My second LN Mastery Day of the year, and this time it was in Birmingham. The day was made up of three workshop; Designing for lasting behaviour change, Product Design for Learning (rapid sprint) and What factors determine learning transfer success. Here are my thoughts about the day.
I’m still playing catch-up on these reflective blog posts. A lot of my CPD days tend to be at the start of the year, which also coincides with my busiest time of the year, so it means I’m often a little bit late posting. I do try to post at the end of the day if I can, but sometimes the sessions can be quite intense, and I just don’t have the brain power to make sense of everything.
Anyone who follows me or reads my blog posts will know that I love the Mastery Days run by the Learning Network. I’ve found them so valuable and I would highly recommend them. This day was a little different to the previous ones. I tend to go to events with a practical element, such as learning a new tool, building something tangible, but this day was more focused on process than practicality.
Session 1: Designing for lasting behaviour change
The first workshop looked at the dreaded course we’ve all designed at some point; a course that ticks all the boxes but changed nothing. We looked at the barriers organisations face, then focused on the jump from training to behaviour change. We looked at several models; the behaviour change wheel, COM-B, The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) and applied them to realistic scenarios.
What I took away from this particular workshop was a reminder that measurable impact should be designed from the start.
Session 2: Product Design for Learning (rapid sprint)
This session asked us to swap our learning design hat for a product designer’s. We worked in teams and were asked to build a product based on a scenario and set of briefs. We worked through the Two Circles Design System to highlight how you can cut design cycle time and build learning products people actually want.
This session included lots of sticky notes and a very rudimentary drawing by yours truly. We had to present our idea to the rest of the delegates and then vote on whose was the best idea.
I found this workshop quite difficult and I learnt a lot about myself; I don’t like to rush and I find quick thinking difficult. I’m very analytical and a reflector. I like to weigh up options and research ideas, a lot of which comes from my academic background. This workshop required me to be the total opposite: think rapidly and make assumptions.
For example, we were looking at building a product from scratch, but didn’t stop to ask the question, what tools and technologies does the client already have? Do they really need to build something from scratch? It was the lack of answers to these questions that bugged me, as we had just assumed they wanted something completely bespoke.
I’m not sure I liked being out of my comfort zone here, because I came away looking back at the product we had designed and thinking we’d made a lot of mistakes for not taking into account all the details. However, I think this just highlighted how I like to work, and that perhaps an agile product environment isn’t something I’d particularly thrive in.
My takeaway from this workshop; sometimes looking very quickly at the bigger picture helps you to see things from a different perspective. If you treat a course as a product, the questions you ask start to change. These questions can be quite valuable especially if you’re designing a course from scratch that incorporates a lot of UX design principles.
Workshop 3: What factors determine learning transfer success?
This workshop was the one I was most excited about! The session was on the 12 Levers of Transfer Effectiveness, by Dr. Ina Weinbauer-Heidel, presented by Joss Frimond from the Institute for Transfer Effectiveness. This session made me so happy, because we were given some freebies in the form of a pack of cards covering the 12 levers. I love the 12 levers, I’ve read the book, and I actively apply the levers in my work where I can. With the cards, we played the Transfer Card Game to identify the barriers hiding in our own programmes, which was a clever way to spot the gaps. I liked this workshop as it was evidence-based and genuinely usable, which is the combination I always look for.
My takeaway from this workshop; The 12 levers are a great way to remember that transfer is not just a design problem. They span three areas: the trainees, the training design, and the organisation. Alongside the levers we can own there are the ones we can’t, or rarely control. A good reminder that even the best designed course will struggle to deliver results without the right conditions in place.
Summary
This mastery day was a lot more collaborative than the previous days I’ve attended. I have to admit, when I go to these workshops, I don’t want to collaborate all of the time! And I feel that in between all the collaboration, it would be nice to do an activity just working by myself. This day pulled me out of my comfort zone, and while I did really enjoy it, I’m not sure that this one was as useful to me. I’m not always working with big corporates and I’m not always designing learning from an L&D perspective, so some parts of the session just didn’t land for me. That being said, all of the presenters were brilliant and it was great to see a diverse mix of approaches to the same challenge of getting learning to actually stick.
References
Visit the Learning Network website to learn more about what the Learning Network does and the events they run.