the Interaction

What really makes employees productive?

2011-09-07T11:23:00.001-05:00

Powerful article in the New York Times over the weekend about employee satisfaction and productivity. The authors, Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and Steven Kramer, point out a connection that should be obvious but isn't: dissatisfaction on the job connects directly to a lower bottom line.

Employee engagement may seem like a frill in a downturn economy. But it can make a big difference in a company’s survival.... Conventional wisdom suggests that pressure enhances performance; our real-time data, however, shows that workers perform better when they are happily engaged in what they do.

What do employees find most engaging? Amabile and Kramer's study showed a clear result: "of all the events that engage people at work, the single most important — by far — is simply making progress in meaningful work."

Managers can facilitate this progress. But Amabile and Kramer found that they're missing the boat:

Unfortunately, many companies now keep head count and resources to a minimum and this makes progress a struggle for employees. Most managers don’t understand the negative consequences of this struggle. When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.

Here's a clear call to action: let's humanize the workplace, encourage creativity and meaning, and help people feel that their presence makes a difference. It's not just good-heartedness; it's good business sense.

Photo: Creative Commons

How to set priorities at work

2011-08-18T14:31:00.000-05:00

Erika Andersen has an excellent post here about helping leaders figure out what they need to do themselves and what they should be handing off to others. It's a common problem we've seen, too: after a promotion, people often find it difficult to stop doing their old tasks and focus on the demands of their current job. Whether it's the school principal who keeps hanging out in the classroom or the executive who can't stay off the manufacturing floor, we all like to continue with tasks that we enjoy and do well.

Erika's rule of thumb:

"Only do what only you can do. In other words, only do those things that no one below you is capable of doing. And if you’re doing tasks that someone else less highly paid and skilled than you could do...but there’s no one in the organization to do them...consider hiring someone."

Good advice for all of us, from one-person consultancies to CEOs of multinationals.

Photo: Creative CommonsBy akeg

Good words

2011-08-01T11:16:00.000-05:00

The expert is one who, having incorporated his tools, is unaware of them. – Douglas Harding

No "brilliant jerks" at Netflix

2011-07-25T11:12:00.000-05:00

Everyone talks about company values, but few do anything about them. Here's a post by Bill Taylor of Fast Company magazine about how values really mean behavior. He quotes Netflix CEO Reed Hastings:

"Values are what we value," Hastings declares in his presentation, and values "are shown by who gets promoted, rewarded or let go." Actual company values, he continues, "are the behaviors and skills that are valued in fellow employees."

In other words, not platitudes framed on a wall, but what people consistently do and say - and how they do it and say it. Hastings and Taylor believe that

a great place to work isn't about free lunches or weekly massages. A great place to work is about "stunning colleagues," an organization filled with people who bring out the best in themselves and in everyone around them.

So, even though I'm a little mad at Netflix right now over their price increases, I feel better knowing that they're trying to be human-hearted in corporate life. We need more of that.

Practice helps us own our knowledge

2011-07-07T11:20:00.000-05:00

"The benefit of a flight simulator is that it allows pilots to internalize their new knowledge. Instead of memorizing lessons, a pilot can train the emotional brain, preparing the parts of the cortex that will actually make the decision when up in the air." -- Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide

Great point. When faced with a situation that requires action, we rarely have time to think, "What was that approach we talked about during Day Three of management training?" We act from the gut. And we train the gut through practice.

What do all those NPR people look like?

2011-06-29T14:25:00.000-05:00

Here's Gaelan Kelly's mental pictures of Carl Kasell, Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich, and other voices in our heads.

The case for in-person learning

2011-06-22T08:30:00.007-05:00

Valuable blog post by Deborah Laurel on why interpersonal skills need face-to-face training. Her points 3 and 4 focus on practice, immediate feedback, and trial and error -- and how they help learners master and retain new skills.

Interactive skills require whole body learning. In other words, just because a participant intellectually grasps the steps in a specific type of interaction does not mean that the participant is able to effectively handle the interaction in real life. The only way that learners will achieve confidence in their own competence is for them to practice their new skills in simulations that are as real to life as possible.

a. The participants can evaluate whether their verbal and nonverbal behaviors are consistent with each other, or whether they are giving inconsistent messages.

b. The participants get a chance to see how it feels to actually say what needs to be said to the other person.

c. The participant has to adjust to and handle unexpected responses of the other person.

d. It gives participants the experience of having to think on their feet.

I've got to agree! Practice that's designed to be authentic, realistic, and unexpected (combined with a chance to coach and be coached by peers) is tremendously powerful. It's the difference between reading a recipe and tasting the dish.

Photo by Jill Brazel
at a Workplace Interactors program

Good words

2011-06-21T11:39:00.002-05:00

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. – Woodrow Wilson

Top 10 mistakes in changing behavior

2011-01-18T12:04:00.000-06:00

Good stuff from Stanford:

Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change

View more presentations from Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

From "Ha-ha" to "Aha!"

2010-12-14T09:11:00.001-06:00

New study on puzzles, problem-solving and laughter, demonstrating that people find it easier to solve puzzles through a flash of insight after they've watched something funny. I love this from two points of view:

As a puzzle maniac, I agree that even thinking about a good one (cryptic crosswords are my drug of choice) induces a pleasant mind-state - something they found in the study. And that moment of insight when the answer suddenly appears is one of the great joys of life, to me.

And as a creator of leadership-skills practice sessions which always combine laughter with serious practice, I constantly see how insight follows the loosening-up process of watching a funny live scene.

Glad to have the neurology to prove it!

Stepping up

2010-11-16T10:37:00.001-06:00

British corporate change expert David Bovis wrote in a discussion on LinkedIn, "Neurologically / psychologically, we are 'designed' to learn from mistakes, and we learn quicker from environments that provide positive reinforcement, forgiveness & understanding following mistakes." He goes on to give the (wonderfully vivid) example of how we encourage babies learning to walk. No one ever says, "You little idiot, you'll never walk. Why even try again?" And yet our feedback and evaluation systems tend to focus on what we've done wrong, in a punitive way.

That reminds me of Marshall Goldsmith's wonderful Feedforward exercise, which we've used with a number of different groups: clients, our religious community, and even just between Dan and me. Instead of focusing on the past (which we can't change, anyway), feedforward encourages us to consider ways that we can do better as we move ahead.

If you haven't tried it, I urge you to check it out. Marshall's clever format helps stop our usual resistant brain-chatter and opens us up to true listening and real possibility. People report feeling truly cared for after the exercise and tend to come away with a few good ideas for improving their lives. One baby step at a time.

Good words

2010-11-03T08:33:00.001-05:00

There are trivial truths, and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true. - Neils Bohr

The wisdom of crowds

2010-10-25T15:30:00.000-05:00

Online training has become an accepted, often cost-efficient way of training in the corporate setting. E-learning allows people to work at their own pace, during their own available time. But what's lost?

One answer is hinted at in a blog post by Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex. The topic is buzz and how it works to sell products, especially movies. But near the end of the post, Lehrer writes: "For too long, we’ve tried to understand ourselves in isolation, as we test people one at a time in the psychology lab or rely on their past preferences to predict behavior. But these conditions and algorithms are artificial. In the real world, we are deeply intertwined with each other, dependent on our social networks for all sorts of advice."

I thought back to a recent workshop we gave, in which 24 newly-minted supervisors watched each other deal with various realistic management situations, live and impromptu. Participants commented on how valuable it was to see how other people handle things - even if their style is different from yours (or perhaps especially so!). Even though back on the job these folks will often have to act alone, the collaboration they experience in training helps give them a repertoire of possible approaches that they're more likely to remember when they need them.

We often emphasize the practice aspect of our workshops, and of course that's vital: nothing makes learning stick like actually trying it out. But the group process may be equally important for topics (like supervisor skillls) that involve social interaction. In a culture that still tends to overemphasize the individual, it's useful to reaffirm the wisdom of crowds.

Photo by Jill Brazel of a Workplace Productions program

Good words

2010-10-13T15:22:00.000-05:00

Every tradition is actually a successful invention. - Yo-Yo Ma

Good words

2010-10-02T09:46:00.001-05:00

Part of creativity means keeping your learning curve as high as possible, and part of teaching is learning. - Yo-Yo Ma

Two to tango, four to square dance

2010-09-22T13:39:00.000-05:00

Excellent article in Slate that looks at creativity in partnerships and takes on the pervasive cultural myth of the lone genius. Joshua Wolf Shenk even takes on the whole notion of a separate "self" - an idea that's been questioned by such paths as Buddhism and Advaita.
Do we really exist outside of relationships?

I've always been annoyed by the phrase, "We're born alone, and we die alone." I can't speak about the death part of it, but having given birth, I can say most emphatically that we're not born alone! Some woman (and likely a whole bunch of other people) are on the scene and working very hard to make that birth happen. And, as the article points out, babies are interrelating right from the start.

We Americans seem to be especially in love with what Shenk calls "the atomized person." I can't help thinking that this notion is partly responsible for the polarization of the country today, and the apparent loss of the sense of the collective good. If we saw harming our neighbor as actually harming ourselves, we might have a different view. In the piece, John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago says: "We're ready for a Copernican revolution in psychology."

Which sets me to thinking about how what aspects of learning design may be based, unknowingly, on this underlying belief in individualism. Are there ways to do it better?

At Workplace, we adore collaboration. From the basic pair who run the company (Dan and Beverly Feldt, who are husband and wife); to our fabulous interactors; to our clients, whose great ideas are always incorporated in our "flight simulators"; to our focus groups and participants, whose grappling with the situations we present creates the learning - it's all glorious groups. Could we be the wave of the future?

Yummy food for thought. Maybe I'll go talk to Dan about it...

Good words

2010-09-08T10:56:00.000-05:00

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success. – Thomas J. Watson

The clock is ticking, part two

2010-08-30T10:27:00.000-05:00

I had a chance to try out the 10-minute rule at a program we did for Northwestern University last week. The workshop is called "Grace Under Pressure," and it focuses on how to recognize and relieve adrenaline flooding - the fight-or-flight response that shuts down your ability to think clearly. It's really cool material, mostly developed by Andra Medea, who wrote Conflict Unraveled and certified me to teach this stuff.

We have two fantastic interactors who demonstrate flooding and its solutions, and of course they're riveting. But there's also a lot of information on the physical signs and symptoms of flooding that I have to convey at the beginning of the workshop. Last time we did it, a participant complained about the "lecture" (!), so I wanted to tinker with this section to see if the 10-minute rule might help keep the learners more engaged.

I redesigned this chunk it so that I changed direction about every 9 minutes, bringing in the interactors, discussion, etc. I also made sure that I explained BEFOREHAND exactly how the information would be useful to the learners. (I'm an awful nerd sometimes, and I tend to get enthusiastic and not notice that listeners may be thinking, "And you're telling me this WHY?")

The redesign worked beautifully! In fact, one of the participants, commenting on the half-day program as a whole, said, "I don’t think any of us were bored for even one second."

Granted, most of this was due to Ta-Tanisha Jordan and Jack Hickey (pictured above), and their skill at demonstrating conflict and calm. But at least I didn't get in their way!

Photo: Jill Brazel

The clock is ticking

2010-08-18T11:32:00.000-05:00

Found this interesting item on John Jamison's ImagiLearning blog:

There is something about the human brain that causes it to begin to refocus every 10 minutes. So after doing your best for 9 minutes, spend the next 60 seconds doing something to re-capture the brain's attention, to 'hook' it into sticking around for the next 10 minutes. If you lecture for 60 minutes...or create online courses...chunk them into 10 minute 'modules' divided by a 60 second "hook"...something that will cause the learners' brains to say, "Say what?" This buys you another 10 minutes.

Don't know what research this comes from, but it's interesting enough to try out. I'll watch in my next training program to see if folks get restless in 10-minute intervals. Anybody notice this in their own classroom work?

Good words

2010-08-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

Tell me and I'll forget.

Show me and I'll remember.

Involve me and I'll understand. - Confucius

Vulcanizing

2010-07-27T16:26:00.000-05:00

This brief article in NewScientist, "We Humans Can Mind-Meld, Too," says people listening to a story produced the same brain patterns as the narrator -- just a few seconds later. In a few cases, the listeners' patterns even preceded the storyteller's. (I've experienced that myself: watching certain television shows or movies, I can often say the next line before the character does. Poor writing, not my genius!)

These findings seem like neurological support for the well-documented phenomenon of entrainment, when people in conversational sync spontaneously mirror each other's movements and rhythms. Guess we do it on the brain level, too. Does this explain why my sister and I so frequently say the same thing at the same time? We even do it while instant messaging.

So, fellow trainers, how can we encourage this shared neurological dance with our classes? And does this give you new ideas about the effectiveness of story in adult learning?

Wait, I know what you're going to say...

What really motivates us?

2010-06-02T12:19:00.000-05:00

Cool story on NPR yesterday: an interview with Dan Ariely, author of The Upside of Irrationality, about how effective money is as a motivator. More money, more motivation? Sometimes. More money, less achievement? Also true: we're more likely to choke when the stakes are high.

And how important is it to see our work last? Ariely devised a fiendish experiment about that, too.

If you have eight minutes, listen to the interview. It's fun, and there are surprises lurking.

Good words

2010-05-05T10:20:00.000-05:00

To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light. - Carl G. Jung

Getting to "Aha!"

2010-04-30T12:45:00.002-05:00

Great blog post by Mitch Ditkoff on helping the fiercely left-brained learn to be more creative. I especially appreciate his emphasis on giving linear thinkers a mental map of the brainstorming process to reduce their anxiety.

I also like his suggestion that those leading creativity sessions mention repeatedly that chaos and disorder precede breakthroughs; so many people take that wheels-coming-off moment as a sign that they're lost, rather than as evidence that they're finally beginning to get somewhere.

Most of us are heavily rewarded throughout schooling and career for being orderly, linear thinkers. Predictable. Correct. Logical!

New research (and a lot of old intuition) is showing that this left-brain approach is only a tiny part of the real capability of the brain -- and not the smartest part, either.

As trainers, we can help people trust their mental resources by giving permission to be playful, non-judgmental, and experimental. And by setting aside time for analysis and logic, when they're appropriate -- but not letting them run the show all the time.

Image via Creative Commons

Good words

2010-04-21T16:20:00.002-05:00

[Leonard] Bernstein was always able to take big risks. He never fell off the first rung of the ladder, he always fell off the top rung. - Stephen Sondheim

Cheat the choke!

2010-04-14T11:01:00.006-05:00

We've all had that horrible moment. The presentation where we suddenly can't get the words out. The big exam, and we can't remember anything we've studied. The music performance where our fingers won't work any more.

What's behind this painful self-sabotage? Jonah Lehrer discusses the latest research on his always-excellent blog, The Frontal Cortex. Choking could be described as the analytical function of the mind interfering with an "automated" action -- one that we've learned so well that our own verbal prompting impairs our ordinarily smooth operation. (Think of what happens to your golf swing when you're telling yourself, "Wrists straight! Head down!)

Surprisingly, we can actually help prevent choking by concentrating not on the details of our action but on what the experimenters called a "holistic cue word," such as "smooth" or "balanced."

This finding reminds me of a practice my teacher Cliff Missen showed me when I first learned African-style drumming. If you focus on your hands or try to count beats, you'll mess up every time. But you can keep yourself in the rhythm if you make up a little phrase (nonsense is fine) that recites your part. For example, one drummer had a rhythm that was played exactly like "I'm ex-TREME-ly late." All she had to do was mentally recite that sentence and play along.

This technique was fabulous for me, since I'm prone to verbal intrusions into everything and tend to argue and discuss with myself while I'm trying to do something else. Reciting my piece kept my overactive verbal mind happy and left my hands free to do some drumming! And usually I was able to drop the recitation at some point in the drumming session and just enjoy the groove.

As my Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ven. Tsoknyi Rinpoche used to say, "You've got to throw your mind a lamb chop to keep it happy." Another term for this process, I believe, is what Jill Bolte Taylor calls "stepping to the right": dropping the intrusive mental process of rehashing and hectoring that we call thinking, and allowing a more holistic sensibility to take over -- which it's generally dying to do!

From the Gateless Gate

2010-04-13T16:09:00.001-05:00

Ten thousand flowers in spring,

the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer,
snow in winter.

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

Photo by Howard Wolinsky

Good words

2010-04-07T08:32:00.005-05:00

We must realize, if tomorrow is going to look any better than today, that the currency for compassion isn’t what someone else does, right or wrong – it is the very fact that that person exists.

- Sharon Salzberg

Book review

2010-03-25T12:49:00.000-05:00

Check out my review of Oops! in the current issue of Perdido Magazine. Subtitled "13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money," Aubrey Daniels's book is a contrarian take on widespread strategies that don't work -- including downsizing, discussed at some length in a recent Newsweek cover story. The book's kind of clunky in its writing, but definitely worth a look.

Good words

2010-03-25T08:22:00.002-05:00

Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think. - Deborah Loewenberg Ball, in an excellent article on the elements of good teaching.

All I have to do is dream...

2010-03-24T11:29:00.008-05:00

From Jonah Lehrer's recent essay in the New York Times:

In a 2004 paper published in Nature, Jan Born, a neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck, described the following experiment: a group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to apply a painstaking set of algorithms. However, Born had designed the task so that there was an elegant shortcut, which could only be uncovered if the subjects saw the subtle links between the different number sets. When left to their own devices, less than 25 percent of people found the shortcut, even when given several hours to mull over the task. However, when Born allowed people to sleep between experimental trials, they suddenly became much more clever: 59 percent of all participants were able to find the shortcut. Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming "set the stage for the emergence of insight" by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.

photo courtesy of Creative Commons

Good words

2010-03-08T08:49:00.001-06:00

Integrity is the essence of everything successful. - R. Buckminster Fuller

Good words

2010-03-02T10:51:00.002-06:00

The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you "come to terms with" only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will. - Ingrid Bengis

Mind games

2009-12-08T16:26:00.009-06:00

Terrific interview with cognitive developmental neuroscientist Adele Diamond from Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Diamond has found that full-body involvement and dramatic play facilitate learning (something we're committed to at Workplace Productions). Surprisingly, some now-rejected traditional strategies such as memorization also help. Diamond's research focuses on children, but I think some of these ideas relate to adult learning as well. What's your take?

Good words

2009-09-30T11:11:00.003-05:00

You don't teach someone to the limit of their ability; you teach them to the limit of your ability. - Aubrey C. Daniels

Say what you think, think what you say

2009-07-14T13:23:00.007-05:00

Newsweek's Sharon Begley, who can always be relied on for thought-provoking science reporting, has a great piece in the current issue. "What's in a Word?" describes new experiments by Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky that explore the question of whether the language we speak reflects or creates our perceptions. (By the way, I recommend that you click that link to Boroditsky's site and mouse over her picture. That's my kind of scientist!)

Begley quotes Boroditsky as saying, "'Even a small fluke of grammar' -- the gender of nouns -- 'can have an effect on how people think about things in the world.'" Speakers of gendered languages tend to see objects in terms of traditionally masculine or feminine qualities: bridges as immense and powerful (masculine) or as light, soaring and beautiful (feminine). Note: these adjectives were applied to the same bridge, by French and German speakers, respectively.

I've always felt that language shapes what we notice in the world. Although not fluently multilingual, I had the good fortune to be able to study several vastly different languages at fairly early ages -- early enough so that each of three languages has a profound internal logic to me. And boy, are they different!

Read the article for some fascinating examples of how languages and perceptions differ. And think about what we English speakers take for granted that just might not be so somewhere else in the world.

Graphic by Lera Boroditsky. I hope she doesn't mind!

Learning links

2009-04-30T12:28:00.003-05:00

Good stuff on learning from various blogs:

From Cognitive Daily: how using gestures help us learn. The article describes an experiment with children, but I'd suggest it works for adults, too. And here's how an eye exercise can improve scores on a memorization test, at least for the right-handed.

From The Frontal Cortex: what's it like to be a baby, with a wonderful first comment about tight vs. open focus. And more on focus and creativity in a post about neuroenhancing drugs. Comment #2 is especially interesting here.

From Developing Intelligence: what happens to memories when we forget them (kind of technical, but fascinating nevertheless).

Enjoy!

Good words

2009-04-03T07:03:00.000-05:00

Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question. ...The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn.
...you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan

No foolin'

2009-04-01T14:21:00.002-05:00

One of the enduring paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn’t know itself very well. The conscious brain is ignorant of its own underpinnings, blind to all that neural activity taking place outside the prefrontal cortex. This is why people have emotions: they are windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the information we process but don’t perceive. - Jonah Lehrer

Good words

2009-03-16T12:57:00.002-05:00

Insight requires a clean slate - Mark Jung-Beeman, quoted in Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide

Bouncing back

2009-03-10T16:33:00.002-05:00

Dr. Tamar Chansky, who commented on yesterday's post, has an excellent article on how to cultivate resilience in a time of anxiety. She offers clarity on the difference between crisis mode and coping mode, and how to move from the first to the second. So quit wringing your hands and check it out!

Good words

2009-03-10T09:03:00.000-05:00

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. – Joseph Chilton Pearce

Failure to thrive

2009-03-09T13:07:00.004-05:00

I've been reading Jonah Lehrer's excellent new book How We Decide, and this morning I turned up something that startled me but makes utter sense.

People who are praised for innate intelligence end up learning less and performing more poorly than those who are praised for their effort.

Lehrer describes the experiments of Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist who gave hundreds of school children an easy test, told them their scores, and then gave each one sentence of praise. Half were told, "You must be really smart," and the other half were told, "You must have worked really hard."

Then all the children were given a choice to take a hard test or an easy one. Overwhelmingly, the children praised for their effort chose the harder test, while those who had been commended for their intelligence chose the easier one. And on a final test of the same difficulty as the intial one, the "hard workers" improved their scores by an average of 30 percent, while the "smart" kids' results actually dropped by nearly 20 percent.

Dweck wrote that praising children for their intelligence teaches them not to risk making mistakes; Lehrer points out that "it encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is learning from mistakes." The most effective masters of any skill actively look for their mistakes, to train their brains to avoid them next time.

I encourage you to read the book; Lehrer explains the neurological reasons why lots of failure is essential to learning.

How many of our learners (and how many of us) don't reach the levels we could because we have been taught to avoid making errors? How can we set up learning situations to help failure-averse people, whose sense of self-worth may be tied up in making no mistakes, and therefore learning nothing?

Drawing a lesson

2009-03-02T16:36:00.007-06:00

A new study shows that people who doodle during boring meetings or classes actually retain more information than those who don't. The theory is that doodling at least keeps your mind in the room, instead of tuning out altogether and daydreaming.

Note: it works in dull settings. So, fellow learning leaders, next time we encounter doodlers, rather than getting snarky about their lack of attention, maybe we need to find ways to engage them more fully. (That's our mission at Workplace.)

Probably not the best thing to point out to the boss, though, during that endless monthly meeting...

Illustration via FlickrCC on a Creative Commons license.
Can't you just imagine the meeting this came out of?

Good words

2009-02-25T10:27:00.001-06:00

Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction. - Francis Picabia

Good words

2009-02-11T19:30:00.002-06:00

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. - Gertrude Stein

Distraction, creativity, and -- oh, wait a minute, someone's texting me

2009-02-11T13:49:00.004-06:00

Every classroom trainer has faced the scourge of the BlackBerry: the participant whose attention is focused more on her handheld than on the task at hand. With our clients' support, we generally bar the devices from our learning sessions, which are all about engagement and interaction -- what's happening here and now.

The current Newsweek has a terrific article about the cognitive effects of frequent interruptions. Although many BlackBerry fans maintain that their habit doesn't harm their thinking, lots of scientific studies beg to differ. Distraction interferes with memory, problem-solving, and creativity. So-called multitasking actually means not doing several things at once, but switching rapidly among them, to the detriment of all.

So the CrackBerry fan, while telling himself he's being efficient, is actually functioning with one frontal lobe tied behind his back. Which may be why he doesn't even realize he's missing things, like that really useful learning that's going on right in front of him. Hello?

Good words

2009-01-30T10:00:00.000-06:00

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. - Igor Stravinsky

Written on your face

2009-01-28T11:31:00.006-06:00

I enjoyed last Wednesday's premiere episode of "Lie to Me," a new TV show that incorporates Paul Ekman's work on microexpressions, the fleeting "tells" we all have that reveal our true feelings for a split second before we cover them over with decorum or deceit.

For a recent Workplace Productions program, I taught some of our interactors about microexpressions, and they're using them intentionally in our live case studies and interactive practice. I think microexpressions probably account for the "shimmering" quality - a sense of real thought and emotion, swiftly changing - that the best actors have. For a phenomenal example, see Frank Langella's brilliant work in Frost/Nixon.

Check out "Lie to Me" tonight at 8:00 CST on Fox broadcast, or see episodes online at the link above. Here's more about microexpressions, and here is a nice video about the universality of facial expression of emotion, featuring Paul Ekman.

Good words

2009-01-23T08:00:00.000-06:00

If you hire only those people you understand, the company will never get people better than you are. Always remember that you often find outstanding people among those you don't particularly like. – Soichiro Honda

Good words

2009-01-20T08:00:00.001-06:00

There are years that ask questions and years that answer. - Zora Neale Hurston

Step by step

2009-01-19T11:17:00.009-06:00

I'm reading a marvelous little book called My Stroke of Insight. The author, Jill Bolte Taylor, is a Ph.D. neuroanatomist who suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke at the age of 37. She writes about the experience of stroke from the inside, aided by her knowledge of brain structures and science. And she tells the story of her long, slow recovery after losing much of her left-brain functioning, including speaking, understanding language, reading, and virtually all conceptual thinking.

The book is fascinating in many ways, but one of Jill's insights into learning struck me particularly. It's something we probably know, but probably forget all the time: the most productive way to learn is to focus on the step we're working on now. For example, immediately post-stroke, Jill was trying to learn to sit up - a process that began with rocking. She writes,

While in this stage of rocking, I had to recognize that rocking was the only activity that mattered. Focusing my success on the final goal of sitting up was not wise because it was far beyond my current ability. If I had decided that sitting up was the goal, and then tried and failed repeatedly on every trial, I would have been disappointed with my inability and stopped trying....Essentially, I had to completely inhabit the level of ability that I could achieve before it was time to take the next step.

How often do we rush our learners - or ourselves - through necessary stages, trying for a final goal? And how often do we create a sense of failure and discouragement, instead of celebration for small successes?

Good words

2009-01-09T09:06:00.001-06:00

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. - Chinese proverb

Raisin' brain

2009-01-08T08:25:00.001-06:00

Fascinating article at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer's blog, on the mental effects of intimidation. Seems that when the brain feels overwhelmed by too much choice or competition, it tends to shut down instead of working harder. (And I thought it was just me!)

I'm looking forward to Lehrer's new book, How We Decide, due out next month. Oh, and if you haven't read Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping, give it a look. Whether you love shopping or hate to cross a store's threshhold, I predict you'll find lots of insights that may be useful for training design as well.

New Year's good words

2009-01-06T15:08:00.001-06:00

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else. – R. Buckminster Fuller

Holiday reading

2008-12-26T17:04:00.000-06:00

Just started Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers. I love it already. He aims to explode our idea that individuals succeed solely because of their own personal qualities, like talent, brains and moxie. Gladwell feels that "we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with." Sometimes it seems like we ignore the community to focus on the person - sort of like attributing a substance's qualities just to its electrons rather than to its atoms (or molecules, more likely). Corporate culture, anyone?

Just in case you somehow missed them, I strongly recommend Gladwell's other books, The Tipping Point and Blink. He's got a wonderful way of twisting the common wisdom and helping us look at the world - and our minds - in a fresh way that nevertheless resonates with experience. Gladwell's blog is fun, too. Check it out - and have a happy and enlightening New Year!

Pic via Swiss Miss

Surfacing

2008-12-22T16:50:00.007-06:00

A dear friend wrote recently, surmising that I've been really busy, because I haven't updated my blog in quite a while. Actually, I've been so active I forgot I even have a blog! (Thanks for the reminder, M.)

It's been several months of new projects and exciting work with (mostly) eager learners. Giving technical presentations, keeping calm under stress, leadership and diversity have been some of Workplace's topics lately. With our last training date of the year just last Thursday, it's been a busier-than-usual December.

But now...ahh! Some time to kick back and catch up a bit on the reading. I promise to share.

Good words

2008-10-30T14:32:00.001-05:00

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. -- Thomas Szasz

Face facts

2008-10-28T10:34:00.004-05:00

Wonderful article in Discover Magazine this month about facial expressions. Humans, it seems, have a "deep instinct" to mimic faces. When we see an expression on another person, we make the same face, fleetingly -- which helps us understand what that person is feeling. Mirroring facilitates empathy.

I'm trained as an actor, and actors have long understood that assuming a facial expression can create the emotion associated with it. Try it right now. Allow the inner edges of your eyebrows to rise up. Feel the corners of your eyes pull down. In other words, make a sad face. And stay with it for a little. Suddenly feeling sad?

Now look at the kid in the picture. Grin along. Feel better?

As Carl Zimmer says in the Discover piece, "When humans mimic others' faces...we don't just go through the motions. We also go through the emotions."

What implications does this have for communications training? It's fascinating to think.

Photo by CARF, Creative Commons

Bad blogger. Bad. Bad!

2008-10-17T12:24:00.009-05:00

So sorry for neglecting you for so long. What can I say? It's been a busy fall, with Workplace designing a bunch of new programs. And then the hard drive fried...don't ask!

Anyway, I have a new book review up at the Perdido website. If you've thought about reading Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin, I recommend it -- and I'm not exactly what you'd call a visual thinker. Great stuff.

I'll try to stay with you better during the weeks ahead. Been reading lots of fascinating stuff about emotion and learning, faces, and neurological whizbang. Let's talk!

Photo by Morten Skovgaard, Creative Commons

Good words

2008-09-02T10:30:00.001-05:00

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. - Hans Hofmann

Let me hear your body talk...

2008-08-13T12:18:00.007-05:00

No, I haven't been ignoring you. It's been a few weeks of intense work on a bunch of new programs for Workplace Productions, including a new diversity program we piloted yesterday.

To me, one of the most fascinating aspecsts of diversity work is nonverbal communication. How much is innate and species-wide? How much is learned and cultural? We know some specific gestures don't translate well: for example, the American "OK" sign, which is exceedingly rude in some places, as a friend of mine found out after she used it to thank a sweet little old Brazilian lady who had helped her find the right bus.

But the facial expressions that express the basic human emotions seem to be universal, according to research by Paul Ekman and others. And a very clever study of blind Olympic athletes suggests that full-body gestures of pride and shame may also be inborn. And like the facial expressions, we share many of them with our fellow primates.

Why these specific gestures? Here's a study that suggests that the spontaneous expression of fear may have a practical advantage...the better to see you with, my dear!

Good words

2008-07-24T12:11:00.001-05:00

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. - George Santayana

Frogs and ears

2008-07-22T10:37:00.008-05:00

Not much to do with workplace learning, but I loved this story about how pure research can lead to useful things -- in this case, the discovery of a frog's ability to block out extraneous sounds while listening for a mating call, and what it might mean for hearing aids of the future.

(By the way, the image comes from an online store called Frog Nirvana, which sells an unimaginable variety of merchandise featuring frogs: rugs, wind chimes, staplers, birdbaths, music boxes...and, of course, earrings.)

Cyberspace -- you gotta love it.

Blog crawl

2008-07-16T14:36:00.007-05:00

Some interesting stuff on blogs:

How sleep, practice and testing consolidate memory on Sharp Brains.

More on power naps from the Boston Globe.

Everyone wants leadership development, but what are leaders without followers? Harvard Business School's blog reviews the new book Followership by Barbara Kellerman.

And the wonderful Jonah Lehrer in "Grape Expectations: What wine can tell us about the nature of reality":

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects.

Enjoy!

Good words

2008-07-02T10:54:00.003-05:00

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back. - Maya Angelou

Old dogs and new tricks

2008-06-28T21:04:00.005-05:00

Could walking into a room and forgetting why you came in there actually be a sign of wisdom? This New York Times article suggests older people have wider (not longer) attention spans, enabling them to think more creatively, retain more detail, and solve problems more effectively.

Take that, whippersnappers!

FHA Old Dog with New Tricks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Good words

2008-06-23T10:21:00.001-05:00

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth. – George Bernard Shaw

Son of my laptop ate my brain...

2008-06-17T10:38:00.005-05:00

The wonderful Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. weighs in on our fading ability to sit patiently and read. Like me, Pitts has been finding himself dozing off over material that would have been a treat a few years ago.

I've decided to get back to reading books, at least an hour a day. (Shocking to make a program of something that used to be a guilty pleasure!) I hope to renew my ability to sit still and lose myself in nuanced material, without craving a hyperlink to another story, and then another, and then just one more...

Join me? Let me know how it's going for you. I'm heading back to Pierre and Natasha, and that little rat Napoleon.

My laptop ate my brain...

2008-06-16T13:21:00.004-05:00

Finding it harder to concentrate on books these days? You're not alone. It might be that online reading is changing the way our brains work.

That's what Nicholas Carr's fascinating article in the current Atlantic Monthly explores. Carr writes:

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also
has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost
totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Uh-oh. My copy of War and Peace, bookmarked at page 390, has been staring at me sadly for several months now. How could I leave Pierre at the mercy of his steward for so long?

I think Carr may be on to something. How about you?

Good words

2008-06-03T13:15:00.001-05:00

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. – E. L. Doctorow

Talkin' about your generation

2008-05-30T09:35:00.006-05:00

Lots of stuff in the media lately about the Millennials (aka Generation Y), the latest age group entering the workforce. Workplace Productions has been doing programs on generational diversity for a while now, so I'm always interested in new theory about differences in learning styles, ethics, working patterns, and so on. Having a daughter in this age cohort adds to the fascination. But so far, I'm not impressed with the analysis.

Last Sunday, 60 Minutes reran a pretty unflattering story about young people in the workforce. Oh, they mentioned in passing that many of this generation are hardworking, skilled and smart. But then the story went on to depict Millennials as "narcissistic praise hounds" who expect trophies just for showing up. (See? Didn't you just know those soccer banquets would ruin your kid's future?)

They don't like to be bossed around. They put family and friends above loyalty to employers. And they intend to keep looking until they find a job they can really love.

Shocking! Where do they think they are -- America?

Okay, I may be a little biased. But most of the young people I know are passionate, kind, idealistic, and very willing to work hard -- for causes that mean something to them. What's wrong with that?

There's an odor of sour Boomer over all this. We seem to be chastising the younger folks for the very ideals and priorities that we had at their age. If we gave them up for Hummers and summer homes, it isn't the Millennials' fault.

The workplace has been moving away from the factory model and toward more humane and creative culture for years now. (We training folks have been helping it get there.) "I suffered, so you should suffer too" is a pretty destructive attitude.

So instead of yelling "Get off my lawn," maybe business should invite the kids over to play. After all, it's not really our lawn. It's the village green, and it belongs to all of us.

Good words

2008-05-27T12:18:00.000-05:00

I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on. – Beryl Pfizer

Memorial Day

2008-05-25T17:28:00.003-05:00

Wonderful piece from the upcoming season of This American Life on the malleability and failures of memory. Thanks to Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex.

Good words

2008-05-13T14:41:00.002-05:00

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. – R. Buckminster Fuller

Learning watch

2008-05-08T23:22:00.005-05:00

There's a feast of a story in the New York Times about creating new habits. Dr. Dawna Markova and Mary Jane Ryan, of Professional Thinking Partners, also talk about learning styles, comfort zones, innovation, and the neurology of the new. I especially liked their discussion of what they call the three zones of existence: comfort zone, stretch zone and stress zone. Great stuff!

Good words for the first of May

2008-05-01T10:45:00.002-05:00

A personal note...

The Middle
by Ogden Nash

When I remember bygone days
I think how evening follows morn;
So many I loved were not yet dead,
So many I love were not yet born.

Good words

2008-04-21T13:19:00.001-05:00

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
– Douglas Adams

Kid in a candy store

2008-04-16T11:34:00.003-05:00

Just found a fantastic site for all of us who are fascinated by science: ScienceBlogs.com. I'm having a great time gobbling down the blogs on behavioral and neurological research, such as Cognitive Daily and The Frontal Cortex. But the site also links to blogs on physical science, environment, medicine and health, and more.

Gotta go -- I'm only halfway through that article on the collective mind and the neurology of human interaction...

Learning watch: new research

2008-04-14T14:08:00.007-05:00

Here's an article by Howard Wolinsky about gender differences in processing language. Doug Burman, a researcher at Northwestern University's Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, says that language areas in girls' brains are more active than in boys' -- and girls process language differently than boys do.

Scientists aren't sure if these differences persist into adulthood, but the research suggests that males rely more on sensory vision and hearing centers in working with language, while females use more abstract brain regions for the same tasks.

The result is that how information is given -- through the ear or through the eye -- is more important to males than to females.

In your workshops, have you noticed any differences between men and women in processing language? Are visual aids stickier for one gender than for the other? What's the best way to get your message across?

Good words

2008-04-10T14:59:00.001-05:00

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is; it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. - Richard Feynman

Good words

2008-04-02T09:05:00.003-05:00

One thing we do know about humans is that the left brain, which is the conscious language part of the brain, always makes up a story to explain what's going on. - Temple Grandin

11 Ways Trainers Can Create Terrific Role Plays: Part Four

2008-03-27T11:35:00.003-05:00

Facilitation

10. Applaud. Praise and validate the role players' work. Thank them for their contributions. Point out where they used the learning points and how it led to a successful outcome. Applaud them for taking the risk of role playing.

11. When "failures" happen, focus on the process rather than the person. When role players don't follow the learning points, say (for example), "Well, that certainly put him in his place. What might be some of the drawbacks to handling it that way?" Discuss the behaviors. Have the role players try the same situation again, with suggestions from other participants. Thank the role players for providing good material for discussion. After all, the whole group will learn from things that don't work out as well as from those that do.

Role plays can be a great teaching tool, with your help. You can design, introduce and facilitate them so learners:

Know what they're supposed to be doing

Aren't afraid of being judged

Feel free to experiment and have fun

With less anxiety and more targeted learning, who knows? Maybe role plays will become your company's favorite learning technique.

Reprinted with permission from Training Today.

11 Ways Trainers Can Create Terrific Role Plays: Part Three

2008-03-24T16:30:00.004-05:00

4. Focus on a small, important piece of behavior. Don't try to do too much in a single role play. If you're training people in a process, work it section by section. For example, in sales training, focus on establishing rapport, then on asking probing questions, etc. -- perhaps with different participants playing the salesperson in each section.

5. Don't be afraid of "negative models." You can inject a lot of humor -- and learning -- into a workshop by asking people to "do everything wrong." For example, in the customer service situation, ask the person playing the rep to come up with three bad ways to handle the complaining customer (such as sounding bored, using sarcasm, and shouting at her), and then let the participants discuss why those approaches didn't work -- the consequences of not using the new learning. You can generate a lot of energy with this exercise, and the humor helps break the ice for further role playing.

Instructions

6. Take role players off the hook. Tell them, "You're not you in this role play, you're somebody else just like you." Refer to the character by another name, not the role player's name. Creating distance between the character and the self means participants don't have to own any errors they make -- they're not really "their" mistakes. Sometimes it helps to set role plays at a fictional company similar to the real one.

7. Strive for a better -- not a perfect -- interaction. Let participants know that you'll applaud any success, even a small one.

8. Bring a sense of fun to the exercise. Keep it light. People learn better through humor, liveliness, and enjoyment.

9. Share the risk. Let role players work in teams, sharing solutions and coaching each other. Have the team come up to the front, so the person who is actually doing the role play can turn to his team for advice. Have team members replace each other in the role, as in tag-team wrestling, so no one has to do the entire exercise by herself.

To be continued...

11 Ways Trainers Can Create Terrific Role Plays: Part Two

2008-03-20T10:47:00.003-05:00

Here are 11 ways to make role plays work for you. We've divided these tips into the three phases of creating a role play: Design (how you structure the exercise), Instructions (how you explain the exercise to participants), and Facilitation (how you work with the role players as the exercise is taking place).

Design

1. Be specific. Most role plays fail because they're too general, and people don't know what to do. Choose the circumstances of the role play carefully. Fill in lots of detail. For example, if it's customer service training, don't just ask someone to play a complaining customer. Tell the role players exactly what the issue is: "You're a credit card customer who asked last month to have an erroneous charge removed from your bill. You just got the new bill, and the charge is still there." And to the person playing the customer service rept: "Two people are out sick, and you're covering for them, even though you should have gone to lunch a half-hour ago. The last person you talked to hung up on you." This level of detail helps role players believe in the action. They're less likely to be distracted by their own nerves or by others' reactions.

2. Make the role play situation important to the characters. The stakes should be high. For example, a valuable employee is ready to quit because his manager never recognizes his achievements. The manager already has been warned by her boss about too much turnover in her department. When the outcome is important to the characters, the exercise has more energy and interest for the role players and for those watching.

3. Target the learning points. Make sure the situation you choose will make the role players deal with the behavior you want to reinforce. Because new learning feels uncomfortable, most role players will try to avoid acting it out. Close the escape hatches by picking a situation that must be solved by putting the learning points into practice.

To be continued...

11 Ways Trainers Can Create Terrific Role Plays: Part One

2008-03-19T12:12:00.002-05:00

You know that role plays are a wonderful tool for turning theory into practice. They can answer that crucial question, "How does this apply to me?" By giving learners a chance to try out new behaviors in a controlled setting, they can jump-start the application of new learning back on the job. They get people out of their chairs and into action.

So why do so many learners hate role plays? You've seen it happen: participants groan when a role play is announced. You can't get a volunteer, so you have to force someone to come up. The role players are too easy on each other, or they give up too soon -- or they just undermine the whole exercise with joking or hostility. What's going on here?

It's simple: they're afraid they're going to make fools of themselves. As a trainer, you know that most people get anxious when they have to get up in front of a group. They're afraid they'll be judged. When that group consists of their peers and co-workers, it feels even riskier. And when they're not sure what they're supposed to be doing, that anxiety goes sky-high.

You can reduce the risk of role plays. You can't take away people's performance anxiety -- but you can minimize it through the way you design, set up, and facilitate role plays. You can create an atmosphere of humor and experimentation, and you can ensure succcess for all participants -- no matter what mistakes they make.

To be continued...

Flying lessons

2008-03-17T10:41:00.008-05:00

At Workplace Productions, we create "flight simulators" for new learning: opportunities for people to practice skills in a low-risk setting before they go back to the job. We find it's the most effective way to make the transition from classroom to real life.

One of our favorite techniques is using our interactors (specially trained professional actors) in brief, intense simulations with learners. We do tons of research and create realistic situations that mirror those our participants are going to deal with back at work. They're like role plays on steroids (only legal!), because the interactors know how to keep the simulation on track and don't make it easy for the learner.

But what do you do if you're not bringing us in for a training?

A few years back I wrote an article for the magazine Training Today called "11 Ways Trainers Can Create Terrific Role Plays." I drew on our years of experience working with the form to help people use this great learning tool more effectively with the resources on hand.

With Training Today's generous permission, I'll be posting the article in several chunks over the next few days. I'd love your thoughts on it, so please leave a comment.

Good words

2008-03-13T13:43:00.002-05:00

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few. - Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Cracking the Curse

2008-03-13T13:39:00.003-05:00

So what's the cure for the Curse of Knowlege? How do we communicate what we know to those who don't know it -- without getting tied to the railroad track of our own understanding?

The most direct way is through stories.

Stories are how our brains work. We can understand more by a quick anecdote than by dozens of charts and graphs. Stories supply context.

Our expertise tends to assume that others are with us. They're not: we have to take them there. And concrete, emotionally lively stories are the quickest way.

Basically, we unboil the message our knowledge has boiled down. We're using a kind of mental shorthand internally -- but it's meaningless to those who haven't shared with us all the experiences that created our understanding. So we have to talk in terms that we both understand. Add vividness and credibility, and you've cracked the Curse.

I love shop talk of all kinds, and I'm fortunate that what I do allows me to learn a little bit about a lot of different businesses. It's not only fascinating -- it keeps me humble. Listening to a lineman, a university administrator, a shift nurse, I get a glimpse into another person's world. It's clear that they know things I can only guess at.

My best understanding of their workplaces comes through their stories.

My task as a learning designer is to find the common place where our different mindsets can meet. In my experience, it's stories that take us to that place.

Good words

2008-03-07T10:50:00.003-06:00

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. - Robert Benchley

Curses! Foiled again!

2008-03-04T15:57:00.010-06:00

The idea from Made to Stick that I find myself quoting the most is the Curse of Knowle dge.

That Snidely Whiplash-like phrase means that once we know something, we can't imagine the state of mind of someone who doesn't know it. And it's a curse, all right.

The Curse of Knowledge is what's operating when we sling the training lingo around. We're standing up there, staring at learners who are blinking blankly back at us. They don't know what we're talking about, and we can't figure out what's not to understand. But it's more than just a jargon gap.

When we're under the Curse of Knowledge, we assume that everyone has the same information we have. And the more expert we are in any subject, the further we are from the true mindset of the people we think we're communicating with, because we've been immersed for years in material that may be brand new to our listeners. When we understand something in our bones, it's hard to imagine that others don't get it at all. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick, "you tend to communicate as if your audience were you."

I've found it quite useful to be alert for the Curse of Knowledge in my life. I look for signs that I've made assumptions, and that my communication may be foiled again.

How to dispel the Curse? More on that in a later post.

Good words

2008-03-03T11:19:00.003-06:00

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. - Carl Jung

Nourishing

2008-02-28T10:15:00.012-06:00

A client recently turned us on to Marshall Goldsmith's concept of "feedforward," and we've been happily passing it along.

Goldsmith points out that the problem with feedback is that it focuses on the past (and blame!) rather than on the future (and growth). Feedforward emphasizes ideas that can help you do a better job next time, instead of analyzing where you screwed up last time. Imagine development sessions without criticism, defensiveness, or arguing about who was wrong and who was right. (Hey, imagine a marriage like that!)

Try the exercise Goldsmith uses. We found it a much more productive and respectful way to share ideas about how we can do better. And after seeing a group of twenty practicing, we were delighted by the energy and connection in the room.

Of course, we can't completely abandon talking about the past. But we can use feedforward more often than we think. It's a great tool for keeping communication positive and fruitful. And people eat it up.

Good words

2008-02-20T12:17:00.002-06:00

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this. - Emo Phillips

Stuck on you

2008-02-19T12:10:00.007-06:00

For some months now I've been in love with Chip Heath's and Dan Heath's Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

The title of the 2007 book grabbed me, of course, because Workplace Productions has been using the phrase "Learning that Sticks" for five years or so. And as a designer and facilitator of adult learning I'm always looking for new ways to make ideas and skills memorable.

And what a treasure this book is! It's written using its own principles: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional appeal, and stories.

I'll be discussing aspects of it here (even though the orange cover clashes with my color scheme), and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Heaths' practice-what-you-preach manual.

So grab your copy, and over the next couple of weeks we'll talk about how these ideas relate to workplace learning. Stick around.

Good words for Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T16:30:00.002-06:00

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. - Carl Jung

Good words

2008-02-11T10:10:00.000-06:00

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. - Naguib Mahfouz

Anniversary Waltz

2008-02-10T17:47:00.000-06:00

Today marks ten years that Workplace Productions, Inc. has been in business. It's only getting more exciting for us, as we explore new ways to make business learning interactive, engaging and memorable. Check out some of our stories at our website (yes, we promise to update those pictures soon!).

Thanks to our wonderful clients and especially to our great team of interactors. We love working with you.

And we never get tired of hearing participants say, "This was the best training I've ever had."

I'm recommending...

2008-02-08T16:45:00.005-06:00

Here's my review, from Perdido magazine, of a terrific all-around management book. It's just come out in paperback.

Growing Great Employees: Turning Ordinary People into Extraordinary Performers
By Erika Andersen
Reviewed by Beverly Feldt

Say you’re a manager. The people who report to you are pretty good, but there are a few problems, of course. You’ve had some management training from your company – mostly focusing on theory, rather than practice. Some of the approaches you’ve learned are useful, when you can remember them in time. But often you run on instinct, and often you regret it later. You recall vague terms such as “core competencies” and “coaching for performance.” However, it’s kind of a jumble in your mind.

You’ve even read a few books on management, but most of them are either too simple or too abstract. Usually they tout one skill, such as listening, as the cure for all workplace ills. You’d give a lot for a clear, well-organized manual on the people side of management.

Got $15.00?

Growing Great Employees (Portfolio, 2006) might be the handbook you’ve been waiting for. It’s the best management training book I’ve seen.

Beautifully organized, comprehensive and straightforward, Growing Great Employees is better than its title. (And don’t be put off by its unifying metaphor, gardening, which appears mostly in chapter headings and introductions.) Erika Andersen, founder of the consulting firm Proteus International, has put 25 years of experience into a reader-friendly, meaty guide to “all that people stuff.”

In admirably clear language, Andersen covers an astonishing amount of material: the hiring interview, TRACOM’s Social Styles ™, delegating, positive and corrective feedback, performance agreements–even how to fire someone. There’s a guide for making sure new employees start out well; a technique for discovering the key responsibilities of a job; a model for changing your own mindset to become a better coach. Each topic is discussed step by step and illustrated with dialogues and case studies. Diagrams and models are lucid, logical and easy to follow. Every chapter ends with a page of “Big Ideas” that summarizes the main points just covered.

Even more useful are the many practical exercises throughout the book. Called “Try It Out,” these experiments cover actual practice (using listening skills in a real conversation), planning (writing out statements and questions you might use in a corrective feedback session), analysis (filling out a job description template) and self-assessment (determining your preferred learning style). There are checklists and charts, and even space to write in the book.

But what makes Growing Great Employees a true handbook – and truly useful – is its structure. In the introduction, Andersen offers a summary of each chapter, acknowledging that many readers might not choose to read the book “in a straight line.” Since reading non-fiction books out of order is a secret vice of mine, I was delighted. What’s more, throughout the book Andersen provides references back to earlier chapters as needed.

For example, in Chapter 4, during a discussion of non-verbal signals, she writes, “…if you’re reading this book out of order, at this point you might want to go back and read the first chapter, where we focus on listening skills.” This interconnected approach, reminiscent of hyperlinks on a website, makes the book much more accessible if a reader is trying to work through a particular management problem.

Throughout each chapter, there’s a personal flavor, as if you were having a private consultation with Andersen. The tone is positive, down-to-earth and specific – a welcome change from most management books, which seem either to oversimplify or to wallow in impenetrable jargon. Growing Great Employees does neither.

Non-gardeners may roll their eyes a bit at chapter titles such as “Staking and Weeding” and “Some Plants Don’t Make It,” but Andersen has a charming way of laughing a bit at her own tendency to push the metaphor. (She says in the introduction, “I intend to wring every last drop [from the gardening image] by the end of the final chapter.”) It’s not really a gimmick; it’s more of a useful trellis on which some prize roses grow.

Is Growing Great Employees for you? It’s worth a look. As productivity demands increase and hierarchies flatten, hiring and keeping good people becomes crucial. As Andersen says, “Most of the things that make employees want to work for a particular company can be provided by a skillful manager. I can help you be that kind of manager.” I think she’s right.

Reprinted with permission from Perdido: Leadership with a Conscience, Vol. 14, No. 3, ©2007 Trinity Foundation.

Good words

2008-02-07T11:51:00.000-06:00

There is no pleasure to me without communication; there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to. - Montaigne