11

Final Words: Parting Shots

Larry Israelite

I often start these projects with some idea of how I would like to end them. And I had planned to name this last chapter something like “Some Truths About Learning.” That’s how I ended Lies About Learning, and I figured it would work for this one too. But then I started reading and working with the chapters, and my plan started to change. Allow me to take you through my thought process.

The Lies and the Liars Who Tell Them

Once I started reading the chapters, I realized that I have heard this all before—old lie, new liar; new lie, old liar. So I built a matrix of the lies and the people who told them (Figure 11-1).

Figure 11-1. Lies and Liars Matrix

I operated under the impression that, since 2006, some new lies and new liars had appeared on the scene, but others had persisted over time, with some interesting twists and turns.

I based this approach on an experience from almost 15 years ago, when I attended a learning technology conference after having been away from these conferences for about seven years. I’m not sure what I expected, but I found that the same people (literally) were making the same presentations (figuratively) with the same outrageous claims. All that was new were the technologies being touted and the scale of the claims. The presenters used powerful, seductive (to a learning audience, anyway) words and phrases like revolutionize, dramatically increase, and significantly reduce. And just as they had been seven years earlier, most of the claims proved to be false. They were nothing more than a figment of very creative imaginations, claiming as truth the often outlandish hypotheses that product marketers develop. Yet year after year we listened, and even all these years later it appears that we still do.

As I tried to fill in the matrix, I found that it didn’t really work as well as I had hoped. I discovered that almost every new lie is some variation of an older lie. Sure, there are updates, upgrades, and refinements. But in the same way that cars haven’t really changed all that much over time (four wheels, motor, transmission, seats), the new lies are just upgrades of the old ones. I kept looking for, but never found, the Tesla of lies about learning. There was no real game-changing technology, no radical departure from previous practice, no previously unheard of approach or solution. Instead, there is simply more of the same, just more creative and more interesting.

And as it turns out, the liars haven’t really changed all that much either. Most, though by no means all, are vendors, analysts, pundits, and consultants—those who stand to benefit from buyers who believe their claims. I don’t blame them; they all have jobs to do. I just wish consumers would demand more real proof of their claims. So with similar lies and the same liars, my matrix turned out to be more like a single cell, which hardly seemed worthy of a final chapter. So I started again.

Back to the Source

In the preface to Lies About Learning, I attempted to explain what motivates us to live with and accept the lies. I said:

Based on this passage, I’ve decided to take a different approach to the final chapter—one based on the perspective of the community of learning professionals who spend each and every day trying to deliver high-value, high-impact learning solutions to their customers. So as I thought about this quote and reviewed the content of Lies About Learning and this new book, I started to see a pattern. I saw two types of lies: lies we tell ourselves and the lies others tell us. While interesting, the lies others tell us are addressed elsewhere in this book. I’ll focus here on the lies we tell ourselves.

Lies We Tell Ourselves

The lies we tell ourselves are the things we think silently to refute our doubts about what we are doing and why. In many ways, these lies are what allow us to make the expedient decision when we should know better, to implement methodologies absent evidence that they will work, or to take shortcuts we know we shouldn’t. We might think of them as the little white lies we tell ourselves that help get us through the day.

Are they harmful? That’s hard to say. But do they sometimes take us on detours that reduce the impact or value of the solutions we are trying to deliver? I am reasonably certain that this is the case.

I expect that the most common lie we tell ourselves is the learning equivalent of “I can name that song in three notes.” A learning professional might phrase it as “I can help you reach your objectives in [some amount of time],” with the amount of time being considerably less than what we know we really need. In fact, the measure might not be time; it might be money, a delivery technology, or some other request. Regardless, far too often we talk ourselves into believing that learning effectiveness is somehow unrelated to the constraints under which we are asked to develop a solution.

Why do we do this? We fear that if we don’t agree to unreasonable demands we will be viewed as being out of touch, unrealistic, not focused on the business, insensitive to the needs of our customers, or some combination. So what can we do about it? Well, that’s a little more difficult. But allow me to suggest that earning credibility is the best place to start.

The story I used to tell about this issue is quite simple. Learning professionals often get requests for time management training or some other equivalent. We know that delivering a one-day program will rarely solve the problem, which our clients are often hesitant to even discuss. The first time I would get such as request I would deliver the program, making sure that it was well designed, delivered flawlessly, and well liked by participants. I also would make every attempt to set appropriate expectations. If the program went well, I would usually get another request, and I would fulfill that one too. By this point, I had developed a good relationship with my client, who viewed me as a credible partner who tried hard to meet her needs. So when the third request came, I would push back, suggesting that the solution isn’t solving the problem, and engage in the kind of diagnostic that I had wanted from the start. But I had to be patient because credibility takes time. We have to earn the right to question our clients by delivering successfully on early requests, even if we know the solutions aren’t optimal.

In the end, earning the trust of clients by delivering a few things they ask for (but may not really need) can open the door to truth-telling. It may not be as simple as telling them a particular program won’t solve the problem. But it may allow for pushing back on or adjusting all sorts of crazy expectations, including the amount of time required to achieve a specific outcome, the budget to do so, the technology to be used, or some other cockamamie request.

Well, when I first re-read these past few paragraphs, I wondered: “Is my little story about credibility and trust nothing more than a little lie I tell myself?” That scared me, and sadly, I expect that the answer may be yes. But I do know that the technique has worked for me. And while it may not work as well as it once did, at least for a while I had found a small weapon to combat a much larger problem.

So what do we do about the lies we tell ourselves? Most important is simply acknowledging that we have a problem. We have less time, less money, fewer resources, and a greater sense of urgency than ever before. And our clients are experiencing the same things. They may also have unreasonable faith in our ability to deliver value, which tempts us to succumb to the pressure.

When you are forced (or willingly agree) to name that proverbial tune in three notes, jot down how many notes you really think it should take and why. Then plan how to get there in three notes. Look for opportunities to retrofit your ideas to fit your current context. Find compromises that aren’t sacrifices. Dig for hidden opportunities.

Here’s an example. My wife and I have designed a few kitchens, and our budgets are always lower than our desires. But that hasn’t stopped us from looking at really high-end stuff—cabinets, appliances, lights, tile. While we couldn’t afford it, this act of looking gave us ideas that we could apply as we designed within our budget constraints.

As learning professionals, we should always think a little bigger than we can afford. Just because we agreed to deliver a product within a set of unreasonable constraints (the lie we told ourselves), doesn’t mean we can’t think about what we might have done without the constraints. This serves as a reminder of what is possible, and far more important, prevents us from falling victim to the learning version of the Stockholm syndrome—we lie to ourselves with such strength and conviction that we actually start to believe the things we are saying. And that is when the real trouble begins.

Some Truths

To this point, I’ve covered the lies and the liars who tell them and the lies we tell ourselves. So I asked myself, where do I go from here? The answer was to go back to the title of the book.

The challenge with a title that includes the word “lies” is that it sounds negative. But in this case, the title was more a deliberate intent to amuse. In fact, it makes most people smile, hopefully because it contains an element of truth. Our profession, perhaps neither more nor less than others, has a propensity for telling its share of whoppers.

But remember there are also some truths about learning. And in many ways, they are more important than the lies.

It’s About the Learner (Most of the Time)

One of our biggest challenges is figuring out who our customer really is. Very early in my career I worked on a government research and development project for which we developed almost 250 hours of training for M-1 Abrams tank mechanics. Our program had a sponsor, a funder, a buyer, an implementer, and a learner—five different stakeholders, all with very different agendas. Thus our meetings were full of jockeying for position and political arguments, but hardly any discussion of the actual learning experience.

Fast forward a few years. I developed a classroom program on project management for a very demanding customer. One of the explicit requests was to include a detailed module on budgeting, as this had been identified as a point of failure on many projects. I talked with the instructor after the first official delivery of the program (we had piloted it several times), and he told me he had gotten a lot of push back from class participants about the budgeting module, so he had decided to skip it. A vigorous discussion ensued. The instructor argued that his learners were his customers and, as such, should be able to influence what content they learn. I countered by insisting that the sponsor was the customer and had the right to decide what content the instructor covers.

Sometimes, we are beholden to the politics of learning. We have to deal with and, far too often, resolve competing agendas from the broad range of stakeholders who (attempt to) influence our work. How do we do our jobs when this occurs? I think the answer is relatively easy, although acting on it may be less so.

Almost any learning solution comprises goals, content, and design. The first two items are the exclusive domain of stakeholders, sponsors, and funders. But the design—the actual experience of the solution—should be focused completely on the learner. We should not let the politics of learning dictate how we create the experience of learning.

Design Matters

Several years ago I wrote about feeling like I was constantly listening to my own obituary. At conference after conference the speakers—often keynoters—proclaimed that instructional design was dead, that the field was completely irrelevant and the people who practiced it had become the learning equivalent of dinosaurs. As a proud, card-carrying member of the profession, I was a little shocked.

Had I more fully developed the earlier section on liars and the lies they tell, this lie would have fallen into the old lie/new liar quadrant. It seems that each time a new technology appeared on the scene, instructional designers were no longer needed because people from other professions would play their roles. Table 11-1 presents a partial list.

Table 11-1. Technologies and the “Fading” Role of Instructional Designers

In each case, after many—sometimes highly visible—failures, we found out that there was something to this instructional design stuff. It wasn’t just about the technology. Some understanding about how people learn, the affordances that technology provides, and visual design were needed to create learning experiences that actually resulted in learning (a persisting change in human performance or performance potential). Go figure.

But to be clear, we are not a profession without our share of challenges. We need to become better partners and more businesslike in our approach to performance issues. We need to adapt better to the constraints under which our clients work. And, most important, we need to become better learners.

All of that said, I’m pleased to say that I’m experiencing a lull in the threats of my imminent demise. It seems as though we may even be seeing a little instructional design renaissance. And this is good, because design really does matter.

Methods and Tools Are Methods and Tools

In the early 1980s, Robert Reiser and Robert Gagné, professors at Florida State University, wrote Selecting Media for Instruction. They start the first chapter with:

They go on to present a model and a method for assessing instructional situations and then systematically selecting the media best suited for helping learners achieve the instructional goals. Remember, this was 1983. The available options were limited by today’s standard.

One of their major points is that instructional media are a means, not an end. There are days when I think that we have forgotten this important message. How often have we started a conversation by naming the delivery system before fully understanding the problem, analyzing the content and the learner, and writing the first objective? I have many times. And it has become a chronic problem in our profession.

In several chapters of Lies About Learning and of this book, contributors discuss how we have started to view new technologies as solutions in and of themselves, rather than as new methods or tools. We skip over the media selection process altogether. I’m guilty of doing this. But let’s unpack this issue a little.

Could it be that a book on media selection in 2015 would focus less on the media and more on the instructional techniques that designers can deploy within the media to facilitate learning? Is it appropriate to view e-learning in the same way that we viewed a filmstrip 30 years ago? I think they are good questions, and honestly, I’m not sure of the answers.

But I do know one thing. The cycle of failure described in chapter 10 (Figure 10-1) is a direct reflection of the problem I raise here. If we adopt instructional media without weighing their characteristics (affordances) and the instructional problems they can solve, we are making a very costly mistake. We are thus saying that the medium is the (learning) method, rather than one of many tools the designer deploys to reach an instructional goal.

Methods and tools are just that. They are not solutions. Whether we use a modern version of the Reiser–Gagné model or some other approach to select the ways in which we solve a learning problem is largely irrelevant. But we ought to have a method.

A Few Final Words

I ended the first edition with the following:

That pretty well sums it up.

References

Israelite, L. 2006. Lies About Learning: Leading Executives Separate Truth From Fiction in a $100 Billion Industry. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Reiser, R.A., and R.M. Gagné. 1983. Selecting Media for Instruction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.