I’ve long held this theory about the relationship between trust and chaos (which often results in conflict). The theory started out like this.

Trust and chaos have an inversely proportional relationship. As trust nears zero, we’re all going to be in serious trouble.

This statement implies that as trust goes up, chaos decreases and vice-versa. The more I think about it, the more I think this isn’t exactly right. How could it be right? If it were this simple, trust would be universal, right? And we know this isn’t the case. Not even close.

I do think there is a direct relationship between trust and chaos. Trust is at the heart of most, if not all, of the conflicts and problems on this little planet. But the relationship is far from simple.

Earned & Granted

There are two ways I’m now thinking about the relationship between trust and chaos. The first is a simplified categorization of trust. This categorizes trust as earned and / or granted.

This is the first opportunity for conflict. And in this logical equation, multiple situations can arise:

• Trust can be earned but not granted.
• Trust can be granted but not earned.
• Trust can be earned and granted.
• Trust can be neither earned nor granted.

Only one of these situations minimizes conflict. A combination of these situations can compound conflict or chaos. For example, if one member earns but isn’t given trust while another is given without earning, ugly conflict is sure to brew below the surface. Many workplaces have their share of empowered incompetents. Conflict in these environments is probably significantly higher than environments with equitable distribution of trust. Ideally, trust is granted until removed (temporarily) as a consequence.

Which workplace do you think operates at potential? The workplace with low trust / misplaced trust or the one with high trust / equitably distributed trust?

Local & System Trust

Mario Vittone, a friend of mine, recently retired from Coast Guard active duty. Back in 2008, he wrote a fantastic article titled “The Missing Competency“. In his article, Mario writes that trust is the missing competency in leadership development. The component of leadership that is seldom spoken of in formal development programs and rarely practiced with intent. He gives some great advice for increasing local trust, in particular methods you can use to increase your personal trustworthiness score. Read Mario’s stuff! You won’t regret it.

But I see local trust and system trust differently. I see tight coupling with local trust and loose and complex coupling with system trust. Think about how much you trust the U.S. Congress this year or last year. Now compare that with two decades ago, if you can remember back that far. Is your trust of that system component higher or lower? Now think about large banks and Wall Street. Do you have higher or lower trust in these systems than you did a decade ago? System trust isn’t universal and it’s far more complex than local trust.

A Trust Curve

I’ve revised my original theory about the relationship between trust and conflict or chaos to look more like a curve. And this curve isn’t the same for every context.

Trust seems to have a band of effectiveness on average. While I think we should 1) grant trust more often and 2) push for more trust, I don’t think 100% trust is the answer in every context. There is likely a threshold of trust that provides the best return on energy used to build the trust, beyond which conflict could be higher.

For example, consider the much maligned position of IT services within most organizations. Opening up 100% trust provides a risk calculation that is uncomfortable or unacceptable to those that govern IT resources and are charged with protecting the organization, its business, and its data. In this situation, zero trust is completely counterproductive (though common). 100% trust (though rare) opens the organization to risks that IT management believes are unacceptable. So the default response to many requests for an increase in trust or access is no. Right or wrong, this is a common position. It’s a balancing act that tends to err on the side of caution.

Within any optimized trust band (best discovered through experience and honest evaluation), there lies a point of diminishing or negative return. The hard part is figuring out where this balance is and leaving both benefit of the doubt and options to increase the window of trust when the returns are positive. This becomes a game of trade-offs. One of min-max where you’re aiming to maximize the positive and minimize the negative. It’s almost never simple.

Low trust makes things that should be easy excruciatingly hard to get done. Unbalanced assignment of trust creates subsurface conflicts and can destroy a team’s motivation.

How do you maximize trust and minimize chaos?

I’m a week into the Educational Technology and Media MOOC (etmooc) experience. This style of experience is difficult to describe. It’s a BIG conversation between hundreds of (1500, or so) folks from all over the globe with similar interests, across multiple channels, in a large and loose structure. The course leverages Twitter, Google+, live sessions, and blog aggregations from participants to expose these conversations to the group. Yeah, 1500 participants mixing across multiple tools. If you don’t have well tuned filters, this can be seriously overwhelming. It’s chaos. But not necessarily in a bad way.

As this experience coalesces, I see people doing many things for the first time. First blogs. First time using Twitter. Sharing different types of simple media production tools and producing video narrative to “make learning visible”. As the experience progresses, folks are beginning to form smaller groups of resonance in this great big space. Through a natural process, smaller spaces form within the bigger space.

This is the most fascinating thing to me about this experience. Observing the social dynamics of a very large group, engaged in a really big conversation is pretty fantastic. Each participant working around a couple of big questions:

• How are you making your learning visible?
• How are you contributing to the learning of others?

Here’s the way I am thinking of the MOOC. It’s working like a pressure system, behaving with dynamics not entirely unlike weather patterns. The loose course structure and the promise of learning about how to improve pedagogy with communication technologies create a pressure well, drawing folks in. Participants come from different fields and backgrounds, with different perspectives, and with different levels of commitment and intensity.

Not entirely unlike a weather system, differences in pressures (interests) form eddies. Groups of interest are starting to emerge. I anticipate this will continue through the remainder of the course.

This isn’t my first MOOC but it is my first connectivist MOOC experience. It may also be the first MOOC I finish. Enrolled in a few content MOOCs but combination of linear structure and no real incentive caused an attention dump early on.

I’ve been inspired by the passion of the educators in the group. It’s been a positive experience. Maybe I’ll make it through this one. Time will tell.

I’m Steve Flowers and here’s how you can build a mental model of my construct.

Note for my 2 (or so) regular readers: I’m participating in #etmooc, a massively open online course for education technology and media. This is assignment 1. I think there are still open spots if you want to join in.

1. Steve’s personal and professional life are hopelessly intermingled

My personal and professional life are a seriously commingled mess. By that, I mean that it’s difficult to see where one stops and the other begins. I suspect that this is fairly common in folks that are passionate about what they do.

On the professional side, I have worked for the U.S. Coast Guard in one form or another for longer than 20 years. I was an active duty electronics technician for just over 10 and I’m currently a performance technologist / solutions consultant with the USCG Performance Technology Center. That means I’m sometimes a consultant, sometimes a developer, sometimes a producer, most times a designer (technical, communication, instructional, or process — really whatever the situation calls for, I try to fill the need). I build digital stuff like EPSS, tools, and eLearning.

I’m a tool pilot and tend to master tools quickly. There aren’t many classes of tools I haven’t driven or taught others to drive. Consequently, I’m less interested in tools than I am in outcomes, goals, results and the covert or tacit things that contribute to outcomes, goals, and results.

2. At the heart of it, Steve is (proud to be) nothing more than an assistant

If you remove all of the lofty terms that define a discipline, at the heart of it I’m just an assistant. I assist the apprentice, the journeyman, and the master get done what they need to get done. I try to enable growth and development where I can but I try to stay out of the way.

3. Steve writes stuff and participates in communities

There’s a book I co-wrote with a couple of other fine fellows to support new Articulate Storyline users. I also participate regularly as an Articulate MVP (Super Hero) on Articulate’s E-learning Heroes Community.

4. Don’t let Steve fool you, Steve’s life is excellent.

On the personal side, I’m married to a media specialist, science fiction author, and fairly famous Russian Poet named Irina. She’s pretty awesome. We live in a modest flat overlooking a mill pond with our three cats Lola (not the brightest cat), Gray (more person than cat), and General Tso (demon spawn). We far exceed the per capita average of devices and displays in the house. I’m embarrassed to say how much technology stuff we’ve hoarded away… It’s a disease, I tell you.

In the time I’m not working for my day job or helping folks with moonlight work, I like to play games (I used to be a huge World of Warcraft nerd) and write about stuff that interests me. I read a bit, though my collection of unread books is far larger than my collection of read books.

5. Steve likes his friends and his network. 

I’m fortunate to have a network of really smart friends that like the same stuff I do and a global network of tools that makes it easy to stay connected. If you’re reading this, you’re automatically one of those friends. So, thank you.

6. A lot of things interest Steve, here are a few of them:

• Application of technology to help people 1) get things done and 2) develop their skills. Particularly interested in mobile / accessible and Web-based technologies and structures. Have written a few things on the xAPI (Tin Can API).
• Use of everyday household technology to generate things of use to other people. This includes a strong interest in the use of video to capture and share authentic experiences or articulate ideas. This tech is ubiquitous. The barrier isn’t gadgetry, it’s habitry. I made it my goal to use a tablet / device to generate much of the media I’ll produce this year and I hope to share some things I’ve learned with the folks in this group. Did I mention that I have a technology addiction?
• Profiles, lenses, patterns, and frameworks are a passion of mine. I think lexicons of work and decision paths are important to validating a body of knowledge. I don’t believe we do enough in the education and training space to communicate the things that work and consequently we rarely discuss why. To me, this is critical to the development of (an admittedly fractured) professional discipline.

7. Steve is opinionated as all get out. Here are some things Steve has opinions about:

• Culture as the core influencing signal on behavior (how we are influenced by and influence this signal)
• How often we seem to avoid showing our work and end up arbitrarily making decisions about delivery mediums and media with big holes in our data support.
• The biggest problems in education center around 1) a focus on information [vice capability] as a central object 2) poorly designed and administered assessment mechanisms that result in misplacement and mismatches between certification and competence. Both of these are common but not universal. That’s what makes the problem so darn hard to diagnose.
• Everything (yes, everything)

8. Steve is happy to be on this journey with y’all.

Happy to be here. I anxiously anticipate the adventure.

In a meeting last week, we discussed adoption of mobile technologies. I suggested that different folks would operate and adopt at different wavelengths. So a one size fits all expectation might not work out. Some will take a shorter focus and try to change something small without seeking a larger goal of system alignment.

Some efforts will seek that broad signal and gradually move towards a holistic change. When I initially thought about it, I thought in terms of two wavelengths. The first, I thought, was evolutionary and the second revolutionary. On reflection, it really seems like there’s more to it than this.

Maybe efforts could be categorized into three areas of focus:

• Isolated transformation (incremental / isolated)
• System evolution (measured / holistic)
• System revolution (radical / holistic)

This isn’t about novel innovation for novel innovation’s sake (which tends to sound like “because it’s cool”). Think about this type of change as an effort to scale up ways of doing business that make a positive difference.

Isolated transformations tend not to be aimed at long-term system change. This type of change seems to be common. Think about the small, incremental transformations you’ve seen. If these don’t lead to more holistic evolution, where do they lead? And why don’t the goals of these micro-transformations connect with more holistic goals? I imagine that the answer is that these types of changes are easier to accomplish and less threatening to organizational control structures. If I wanted to avoid changing the system, why would I make any efforts toward change?  Everything is connected. Isolated transformations don’t make much sense to me.

That’s not to say that hacks and smaller efforts can’t tie to a larger system goal. It’s just that usually… they don’t. If you’re familiar with e-learning deployments, you’ve probably seen insulated efforts that don’t connect or tie to bigger picture efforts. While these might be loosely tied to a business goal, they tend to be “one and done” and “fire and forget”.

System evolution defines a tempered approach that migrates and scales organizational practices, policies, and processes toward something better.  System evolutions happen over time but always start with the end in mind.

System revolution is a less tempered approach that can violently disrupt a larger system to enact broad change. Like the system evolution, revolutions start with the end in mind but through the force and speed of the change can cause collateral damage to organizational structures. When systems are really broken, a revolution might be called for.

In every case, successful holistic changes are driven by visionary foresight.  If you’re driving toward a change, what kind of change wavelength are you on?

You start a new project and receive a heap of content from stakeholders. Your shiny new stack of content arrives with an expectation from the project owner that you deliver that content (every ounce of it) to the mental doormats of their audience. In an attempt to do the right thing, you dutifully conduct an analysis of the performance & skills that the program you’re helping needs to address. You get to know the audience. You frame a set of performance objectives around a reasonably rigorous analysis.  Despite this effort, you’re still stuck with big pile of content.

The tail wags the dog. You dive into the rabbit hole head first. You search for aesthetically pleasing layouts and graphics that will grab attention. You look for ways to make an awful experience less awful. Soon you’ve invested a ton of time trying to engineer treatments for content and you’ve lost sight of the purpose of the solution (if ever there was a purpose).

Sound familiar? You bet. When you enter into a battle with content treatments, it’s easy to get lost in the noise. That noise makes it easy to lose sight of the things we can do to really make the biggest difference. Unfortunately, this unenviable situation is far too common. It seems unfair to give information this much of our attention, doesn’t it?

In the performance solutions field (ISD, learning experiences, whatever you want to call what we do), we often look at other fields of discipline for guidance and inspiration. We often examine other design disciplines or areas of media production, looking for better ways to position and polish our communication. As helpful as these fields might be, we may be overlooking an important, albeit less sexy, discipline. The field of economics may hold one key to making solutions worth the effort we put into them.

Economics is a process that converts inputs that have economic value into outputs that also have economic value.

In design, we deal with many factors and artifacts (currencies). Ideally we’ll weigh all of the inputs we can to make decisions that provide the best trade-offs and consequently the best outputs and value for all stakeholders, given the inputs we have to work with. Content is just one of these currencies. Other currencies include:

• Target accomplishments
• Tasks that enable the accomplishments
• Skills that enable the tasks
• Components of the skills that enable the tasks
• Audience factors
• Environment factors
• Technology supports / constraints
• The client’s wants
• The client’s needs

An experience itself is defined by economics. Good experiences consist of moments that drive towards the design intent or the goal of the solution. That’s a deep one, I’d rather go down that route in another post.

Good economics supply greater value in the outputs than the inputs, making the outcome worth the effort. While it’s not as sexy as User Experience (UX) or game design, doesn’t economics sound like a field worth looking into?

Make the outcome worth the effort.

Often, maybe too often, we make decisions that seem to draw magic lines between content and solution without consideration of the intent of the aggregate of those decisions. Starting with purpose in mind is a sensible guideline. It’s easy and intuitive to point to this and say “Yeah, that’s the right way to do it” but it’s challenging to follow in practice. I guess that’s why we call it a discipline.

Here are two suggestions you can use to battle the magic leap and increase your effort to outcome ratio.

1. Look at your solutions as economic problems. Map the structure of your problem so you can know exactly how the structure of your answers matter in the big picture. Understand the structure of the task down to the skills and all of the factors that shape the execution of the skill. Know what concepts drive the skill. Know common interpretations of a rule that influences the execution of the skill. Use this structure to validate your decisions. If something doesn’t stick, dump it.
2. Don’t start with content. Don’t get hung up on content. While content is often an important artifact, it’s the wrong starting point. And in many cases it hadn’t earned the effort we often invest in it. Getting lost in the (often horrible) noise of treating content is a great way to lose sight of the big picture and is a terrible way to deliver value. It’s hard to win the performance war if we tie all of our energy up in a content battle. Content is a means to an end. Starting with a focus on content will make it a slog for you and a slog for your participants. Pick another starting point.

Everything we do and every choice we make has a cost. Every cost stacks debt. That debt can manifest as time, money, disappointment, or simply things you need to fix to make it work (costing time, money, and disappointment). This debt adds up. Design is an economic problem. How do you account for your design debt?

In follow-up posts, I’ll talk a little about a process I’ve been exploring to expose a deeper look at the currencies we use in design and a way to change the tendencies we have that give so much weight to content.

How are you showing your work?

Test

The article below was written for an internal audience to illustrate the potential of the Experience API (Tin Can API). This brief overview contains narrative descriptions of four use-cases.

Disclaimer

The use-cases described below illustrate projections and opportunities that could help to resolve some organizational challenges. The use cases described below do not represent plans. This article doesn’t necessarily represent the viewpoint of the U.S. Coast Guard or the Department of Homeland Security.

The DoD ADL Initiative is working on a set of technology interoperability standards to enable training and learning systems. This new set of standards is called the Training and Learning Architecture (TLA). The first technology standard in the TLA is the Experience API (XAPI) also known as the Tin Can API. Differing from current systems that focus on connecting content with systems, this standard creates a language and technology framework that focuses on connecting people with systems. More specifically, the Experience API enables systems to capture the actions, activities, experiences, and accomplishments of people. Continue reading →

This post will mix a kitchen remodel with some video game nostalgia. Believe it or not, these have something powerful in common. Artificial competence isn’t a bad thing if it gets the job done.

A kitchen remodel

We’ve been planning to remodel our kitchen since moving into our townhome 8 years ago. The old pine cabinets and light blue countertop had each overstayed their welcome. This year we took the plunge and decided to do it ourselves. I have some construction skills but had never tackled anything as complex as a kitchen. I was going to need a special kind of magic to get this done without help. Continue reading →

Think about how you’d answer these questions:

• How do we as performers make the journey from beginner to competent to proficient and beyond?
• How can Human Performance Technology (HPT) practices help remove friction and improve the environments where this journey happens?
• If we don’t all have the same idea for what the pathway looks like, how can we work together to efficiently help the performer ascend to the levels they need to reach and heights that they aspire to?

While I’m not sure it’s always necessary, I think it’s important to create some sense of consistent gravity around critical anchors in the language of our discipline. Skill, proficiency, and expertise are among the concepts I would consider to be critical in a field that exists to support, facilitate, and improve the things that these terms represent. In this case the mechanisms by which we help folks climb the ladder, navigate pathways, and make connections seems to be more more important than the meaning of the terms (levels) themselves.

The post is still going to be about the lexicon for competence, proficiency, expertise, and mastery but it’s going to cover a bit of ground in the process.

I had been planning to read an article written by ADM Robert J. Papp , Jr. titled Proficiency: The Essence of Discipline for a few weeks. I’ve known ADM Papp for a few years and he’s one of the many people I admire. His views on experience and proficiency have informed my own. As an organizational leader (he’s the four star Admiral in charge of the USCG and a genuinely cool dude), the Admiral walks the talk and the steps he’s outlined are indeed in motion. The article did not disappoint.  I recommend giving it a read.

I began speaking of proficiency in my first “State of the Coast Guard” address in early 2011, and it generated a flood of questions. During all-hands meetings last year, I frequently was asked to describe “proficiency.” I would reply by recounting how during a visit to a Coast Guard boat station I had asked the crew, “Who is the best boat coxswain?” Of course half a dozen boatswain’s mates immediately raised their hands. So I rephrased the question. “If the search-and-rescue alarm sounded and you had to go out in a severe storm, who would you want to be the coxswain of the motor lifeboat?” Everyone turned and pointed to the commander, a chief warrant officer boatswain (BOSN4) and surfman with more than 30 years of experience. Clearly, we all know proficiency when we see it. But how do we become proficient? And proficient at what?

~ ADM Robert J. Papp, Commandant USCG

Do we have a common language for the steps in skill acquisition?

As I read ADM Papp’s article, it struck me that while we often talk about proficiency, skill, and expertise in my field, we might not have a common idea for what these terms represent. If we don’t have a common concept for the meaning, it could be difficult for us to agree on the mechanisms we use to facilitate (or know when to get out of the way and trust in the strength of the network or the individual). When do we mediate and intervene? When do we let go? Tough questions if we don’t agree on the model for what skill progression looks like.

I talked about my views on the place “skills” live in the great network of being in Make the Structure Visible. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that the outcome is the goal and the skill is one of the means to reach the goal. Let’s also assume that most, if not all, skills can be categorized with multiple different levels of mastery.

To start, let’s riff off of an inspiring post by Craig Wiggins with some martial arts flavor. These are probably some of the oldest mastery development models in existence. Ancient disciplines seem like a good place to start. The definition of levels is one facet, but looking at the model, the real value of the definition is in the mechanisms that bridge from one level to the next.

Shuhari (foundations, breaking away, transcendence)

Shuhari comes from a Japanese martial art concept that illustrates progression for attaining mastery through disciplined learning.

 shu (守) translates as protect or obey. In the context of Japanese martial arts, this is where learning progression begins. These foundations represent learning fundamental techniques, heuristics, and proverbs. During this stage, the subject of the discipline does not deviate from the forms presented by a single instructor.

 ha (破) translates as detach or digress. This is where learning progression expands beyond the foundations and the subject is encouraged to innovate and break free of the rigid foundations. During this stage, the subject explores the application of the foundational forms, making some forms their own and discarding others.

 ri (離) translates as leave or separate. In this stage, the subject completely departs from the discipline of the forms and opens themselves to creative techniques that align with the desires of the heart and mind within the bounds of laws, rules, and values. The subject is encouraged to use what they have acquired during shu and ha to transcend teachings and acquire mastery, making their own connections and relationships to the discipline.

Chinese martial arts such as Wushu also offer a three-phase mastery concept.

• Earth – Basics.
• Human – Ready to learn (equated to 1^st level black belt, so I suppose you’re not really ready to learn in this context until you’ve reached performance competence.)
• Sky – No conscious thought.

It looks like the concepts of defining states or levels along the path to mastery have been around for a while. These relatively simple models represent a disciplined progression and transformation from novice to apprentice through to journeyman and master.

The Flowers Model of Capacity

I’ve long held my own categorization for levels of performer across three dimensions: Selection, interpretation, and execution.  Following novice through master, each level is matched with a more colloquial label.

Novice is matched with the label Burden since it can be a challenge to find the right resources to grow a novice.  This isn’t meant to be an insult to the novice. Everyone has to start somewhere. This merely implies that the development of the novice can be a larger draw on an organization’s resources than the development of the higher levels. That doesn’t prevent a senior performer from regressing or not growing beyond the novice level. We don’t always do the Novice relationship (opportunity) justice. The burden level is about exchange of value. When considering a person that’s new to an organization, training and patience are an investment in future returns.

It’s purely coincidental, but this is really similar to the Shuhari model of progression through mastery. The chart describing this model represents three main activity areas: selection, interpretation, and execution. I still like this model for some types of work but I don’t think it’s good enough to map into a common lexicon.

Dreyfus’ Model of Skill Acquisition

This model of skill acquisition comes from Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher and educator. The original model proposed that people pass through five stages in pursuit of skills: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. This was later revised to encompass seven distinct stages.

Novice	A novice is just learning the basics of a subject, unable to exercise discretionary judgment and has rigid adherence to taught rules or plans.
Advanced Beginner	The advanced beginner is beginning to connect relevant contexts to the rules and facts they are learning. Folks at this level may have no sense of practical priority. All aspects of work may be treated separately and will likely have equal importance.
Competence	A competent performer is able to select rules or perspectives appropriate to the situation, taking responsibility for approach.
Proficiency	A proficient performer has experience making situational discriminations that enables recognition of problems and best approaches for solving the problems. At this stage, intuitive reactions replace reasoned responses.
Expertise	The expert performer is able to see what needs to be achieved and how to achieve it. This level of performer is able to make more refined and subtle discriminations than a proficient performer, tailoring approach and method to each situation based on this level of skill.
Mastery	The mastery performer has developed their own style, extending expertise within a domain with their own synthesis of tools and methods.
Practical Wisdom	This level was tacked on later at the behest of a colleague. This describes the assimilation of the master’s creations within the culture of a work unit or organization. In my interpretation, this is the closure of the cycle and describes the giving back from the master to the domain, enhancing the domain body of knowledge itself.

Let’s focus for a moment on the four levels in the middle: competence, proficiency, expertise, and mastery. These represent the progression from confidently able (decreased burden on the system – returns are beginning to emerge), intuitively able (solver), to crazy able (synthesizer), and beyond.

While I like this model, it doesn’t seem to offer a solid definition of the behavioral components of proficient, expert, or master. If it matters that these levels are attained, what signifies each milestone for a particular skill? How are these levels distinct?

James Atherton offers an extension that might be useful in narrowing the definition expertise and may be helpful in quantifying the meaning of and mechanisms for attaining proficiency, expertise, and mastery. He adds that an expert might be defined by the demonstration of:

• Competence: The ability to perform a requisite range of skills.
• Contextualization: Knowing when to do what.
• Contingency: The flexibility to cope, adapt, and respond when things go wrong.
• Creativity: The capacity to solve novel problems.

I’m not sure these round it out for me completely, but these do clarify the borders of meaning between these terms. To be useful, the definitions should ultimately define a clear distinction among proficiency, expertise, and mastery that sets these levels apart from the threshold of competency.

One question that seems to surface often, one that I’ve brought up as well, is the importance of skill mastery beyond performance competence. How important is mastery beyond performance competence? I think the answer is “it depends” but it seems like there’s a consistent human drive that requires a goal beyond status quo for satisfaction in life (including life at work). If we don’t define what those goals *could* look like and don’t set our expectations higher, we risk *performance competence* becoming the high water mark in organizational performance expectations. Shouldn’t performance competence be the minimum standard?

Wrapping this up

I think holding a common understanding of what each of these levels mean could help to better communicate relationships. The value of this common thread transcends the relationships between the levels. A common understanding could help us better map the what, when, and why of how we help folks navigate the journey from no skill to skill mastery or any stop in between.

Let’s continue the conversation. Does Dreyfus’ model resonate with you? Does this matter? What have you found?

I’ve been thinking about this post for bit. Dr. Clark Quinn has been thinking along similar lines, from a different angle at his Learnlets blog (http://blog.learnlets.com/?p=2822).

This post is about lexicons. What we call things, what these labels mean, and how these labels lose their meaning when folks develop a tendency to apply the same label to everything. Yes, courses, I’m picking on you again. Or am I?

Earlier this week, a co-worker and I discussed some recent feedback we received on a “course” the organization deployed earlier in the year. I had a really hard time seeing these products as a valuable solution when this set of courses were originally contracted for design and production last year. I still think we paid far more for these than the value they deliver, but there’s something this class of products appear to provide that I didn’t account for. From the feedback we’ve received, a few potential and (to me) unexpected value propositions seem have emerged:

1.  These junior teammates were often involved in tasks away from operations and didn’t have the opportunity to orient to equipment and platforms while qualifying in other areas or performing entry level tasks. The orientations helped these members maintain a sense of connection with meaningful operational tasks and the bigger picture.
2. An independent opportunity to study and orient to the basics of a platform stokes confidence to ask better questions when interacting with experienced teammates.

I used quotes around “course” above because I think the classification of solutions described above are not courses at all. This might seem like a petty labeling nitpick.  But it seems important, if not critical, to reconcile the performance solutions lexicon around fit, purpose, and characteristics so we don’t pollute one stream with the meaning provided by another. This intersects with solution selection processes as well.

When you think about fit, purpose, and characteristics of a course what attributes come to mind? Do any of these characteristics resonate? Courses…

• Are designed for a resulting net positive change in capability or behavior for tasks that must be committed to memory (measured in outcomes, not quiz scores)
• Provide examples and demonstrations that show, illustrate, and elaborate concepts, procedures, and processes.
• Provide opportunities for authentic and contextual practice and feedback.
• Frame structures of clear progression toward skill goals.

How many packages have you seen that take on the course label don’t carry all (or any) of these features? Many? Most? Almost all of the compliance “courses” I’ve had the “pleasure” to participate in didn’t offer any of these characteristics. And this isn’t isolated to online offerings. Many physical classrooms suffer from the same deficiencies.

These qualities aren’t elements I’ve made up. Dr. Dave Merrill, Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark and countless others express these qualities as the core principles of effective instruction. Reams of books and studies have been published to support these characteristics as central to success.

It’s not uncommon for packaged content to take on the label of a course. To me, a mislabeling can seriously dilute the value and distract from the deliberate services provided by a course of instruction. A lexical hierarchy of solutions that includes courses and other classifications of solution could work together to better define what solutions are, what they do, and how they are selected to match with problem contexts. Heck, this common lexicon could already exist. If you know of a systems lexicon for performance solutions, I’d love to hear about it.

I suggest adding a category of solution at the level of awareness called orientation. Orientations have value but they are not courses. Orientations provide foundations for more complex learning structures and support tools. Solutions that aren’t courses have value to the big picture. Orientations, for example, can provide a nudge or boost for task performance when added to performance support. Orientations can also fit well when intentionally situated within course structures. Orientations don’t need to be fancy or expensive to get the job done.

We should try to avoid dressing solutions up as objects that they’re not and confusing ourselves as well as the people we provide services for.

I’ll be thinking and writing about this more in the future and welcome feedback and advice. In the end, maybe a more clearly and consistently defined set of characteristic definitions and labels for performance solutions wouldn’t be a bad thing.

What do you think?