The 5 Moments of Need Blog

Design to Measurement: An Instructional Designer's 5 Moments of Need Journey

This blog is excerpted from episode 19 of the Performance Matters podcast where Bob Mosher speaks with Sue Reber, one of the world’s top 5 Moments of Need Designers, on: the 5 Moments methodology, how it differs from other approaches, and the how and why around shifting mindsets to performance-first.

Bob Mosher (BM): One reason I’m so excited about this particular episode is that we’ve interviewed Con from a theory perspective and as the visionary. We all know he’s a pioneer in this stuff. We’ve interviewed organizations who are well on this journey, and the Leaders in those companies who have the vision and such. Clearly, you are a leader when it comes to design and development. Sue, you’ve mentored so many, you’ve been a part of the certificate program and others, and we’ve just watched you mature in your development as you have been along for this ride and gone through all of this. So many on this call are ID’s and early in the journey, and having a true Senior Developer’s perspective on this is so important. So, let’s start with how you got here; give us a bit of your background in how you arrived to where you are today.

Sue Reber (SR): It was all a little bit of luck, actually. I started out as a high school English teacher graduating from college at a time when there were literally hundreds of applications for every teaching position. I did teach for a few years. But I didn’t like it very well. I loved the teaching part, but not the administrative stuff that went along with it.

So, I started looking for a job that would use my education background and allow me to write, and I fell into a job as an instructional designer, as you know, for Logical Operations. And that was the beginning of it all, so many doors opened and it was a total blessing to wind up there. I got be an instructional designer in a company where there was a good foundation in training and that helped me a lot. They facilitated me in getting my master’s degree and introduced me to performance-based, problem-based learning with LearnPro, our case-based learning model, which I managed. And that, really, is what started me on my journey toward performance-based training as opposed to knowledge-based training.

BM: Let’s run with that a bit. You mention hitting this important pivot where you realized that training alone is not enough, or a “training first” mindset is not enough. Tell me, why does The 5 Moments of Need, which you are so good at, work for you as a designer? What is it that makes it so unique to you, or has helped you change that mindset?

SR: It makes me think about the performance first. It’s really all about performance, right? The 5 Moments help me think about that from what it is that people need to be able to do and all the different contexts in which they need to do that work—whether it’s apply or change or learn something new. When you think through what it means to the learner, you’re going to come up with a solution that will far better meet the needs of the performers rather than meeting the needs of the trainer or what the business thinks the performers need.

BM: Can you do performance support for soft skills?

SR: You can absolutely do performance support for soft skills. In fact, it’s more important to do performance support for soft skills because we have a hard time with that even in our business world. It does require a bit of a mind shift because a lot of times in soft skills you’re talking about guidelines you need to identify and apply. But there is still some skill that you need to be able to perform with those soft skills, such as active listening.

BM: So, let me ask a question around your response. This real pivot on training first versus performance first is really at the heart of the whole thing. And “tasks” leads us to “measurement.” Sue, my gosh, we’ve been chasing this “ROI” acronym forever. And when I had a training first mindset, I struggled with—agree or disagree with them—the higher levels of Phillips and Kirkpatrick.

And so, my “aha!” in this journey is that training often gets unfairly positioned as being able to directly measure or influence higher level Kirkpatrick or Phillips. I think, candidly, understanding the 5 moments, that training can’t stretch itself into those areas. This is where performance support comes in because when you move into the workflow, and you want to get into those higher levels, you have to be where the performance occurs. Sue, help us understand, from your opinion, how has the shift to 5 Moments helped us look at measurement differently?

SR: When we are building training, we are generally looking at measuring the training. if I’m talking Kirkpatrick—we have Level 1 smile sheets, Level 2 skill checks. Then we might even go beyond that like we tried to do with LearnPro, where we went back after the fact to people on the job to see if they were able to translate—transfer—what they learned. But it’s not measuring the performance, it’s measuring the training, right?

I don’t know that the business really cares about the training. They care about how the performance changes as a result of the training and I don’t believe it can change as a result of the training because training is an event and performance support is a way of life. Right? You’re integrating it right into the way you work and you’re not just measuring a single moment in time.

For more on Sue’s take on measurement, usage, and assets—as well as her biggest takeaways from her journey to-date—download or listen to this entire episode. And be sure to subscribe to The Performance Matters Podcast to stay up-to-date on all the latest conversations and guests in the 5 Moments space.

Methodology Matters: Answers to Hot Topics and Common Questions

By: Dr. Conrad Gottfredson

This post has been excerpted from it’s original content, Episode 18 of The Performance Matters Podcast.

In this episode Con answers questions submitted from our good friends at ttc Innovations.

What is broken with traditional learning and how do we fix it?

Well, it’s kind of important to see ourselves with where we really are. Unfortunately, in traditional learning, the focus is on learning instead of on performance, making sure that people can perform effectively on the job, all the time, anywhere. The mindset in Learning is really quite narrow. Many years ago—1984 actually—I became very much aware that there were five moments of learning need. Two of those are traditional learning moments—the moment of learning new and the moment of learning more.

But I also became convinced that there was a very important moment that if you don’t take care of it, everything that you do in learning new or learning more is moot. And that’s the moment of apply, when people have to take whatever it is that they have learned and perform effectively at the moment of apply. Then there is the moment of change that is also in the workflow, and the moment of solve, also in the workflow.

Those five moments of need are very important for us to address. Unfortunately, in traditional Learning, we take a very narrow view and focus in on the learning without taking into consideration what needs to happen at the moments of apply, solve, and change.

So what’s broken? It’s really our mindset, where we’re thinking about learning rather than performance. And we’re very narrow in that view of what we do.

What does a 5 Moments of Need Solution look like?

It’s a blend of learning and performance support. The discipline of performance support is really the discipline of providing just what you need, at the moment of need, to help you get the job done.

A 5 Moments of Need Solution assists people not only in the learning, where I learn to be independent in the workflow, but also across that learning through the Transfer phase and into the Sustainment phase. That is, transferring what I’ve learned to my job and then sustaining me in an ever-changing work environment. A 5 Moments Solution addresses all of that, as I move from Training to Transfer to Sustain across all five moments of learning need.

How does a 5 Moments solution deliver measurable results?

You know, Gloria Gery wrote an interesting article in the 90s. As she was being asked to report on traditional learning metrics, she asked, “Why don’t we just weigh them? Why don’t we just bring in cattle scales and weigh our students?” She understood then that most learning metrics don’t really get at what really matters, which is how people can perform effectively and our ability to measure that.

When you build a 5 Moments Solution, you extend your reach into the workflow. You build a performance support solution that supports people as they do their job in the flow of work. Because it’s extended into there, because we have tools helping people in the performance of their jobs, we have the ability to gather metrics in ways we have not been able to gather metrics in the past. So our ability to reach in and know that people are actually performing on the job to be able to ask very brief questions about that performance and gather that data allows us to truly measure business impact. Like time to effective performance, or reduction of time wasted as people are searching for the resources they need to do their job.

There are really five areas of business impact that we can now measure. Those include 1) the ability to measure how we are able to optimize performance in the workflow; 2) increase profitability; 3) reduce operational risk; 4) cultivate a dynamic, engaged workforce; or 5) reinforce organizational mission and values. We’re able to gather data in all five of these areas because we have reached into the workflow. We intentionally have solutions in the workflow supporting people as they do their jobs.

What is the difference between adaptive and personalized learning?

Personalized learning is a broader view of learning. Adaptive learning is a type of personalized learning. It’s very knowledge-based, frankly. It’s adaptive. It’s smart. It pushes questions to you. As you answer those questions, you may have access to resources to help you in the answering of those questions. And as you learn adaptively, the system is able to understand and determine of whether you have really mastered that piece of knowledge or not. It will use its algorithms to push those questions to you over time so that you learn over time and have it reinforced. It’s very nice learning system. A lot of the gaming technologies that are in place to help us learn through gaming is really adaptive learning being applied that way.

Personalized learning is really broader than that. Adaptive learning is a part of personalized learning. But if I have you learning in the workflow on tasks that only you need to know, and I have everything you need supporting you as you do that, that in a sense is personalized learning. Particularly if you have access to on-the-job coaching and association. Even in a classroom, I can have personalized learning where I turn you lose to use a digital coach—an EPSS—to work on learning that is personalized to you. So personalized learning is a broader engagement in learning. It’s anything we do to make sure you are focusing only on what is important to you in your growth and development rather than the generalized learning where I’m listening to things I’m learning and practicing on things I need to know but the person next to me doesn’t need to know.

How does artificial intelligence impact the speed of change?

Smart performance support is really important. Mobile technology is enabling us to know who you are, where you are, what you are doing, what is around you. This data allows us to become very smart in what we’re pushing to you based upon what you and others are doing and what [data] you’re using and how you’re using it to be able to impact your work.

Artificial intelligence is an exciting frontier but it is a frontier. We need to move into this with great speed and attention, but also care to make sure that what we are doing is allowing us to learn from the performance of others and adapt and change based upon that learning.

For the complete list of questions and responses, listen to the full episode. And be sure to subscribe to The Performance Matters Podcast to stay up-to-date on all the latest conversations and guests in the 5 Moments space.

Leading Change

By: Drs. Conrad Gottfredson and Timothy R. Clark.

The following is an excerpt from The Performance Matters Podcast Series, Episode 15.

Dr. Timothy R. Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a three-time CEO, earned a PHD in Social Science from Oxford University, and was an academic all-American football player while at BYU.

Here, he shares his counsel on how to effectively take on, and lead, change within our organizations.

Con: Leading change is one of the many areas where you’ve had deep experience and remarkable insight. Please do share some of that experience with our audience.

Tim: I look at leading change as a gateway competency. With the twenty-first century being so dynamic, I don’t know a leader who is being paid to maintain the status quo. I don’t know that I’ve met one. I just don’t.

So what are we being paid for? We’re being paid to maintain competitive advantage in a highly dynamic, unforgiving, hyper-competitive environment. And what does this mean? By definition, it means that you are going to be leading change. So, if you can do that, you’ve got a chance. If you can’t do that, I don’t know how you survive.

Con: If you could choose any one quality that a leader needs in order to successfully navigate change in their organization, what would that be?

Tim: I think I may surprise you a bit in my answer. And this is really the subject of my latest research and my forthcoming book. I’m going to say, “the ability to create psychological safety.” And the reason I say that is because—here’s what I’ve learned over time. If you go into an organization and you see evidence of fear, that’s the first sign of weak leadership. You have to think about that for a minute.

Not only is it symptomatic of weak leadership, but it’s the thing that really shuts people down. It’s the thing that neutralizes their performance and stifles creativity and innovation.

Leaders have to be able to draw out people, draw out their motivation and their capacity and if he or she can do that, then we have a chance to do some special things.

So, I think that regardless of the industry you’re in, regardless of what your technical skills may be, and regardless of what the source of your competitive advantage may be; you have to be the architect of the culture.

You set the tone. The vibe. And the working environment. And that is what becomes the great enabler of collaboration.

Here’s the way I look at it. In any organization, you only have two processes going on. You have execution, which is the creation of value today. And you have innovation, which is the creation of value tomorrow. That’s all we do, just those two processes.

If you step back and look at those two processes, those two processes are primarily social processes. They are both reliant upon rich, high quality collaboration. Well, what do you need for that? You need psychological safety. It’s really that important.

Con: So when you say, “psychological safety,” what does that look like in an organization?

Tim: I think it means four things:

1. You feel included.

2. You feel safe enough to learn. To ask questions. Give and receive feedback. Even make mistakes.

3. You are able to contribute. To the team or the organization. To contribute to their purpose and to contribute to the value creation process as a full-fledged member of the team.

4. Safe to be able to challenge the status quo. That’s the culminating stage. That’s the ultimate stage.

Now, all those things you have to feel that you can do it without what? Without being embarrassed, without being marginalized, and without being punished in some way.

Con: I can certainly see how that influences a group, a team’s ability to navigate change, to bring about change in an organization. You have to have that.

What are the key challenges that a team faces when approaching a change initiative?

Tim: Often there are many, but let me cite one that I think is universally a challenge that we see over and over again. And that is: the leaders who are charged with leading the change initiative, whatever it is, they are naïve to the disruption they are going to cause. They just don’t understand it. They don’t understand the breadth and depth of that disruption. They know it’s going cause disruption. They know that they are knocking the organization out of its orbit, but they don’t understand really the full scope of what they are doing.

So, because they don’t understand that and because they haven’t really done high-quality analysis to understand the magnitude of the disruption, they don’t count the cost and they are not prepared.

Look around at organizations across the board and what do you see? You see organizations that are littered with the failed remains of change initiatives that didn’t quite work out. Now, go look at those change initiatives and you realize most weren’t flawed, they were good. They failed on execution. They failed because they didn’t understand what they were really getting into. And they were not prepared for it.

You’ve got to go in and do what we call a disruption analysis. You have to think very clearly and carefully through different categories of disruption about what this proposed change initiative will cause in the organization as it moves through the organization on several levels. And we don’t need to get into all the details but that is an area that is a challenge we see over and over again—going in unprepared, not understanding the extent of the disruption—and not being prepared for that. And what happens? It’s a false start.

Con: That’s very interesting. Any other challenges?

Tim: Let me give you a lens to think about this, and all the listeners. I want you to think about any change initiative that you may be working on. And I want you to think about the way that change initiative sinks into the organization. Change means that you are taking an organization that’s in a state of equilibrium or relative equilibrium and you’re disrupting. So it goes into a state of dis-equilibrium. And then you are going to try to get it back to a new state of equilibrium but better—after the change. Well, think about how change settles into that organization.

For Tim’s explanation of changes’ three phases, drop into the podcast and start listening at the 10:47 marker.

Con: You know, Tim, for a long time I’ve been working with organizations and their whole change approach has been to just have a communication strategy, you know? That’s how we go about it. Clearly, there is so much more to it, if you really want to have change work, to navigate that journey of change.

Is there anything else you want to share with our listeners before we close today?

Tim: Well, to that point, Con, maybe build on that a little bit. What’s funny and ironic about change is that people resist what they agree with. Now you have to think about that a little bit.

When it comes to change, people resist what they agree with, what they think makes sense from a logical, rational, intellectual, strategic standpoint, you can get them to agree with a course of action that you’re going to take or you are taking. And they will say, “Yeah, it makes sense. I think we should do that. That’s the logical thing. This change makes sense in so many ways.” And you can go through the analysis, you can go through the rational, and they will nod their heads and they are going to say, “Yeah! I agree. I agree. I agree.” And yet they will resist what they are agreeing with. Why is that?

Because they are processing it on an intellectual level. But they are also processing it on an emotional level. It is disruptive to them. So, think about the ways the change is disruptive. It’s disruptive in so many ways—socially, economically, politically, geographically. It’s disruptive in every way. So even though we agree with it, we often can resist what we agree with. Having a communication strategy for change is fantastic, but there is a lot more to it because there are three units of analysis when it comes to change. There’s the organization, which we understand. Then there’s the team. The team is the basic unit of performance in every organization. And then there’s the individual.

The change leader in the 21^st Century has to become competent—perceptive and competent—at all three levels to help people to move forward. The individual level, the team level, and the organizational level.

Con: Tim, thank you so much for sharing your insights and remarkable experience.

We look forward to all that lies ahead. This is Con Gottfredson and Dr. Timothy R. Clark, founder and CEO of Leader Factor. Thank you, Tim, for being with us today!

Listen to the full episode and be sure to subscribe to The Performance Matters Series for all the latest conversations.

Workflow Learning: The Four Fundamental Principles

By: Dr. Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher

The following is an excerpt from The Performance Matters Podcast Series, Episode 13.

Let’s jump right into Bob and Con’s discussion around workflow learning…

Bob: Today we’re going to take a strong run at what’s becoming a super-hot topic in our industry that is being currently called “workflow learning”. I think it’s really important to take the time to step back and be sure our industry has a clear understanding of this.

“Workflow learning,” isn’t just about making information available in the workflow. It’s enabling a learner to learn or be supported while doing their work.

eLearning, for instance, has thrown around the acronym JIT, or just-in-time learning. We’ve agreed all along, eLearning does provide ease of use and is clearly a powerful economic model for not taking people out of the workflow for three to five days. But here’s the thing. You still have to step away from your work, in this case, cognitively. For example, you’re not leaving your seat but you’re not performing your work anymore. You’ve launched an LMS to consume.

True workflow learning is done in parallel, not to the side. It’s done while getting work done. It instructs, informs, and supports—three, frankly, different things, all while doing the job. Con, do you agree?

Con: This is a crucial distinction. There is a great deal of misunderstanding in our conversations around workflow learning because of it. Real workflow learning is learning while working. That’s genuine workflow learning. Many people, in their approach to workflow learning assume all learning in the workflow constitutes workflow learning. Micro-learning in the workflow can be a rudimentary form of workflow learning. But the real power of workflow learning is what you said. It’s enabling people to learn as they do their work so that they don’t have to stop work in order to learn. And that’s the distinction.

Bob: I really like this distinction. “Informing” and “supporting”, while performing work is a powerful way to learn.

Con: Oh, yeah! Because in traditional learning we have what we call “train”, and then the learner has to transfer it to their job. That is, contextualize it to their own work. When you have real workflow learning the transfer inherently occurs while learning. There’s no stopping work. There’s no real transfer stage. So, it’s faster and more economical in terms of the learning process. It’s absolutely more powerful—as long as it can be done safely.

Bob: Con, you talk about context a number of times. It’s only since I’ve gotten into this deeper and have been involved in The 5 Moments, watching the methodology play out, that a huge “aha!” came to me. I realized, as an ID, how very little I knew about the workflow. I knew what the SME wanted me to teach. I knew what the SME wanted me to have people understand. I knew what software to use. But that’s not workflow. That’s what is inflicted on the workflow and has to be contextualized.

Con: I have yet to walk into an organization that truly understands their workflow. And that’s startling. Tragic, really. How does an organization really take control of how their people do their work if they are blind to just that—the workflow?

Traditional approaches in instructional design employ traditional job task analysis. But, unfortunately, this approach fails to organize those tasks into a workflow process. You have to map the workflow because this mapping is what creates the context that provides your learners with just-in-time access to just what they need, at the moment they need it, in order to be able to learn in the workflow.

Bob: So Con, “If it’s not embedded in the workflow, it doesn’t work.” Meaning, we have to be sure we understand the context of the work. That’s the workflow. But there’s also the physical context in which the learner can consume. If it’s a system, embed it.

Con: Yes. The only way I can learn as I do my work is if I have access to what I need, to do that learning, as I do my work.

Bob: It’s in this next principle where I think most of us go wrong. We embed well, we make things contextual, but then we pile on. There’s this misconception, in my opinion, about adults and adult learning. How could more not be better? They are adults—they can handle it—well, that’s wrong. A lot of the real need is driven by the context. If I’m in one of The Five Moments of Need—let’s say Solve—I am not in the mood for an asset that’s going to take me twenty minutes to Solve. This principle of Just Enough and The Right Kind of Just Enough is so important.

Con: That’s why we talk about “2 Clicks—10 Seconds.” The “2 Clicks” is getting to the needed information, while the “10 seconds” is the time it takes for me to translate that information into action. So we really do need to be able access just what I need, at my moment of need to help me get the job done—and in the process, learn by doing.

Bob: So let’s wrap up the four fundamental principles with one I know is near and dear to your heart—content management—aggregating content, currency, trustworthiness, maintenance. These principles are sort of foundationally building one on the other but in the end, if what I call up is wrong or if what I call up is old, I would never go back. Con, tell us a bit more about this discipline around currency and trustworthiness of content.

Con: This is the elephant in the room—keeping solutions current. When you step into the workflow, there is no room for people to be accessing information that is inaccurate. We’ve got to take steps to keep the solution meaningful, vibrant, and up-to-date. The good news is that performance support methodology and technology can enable that in ways that we haven’t been able to historically. We have to bring to this world of workflow learning strong content management practices. We can’t ignore it.

We have to step in and partner with the business in that journey, or we will fail. Workflow learning takes us into the world of the organization, and its business, and we have to have practices that let us partner with the business in keeping things current, vibrant and meaningful.

Bob: So, friends, I want to conclude with one last thought, or myth, if you will. “We have workflow learning because we have this really remarkable coaching program.” Disclaimer, we are not knocking coaching programs. But, in the context of what we just got through discussing, that is not what a coaching program does.

Con: Correct. A coach isn’t always around when I experience my moment of learning need. The cost of coaching is so high—I’m tying down another human being to be there to coach me. Then coaches, depending on the day, can be very good or they can just take me to a place that I hadn’t ought to go! Sure, coaching is a very powerful thing, but you can’t scale it to meet all the needs that people have in terms of workflow learning. It’s “just not gonna happen.”

Bob: This discussion is one we have to continue. It’s fundamental to going forward in the Five Moments and effectively doing it.

Listen to the full episode.

Train Transfer Sustain | Moving Past the Training Event

By Dr. Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher

You’ve trained them. Now what? They go back to their desks, immediately apply what they learned, and voila—increased performance. Not quite.

There’s more to it than just the training event. In fact, there are two additional phases in the learning ecosystem that must be addressed to achieve learning success.

Train. Transfer. Sustain.

Think of your learners as ‘performers’, now set them on their journey with the overall destination being competency.

To become competent in our ever-evolving business landscape, performers must clearly master things. You have to train people up to a point of mastery. You definitely do not want a pilot flying a plane without first mastering the lift and landing.

One of the challenges of the journey to mastery is that learners achieve a level of mastery at different rates. So, in any given event, in any given period of time, you have a range of mastery levels that happen and are happening.

Then, within this range, we also have the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. This is where performers, once back to work, begin to forget, at a very rapid rate, whatever it is they have mastered and learned in their event-based experience.

So how does one ever get to their destination—competency? It’s one thing to master something, it’s another to be competent at it. Take for example a story Bob tells on this topic, he received an A+ in accounting while in undergrad, but there was no way he was prepared to actually do your taxes. Mastery did not transfer to competency.

The journey does not end at mastery; your performer must get to some level of competence. This stage is a crucial one as it is where all the different “mastered” pieces are integrated together to form a whole. And they are integrated through our experience as we apply those mastery items to our job, all while adjusting and adapting them.

Transfer is a challenge for performers as they refer back to the training event where “they practiced in class” “were given real-life scenarios” “put in a hands-on lab that simulated the workflow…”, trying to make sense of it all.

But, at the end of the day these are all still practice situations—not the actual workflow.

To further complicate things, not every performer’s workflow is the same as the next, and your workflow today is different than tomorrow. So, making that journey of taking whatever it is that is mastered, integrating it with one’s existing skillset, and becoming competent, more skilled, more able to do what is needed to do on the job is no small feat!

And to complicate things, what is current ‘now’ may not be current an hour from now. So, it’s not only how a performer transfers to competency, but how do they remain competent? To become a better performer over time—that’s the Sustain stage.

And the driver of that stage—the element of change.

When we do things over and over again, we master things. We become competent. Then it changes. That challenge of overriding old skill sets with new skill sets is the greatest learning challenge that there is. You really can’t train your way out of it. No organization can afford to do that.

So, to unlearn and to relearn that is the real challenge.

The need for Train, Transfer, and Sustain has been around forever. People have always had to leave an event and be on their own with their newfound skills and knowledge. We haven’t, and aren’t, giving people the tools to truly navigate the transfer and sustain stages.

But with the 5 Moments of Need Methodology, we do.

And we do so by focusing on the Moment of Apply and building solutions and tools to support people at the Moments of Apply, Change, and Solve. Then, their digital coach if you will, is with them at the critical stages of Transfer and Sustain.

We can intentionally make a difference and it changes everything. It brings greater efficiency to every part of that journey through Train Transfer and Sustain.

The journey’s destination is again, competency and the time to competency. With the Five Moments of Need approach, and Train Transfer Sustain as your deliverable, we see time to competency reduced considerably due to what is enabled beyond the Training stage.

This blog was excerpted from Episode 3 of our Performance Matter Podcast.

To learn more about the Moments of Apply, Change, and Solve visit our resources page.