- "We Need Training"
- Systems Thinking
- Tuning a System
- How This Impacts Behavior-Change Projects
- Key Points
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
How This Impacts Behavior-Change Projects
If you are being asked, as a learning designer, to design a class or resources to help address individual behaviors in a system where results are not visible at an individual level, it probably won’t be enough. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try or that it can’t be part of the solution, but it may be useful to have that discussion with stakeholders so the expectations are set appropriately.
Teaching healthcare providers how to talk to patients about exercise won’t help if providers aren’t given the time to have those conversations.
Teaching people the right method for handwashing will be of limited usefulness if the environment lacks clean water and adequate supplies.
Teaching people to sort their recycling won’t make a dent in plastic going to landfills if there’s no market for recycled goods.
Please understand that I do not mean this in a pessimistic way! As we proceed in this book, I’m going to speak optimistically about our ability as learning designers to impact or influence behavior. I wouldn’t be writing this book if I wasn’t optimistic about this topic. That said, I want to be as clear as possible about the limitations of a tight behavioral focus, how solutions may often need to be part of a broader system approach, and how learning designers should also be part of those broader systems discussions.
How This Impacts Learning Design
I started this chapter talking about how training often gets invoked to help solve large systemic problems. Let’s take a look at a small example of making biased judgments.
You’ve probably heard the message that it’s wrong to judge people based on their appearance. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and all that. Sesame Street made sure my four-year-old self knew that judging people based on how they looked was bad. And it’s not difficult to look at the news and see examples where judging by appearance leads to awful consequences. Making people aware of unconscious bias is a large part of many training initiatives.
But imagine you live in an apartment building, and a delivery person contacts you over the intercom to let you know that you have to sign for a package you ordered. You walk into the lobby and see these three people:
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I don’t think you would be guilty of any problematic bias or irrationality if you walked up to the person in the uniform holding a delivery box.
The point isn’t that “judging by appearance” is okay. The point is that sometimes it’s okay and sometimes it’s not, and the hard part is knowing the difference.
So the learning objective isn’t helping learners understand that “this bias exists.” The learning objective is helping learners “recognize in which environments and circumstances I need to use extra vigilance to make sure I’m not making unfair assumptions.”
The first is an interesting psychological phenomenon that you tell the rider about, and the second is a skill or habit you probably need to practice consistently to help the rider and elephant both develop.
This is an important distinction for learning design, because the learning design will look very different. If you are describing an interesting phenomenon, you might only need a single slide in the presentation deck, but helping people develop a skill or habit requires learning activities with practice, a feedback mechanism, and reinforcement over time.
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Learning where and when you need to heighten your vigilance is a product of the environment you are in, the influences that shaped your learned behavior, and the cues you have acclimated to.
The behavior, like the elephant, never exists in a vacuum. The elephant is always operating in the social and physical environment it exists in. We need to consider these things if we want to design effective learning experiences.
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