If you’re like me your first reaction is — NO WAY.  You’re skeptical, you may get this feeling in your gut that makes you cringe. You’re thinking — love does not belong in the workplace, it’s personal, it belongs at home. You have a vision of people in loose, flowing clothes running around hugging each other. With flowers. And other stuff. (Ok, maybe that’s just me.)

But something made my critical mind pause.

The Pygmalion Effect

The Pygmalion Effect describes how people act in accordance to the expectations you have of them — whether these expectations are conscious or unconscious. If you think people are stupid, guess what? — they can read your mind and act that way. This effect has been demonstrated in the classroom, at home, and at work. (Related effect — the Galatea effect > the expectations we have of ourselves.) Furthermore, a positive mindset from a leader can produce powerful behavioral effects, even in the absence of auditory or visual contact (references below). Whether you are leading employees or students — your mindset matters. Call it good will, call it focusing on the positive — or simply call it love.

Appreciative Processes

Ever heard of Appreciative Inquiry? It’s a type of inquiry that envisions a future that focuses positive relationships and collaboration, building organizations based on what works rather than trying to fix what doesn’t. Appreciative Processes improve systems by amplifying what’s working — identifying what people do best.

Think about how we approach most work — FIX THE PROBLEM. Do a gap analysis. Figure out what people need to learn, figure out what mindsets we need to change, usually ending up with the question — how do we fix our PEOPLE?

Appreciative Processes combine the Demming approach with Appreciative Inquiry — figure out what processes  make a difference and use an appreciative mindset to bring out the best in people. Use Appreciative Leadership to create a culture of systemic change and continuous improvement.

Back to LOVE

Ok, so here we are — back at the idea of love in organizations. When we think about creating an environment that:

• Focuses on what people and organizations do well
• Focuses on strengths,
• Allows people to do their best everyday
• A place where people enjoy being and where they enjoy each other

That’s a organization that uses love.

If it makes you feel better to call it something else, go ahead do so. But just remember, you’re losing the energy of a very powerful word.

Just try this — go about your work constantly thinking — “I love this place, my work, and the people I work with.” Try it for just ONE day. See what difference it makes.

Learn More…

• If you’re interested in learning more — come to a workshop on “Releasing the Power of Love in the Workplace”, by Roger Harrision sponsored by BAodn on June 9, 2010 in San Francisco. [Link to workshop]
• Accessing the Power of Love in the Workplace, by Roger Harrision, Ph.D. [Download PDF document here]
• The Appreciative Leader and Appreciative Change Processes by Gervase R. Bushe, Ph.D. [Download PDF document "aplc" here]. Or visit www.clearlearning.ca
• Pygmalion & Galatea effects

My mother’s kitchen

As an adult, I’d go back to visit my mother’s house, and one of our biggest arguments was over her kitchen — more specifically, the organization of her kitchen. I could never find anything — which is not unusual for a visitor, but more importantly I couldn’t learn how to find anything and had to ask her for help every single time. Drove me bananas.

The cooking oil would be under the sink. The spices would be with the pots. There was nothing useful in the pantry. The flour, sugar, eggs (she had 2 fridges) and baking trays would be in a different room. What kind of logic was this??? I would reorganize her kitchen. She would get furious. Arguments would ensue. After a few times, I gave up.

Only just recently, I realized her logic — the mental model of her kitchen.

You see, I organize according to category — like things with like things. Dry food items here, spices there, pots under there, vegetables here. She organized according to function.

What function would require cooking oil under the sink? Well, she had a huge burner ring outside for deep frying large batches of stuff. The burner was outside on the patio, the kitchen window served as a pass-through, the kitchen sink was under the window. It was easier to have the cooking oil there rather than walk across the kitchen to get it (she also had bad knees.)

Her spices were close to the stove, where she cooked, with the pots because she could reach them there. When my brother remodeled the kitchen, he made the upper cabinets too high. She’s 4’10″.

The sugar, flour, eggs, baking items — well, she didn’t use them that often. And when she did, she baked huge batches of stuff, which meant she needed more room than what was in her kitchen, so she had another room set up for that.

The organization of her kitchen increased her efficiency. That was her mental model.

It was not one I shared.

Learning mental models

When I first moved down to the United States of America, I had a job as a writer. I was to help people learn about information technology at a University. At that time, the SysAdmin folks dictated how we thought about things. I was new, I followed along. The documentation we wrote was organized according to categories: accounts, email software, SSH, FTP, and other stuff. It was mostly useless. Why?

People did not think in those SysAdmin categories. We let the inmates run the asylum. I realized how useless it was after I left that position, then tried to access my email and change my password. I looked in the book that I had written to remember how to do this. I couldn’t find the information under email. I searched and searched and finally called the Help Desk in frustration. The information was under the Accounts section — but who would have ever thought of that?

We never bothered to learn the mental models of our learners. Not even at the most basic level. How did they organize their thinking about “that stuff they do online”?

But wait…we can’t figure out what everyone is thinking!

True, you cannot figure out the mental models of every single individual. No one is asking that. But we can figure out patterns. First question — is about functionality or categories? Do they really need to know how a domain is organized in order to do their work? Yes, it might help them in the long run, but realistically, that’s not the goal of most people. They just want to get their work done. Help them do that. Where are your learners currently at and where do they or you want them to go?

Shared understandings

Sometimes we have to create common or shared understandings. And individual mental models may get in the way. So what do we do — assuming we are talking about adults?

• Treat people as adults
  • They have survived in the world so far using the mental models they have been using, don’t demean their understanding of the world. Work to understand it. Break it down.
• Set a common, agreed upon goal — a destination.
  • Unless you can agree upon why things need to change (the marketplace has changed, more than one person needs to use this kitchen, there’s been a merger) you will not get people on your side.
• Propose a new mental model
  • How will this effect people in their work?
  • What specific behaviors will have to change? Why?
• Talk about people’s fears and uncertainties
  • Create a safe environment to discuss fear and uncertainty
  • Allow people to vent
• Experiment and play with new behaviors
  • Make the learning playful but serious (experiential learning)
  • Engage people in finding resolutions to the change
  • Disrupt existing behaviors – have learners reflect on why they did what they did
• Make a plan to make it happen (action plan)
• Follow-up (metrics)

I realize these are large bullet points and the struggle is still “how”. It’s hard work to figure out where your learners are currently at and how to change. The specific context matters. Doing the research and analysis matters. Figuring out how to measure the impact of changing mental models matters — what’s the business outcome and how do you measure it?

If I were to ever spend a significant amount of time in my mother’s kitchen, I would start with a conversation that would go something like this: “if we’re going to work together in this space, mom, it would help to make some changes on where you keep things.” I would not, ever again, stomp in there and simply start changing things. She would rightly be furious and resistant.

Imagine the emotional impact on the learners.

Then take it one step at a time.

If you’re all alone in this it helps to brainstorm with friends and colleagues. FYI – I’m always willing to play.

Happy Brains

Last night I uploaded a slidecast of Learning Design for the Brain – Multimedia Learning Principles.

This is a deck that I’ve been working on for some time — I created it back in August to better understand all those rather confusing and repetitive multimedia principles. It’s rather technical and academic in nature, but I’m hoping it will be useful, if only for the checklists at the end.

You can view the slidecast at my portfolio page or at SlideShare.net. Also available is a Checklist (PDF download) of  multimedia principles – this is helpful when designing.

Some notes  on creating slidecasts:

• if you’re doing this for the first time, use a short slide deck
• creating a separate audio file and synching online via the slidecast feature takes time! it’s a Flash-based system – very cool and easy to use but a little slow and painful for large files
• Slideshare does not export your animations – it flattens them. I realized this AFTER creating the audio. What a pain and workarounds to get that they way I imagined. Still not quite right.

So enjoy.

At it’s essence this article says a very simple thing — asking learners hard questions before engaging with the content, (i.e., by giving them a test) challenges learners to come up with an answer before they read the material or listen to a lecture, thereby improving recall of the material. That means not giving people the answer before they engage. That means expecting them to get it wrong, expecting them to fail.

Instructional designers often do the opposite. Give people the model or the answers, then test them. What if we were to test them first with hard questions? That would force people to think! To generate and hypothesize for themselves and begin to engage with the material. But that’s not what ID’s are suppose to do, right? It’s our material and instructional design that shows the way to enlightenment. How can learners be expected to know the answer before they see the material. They will probably get it wrong — and that’s ok. Getting it wrong helps people learn — people learn from their mistakes.

The author’s suggest the following study tactic:

Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.

The technique they describe above is similar to the PQ4R (preview, question, read, reflect, recite, review) method for study materials – except they suggest: preview, question, test, then the 4R’s. The key difference being the test. It’s also similar to asking “why” questions to get people to engage with the material.

This research makes sense but elicits a bit of a “duh” response (“I needed research to tell me that?!?”).

What this research does not address is motivation and relevance  — people can go through the motions of taking a test, of asking “why” questions and still not really engage. Challenging test questions may get some students to engage, but is not panacea. It is a simply method that may work in certain circumstances — what would be really helpful to better understand those circumstances.

My takeaways:

• test before you teach to challenge learners
• use hard questions
• allow learners to get the wrong answers
• let them find the right answers
• test again

I’m creating a series of Guidelines posts based on my reading of cognitive brain research — specifically taking about the underlying research and theories, so you can see how I extrapolated into a learning guidelines.

Help learners imagine a specific context

• The learning context matters – people remember things better when you create a learning context similar to the context where the knowledge or skills will be used.
  • For example, research into teaching divers terms taught the memorization of terms either on dry-land or underwater. Then, when learners were asked to recall the terms underwater, those who learned the terms underwater had significantly better recall of terms (Godden and Baddeley, 1975). Wet learning, wet recall performed better – imagine implications for diver training.
  • The flipside is that those who learned in wet environments performed much worse when recalling in dry environments (compared to dry learning/wet recall)
  • Others had inconclusive results when looking for context dependence.
  • However, further research suggested that learners did better when asked to imagine the context in which terms would be used. (Eich, 1985)
  • How well the learners encodes context depends on how much the learner is able to imagine and thus integrate the context with memories.
  • Simulations can be effective if they make it easier to imagine where the learning takes place.

Help learners create meaningful interpretations by asking why

• Understanding why one is learning a concept allows learners to create meaningful elaborations.
  • Answering why questions about the learning, the better the recall (Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987).
  • The more a learner elaborates or embellishes on a concept when trying to remember an item, the better the recall.
  • The more a learner generates their own elaborations, the better.
  • However, sometimes it helps to create elaborations that constrain the material being learned (B.S. Stein & Bransford, 1979).
  • In general, the more a learners engages with an concept, defines or limits the concept in their memory, the better they will be able to remember it.

Next post – frameworks.