Written By: Bob Mosher, Founding Partner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies
I got into Learning and Development (L&D) in 1982. Yep, that was over 40 years ago. My journey actually started with teaching 8-year-olds. I was an elementary school teacher in Warsaw, NY, a small dairy town in upstate New York. I eventually got my master’s in computer education, as we called it back then, which launched my adult-ed career. Unfortunately, schools were decades away from hiring a District Computer Curriculum Director (a role I made up since it didn’t exist).
So, to pay off my school loans, I branched off into Computer Literacy training. Luckily these things called a Personal Computer (PC) and Microsoft (MS) Windows came along and both appeared to hold some promise. I was in the right place at the right time, and the organization I was fortunate enough to have joined spent the next several decades being wildly successful. We trained more students and sold more IT training and e-Learning curriculum than most any company in the world, outside of Microsoft, Novell, and the rest of the computer giants at the time. I learned a lot, trained thousands, taught trainers around the world how to train thousands more, spoke at conferences, and even co-authored a book called Training for Results (more on this later). That led me to an amazing job as the Sr. Director of Learning & Strategy Evangelism with Microsoft Learning, a division of MS responsible for supporting all its training and certification partners around the world. Cool job, right?! Well, it should have been.
To set the record straight, my time with MS was amazing. It was a brilliant company that hired brilliant people who worked incredibly hard at what they did. That included our learning group. My team was one of the most remarkable I’ve ever known, and I was honored and humbled to be a part of it. My team members did award-winning work and they innovated in astonishing ways. Their hearts were in the right place, and they did all the right things to make their training as effective as they could. So, why did I leave MS three years into that amazing journey?
The answer is the “T” word: “Training”. I just couldn’t get past it. Remember my first book, Training for Results? I had been an IT Trainer, Designer, Manager, Director, etc. and was supposedly very successful in those roles. But what kept me up at night was the definition of success. Sure, at MS we trained and certified millions across the globe. We validated that training and those certifications in a remarkable way; yet I still struggled with whether all that amazing training was enough to deliver on the ultimate goal of effective performance in the workplace. My gut told me that it wasn’t, and I realized it had always been telling me that. As I asked more and more of my fellow learning professionals that same question, many of them felt the same. It was the elephant in the room, the 800-pound gorilla, the emperor with no clothes. Even way back in Warsaw, NY when I taught 3rd grade, instruction alone just wasn’t enough.
So, I left MS! I had to. It wasn’t the company; it was me. I had an itch I couldn’t scratch, and I wasn’t going to stay in L&D if training alone didn’t directly impact and support performance. Well, along came the most powerful pivot to which I had ever been introduced: performance support and what has become workflow learning—enabling workers to learn WHILE doing their work. This amazing discipline had been around for decades and eloquently documented by amazing thought leaders like Gloria Gery, Dr. Allison Rossett, and many others. This remarkable deliverable focused on performance first and training if needed. In my many years of learning about education, no one had even mentioned this discipline to me. No one told me about a college major or concentration. No one told me about a course, book, lesson, chapter, verse…nothing! How could that be? Mainly because the design and delivery of education had always taken a training-first approach. After all, as many subject matter experts (SMEs) will scream at the top of their lungs, “There is so much we need to teach people before they can do anything!” The irony is that there have been decades of research that proves otherwise. Experience matters. Application matters. Real-world practice matters. Reflection matters. Context matters. All of those are more powerful and longer lasting than formal instruction. That is not to say that formal instruction is wrong or unnecessary; it’s just not the tip of the sword. It’s a wonderful addition to workflow learning, but only when the failure of certain tasks results in too catastrophic of an outcome. You’d be surprised by how many tasks, even in so-called dangerous environments, can be learned through strongly supported guidance and even failure.
Once I had conceptually made this pivot to performance support and workflow learning, I was on the lookout for one more missing piece: methodology. I’m an instructional designer and methodology wins the day. It lets L&D consistently deliver reliable solutions to those we serve. My problem was that the approaches I had learned, like ADDIE, didn’t get me all the way there. Then along came Dr. Conrad Gottfredson’s work, and everything fell into place. His 5 Moments of Need framework, supported by the EnABLE methodology, showed me and many others a systematic way to design for the workflow and performance first. Today, I create embedded support systems (Digital Coaches) as my prime deliverable. I still develop training if needed, but it is much more targeted and based on the criticality of skills as mentioned above. This allows me to impact and measure performance in ways I never could have with a training-first approach. That’s why I can never go back! As a dear colleague of mine says, “Once you’ve seen it, you can’t look away or go back. It’s almost irresponsible to do so.” You can’t not do it!
Of course, there have been some hurdles along the way, including changing the mindsets of those I served and even many of my colleagues. I had to be seen differently and be engaged in different conversations. I had to be allowed to create different things, because once learners see a workflow learning solution with a Digital Coach, they want a whole lot more of that and a lot less formal training. It helps them perform instead of just know information. Another hurdle was collecting, aggregating, and reconstructing a lot of workflow content. Plus, SMEs’ roles moved beyond content advisors to content creators. That has always been a heavy lift—until AI came along! Its ability to mine and generate content is staggering. It will eliminate many of the content hurdles those of us in this discipline have faced for years and will help make the pivot to this approach much easier if we embrace AI and help guide it. AI will make workflow learning and targeted training doable for the masses. Its time has come!
And that’s why I will never go back. Workflow learning, EnABLE, the 5 Moments of Need, Digital Coaches, and AI combine to empower L&D to reach it true potential and answer its true calling: to enable performance at every changing moment!
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