- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Secret to Success is Asking the Right Questions.

The Secret to Success is Asking the Right Questions. by Andy Snider
e-Learning Magazine, March 2002

In the past few years learning technology components have unquestionably become much more stable and dependable but we still hear relatively few real success stories. Why is that? Part of the problem is simply because the technology is new and it always takes a while to get new programs into use. That problem will go away with time. But a more challenging problem has emerged. Many e-learning initiatives are based on wrong assumptions that may inevitably doom them to failure.

Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to work with dozens of companies on many different initiatives. Most of these eventually worked technically, but some initiatives were wildly successfully and created significant competitive advantage, while many others failed to meet even modest goals. One major company invested $ 2 M in learning technology for their sales team over the last 3 years. They now credit that investment with generating over $ 20M in increased annual sales. Over the same period, another company invested almost $ 3M and has seen virtually no return. There are some significant and consistent differences that I have noticed between the successes and the failures. The data that I have developed on this dichotomy shows pretty clear patterns emerging that separate the winners from the losers. This article attempts to summarize some of those findings. I believe that understanding how these factors work may help increase the likelihood that any specific initiative will achieve its desired goals.

Here are some of the approaches that I find commonly among the winners.

A clear focus on the behavioral outcome, not the content or pedagogy

It is almost impossible to know exactly the right mix of content, delivery and technology to use at the beginning of any e-learning initiative. There are a breath-taking number of possible technologies and different blended approaches on the market today. Nearly all of them do at least something well. The only way to keep a project on track is to be constantly and relentlessly focused on specific audiences and specific desired behavioral change, not instructional pedagogy. To shift our thinking to focus on outcomes is not easy for most of us who have spent years learning to think about education in terms of process.

As a metaphor, think of the process of designing a house, but assume that you have grown up in the jungle and never seen a house. The only way that you would be able get a comfortable house built would be to answer basic questions about the functions you need to support your life. Otherwise there is no way to decide what rooms it would need: a kitchen, a bathroom, a place to sleep, etc. Without that framework, the process would become a lengthy study of how to put familiar jungle elements like trees and campfires in the house rather than to focus on what is really necessary. The important decisions that need to get made would become overwhelming because we would not even know where to begin.

This is similar to the confusion that stalls the development of many e-learning initiatives. Many projects can even become terminally stuck at this stage. The trap becomes spending energy thinking about how to reproduce the classroom experience, that we are all familiar with, rather than focusing on how to use new technology to create a new model for a better way of learning.

The question that often leads to confusion and uncertainty is, "How can we put our content on-line?" The right question to ask is " How can technology be used to create an experience that will help a specific individual change so they can do a specific task better?"

This is a particularly common challenge for successful training companies. It is always tempting to start with the question, "how can we use technology to deliver our text books and classrooms more efficiently?". That sounds like a reasonable question, but usually leads to an expensive and unproductive solution. A better question is,

"What kind of learning experience would help our target audience do what they need to do better and what medium would be the ideal way to deliver that?

When this question is answered honestly, it often turns out that a live facilitator is critical for some portions of the program. But, equally often, a large portion of the program can be delivered better without a teacher, as long as appropriate technology approaches are selected. If there is not a clear focus on a desired behavioral outcome, then it always becomes incredibly difficult to develop any certainty around any particular approach. It is like asking someone if they want a bathroom or a kitchen in their house without understanding what the use of those rooms is.

Here is another example of how this lack of focus on desired outcomes can create confusion and side-track a project, even despite the best of intentions. A few years ago I worked with a large financial service company that was setting up a new call center. Their real goal was to use technology to make their customer agents more skillful at understanding their customers and responding appropriately within guidelines. It typically took several years for an individual agent to reach that level of skill and they needed a much faster process. They had an initial budget of $500,000 and the project started off well with a small team making great progress. They planned to create scenarios and tools that would support that learning process. Then a senior company executive became nervous about the money involved, and suggested that "while they were at it" could they JUST put all company procedure manuals on-line. Instead of arguing about that diversion, they accepted it as a positive sign of support and tried to accommodate him.

At the end of the first phase nearly all their time and budget had been spent working on procedure manuals. The company reviewed their work and decided the apparent value was not sufficient to continue funding. The moral is to always stay focused and be particularly vigilant when you hear the phrase " While you are at it, could you just add??.?"

All good solutions are blended.

There is no single vendor or partnership in the entire world who currently have all the best components to fully address all the likely issues that are needed to deploy a complete performance support system in any substantial organization. If the problem has real performance consequences and/or requires real behavioral change, there is no single vendor, or approach that provides the complete solution . There are also very few vendors in the world who think that the above sentences apply to them. That is why it will always create confusion to ask, " Which single vendor is the best solution to our problem?" Finding the ideal blend of technology and non-technology delivery components and matching that with appropriate content and structure is not a very complex process if the goals are clear, but it is not a process that can be clarified by looking for a single vendor solution.

Another difficulty that arises by on relying on a single vendor to define which components should be incorporated, is the confusion created by the standard software industry sales language. It is important to remember that in the software marketing world, there is no future tense. Everything is expressed in the present tense. So the phrase " Our engine supports all learning components and is completely SCORM compliant with a flexible user interface" may really mean "these are the services we aspire to offer, and if everything goes perfectly, we will have them available sometime in the future." Interpreting and ,managing this language is a skill that most IT departments have learned over the past decade, but it is still a new challenge for those of us who have not had a lot of experience buying corporate software products.

To help sort through this vendor confusion. Always ask a vendor, "What is the one thing that you do better than anyone else in the world?"If there is no satisfying answer to that question, move on. Secondly, always demand to see a live demonstration of the particular competencies that are needed.

It is also helpful to always try to think about what different pieces will need to be connected to make a compete solution. This question adds perspective to help keep from falling in love with a technology approach and then trying to find a problem for it to solve. If there is a mind-set that more than one solution will need to found, it helps keep the focus on the outcome instead of the technology. So, when there is a clear focus on the outcome desired and if there is an honest process of defining the exact expertise that any particular vendor brings to the table, then the likelihood of a "blended solution that really achieves significant measurable change is greatly increased.

Three years ago, a major university raised a $ 15M fund to find ways to leverage their faculty and expand their student population using technology. They began the process backwards. Instead of starting by talking with the faculty to see what they would use, or talking with potential students to see what they would consider an attractive on-line learning experience, the project team put all their efforts into buying parts and building a proprietary "infrastructure" that they thought would be the perfect environment. By the time that they had exhausted all their funds they had an impressive working shell, but very little that was useful to attract students. They also had little support from their own faculty. Ironically, over the same period of time, several software companies came out with reasonably inexpensive software that exceeded the functionality that this team had built. Because they lost their focus on the goal they became seduced by software and "missed the boat."

Technology-enhanced learning initiatives require multiple functions.

In any complex organization, meaningful learning initiatives do not stay easily inside departmental boundaries. Nearly every failed project that I have worked on in the last 10 years was designed without the involvement of critical stakeholders. I often hear: "We want to use an outside hosting model so can we avoid talking to our internal IS department;" or, "The operating division managers do not have time to be involved in this learning initiative;" or "We do not need to have any representatives of the actual end user on our project, we know what they want."

All of these statements are danger flags. Every successful change initiative always crosses departmental bounds. Jack Welsh understood this and preached it constantly in his last years at GE by talking about the "boundary-less organization." Learning technology initiatives always are at some level change initiatives.

It is always critical to ask "How can we get everyone who is a stakeholder in this project involved and how can a process be created to use their input productively?"

This is probably the most important variable and the one that is the hardest to make work. Every HR department feels that they get too little support from the IT department. Every IT department has stories about how operating groups demand unrealistic performance from them. And every operating manager is frustrated that staff never can provide enough useful support. Nonetheless it is absolutely critical to find ways for every stakeholder to be appropriately involved, if real performance change is desired. Finding ways to bridge the gaps created by these perceptions is essential to achieving real success.

Summary

Here is the check-list of questions to keep in mind:

• Are we staying focused on specific performance results and measurements?
• Are we building appropriate learner-focused experiences, not content on-line?
• Is there a process to select & integrate the best combination of technology?
• Is there an inclusive process to engage & coordinate an interdepartmental team?

All of this may seems obvious, but it is important not to underestimate the complexity of this process. Even if we get everything else right, there is always the problem of facing our own fears that inevitably come up as we face something new with some uncertainty. It is often scary to clearly express what we want to accomplish because of our fears that we may be held accountable for an unpredictable set-back. On the other hand, I believe that nothing ever really happens unless someone gets past those fears and commits unequivocally to the task at hand.

There is always a personal question that is probably more significant than everything else in determining the real outcome. It is the question "Am I really committed and do I really want this effort to make a difference?" It always amazes me how much a change initiative can trigger fears that keep projects in a state of limbo. Being prepared to deal with the reactions that come up in creating a process to implement a fundamental change to a new technology. Managing the fear is a lot easier when there is a supportive interdepartmental team equally committed and ideally an impartial coach or consultant to keep the process on track.

Moving to technology enhanced learning always involves disruptive change at some point and disruptive changes are always tricky. Having the right assumptions and processes turns out to be a far more significant predictor of success than which specific technologies, vendors, or approaches are selected.

back to top