This blog is generated from the Performance Matters Podcast episode titled Shifting Paradigms: From ADDIE to EnABLE. In it, Bob Mosher highlights the ways that the EnABLE instructional design methodology is fundamentally different from ADDIE and shares key principles for shifting to a performance-first design approach.
Bob Mosher: Today, I’m going to run at something that’s been an institution in our industry for a long time. It’s the whole idea of ADDIE, design, EnABLE (the methodology that supports the 5 Moments of Need approach), and designing effectively for the 5 Moments of Need in the workflow. We often get asked if EnABLE is the same as ADDIE, so what I want to address, based on my learnings over the last 15+ years of doing this work with great people like Dr. Con Gottfredson, Sue Reber, Carol Stroud, and others that you’ve met through our Performance Matters Podcast (including some wonderful organizations that are doing workflow learning), is that this is a two-fold issue.
First, EnABLE is not ADDIE. It is an alternative approach to instructional design that Dr. Gottfredson developed over his 50 years of work, because we as designers and L&D professionals need ways to provide learning that is scalable and replicable. So no, EnABLE is not ADDIE. Are parts of these methodologies similar? Absolutely. And there is power in EnABLE’s reuse of some elements of ADDIE, but evolution yields differences, and those are what I’d like to focus on today.
Part of EnABLE is the methodology for doing the actual logistics of the design work. But another part is attitudinal and focuses on how we look at the way we do things and the steps of the process. This is where EnABLE is very different from ADDIE in many ways and creates a different outcome because of how it forces us to approach and think about our work.
You’ve heard us talk about making a shift from a training-first to a performance-first mindset. That helps begin the journey away from ADDIE toward EnABLE, but again, it’s not just the rigor of following its steps. Frankly, we’ve had folks go through our Designer Certificate course who tried to learn this approach but still don’t quite understand it, because although they are doing things differently operationally, they have not attitudinally changed their view of what this approach really means.
The first things we must focus on and ask are, “What is the work? What is the performance? What are the performance issues and problems? What is the performance outcome we hope this solution yields?” Notice that I use the word “solution”, because another fundamental part of this model is that we don’t yet know what we’re building. We know the elements and that it’s probably going to involve some degree of what we call “targeted training”, which I’ll explain in just a bit. It’s also going to involve some kind of Digital Coach, which we’ve detailed in some of our previous podcast episodes (today, I want to talk about it more holistically and through a design lens). So, the reality is that when we go into the analysis, we don’t know what the solution will be.
When I was using ADDIE, it was all about the deliverable and training. People walked into our L&D office and said, “I would like five days of training on leadership” or “I want three eLearning modules on a CRM we just bought” or “I want to retrain our customer service folks on a new ERP system that we’ve bought to guide them through being better customer support reps.” All those statements are based on a training-first mentality. And in the ADDIE days, when we sat down with SMEs, we were already locked and loaded for training—using words like “outline”, “course”, and “eLearning” before we even asked a question. And the SMEs arrived thinking they were there to help us build a course.
That is not the case when you shift to a performance-first mindset. You’re there to understand and analyze the workflow. You’re there to understand the work that is done, the Critical Impact of Failure on performance when that work is not done correctly, the supporting knowledge people need to know to do the work, and the resources that exist (or don’t exist) around the organization to help them and support them in that journey. All this analysis pivots on performance and performance outcomes, so it must happen first—before you put pen to paper to make anything, be it targeted training or a Digital Coach. I want to explore the fundamental differences in the EnABLE approach—attitudinally and operationally—that shift us from designers of a training deliverable (whatever that is, whatever modality it takes, however it’s blended) to designers of performance-first solutions with specific tools that enable us in that process.
So, let’s start with the fact that we used to get SMEs in a room to help us develop training. In those days, I wanted them to help me understand all that needed to be known and done to help other people be like them. Many would argue that, fundamentally, we’re off to the races in the wrong direction just by who we have in the room. SMEs are a spectacular resource in this journey, but they are only one resource that we rely on too heavily and, in many ways, incorrectly. A SME is not our audience. A SME has already arrived; they’re already a subject matter expert and don’t need half of what we’re going to build, unless it’s part of Solve or Change in the 5 Moments of Need that we know so well. They are already experts in the world of Apply, right? So, they struggle to see the work through the lens of the learner/performer that we’re trying to serve.
Principle #1: We must get out of the SME-alone mindset. They are in the room, but they alone are not enough anymore. They taint the deliverable—not on purpose—because of the lens through which they look at the work. They have arrived and, in many cases, have forgotten what it took to become the SME that they are. That’s the part that we need to support and maybe provide training for, and they no longer have that lens.
Principle #2: We must shift to “do” before “know”. Traditionally, “know and do” were always mentioned in that order. SMEs would say, “There’s so much they need to know about this before they can do the work.” I was talking to an organization once that had what they called “knowledge courses” that they taught ahead of letting anyone touch or do anything. When I talked them through this thinking, they said, “Well, what we do is so important. There’s so much they must fundamentally know before we can ever let them do anything.” So, this knowing before doing cadence emerged somewhere in the journey. The irony is that doing without knowing doesn’t work, but we don’t know what we need to know until we know the workflow and the doing that happens based on the person we’re trying to support in the flow of work. If we don’t have that context, then everything’s on the table: everything should be known, and we automatically overwhelm the system before we’ve even started.
The workflow gives context to what needs to be known, the importance of what needs to be known, and the criticality of what needs to be known. Without the context of doing, without the context of a task with which to associate a concept and/or supporting knowledge, there are no guardrails. Everything is taught. Nothing sticks and those we support never learn. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen “In this lesson you will learn”, and the first four bullets are about understanding (aka knowing) information. That’s not the way it works. We must shift to a “do and know” order. When we sit down with these resources that are going to help us architect the solution, we must start with the doing. We must start with the workflow. Then and only then do we talk about the things that need to be known to support that doing. It sounds like semantics, but it’s such a huge deal. For so long in our business, we have flipped doing and knowing, and we build behemoth courses that have thousands of PowerPoint slides that we force down our learners’ throats before they ever get to the steps, tasks, and doing the work. Then we wonder why they’re overwhelmed and why it all bleeds together. Because it lacks context! It really is all about the workflow.
The first step in the EnABLE methodology is understanding the business and what we are doing. We ask, “What will ‘good’ look like from a performance perspective? What are we trying to analyze to design? What are we trying to enable that is aligned to the business?” But when we get into the design part and start building this solution, we can’t build for the 5 Moments of Need, we can’t build for workflow learning, we do not know what if any training needs to be developed until we understand the workflow. I love when Con talks about this and his analysis over his decades of work in this area. He’s probably one of the most well-versed people in the world on this. What became painfully clear to him is that the single most important unit of performance is a task. Tasks make up processes; processes make up workflows. Until we understand performance at the task level—what people do—we can’t wrap around it what they need to know. It sounds bizarre, but the first time I sat in the back of a room and watched a Rapid Workflow Analysis (RWA) being done, my jaw dropped. I never had this conversation with my SMEs when I was using ADDIE. Instead, we got right down to it: “You guys are SMEs, so you tell me what people need to know and do.” And it was an onslaught of knowing. Does this sound familiar to you? Because before we know it, we’re filling whiteboards with stuff that we feel is important and will help people do—what? Everything? When it comes to leadership, should we be teaching them everything a leader needs to know? For a brand-new supervisor training course, that’s not appropriate. Ultimately, we’d love them to be seasoned, remarkable leaders. I get that. But that’s not the goal of the first day, and probably not the goal of the first year. But we don’t know the context of a new 30-60-90-day leader. What is the workflow? What is the expectation? What is the performance? What do they do in the beginning of leading that we can build on? We throw everything at them (e.g., “the six pillars of leadership”, “the nine competencies of being an effective leader”, etc.). Sure, some day. But what is the journey of leadership? What is the workflow in getting there?
Principle #3: It is all about understanding the workflow and what defines a task. Start by focusing on tasks and then put them together into processes that make up workflow maps. Then we can say, “Now that we have made the work transparent, now that we have made the work apparent, we know what people do. What do they need to know to do that work?” This process changes everything and it focuses the discussion so that we only get to what is needed to perform at that specific point—not someday and not five years from now—because now it has context of the scope of work being done.
This is the new blend. We’ve talked about blended training in our industry forever, but not blended learning. I’m very careful about these terms and have had several discussions around this topic. In my opinion, we’ve never made blended learning in our industry. We’ve made blended training. We take training assets and mix them up in a well-orchestrated economic model. That, if nothing else, minimizes training time and minimizes classroom time, which is spectacular. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that it’s blended learning. To a learner, to a performer in the workflow, blended learning meets all 5 Moments of Need. It meets New and More and blends those, but it also blends the moments of Apply, Change, and Solve. It enables workers and provides them with tools and strategies in the workflow, like we’ve traditionally provided tools and strategies in New and More. Blended learning encapsulates it all.
When you’re trying to blend across a 5 Moments of Need solution and across workflow learning, and once you understand the workflow and the tasks, processes, and supporting knowledge, a very important decision must be made. How will the solution be blended so that a performer ultimately performs? What is the balance? What is the blend of training and workflow Digital Coach enablement? This isn’t a decision of what’s “important”. That’s probably one of the biggest misunderstandings about this part of the methodology. SMEs, people working with you in this process, and lines of business folks start thinking you’re skipping things. But we never skip anything in a 5 Moments of Need Solution. A Digital Coach doesn’t skip anything. A Digital Coach supports everything, because we did the RWA and identified the tasks, processes, and supporting knowledge. We identified everything, and we’re going to support that entire workflow with the right knowledge, tasks, and resources. But we’re not going to train people how to do everything. This is an issue of designing a deliverable. We are not skipping anything or choosing not to support certain things. We’re supporting everything that we identified in the workflow analysis. What we’re deciding now is what is so critical in its outcome that we need to train people on it—because it warrants that level of attention. Again, this isn’t about skipping things or cutting training in half for the sake of cutting training time. This is about deciding in the 5 Moments of Need journey that performers go through what things are worth taking people away from work.
Time away from work is an amazingly expensive thing and has a huge impact on every organization that we support. We must be very careful when we say we’re going to take leaders out of the workflow and teach them something about leadership, or we’re going to pull customer support people off the line and train them on something about an ERP system or about what customer support means. For salespeople, people in a manufacturing plant, etc., when we say we’re going to stop their work to teach them something, we must be prudent and intentional about what we do with that time. This has crushed us and crept into our industry for decades, because the business looks at us and says, “Look, you guys are expensive. You have my people for a long time. You teach them way too much stuff—more than they can handle. When they come back, there’s lost productivity. People forget things, and what was that whole exercise about—outside of it being very expensive—because people weren’t working when they were with you.”
This is where what we call critical skills, or the Critical Impact of Failure (CIF) rating, comes into play. Once we understand the workflow, we decide on how much of it requires training. To justify that, we use an impact rubric. These decisions are not about importance, because it’s all important; rather, these decisions are about failure. If the failure to perform a task or perform it well is too critical, we should train people so that they don’t hurt themselves, they don’t hurt others, they don’t hurt their self-efficacy, we don’t lose customers, we don’t get sued, and people don’t die. These are levels of criticality. If the outcome of a task warrants a high level of criticality, we must train on that task to some degree, because we can’t let people learn on their own when failure is too critical, and the outcomes are too devastating or hurtful. That is the pivot—not importance. It’s all important, but there are a lot of important things that I can learn on my own—without hurting anyone—using a good Digital Coach and emerge better than if I had been trained on those things. I’ve seen this thousands of times. Training is not the “be all end all”. For years, the elephant in the room has been that we over-teach and train too much. In some ways, that’s hurtful because our learners leave overwhelmed. I recently spoke with a colleague who had just gone through onboarding training and his words were, “Wow, wow. It was a firehose of information.” This is an L&D professional, by the way. That “firehose” is irresponsible, and we’ve been doing it forever. It hurts us, it hurts the people we support, and it hurts our industry and credibility with the business.
The Critical Impact of Failure uses a 1-7 rubric, so there is some gray area. If a task is rated 4 or higher, we teach it because the impact of a 5, 6, or 7 has too high a consequence on performance, the performer, others, etc. That and only that validates training. There are some other things that can come into play, like complexity and dependencies, but it’s way less than you think. With our work, on average, half or more of what was taught in a class shouldn’t have been taught and does not need to be taught. Think about the economic impact of that and of taking people out of work to learn. Just do the math. Imagine the savings. We do some cost justification work for clients and the waste and savings figures are in the millions. If you look at design through this lens, that’s a lot of money and a lot of ROI. In the end, ROI should be about performance, period. But there’s ROI in this as well in the forms of time savings, efficiencies, and people not stopping work to learn. The economic impact of these elements is not necessarily directly tied to performance, but it’s part of the calculation.
Now that we’ve got a different blend of what we put into the Digital Coach, which lives in the workflow and supports workers at the point of need and the point of performance, and now that we’ve decided on and validated what elements require time to train with targeted training, things like content management, governance, and maintenance become critical to this design. Unlike training, 5 Moments of Need solutions are not one-hit wonders. We don’t design for just one point in time; we design for a continuum of learning. In maintaining our Digital Coaches, we must keep them current and understand the content management strategy around that work. We need governance, ownership, processes, and dependencies in keeping that content current, especially because it no longer resides only in our domain. In fact, most of it doesn’t. It resides in the domain of those who have the knowledge in the workflow, and that’s not usually L&D professionals. It pivots on things like wanting managers to manage better each day in the field. That’s what the business wants. Unfortunately, we’ve taught the business to think that five days of training achieves that result, but training is not what they want, and that’s not what the discussion should be about. In the days of ADDIE, we said, “Sure, I can provide five days of training. I need some people in the room to help me do that.” And then off we went, the die was cast, and the train left the station. The conversation must change to one where the business says, “We’d like to help managers manage better,” and we respond with, “Let’s understand the workflow and criticality of their tasks,” vs. offering five days of eLearning or five days of anything. That’s downstream. That’s an outcome of the analysis and not what we should analyze for at the beginning. Do you hear the difference in emphasis here? It’s what I mean by the attitudinal side of the shift in addition to the operational side of shifting away from ADDIE to something like EnABLE. The deliverable is a combination of a Digital Coach and targeted training, typically in that order.
Soon, we’re going to talk about how this new design approach can start in the domain we all know, which is training, before you even get into Digital Coaches. You can shift performance a great deal by changing how you look at the way your classes are set up. That will help guide you to this new blend, which has a profound impact on the classroom. Many of you may want to start there. A classroom can be made much more performance focused. In fact, we already have a recent Performance Matters Podcast episode by Sue Reber about the tactical side of design. In that, she shares what she calls the ADAPT approach, and that’s very classroom centric and a world I know many of you are very comfortable with now. If that’s the first step in your journey, begin there.
I hope this has been helpful. Think training to performance, ADDIE to EnABLE, attitudinal and operational. It takes both to ultimately build for performance first.
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