Principle 6 is the third principle to drive your engagement. Principle 4, “Provide the Perfect Push and Pull,” helps you increase the involvement of your learners. Principle 5, “Create Friction and Direction,” helps you to activate your learners’ brains. Principle 6, “Follow the Reinforcement Flow,” helps you keep the learners in their grow status (see Figure 12.1).

When you follow the reinforcement flow, all your questions, assignments, and learning objectives are in perfect balance with the skills and knowledge levels of your learners. If your learners develop their skills and knowledge levels, your challenges must become more complex to avoid boredom. Or start with a less complex reinforcement program in the beginning, because if your challenges are too difficult in the beginning, learners will feel anxiety. Within the reinforcement flow, your challenges and skills/knowledge are constantly in balance.

Principles 4 and 5 are meant to keep the learners’ brains alert and let them think. Principle 6 is meant to keep the structure and correct level in your reinforcement program. Let’s learn how to avoid boredom or anxiety.

THE VALUE OF FEEDBACK

If you want to drive engagement, feedback is crucial. In top-level sports, athletes love to receive feedback. No matter whether it is positive or negative feedback, top athletes are willing to learn. My coach spent lots of time creating the best training program, selecting the best tournaments, developing the perfect team and staff members, and organizing well-structured feedback during my preparation for the Olympics. In practice, feedback is often forgotten or receives too little attention during the reinforcement process, but feedback is needed for growth.

In your reinforcement program strive to process all four levels of feedback:

1. Task: Feedback about a task or an assignment identifies errors and depth of quality and is usually measured against a set of criteria. This feedback can be used to correct misconceptions. You want to know how well the task has been performed—correctly or incorrectly.
2. Process: The next level is the process level, which focuses on how the task or assignment was processed. You want to know how the learners approached the assignment. What is the relationship between how they approached the assignment and the quality of their performance? Your learners should give feedback on the strategies they needed to perform the assignment.
3. Self-Regulation: The third level of feedback is based on self-regulation. Are your learners able to monitor and control their own learning and growth? Your learners should identify what activities need to be undertaken next to make better progress.
4. Self: The self level is about personal evaluation and the effect of behavior change. I recommend using a third person for feedback on the self level. It is a good way to identify blind spots.

THE CCAF MODEL

How can you create valuable feedback in your reinforcement program? The Context, Challenge, Activity, and Feedback (CCAF) Model is great to use in your reinforcement programs.

• Context provides a meaningful framework and conditions.
• Challenge is a stimulus or urgency to act.
• Activity is a response to the challenge.
• Feedback is a reflection about the effectiveness of the actions.

Give your learners the opportunity to solve problems that they may encounter at work. It’s the first C of the CCAF model, Context. Force learners to make risk-free work-related decisions. Use branching what-if scenarios and case studies, to show learners the consequences of their choices.

In the second C (for Challenge) you recognize Principle 5, “Create Friction and Direction.” Don’t make the challenge too easy for the learners. Use “distractors,” the common misconceptions or easily confused alternative options, to challenge your learners to consider other factors before making their final decisions. Or give them stimuli to search for additional information they need.

The A for Activity determines the quality of your feedback. Your activity in your reinforcement program should neither be too easy nor too difficult for your learners to complete. Being too easy may lead to your learners underestimating the importance of it and becoming bored. If it’s too difficult, it may lead them to give up and quit. Effective reinforcement programs balance the levels of difficulty to guarantee engagement. Principle 6, “Follow the Reinforcement Flow,” is crucial to obtaining the feedback needed for behavioral change.

EXAMINING FLOW

Before you start using the CCAF Model, let’s take a closer look at the definition of flow proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He said, “With flow comes joy and involvement with life, as well as balance between challenge and the ability to meet the challenge.”

How can you use Csikszentmihalyi’s definition in your reinforcement programs? How can you create “joy and involvement”? These two key elements drive learner engagement. How can you use “challenge and the ability to meet the challenge”? More precisely, how can you use the balance between the challenge and the ability to meet the challenge. It’s all about the balance, the perfect fit.

Reinforcement flow is all about balancing skills and challenges.

Kees became Dutch lightweight champion in ’s-Hertogenbosch, Holland, on November 3, 1991. After a day of competition, he was in the final. Kees seemed to be in control the whole day. I was very nervous, more nervous than for my own matches. He started very strong, full of self-confidence. Halfway through the final, they came into the ground fight, called Newaza in Japanese. I had never seen Kees be so quick. He attacked with a strangulation and his opponent tapped the mat three times, signaling “I give up.” Kees’ unique strangulation technique was later known as the “Kees Choke.” Later, Kees told me that he had never used this technique in competition and kept it as a surprise attack, which worked. I was so proud that my brother was national champion.

After he received his gold medal and the national anthem had played, he was interviewed by a reporter from the national television station. The reporter asked, “You started this morning and already seemed the champion. What makes you the champion today?” Kees answered, “Because I was in my flow.” He paused and then repeated, “Yes, it was because I was in a flow.”

The pause made Kees’ statement very powerful. After that weekend, Kees and I talked about that interview and his flow statement. As athletes, we like to understand the flow situation. Everything felt perfect, everything was in balance, everything was a perfect fit. What could we do to create flow for every tournament? You hear about the flow situation a lot when champions are interviewed. I bet you will recognize this feeling from now on.

Balancing skills and challenges

What exactly is the flow and how can you use it in your reinforcement program to drive engagement? Flow is the balance between the current skills and challenges.

Look at Figure 12.2. If the assignment or the challenge is too easy compared with the skill level of your learners, your learners become bored and frustrated. If the assignment or challenge is too difficult compared with the skill level of your learners, your learners become anxious and frustrated. Neither situation is good for engagement in your reinforcement program; they mean lower participation by your learners.

Using Principle 6 means finding that balance between challenges and skills. In a good reinforcement program, skills develop over time. How do the challenges or assignments match this development? Are you using more difficult scenarios, more difficult questions, over time or are you asking questions for which a tiny detail is the difference between correct and incorrect?

Check your assignments and challenges in your reinforcement program and compare them with the expected skills level of the learners. Is your reinforcement program following the reinforcement flow?

If your score ends up in the boredom section, you need to increase the difficulty of the assignments or challenges. Also check Principle 5, “Create Friction and Direction,” to ensure you don’t create lazy brains. Check the questions or answers and make sure they become more difficult over time. If your score is in the anxiety section, decrease the difficulty, especially at the beginning of your program. The pitfall is that you might decide to spell out every detail. That is not decreasing the difficulty. Make the differences between the answers clearer or reduce the complexity of the assignments.

If you use the perfect reinforcement flow, you balance the challenges and the skills development, as shown in Figure 12.3. Keep in mind that this drives your learners’ engagement.

When I look back at my Judo career, it’s clear that over the years each tournament becomes more difficult and more challenging. As young talents, Kees and I went to lots of tournaments in and around Holland. In the next phase, we went to European cup matches. As we grew more skilled, the tournaments became more prestigious, the opponents stronger, the different Judo styles from all over the world more complex, and winning a medal more difficult. Our trainer always looked for the best fit between our newly developed skills and tournament level. In other words, he found the flow to keep us motivated and engaged to train five or six hours every day. In sports it’s a normal process. How is the flow of your reinforcement program?

Table 12.1 shows the three most common pitfalls to creating your reinforcement flow.

Pitfall	Solution
No back and forth move between challenge and reward	If the challenge requires critical thinking and is mildly challenging for the learner, it can be satisfying. The learner can feel rewarded by meeting the challenge and motivated to keep learning. The ideal reinforcement flow moves back and forth between challenging and rewarding your learners.
No break for the learner	When planning your reinforcement flow, remember to give learners a break. If you do not give learners a chance to “rest” or time to work on their skills during reinforcement, they will become frustrated and take their own “breaks.” That means a dropout and low participation as a result.
No feedback to guide behavior change	Promote engagement by rewarding accomplishments and use frequent, multifaceted feedback to guide behavior. Use all four levels of feedback.

USING REINFORCEMENT FLOW TO GROW

When you use the reinforcement flow to leave the comfort zone, your focus is on growth. As you know, your learners enjoy the security and predictability of their daily routines. They fear rejection, judgment, and failure. They avoid risk and the unknown. Think about the Prospect Theory (refer to Chapter 2). A comfort zone relates to anxiety levels. It is defined in psychology as an artificial mental boundary; a place or situation in which your learner feels safe, comfortable, in control, or at ease and without stress. The comfort zone allows for a predictable routine to minimize stress.

Use the Reinforcement Flow to leave the comfort zone.

It’s easy to be comfortable, and there’s nothing wrong with having somewhere familiar to return to. But too much comfort can make your learners lazy and kill productivity and performance (see Figure 12.4). It’s hard for your learners to motivate themselves to make real improvements while feeling content. Your learners will do just enough to get by. This will lead to missed opportunities and regret.

It will take your learners a lot of courage to break out of their comfort zones, but keep in mind it can be great for their self-esteem, motivation, and lasting happiness and fulfillment. In other words, engagement. Learning to face the unknown not only becomes easier with practice, but can be very liberating and surprisingly behavior forming. After my first trip to Japan, many other trips to this Judo Mecca followed.

If you want to use your reinforcement program to help your learners to leave their comfort zones, don’t “push” them too far. Stay within the learning zone or, as I call it, the flow zone. This zone includes excitement, actions, feedback, learning, and development. In the flow zone, confidence is built, and fear disappears.

If you push learners too far, or if your challenges are too complex or way too difficult compared with their current skill-sets, learners may end up in the panic zone. In this zone, learners feel very uncomfortable and may completely block and all actions and initiatives because of fear. This zone kills productivity and performance.

To drive engagement and increase the percentage of participation, your learners need challenges and success. Success can be seen as good performance, based on the determined reinforcement objective. Learners in the flow zone can deliver peak performance and show the desired change in behavior.

The performance curve in Figure 12.5 shows that, in both the comfort zone and the panic zone, performance is low. If you increase the challenge, the learners will move into the flow zone and achieve an increase in performance. Don’t challenge them too much because if they fall into the panic zone, their performance will drop. You must balance the skills and the challenges to create peak performance.