I have no doubt that if you were to give me a tour of your company’s offices, we would encounter countless examples of team members engaged in collaborative pursuits. And we would both fully recognize the many benefits that emerge from such collaboration: spread workload, greater innovation, built-in quality control and accountability, flexibility, and, of […]
When I was assistant director of flight education at Ohio State, I remember an FAA training manual with an image that depicted a student’s head being cracked open and the instructor pouring knowledge into the learner’s brain. Unfortunately, many corporate training organizations still believe that effective learning is as simple as filling the learner’s head […]
Let’s say you’re trying to improve your golf game. Your instincts (or maybe your post-golf moods) tell you that you’re losing ground. Your friends say you’re improving. If you don’t keep score, you can’t really know which is true, right? One of the oldest adages in business is: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t […]
Tell me if you haven’t had a colleague or a teacher who is enamored with PowerPoint. You know the type. They not only use every excuse to put the most mundane material on a slide, they seem to believe that shooting stars and dramatic fades can make up for mediocre content. Sadly, you probably have […]
In the early pages of my book M-Pact Learning: The New Competitive Advantage, I included a quiz for my readers to assess how their companies were doing when it comes to meeting the critical learning needs of their employees. It’s a simple quiz, measured 1-5 on a gradient. For the question: “What is the role […]
If you’re like most people, things that you know you need to do—like going to the gym—can be hard, and the work-outs themselves can feel endless. But find yourself in a pick-up basketball game on the driveway court with your kids, or in a fast-paced doubles game and you probably don’t view it as working […]
Learning doesn’t stop at the classroom door. Even if you have the best instructional design imaginable and even if you see all your employee’s learning metrics skyrocket, if you want them to become experts, you have to support them after the course ends. What S4 NetQuest supplies after the course is what we call performance […]
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes, “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.” This observation is part of Gladwell’s larger assertion, drawing on research subjects as varied as world chess masters to classical […]
Going back further than I might care to admit, my very first foray into the world of learning design was by teaching future commercial airline pilots how to fly by employing flight simulators. I gained a bit of notoriety in flight training circles by speaking at conferences on a topic that challenged a core notion […]
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher said, “Change is the only constant in life.” He may have lived long before Plato or Aristotle, but his words feel like they belong to the present. As much energy as we devote to trying to predict the future in order to place our businesses in front of the pack, we […]