Imagine somebody finishing one of your learning programmes at 4.30 on Tuesday afternoon.
They enjoyed it. They learned some useful things. Perhaps they even left determined to do something differently as a result.
Then Wednesday morning arrives. What happens at 9am?
I think that is a useful question to ask when designing almost any learning intervention. We tend to put a lot of thought into what happens during the learning. What will we cover? What activities will we use? How will we engage people? How will we know whether they understood it?
But the reason the organisation paid for the learning probably has very little to do with what happened while people were learning.
And a lot to do with what happens afterwards.
So what is the person actually expected to do differently when they are back at work? And can you describe that difference well enough that somebody could recognise it if they saw it?
Then there is another layer to this.
Will they get an opportunity to try the new behaviour? Does their manager know what they are trying to do? What happens when their first attempt doesn’t go particularly well? Is there any feedback, support, or encouragement to have another go?
We know that knowing something is not the same as doing it. Yet, we still have a habit of designing the learning very carefully, and leaving what happens afterwards largely to chance.
Perhaps we need to extend our design further downstream.
That doesn’t mean creating another big programme. It might mean a conversation with a manager, an opportunity to try something, some feedback, a second attempt, and a little reflection on what happened.
In other words, a simple sequence that continues the journey from knowing into doing.
If all our design effort stops when the learning event stops, perhaps we haven’t designed the intervention. We’ve just designed the learning event part of it.
So, take one of your current learning interventions and ask yourself:
What happens at 9am the next morning?
I’m exploring this idea in more depth on 2nd September in an online conference session called “Making Learning Stick in the Workflow”. I’ll be looking at how we can deliberately design what happens before, during and after formal learning so that application and follow-through aren’t simply left to chance.
You can find out about the other modules and register for the conference here
