our
40th episode and eleven thousandth download—these are milestones for us!
We are
honored that you’ve joined us throughout so many of these recordings. Because
it’s our fortieth episode, what we decided to do was go back and listen to some
of our most popular ones and pull out ten of the most prevalent and powerful best
practices we’ve heard to-date.
Number
One: Workflow learning fixes the classroom.
Unanimously,
one of the most powerful things about The Five Moments is that there are Five
Moments. For years, we were known as the performance support guys. Obviously,
we talk an awful lot about the power of workflow learning and the impact it can
have on the workflow by designing for the moment of Apply first. But the
reality is that there are still all Five Moments. There’s New and More. And
unanimously, from all the organizations who have tried this, when they focus on
The Five Moments, they found was that it
has a huge impact on the classroom itself.
We
over teach. People talked about the fact that we just do too much of a content
dump. We overload our learners. There’s cognitive overload from all the
information. We cover everything. And The Five Moments of Need design
methodology allows you to let the classroom do what it does best. It lets us finally
deliver on blended learning the way our industry’s always wanted to do blended
learning. We’re allowed to blend the perfect amount of classroom learning with
what we intentionally put into the workflow using the EPSS and the performance
support that we design.
So,
Number One, workflow learning helps fix the classroom and finally allow it to
do what it does best.
Number
Two: All tasks are not created equal.
Number
Two is a byproduct of Number One in many ways.
The classroom suffers because it’s born out of the idea that everything
we’re asked to teach is important—and of course our SMEs, or subject matter
experts, feel that same way. But the reality is that all tasks are not created
equal.
What
about the criticality of failure? We’re pivoting on performance. So, when you
look at tasks, when you look at supporting knowledge, when you look at the
resources that enable both of
those
through the lens of failure as the pivot, what’s the criticality of failure? If
someone tries to learn something on their own, if someone tries to remember
something on their own, if someone tries to learn New and More on their own,
and they fail, even though they have support, if the outcome of failing is too
severe, those are the areas that we need to teach. That impacts Number One, the classroom in a
significant way.
Every organization
we talked to came to the same conclusion.
Understanding the outcome of failure took all the pressure off the fact
that “everything had to be trained=”. It
allowed our subject matter experts, our business matter experts, even the line
of business, to see the power of an EPSS,
By showing them the power of workflow design, even though all things are
important, criticality of failure helped us understand where things are best
learned and where they’re best left to be learned in the context of experience.
Workflow learning design lets us put things where they belong and support it
holistically.
Number
Three: The Five Moments of Need design process makes the workflow
visible.
This
has been a remarkable learning for me personally. When I’ve done my own design
in this years ago—I am always amazed how little I understood about the actual workflow
that my learners went back to. I understood what the SME wanted me to teach. I
understood the content and the order and flow of information. But that is
not the context of the workflow.
When
you start doing Rapid Workflow Analysis with your stakeholders, it amazes me
how the SMEs, the business owners, somewhere during the 2~3-day exercise always
comes back and says, “Look. We had no idea what our people actually did from 8
to 5. We have SOPs, we have sales processes, we have leadership skills and
competencies, but we didn’t realize how that translated into the workflow
itself.”
So,
one of the most powerful gifts you’ll give to your organizations through
creating and building a 5 Moments of Need solution is making the work being
done within the workflow visible. Managers feel empowered by that because now
they know what’s truly being done. They know how to manage to it, and probably
more importantly, they see gaps. They see things that are broken. They see
redundancies. They see things being done that, frankly, should not be done.
What became
apparent in each organization’s journey is that managers have never had an
intentional and structured way to analyze and look into what was happening in
the workflow itself. So, the Five Moments of Need design process—although the
end game is workflow learning—helped every learning organization build a stronger
relationship with the business because they helped them see what actually
happened. It makes the workflow visible.
Number
Four: Content management is back and in a remarkable way.
This
is one of Dr. Gottfredson’s favorites. Content management is back and in a
remarkable way. I remember going through this in the 90s – Content management, Learning
Content Management Systems, Knowledge Management… We ran all of these disciplines
and tools in a big way in the early days, and I think for many we fell short.
Content management is a remarkable discipline, but it’s best done in the
context of managing that content for an outcome. That was the big pivot for
me.
Often,
we went into manage content because it was lying around, there was too much. We
had a lot to get our arms around. So, our intent was that we were chasing a
content problem or an overwhelmed problem, but we were missing context. Content
management in the context of roles, the context of the workflow, the context of
tasks, the context of knowledge, takes on a whole different light. And many of
us are being asked to go into the content curation of not just our own content,
or the content the organization owns, but also content that users are
creating.
Good performance support, good workflow learning, will broker and reach into assets
that a learner may be managing at an individual level. So, content management
takes on a remarkable role in migrating to workflow learning. And in many organizations,
it was the tipping point they needed to do it well. It put the methodology of
content management ahead of the technology of content management, which, I
think, for a lot of us in the early days was where we missed the mark.
We had
it wrong. We were buying LCMSs. We were seeing content messes. Our LMSs were
causing us to create these huge libraries. SharePoint was causing us to create
huge content libraries. We ran at the technology overload, the content overload,
and we were lacking context.
Workflow
learning will allow you to begin the journey of tackling content management in
a manageable way—one outcome, one project at a time.
Number
Five: Methodology begets technology.
This
is my favorite. Methodology begets technology. I have been in this business for
over thirty-six years, and I’m a technology guy. I had one of the earlier
mobile phones. It was the size of a shoe box. I’ve been all over every
technology when it comes out. E-learning, smart boards, the internet, virtual
instruction… I was often, and tried to be, one of the first ones using and
testing these. But friends, when you chase technology for learning ahead of
methodology to design using that technology it gets you in trouble.
So,
every organization we talked to, somewhere in their lessons learned, shared
that either they had already bought technology and were trying to
“square-hole-round-peg” it, or that they were already using technology and were
trying to get ahead of things like SharePoint, and fix it so that it
worked.
The
power of The Five Moments of Need is that it is a methodology first. Workflow
learning is a methodology first. And if you run at the problem, if you analyze
the tasks, if you design for the workflow, if you understand the amazing amount
of resources that need to be brokered based on the Performance Support pyramid,
the technology will follow once that design architecture is in place.
And it
is an evolutionary journey. Many did not go out and buy a formal authoring EPSS
system. They had to crawl, walk, run into it. They might have used SharePoint.
We’ve heard of a bunch of different technologies that have been used but as
long as the principles of the methodology were applied, even some of the lower
end technologies—i.e., a PDF— it could still work.
Ultimately,
they grew into the right technologies, or a more powerful technology, or a
better use of the technologies that they may have already purchased. But they
got there in an intentional way, understanding the needs of the organization,
the kinds of workflow learning they had to build, and the methodology that
drove it.
So,
methodology always begets and will direct you toward the right
technology.
Halfway
there, friends! For the top 5 best practices we’ve heard, learned, and
experience, listen to the full episode.
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