Chapter Connections

It’s late July, which means the Orange County Fair is in full swing with livestock, exhibits, carnival games, and tongue-wagging food.  Some of the new innovations this year: 

• Funnel Cake Fried Chicken Sandwich

• Birria Burger

• Pickled Dr. Pepper

I wanted to take a look at the Hot Cheetos-Crusted Chicken Potstickers.

Here’s a description, courtesy of the Orange County Register:

“The pulverized snack chips make a pleasantly spicy coating that help cut through the finger food’s richness. Comes with a side of pineapple teriyaki sauce.”

I find fair food interesting. While it seems that every year there’s some distributor who is trying to capture the attention of anyone within earshot by producing the quirkiest food, they still have to approach the challenge with the research and rigor of the most diligent talent development analysis. 

I wanted to explore the opportunity of any link between fair food innovation and talent development, and I believe I found a few.

1. Creative problem solving

2. Understanding design

3. Techniques for improvement

4. Methods for reducing over-indulgence

1. Creative problem solving

Food Development:

Experimentation: Innovating new foods often requires experimenting with different ingredients, techniques, and combinations to create something unique and appealing.
Iteration: Similar to product development, food innovation involves testing and refining recipes based on feedback and results.

Talent Development:

Innovative Solutions: Creating effective training programs involves identifying new methods and tools to address specific learning needs.

Adaptability: Like chefs, instructional designers must adapt and iterate their approaches based on feedback and changing requirements.

2. Understanding design

Food Development:

Flavor Harmony: Successful dishes balance flavors like sweetness, acidity, bitterness, and umami to create a cohesive experience.
Complementary Ingredients: Pairing ingredients that enhance each other's flavors leads to a more enjoyable dish.

Talent Development:

Learning Harmony: Effective training programs balance different instructional methods to cater to diverse audiences.
Complementary Activities: Using a mix of lectures, interactive sessions, and hands-on activities can enhance the overall learning experience.

3. Techniques for Improvement

Food Development:

Texture Contrast: Using techniques like pulverized snack chips for coating creates a satisfying textural contrast between the crunchy exterior and soft interior.
Mouthfeel: Attention to the mouthfeel, or the physical sensations in the mouth produced by food, is crucial for creating an enjoyable dish.

Talent Development:

Engagement Contrast: Combining various training methods can keep learners engaged and cater to different preferences.
Learning Experience: Focusing on the "feel" of the training experience—making it engaging and interactive—helps retain learners' interest.

4. Methods for reducing over-indulgence

Food Development:

Balance Richness: Techniques like using spicy coatings can cut through the richness, making the food feel lighter and more palatable.
Flavor Offsetting: Balancing rich ingredients with lighter elements prevents dishes from being overwhelming.

Talent Development:

Content Offsetting: Avoiding information overload in training by balancing dense material with lighter, more interactive elements.
Balance Engagement: Ensuring that training content is digestible and well-paced helps learners retain information without feeling overwhelmed.

Bonus:
Marketing Strategies for Novel Food Items and Training Programs

Food Development:

Appeal to Curiosity: Novel foods attract attention by offering something unique and different, leveraging the curiosity of fair-goers.

Talent Development:

Engaging Promotion: Novel posts that encourage readers to consider parallels between talent development and other professions. Say, advertising?

What do you think? Is this a bit of a stretch? Or can we learn something from the creative process behind fair food that can be applied to developing effective training programs? Let us know your thoughts!

Are you a "multiplier" in your organization? Someone who grows intelligence by engaging it?  

"Of course," is our answer. "We're part of ATDOC."  

And yet: our organizational leaders continue to approach us with problems like these:

• We can’t hire, but we need to grow.
• We need everyone’s best, but people are burned out.
• We’re okay today, but we’re not ready to compete tomorrow.
• We have the best talent, but they’re not engaged.

In these circumstances, leaders can’t afford to waste talent. They need people to innovate, to solve problems, to deliver results—and to be excited and engaged as they do so.

That’s where you come in.

This month’s Learning Event challenges us to become “multipliers” in our organizations – individuals who cultivate a culture of continuous learning and enhance their role as a catalyst for growth.  Senior FranklinCovey Consultant Andy Cindrich will lead us in interactive discussions as we explore the Four Shifts of Multipliers:

• Ask Better Questions: Encourage curiosity by asking questions that stimulate thinking and problem-solving among your team members.
• Look for Genius: Identify and leverage the unique strengths and talents of each team member.
• Create Space for Others: Foster an environment where everyone feels safe to contribute ideas and take risks.
• Offer Bigger Challenges: Provide opportunities that stretch your team’s capabilities and encourage them to achieve more than they thought possible.

How can we apply these multiplier mindsets as learning and development professionals?

• Build something beyond the classroom.  As we ask better questions, we inspire curiosity. Strategize ways to promote a culture where learning is not just a periodic activity but a continuous journey.
• Create collaborative platforms. As we create space for others to learn, we provide opportunities for teams to learn from each other.  What platforms can we facilitate – from group discussions, peer-to-peer mentoring, or collaborative projects – that will build stronger teams within your organization?

Create More Multipliers With Us

Our webinar on July 24 — Multipliers — will encourage us to discuss these opportunities and more in an interactive session where practice collaborative learning ourselves. We’ll share insights and experiences with our peers via lively chat and small group breakout discussions. Through a series of informative short videos we’ll learn directly from the author of Multipliers, Liz Wiseman, and will be further guided by Andy Cindrich.

Empower yourself with the knowledge and skills to become a Multiplier and make a lasting impact on your organization.

Join us at the upcoming Multipliers Learning Event and take the first step towards unlocking your team's full potential.

REGISTER NOW!

The above quote comes from Joe Sparano, a graphic designer. While he’s undoubtedly talking about graphic design principles here, we believe this statement applies equally to instructional design.

Good Instructional Design is Obvious

Obvious instructional design effectively communicates its purpose and is easy for learners to follow. It ensures that:

• Content is Clear: Lessons and modules are structured in a straightforward manner.
• Objectives are Explicit: Learning goals and outcomes are clearly stated at the outset. 
• Usability is High: Navigation and access to materials are intuitive and user-friendly.

These are good guiding principles for designing training materials. What about great instructional design?

Great Instructional Design is Transparent

Transparent instructional design goes beyond mere clarity and ease of use. It seamlessly integrates into the learning experience, almost fading into the background, allowing learners to focus entirely on the content and learning process without being distracted by the design itself. This is achieved by:

• Embedding Purpose: The design is so well-aligned with the learning objectives and content that it feels like a natural extension of the material.
• Flow and Engagement: The progression of lessons is so smooth and engaging that learners move from one concept to another effortlessly, deeply immersed in the learning experience.
• Supporting Autonomy: Learners feel empowered and self-directed, often not even noticing the guidance and support structures in place because they are so intuitively integrated.

These concepts are the heart of our upcoming Total Trainer workshop series. If you’re a training professional looking to elevate your skills and create truly impactful training programs, Total Trainer is your pathway to mastery.

How Total Trainer Incorporates These Principles

1. Aligning with Learning Objectives

Every element of the Total Trainer workshop is meticulously crafted to serve the educational goals. The structure of the workshops feels like a natural extension of the content, ensuring a cohesive and impactful learning journey.

2. Creating Intuitive Navigation

The course interface is designed so learners can navigate seamlessly, allowing them to focus entirely on absorbing information. You’ll experience a smooth and user-friendly environment that enhances your learning efficiency.

3. Enhancing Engagement Through Subtlety

Total Trainer uses design elements to subtly guide attention and engagement. Through carefully chosen colors and typography, key points are highlighted without being overtly conspicuous, ensuring a deeply immersive learning experience.

4. Minimizing Cognitive Load

By minimizing unnecessary distractions and cognitive load, the workshops enable you to process information more efficiently and effectively. This transparent design approach ensures that your focus remains on learning and applying new skills.

Real-World Application in Training

This is the goal of the Total Trainer workshop series – a workshop in which great instructional design concepts are not only discussed, but explored in a practical application that will result in the creation of a single learning experience.

Join the Total Trainer Workshop Series

By striving for transparency in instructional design, Total Trainer creates an environment where learning becomes a natural, engaging, and enriching experience. This approach ensures that the focus remains on your journey and growth, making the design an invisible yet powerful facilitator of learning.

Our two-part workshop series covers all aspects of training development and delivery:

Workshop One: Creating Training

• Develop an initial needs analysis, effective training materials, and a final analysis required for any successful training program.
• Learn to identify key components that make any training initiative effective, assess existing training programs, and recommend strategies for improvement.

Workshop Two: Delivering Training

• Design and deliver impactful presentations for business meetings, conferences, special events, or classroom settings.
• Enhance your ability to engage your audience through discussion, practice, and exceptional presentation skills. Learn to lead individual and group activities effectively, tell compelling stories, use humor, and handle off-track and challenging participants.

Transform Your Training Approach

This is more than just another train-the-trainer workshop. It's an opportunity to engage in a supportive, collaborative environment where you can practice your newfound abilities with real clients. Imagine the confidence you'll feel putting these lessons into action, and the satisfaction of knowing you're elevating the field of learning and development.

One of the participants in last night’s Practicing Prompts session asked about Perplexity.ai.  We’d been so focused on using our existing source material to create the structure of the course that we didn’t get into Perplexity’s wheelhouse.  Let’s explore that (briefly) here:

Perplexity.ai is designed for gathering the information that we can use for other content, such as our Writing Proposals course.  For example: we have an objective: “Incorporate relevant graphics and charts into the proposal to enhance understanding and engagement.”

When I review my source material, I find a section that states: “Graphics are a powerful way to convey ideas and focus the reader’s attention.”  From there, it discusses selecting clipart or photos that show “some creative association with the associated text” such as a clipart image of a telescope as a metaphor for focus.

Bearing in mind that this source material was written in 2002.

I believe that this section could benefit with some more thought. Let me turn to Perplexity to see if there are any studies or recent references that will help us better relate how to include graphics into our proposals.

Where we may use a framework to design our prompts in ChatGPT or Gemini, I’m more comfortable asking Perplexity a starting question.  Perplexity will prompt me to ask a follow-up question if I’m not finding the resources I want.  I will state the role and use my source content to help structure my question.

Here’s where Perplexity shines:  It provides ideas to explore, and links to the content where it found those ideas, thus providing me with a starting point and a path for further exploration of the topic.

Right below the question, you can see a grouping of five sources. Select one of those boxes, you'll be directed to the site in question.  

Review Perplexity's answers, and you will see links to the article that the system is referencing.  For example, I'm able to open the "openasset" article to learn more about their ideas for Representing Data Visually.  That's not a bad article (despite their application of the 80/20/10 myth*) and one that did not appear in the results when I conducted a Google Search for "Selecting Proposal Graphics."

In essence, Perplexity is more of a search engine than a generative tool, albeit one that is capable of composing conclusions based upon the information it finds.  I tend to appreciate its guidance; it is a great resource for helping me identify what I don’t know and pointing me down the path to learn more.

Case in point.

*Ask Perplexity.ai: "Is it true that we remember 80% of what we see, 20% of what we read, and 10% of what we hear? What studies show these statistics?"  Share what you find in the comments.

Are you an experienced training professional looking to take your skills to the next level? If so, you're not alone. Many “subject-matter expert” trainers have found themselves in your shoes - eager to grow, but unsure of the path forward. The training and development field is evolving rapidly, and those who are willing to learn, adapt, and innovate will be the ones to lead the charge.

That's where the "Total Trainer" workshop series comes in. You'll gain the skills to assess existing programs, create dynamic new initiatives, and make a lasting impact in your organization. This is more than just skill-building; it's about evolving into a true performance consultant who drives change and inspires excellence.

Wherever you are in your journey, "Total Trainer" is designed to help you evolve and excel. This transformative program will empower you to:

• Move toward performance consulting, making a tangible difference in your organization
• Develop mastery in training models, concepts, and best practices
• Practice your skills in a safe environment with real clients

Let's explore how "Total Trainer" helps you achieve these three key goals:

Move Toward Performance Consulting

Performance consulting is more than just delivering training; it's about identifying and solving performance issues within organizations. "Total Trainer" equips you with the tools and knowledge to excel in this role.

You'll dive into the essence of performance consulting. You'll learn how to identify the root causes of performance problems, suggest and implement effective solutions, and transition from merely delivering training to solving critical organizational issues. This approach will elevate your role from an order-taker to a strategic consultant.

To solidify your learning, you'll engage in scenario activities that mimic real-life consulting situations. For instance, you'll practice using performance consulting questions to determine the actual needs of a client, such as whether team-building training is genuinely necessary. These activities prepare you to apply consulting skills confidently and effectively in your professional role​​.

Develop Skills to Apply Various Training Models, Concepts, and Best Practices

"Total Trainer" ensures that you are well-versed in a variety of training models and best practices, enabling you to design and deliver effective training programs.

Beginning with the first day of Creating Training, you'll be introduced to the key components of effective training initiatives. You'll learn to create a learning journey that includes pre-event, intersession, and follow-up activities, ensuring that training is not only delivered but also effectively reinforced​​.

From there you'll focus on planning for implementation — a critical phase often overlooked. You'll learn to identify implementation needs, create detailed plans, and use checklists to manage risks. This ensures that your training initiatives achieve their goals and deliver lasting impact​​.

Our second workshop offers hands-on experience with various instructional methods and lesson plan structures. You'll explore different models like Gagne’s 9 Instructional Events and the 5 Es Model​​.

You will evaluate and choose the right training modalities for your programs, from Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and Virtual Instructor-Led Training (vILT) to asynchronous and blended learning. This comprehensive understanding allows you to tailor your training to best meet your audience's needs​​.

Practice My Skills in a Safe Environment with a Real Client

One of the standout features of "Total Trainer" is the opportunity to practice your skills in a supportive, real-world environment.

Throughout the modules, you'll participate in interactive breakout activities. These exercises offer a supportive environment to design and refine lesson plans, develop training content, and practice performance consulting techniques. You'll work on real-world scenarios and collaborate with peers, ensuring you gain the confidence and practical experience needed to excel​​​​.

Finally, you'll engage in group work to develop and test training initiatives using iterative tools. This collaborative environment allows you to receive constructive feedback from peers and facilitators, ensuring continuous improvement and mastery of your skills​​.

Modules like the performance consulting scenarios provide simulated client interactions. These scenarios prepare you to handle real client situations effectively, ensuring that you can transfer your learning to your professional practice seamlessly​​.

Join "Total Trainer" and Transform Your Career

This is more than just another train-the-trainer workshop. It's an opportunity to engage in a supportive, collaborative environment where you can practice your newfound abilities with real clients. Imagine the confidence you'll feel putting these lessons into action, and the satisfaction of knowing you're elevating the field of learning and development.

Don't miss this opportunity to enhance your professional capabilities and make a significant impact in your organization. Sign up for "Total Trainer" today and start your journey towards becoming a top-tier training and development professional.

I took a learning styles quiz today.  The results: “it depends.” 

Which is probably the most accurate result one can get from a learning styles quiz.  Why?

Visual/Auditory/Kinesthetic(VAK) learning styles is a flawed hypothesis that is not backed by solid research in the L&D field.

Yet the idea that learners have a preferred style of learning, and that we should incorporate those styles into our instructional design, perpetuates the industry.  A 2017 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress found that close to 90 percent of responders “indicated that students should receive information in their own learning style.”  Why?

The concept of learning styles can be traced back decades, but current research on the topic points to Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory.  However, the LSI classified individuals into four types — divergers, assimilators, convergers, accommodators — based on where they fall along a concrete/abstract continuum and a reflective/active continuum. 

How did the LSI evolve to auditory/visual/kinesthetic learning styles? In a 2008 study: Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, authors analyze how the concept of one’s learning style has been validated using an “existence of study preferences.”  In other words, people participating in the study volunteered preferences about their preferred mode of taking in new information and studying. When we attempt to figure out how to do something new, do we prefer to watch YouTube videos? Listen to podcasts?  Read instruction manuals? 

The Concepts and Evidence study finds that there is little evidence that one’s preference for how we prefer to receive information is related to an individual’s ability to master the skill. 

Other reports challenge the learning style approach to instructional design. In an Educational Psychology article titled: Kolb’s learning styles and learning preferences: is there a linkage?  The author states: “It is suggested that large individual differences in learning preferences within each style and type, and small differences in learning preference mean scores show that, overall, there are weak linkages between learning styles and learning preferences.” 

Subsequent studies have continued to challenge the efficacy of VAK learning styles.  

Perhaps equally telling is this paragraph at the bottom of a Learning Styles Inventory quiz found on the Middlesex Community College website: “However, a valuable goal to set for yourself is to strive to integrate all of the modalities into your learning process; therefore, try using several of the strategies for your weaker modalities as well. As you will also notice, some learning strategies will incorporate more than one modality. Multisensory learning strategies have the capability of strengthening your memory even more.”

What to do? 

Understanding learning strategies requires recognizing the complexity of how people learn rather than oversimplifying it into distinct learning styles. Research shows that it's not the preferred mode of information delivery that matters most, but rather how learners engage and apply the material. To enhance retention, it's crucial to integrate varied content—such as text, images, and audio—with interactive elements like quizzes, simulations, and real-world challenges. These tools encourage active learning and ensure that learners can practice and master new skills effectively.

"This is part therapy. #validation," typed one participant during last week's Learning Event titled "Strategies for Better Engaging Learners."

She was referring to Dr. Bob Nelson's passion for positive reinforcement and his findings that recognition in the workplace is more important than ever.

"Employees are reporting that they are working harder than before, but feel less valued," Dr. Nelson declared.  He stressed the value of engaged employees, pointing out that they deliver 57% more effort than unengaged employees.

The Power of Positive Reinforcement

Dr. Nelson defined recognition as "acknowledging and appreciating people for their achievements."  He noted that today, 99.4% of employees expect to be recognized when they do good work, but only 12% of employees feel they are recognized in important ways.  The company picnic and snack box gifts are nice, but they aren't necessarily considered recognition because they aren't in response to specific work performed by a specific employee.

From there, Dr. Nelson shared some examples of powerful positive reinforcement that he had uncovered in his years of research in this field.

"I'm going to try the Thank You note activity," Jason Dreyer said. He believes it will be "a great way to incorporate some gratitude into our meetings. Our leadership team is about 50% newer people, so we're still learning to work with each other. Sharing 'thank yous' would help people feel appreciated and seen for their contributions."

Applying Positive Reinforcement to Training and Development

How can these concepts apply to our role in training and development?  Dr. Nelson shared a few ways to apply positive reinforcement techniques throughout a class.

One example Dr. Nelson shared: “If you break into groups you can have a competition just for the training on who did the activity best and you can have something you can give them and it can be a revolving trophy to move on after that person.” 

This idea sparked a memory from another participant. “When I was a teacher,” he shared in chat. “We had a weekly shout out where people would hand over a bowling pin for who was the "rock star" of the week. Every week the holder of the pin would nominate another "rock star" and so on.”

The end of the session was filled with participant-shared examples of how they have used or experienced positive reinforcement, either in the workplace or in the training rooms.  Which, in itself, was another form of therapy.

“I'm an L&D team of one,” explained Jason Dreyer. “So connecting with other L&D professionals helps me stay connected to my field of choice and see that I'm not alone in what I'm doing.”

We are thrilled to announce James Skee as our Volunteer of the Spring 2024 Quarter! James has served as a Certification Manager in the Multi-Chapter CPTD Study Group, helping to prepare our members to site for the CPTD exam.  In addition, he’s served on the Chapter Finance Committee since 2023, where he is developing visualizations to help the finance team clearly communicate the Chapter’s financial health. 

A Director of Learning & Development at NexusTek – a Managed Services Provider focusing on the mid-size market in North America – James chose to volunteer with ATD-OC not only to “give back to the Talent Development community, but also to apply the principles of L&D.” He views volunteering as a practical arena to leverage and expand his skills beyond his full-time role, embodying the true spirit of learning through service.

Connect with James at an upcoming Learning Event to explore how you can also invest in yourself and grow within our community. Or perhaps be inspired to follow a similar path of volunteerism and professional growth in our own journeys.

James D. Skee is Director of Learning & Development at NexusTek, a Managed Services Provider focusing on the mid-size market in North America. Prior to joining NexusTek in 2018, he worked for 10 years in higher ed and secondary education, and 12 years in Information Technology. James has taught courses in History of Business, History of Science, and Science, Technology & Society (STS) at UC Berkeley and Hult International Business School. He earned both his MA and PhD at UC Berkeley.

In an ATD article titled: Beyond Gamification, professor Karl M. Kapp suggested that gamification might not be a solution for building employee engagement. 

“Many gamification efforts focus on cute characters, meaningless point systems, and leaderboards, which only the top 10 people care about,” writes Dr. Kapp. “Unless gamification is part of a larger strategy or a more focused effort, it will not have the success an organization hopes to achieve in terms of employee engagement.”

Jonathan Peters, Ph.D., would agree. He peppered the start of his webinar: “The Four ‘Levels’ of Gamification Implementation in Learning Experiences” with a few game mechanics: the opportunity to collect badges, a chance to win a gamification surveyor certification workshop, and a chance to lose the previous opportunity if you don’t have enough badges.  Then he asked us to think about the experience.  How long would he have been able to motivate us and keep us motivated?

The majority of participants were motivated up until we had earned three badges, which was the threshold for qualifying for the workshop registration. 

If badges and points and leaderboards is all we have when it comes to gamification, he informed us during a Gamification of Learning webinar, “We can expect that we won’t get results over time.  It might make something more interesting, and it feels fun, but what we know from the research is that it doesn’t last over time.”

Badges and points and leaderboards provide a cosmetic level of gamification, Dr. Peters shared. These game mechanics have no impact to the course and are easily ignored once the learners figure out how to game the system.

The higher levels of gamification are:

To reach that immersive level, Dr. Peters shares a 30 point path that incorporates deliberate, purposeful consideration of game mechanics to ensure the resulting product doesn’t feel superficial or meaningless, but rather guides the learners towards achieving a mutual objective.

And of course, they lay out those steps in a game format.

Dr. Peters will walk you through this path during next month’s Gamification Certification workshop.  This program is like no conference or workshop you’ve attended. The Sententia Gamification LIVE Certification is a complete immersion experience designed to leave you creatively inspired and technically masterful.

Learn More About Our Upcoming Workshop:

Gamification Certification: A Learning and Design Adventure Through the Fundamentals of Gamification for Learning

"If you’ve ever been pitted against colleagues during corporate online training or started a new job where the health and safety compliance course involved quiz questions to progress through a series of levels, then you’re familiar with gamification. Gartner has defined gamification as “the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.” In other words, gamification uses gaming elements in a nongame context, which could be any situation where engaging people with an instructive process is necessary. Examples include recruitment, company inductions, brand loyalty schemes—or e-learning."

Read the complete article: Gamification in E-Learning: How Does It Work? at (td.org)

We've got a full-day workshop on gamification the first Saturday of May.