The 5 Moments of Need Blog

Axalta’s Road to The 5 Moments

This blog is excerpted from episode 25 of the Performance Matters Podcast where Sue Reber, APPLY’s director of practice, sat down with Bill Hickey, a 5 Moments Designer and learning practitioner with Axalta, to discuss what led him to search out “something more” than traditional training.

Sue Reber (SR): Today I’m going to be talking with Bill Hickey from Axalta about the journey that he made shifting from traditional instructional design to The 5 Moments design. Bill, welcome!

Bill Hickey (BH): Hi Sue. Thanks for having me.

SR: You started out as a high school history teacher, Bill, then you got your degree in instructional design and that was traditional instructional design. Because back then it was Dick & Carry and Gagne—right?

BH: Oh, yeah, very much. “Back then” it was very much a traditional type of background. And very solid. Not criticizing that traditional background. It really has served well. But it was very much focused on the learning, how do we write the appropriate objectives, how do we make sure all the multiple choice questions have the appropriate plausible distractors in them, how do we make sure the design of our performance evaluations is very oriented to the lesson at hand. Good experiences. Great background to have. But as I continued to progress in my career and as business challenges started to come faster and faster, you started to say, “Wait a minute. This doesn’t quite get us exactly where we need to be. It’s good. It’s addressing some things. But it’s not really getting us where the business needs us to be and, frankly, where our learners need us to be.”

SR: Bill please share a bit more about that, because in your experience—in your world—the trainers were training people and they were going back on the job and what was happening?

BH: Most of what I have done in my career and most of what the groups that I have supported throughout my career have been focusing on end users of the product. And so, they usually spent two, three, four days with those students in a very traditionally designed learning event.

And at the end of that event and we would have our Level 1 Reaction Forms completed and folks would tell us how wonderful it was. And we had our tests at the end and our knowledge assessments and everyone scoring 85 and above and we would have a performance evaluation. We could watch people perform on the job they had been trained on, and sure enough they could get that job done at our location.

And then, it might be a week, it might be a month, it might be six months later, we would hear, “Oh, by the way, that person you trained...” and you could feel the finger pointing at you as it is said, “that person doesn’t know what they are doing.”

And you’d sit back and say, “Wait a second.” And you’d pull open the file cabinet and you pulled out the class they were in and sure enough, they passed the test. They did the tasks. They said it was “great”. But it turned out that nothing was really transferring from our learning events back to the workplace. And it definitely wasn’t’ being sustained over time.

So, where we really started to see, and I most especially started to see, if we can’t connect what we are doing to actual performance on the job, we’ve got an issue. And as the business climates became more and more intense, it became obvious to me that if we can’t fix this post-training performance thing, we’re not going to be around very long.

So “How do we start to get at that?” became my real concern, it led me to a point where I was really starting to look around and say, “There’s got to be something ‘else’ out there.” Not that what we had was wrong, it just wasn’t getting us to where we had to be.

SR: So, did you find that “other” thing you were looking for?

BH: Interestingly enough, I had the opportunity to attend Learning 2009 and I was paging through the event guide and I came across this thing called—I think we were calling it— “Performance Support 101.” And it was presented by a couple of guys you may have heard of, Con Gottfredson and Bob Mosher. And I said, “Hey!” As I read this write-up, it was pretty much saying, “Yeah, you ran a great event and people loved it. Then they went back on the job and they didn’t know what they were doing. Have you solved this?” And I said, “I gotta go see these guys.”

It was there that a light bulb went on. And the process began. The conversations began around, “How can we begin to transform what had been traditionally done, traditionally designed? How do we begin to move that into a new and different space? What are the technologies we need? What are the design principles we must have? And how quickly can we start to turn this around?” And that’s where a lot of challenges started to emerge.

SR: Could you share more about those challenges?

BH: One was personal. I attend this event. The lightbulb goes on for me with the sense of, “This is what we need. This is how we need to approach it.” And I, of course, want to flip everything right away. “Let’s go back. Let’s change everything we’re doing. Let’s modify everything about our design approach, our instructional delivery, let’s start to look at systems that will work.”

So, my own lack of patience was certainly one of the challenges. I wanted it all yesterday and that just wasn’t going to happen.

Organizational challenges. Certainly, we had a technical instructional staff who were very good at what they did. They were viewed as experts in what they did and now here comes this instructional design knucklehead coming in and telling them it’s got to be different. Because they are the ones reading the reaction forms. They are the ones looking at the tests. They are the ones who had watched the performance evaluations. They say, “Wait a minute. Everything is right!”

It was me trying to say, “No, we need to change the way we do things.” So internally, our instructional staff needed to think differently about this. And our organization as well. As we began to look at how would we do this, how we would get our entire organization to think differently about what a training function could really do—for that training function to not only have responsibility for sort of these one-off classroom experiences, but instead for that training organization to take responsibility for this full life-cycle of the learner from the first time they are introduced to our products. How do we take that and move it to transfer to the workplace and then sustain over time? Where our relationship with the learner is not measured in hours that they might be in a class but really over the lifetime of their experience with us.

So, getting the whole organization to begin to think about us differently—at a time, truthfully, when we were transitioning. Our division was being sold at that time. So a lot of those sorts of things that really tested our ability to persevere through many different challenges until ultimately we could find a spot where we could find a willing partner who could grasp what it was that we were thinking about doing and then be willing to walk down a path with us as we tried to do our first proof of concept.

SR: So, what did happen to make that shift? How did you find someone who was willing to take the journey with you on the business side?

BH: It was sort of a chance happenstance. We were working with one of our functional groups who had responsibility for getting color formulas out to customers. When you’re painting things, obviously, you’re painting them with a color formula. So how do we communicate that formula to the users of our products?

And the folks who were responsible for that were having sort of a similar struggle as to what we had. They had a lot of great tools that folks could use. They knew those tools worked well. But all they’d ever hear back from the customer was, “Your stuff doesn’t work. I can’t match the colors I need.”

“Well, wait a minute. We know you can because here it is! Why can’t you do it?”

So, sort of similarly, they could show folks something but when those folks then went out and tried to apply it, they couldn’t get it done. So here we were on the training side, here I was on the design side, saying, “Hey, I gotta get at that thing out there called performance.” And now I had someone, subject matter experts inside saying, “Hey! We gotta get at that performance. Maybe we could link this up.”

And that’s what we did. So, having that opportunity and inviting Con Gottfredson in at that point to say, “Hey, could you help us do some Rapid Workflow Analysis? Can we begin to look at the critical impact skills things that we need here? Can we put together a plan that would say, ‘Here’s how we can clarify what it is you need to instruct on?’ and then here’s the support pieces we can make sure we have in place.” So not only do what they need to do but then, over time, know what they need to know and sustain that for the long run.

And that’s, Sue, when you and I got to work together.

To learn more out about Bill’s first project, what it took to build the solution, how it was different from their previous traditional training, and the impact this “new” form of training had on training—listen to the entire episode.

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Performance Matters Podcast to stay up-to-date on all the latest conversations and guests in The 5 Moments space.

Learning Theories + Approaches

This blog is excerpted from episode 24 of the Performance Matters Podcast where Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson discuss the learning theories that have shaped where we are today—empowering the workflow.

Bob Mosher (BM): Con, welcome!

Conrad Gottfredson (CG): Thank you, Bob. Great to be with you!

BM: I’m so looking forward to this discussion. Today we’re going to go a bit deeper and peel the onion back. We are often asked, “Is workflow learning based on learning theory?” “How long has workflow learning been around?” “What about the great work of Gloria Gery, Jay Cross, and Allison Rossett?” Today we’re going to put a bit of a bow around those questions and talk theory. Then we’ll really run at, not so much the definition of workflow learning, but the approaches we’re seeing that people are calling workflow learning. And get a bit into pros, cons, and what might be the best way to get into this.

Con, you’re the PhD in the room—take us back a bit and give us a little bit of a history lesson, if you wouldn’t mind, about sort of the schools of thought around learning theory and where the beginnings of workflow learning started.

CG: Sure, would love to. Back a hundred years ago when I was working on my PhD, I was introduced to the thought of applied learning theory. Applied learning theory is learning theory that has been applied in such a way that it’s proven itself. And that’s important. So, as we talk about learning theory it needs to be applicable and have some track record of being proven in the real world of the application.

I was grounded, in my graduate work, in behavioral and cognitive learning theory. Those are two of the three fundamental schools of learning theory. The third is constructivism, constructive learning theory, or experiential learning theory. The first real school of learning theory was behavioral, really, that I was introduced to. And Gagne and Briggs and others were really coming out of that school. It was all about training, right? It was all about principles tied to the things we could do that would make a difference and facilitate people learning the skills they needed to develop. All very important. It focused on behavioral psychology. Behavioral learning theory focused on training. It was out of the workflow. It was embedded deeply in classroom models.

Then, starting to scratch the surface of asynchronous approaches, cognitive theorists came on board and said, “I’m sorry, behavioral approaches are great but there are some cognitive things that we’ve got to be worrying about. In other words, you’ve got to understand things. You’ve got to know things as well as being able to do things. There are cognitive constructs that make a difference in terms of our ability to transition to performance. So cognitive theory shifted our mindset from training to learning. We began to focus on the learner and cognitive pieces—both of which are very important--the behavioral of learning theory and cognitive learning theory.

But at the same time there was this movement going on that didn’t get a lot of attention until much later. This was constructivism—experiential learning theory. The philosophy there, Bob, was that we learn by doing things in the real world—that experience is important—that you can’t have learning without factoring in that experience.

The theorists in the early days or early stages of this couldn’t quite figure out how to push learning into the workflow. But everything they talked about was grounded in what works today in the world of workflow learning. The bottom line is you don’t have workflow learning without the fundamentals coming out of behavioral learning and cognitive learning and constructivism. You just don’t. All of it has to come to bear to help us put together the kind of solution that we need to have in the world of workflow learning.

BM: So, it’s almost, Con, as if one builds upon the other as these theories matured.

CG: Yeah, it does! Unfortunately, there are people who sit in each of those camps and think that’s the camp they are in when in reality, each of these schools have a lot to offer. We draw upon the research and the work out of each one of these schools of learning theory to put together the methodology we have for workflow learning.

BM: Brilliant. So, Con, we’re seeing a lot of confusion in how workflow learning is approached. How does it manifest itself through the theories into how people are approaching it? Not only is there confusion about the definition, which we talked about in a previous podcast—by all means, give a listen—but at the same time we’re seeing confusion about how it’s done.

eLearning, for years, has been “just-in-time.” I was on that bandwagon early on, but it was not quite workflow learning in the way we define it today, as in “you learn while doing.” We confused it with availability.

CG: Yep!

BM: And because we could not send you to a classroom, we could put you in an LMS, we could suggest a learning path, we could assess and test, pre- and post, see who took, who didn’t, who completed, who didn’t, etc. So, let’s talk through a couple of workflow learning approaches we’re seeing, talk about the plusses and minuses so we know where we might direct people. We hear this a lot, we’ve had workflow learning since forever, right? We’ve always learned while living. What would be the most dramatic of approaches?

CG: Well, it’s how I grew up on a dairy farm. I was just given assignments. It’s what we call total immersion. It’s where you’re on your own. It’s discovery learning, really. But I learned by doing without any help. I used to do this to our kids. I’d give them an assignment to go out and do something on our property. But my intent was for them to learn how to figure something out, not really to do something, but to develop the skill of figuring it out. But in many cases, we have what we call immersive learning, where you just jump in and you don’t have anybody to help you. You just learn on your own as you go and as you do. That kind of learning is inefficient in terms of skill development. It takes a long time to get to where you need to be and there’s always high risk of failure.

BM: But there are positives, to your point, around critical thinking skills, problem solving, maybe building confidence, how courageous I might be as a thinker or a learner. But, particularly in the professional environment, not really the best way to go. So, let’s talk about when others get involved. There are really two approaches that we’ve seen where we assign someone to guide, be present, or periodically be present.

CG: For centuries we’ve had the apprentice model, right? This is the model where you apprentice to someone and you’re right at their side. Great artists were apprenticed. It’s very costly to scale today and does take time for people to become proficient in that model. It’s why we moved to these other models that we have today, why we moved to classroom learning. The apprenticeship model—you just couldn’t afford to scale it.

So, we’ve modified it to this sporadic on-the-job coaching model. It is sort of like apprenticeship, we have coaches and send them in. The coaching model can be very effective in learning New, or learning things for the first time. It is, however, tough to have a coach there at the moment of Apply, Change or Solve. It’s very difficult to have them there at all the times they might need to be there to support people as they do their jobs.

BM: Also, how do you ensure that every coach is caught up in the world we live in today with its rate of change, with what’s the latest SOP, the latest regulations, all these kinds of things so that people are most efficient.

Frankly, Con, I think the thing I’ve taken as far as workflow learning is concerned, we want independent learners. We want people who can stand alone in their ability to perform and continue their growth. And the danger of apprentice and coaching programs is that unless the coach has coached really well the ability for a classroom or formal environment to intentionally remove the mentor, remove the coach, remove the master, remove the instructor, so the student stands alone, that’s a tough skill.

CG: Yeah. Coaching is the most misused tool that we have in our tool chest. If we designed it properly and we support coaches properly, it could be so powerful. Yet, we have them doing work that could be—and should be—done in other ways. They need to be targeting those skills where the critical impact of failure is significant to catastrophic. They need to be working on higher order skill sets, helping people to move and transition to higher order thinking and higher order performance, not down in the nitty-gritty workflow.

BM: You know, so often we pick those roles by ability. We pick those roles by seniority. We assign a senior salesperson to a junior salesperson. Then the problem is that in many cases, it’s not just the content. Or the journey to the content. It’s the dependency that they are left with or not left with. It’s their ability to do cognitive apprenticeship and scaffolding—all these words we use in education that are all about ultimately moving the performer to being self-reliant. And to your point, Con, the people who step up—God bless them—and volunteer, which is another problem—getting people to even want to do it—are often not the folks that are in the right place to instruct in a way that workflow learning would actually be maximized.

CG: I agree. Then, as you mentioned as we were beginning this discussion, there’s the whole eLearning, asynchronous learning, "just-in-time"—and we’re seeing tools out there that can give you immediate, instant access to asynchronous learning resources, but you still have to stop your work to learn with those asynchronous learning tools. So, while it might help, it’s very wasteful. If I must move through a 30-minute eLearning module to get to the nugget that I need, I’m stopping work for 30 minutes. Maybe it’s helped with microlearning. I’m a proponent of microlearning to a degree. The problem is that I must get to the right microlearning piece at the moment of need and really, many times, I don’t even need to do that. I can just get the help I need when I need it with a true EPSS.

That’s where the real power of workflow learning is unleashed. Microlearning can carry the day just so far. But it’s not where workflow learning can and should be. It’s when you have a digital coach or EPSS in place where I can get down to 2-click/10-second access and follow that task. I am learning in the flow of work in an adaptive way. As we’ve talked about, once I’m doing that, there may be a call to drop down to a microlearning element because of the nature of things. But I don’t always have to go there. That should not be my first step in workflow learning. It should be a step I take when I can’t get there in other ways.

BM: All the great work, Con, you have done around workflow learning and the EnABLE methodology is based on sound research. But what I love about where you’ve brought us and where workflow learning is today is that it really is a defendable amalgamation of the best work in our industry. We can bring it all together in the workflow in a way we’ve never been to do before.

Brilliant, my friend. Well, as always, it’s terrific having you here.

For Con and Bob’s entire discussion listen to the entire episode and don’t forget to subscribe to The Performance Matters Podcast to stay up-to-date on all the latest conversations and guests in The 5 Moments space.

Where We're Headed

This blog is excerpted from episode 25 of the Performance Matters podcast where Bob Mosher speaks with Elliott Masie, host, speaker, and curator of many Learning and Development events, around where we as an industry have been and where we’re headed.

Bob Mosher (BM): I can’t think of a better way to kick-off our first “Industry Matters” episode than with my friend, mentor, and one of my heroes in the industry—Elliot Masie.

Elliott Masie (EM): Absolutely an honor Bob. And for everybody listening, Bob is my mentor! I think what we ought to know in the world of learning is that mentorship is never a one-way process. We give to get and we get from giving. So, it goes both ways.

BM: Through the consortium, the many conferences you host, the journeys across this globe you take, and the work you’ve done from public to private to government, you see across the industry like no one else, in my opinion. You’ve seen where we’ve come, some of the wrong turns we’ve taken, how we have gotten here intentionally, and how sometimes by kind of tripping over ourselves.

Please share your view of how we got here and where it’s taking us.

EM: If we go back to the beginning of my time in this field, what our field was about was very specific job training. Everything we did in Learning and Development was really about training somebody to do a job to a very specific set of criteria, and for the most part, to do it either in a “one size fits many” or an “on the job, shoulder-to-shoulder, very personalized” way.

Over the years our workplace changed, and it changed what the learning field was. Bob, you were very much in the middle of the growth of the computer training industry, particularly once PCs came out.

Then, we weren’t necessarily training people for their jobs, we were training them for systems, for capabilities, for capacities, and we were training them on tools that may or may not be used directly for a specific job. This put a lot more pressure on us. We had to accept a lot more ambiguity, you know.

We then moved from a “computer training” focus to where work in the workplace was much more agile, where things evolved to where now we were teaching people for readiness. We were training them to get ready to do something even if they were not yet doing it, even if the organization was not yet doing it, and we were teaching them to teach people to go into a workflow or work environment and need to learn as that changed and as that evolved.

And all the way through that, we’ve made the shift from developing to a job to also developing a capacity for an individual. And then how do we build a collective of the workforce.

I will say that “tomorrow” is an interesting question. Just last night I sat with a number of workplace learning leaders from around the world working for labor departments. I was there with McDonald’s and a few other corporations and they kept asking us, “Okay, what do we need? What does the worker of tomorrow need?”

I think they were wanting us to say something like, “Well, they need to learn coding.” Or “They need to learn X.” And what we said to them was, “We don’t really know.”

What we do know is that we need a worker who comes ready to work, ready to communicate, and ready to learn how to perform in an environment that’s going to change pretty rapidly. It was not what our government colleagues wanted to hear. Yet I think they got it in the end.

BM: You were the first to, in my opinion, coin “personalized learning” and “finger-tip learning.” You pushed us on “Big Data.” I think the learner would laugh at the difference between what we in the learning world call cutting-edge, like LXPs and these other acronyms that they are throwing around, and the apps we use on a daily basis to get from A to B, or check our health for example.

Why do you think we, as an industry, have struggled with taking these things from an obvious reality to implementation? Where do you think the struggle comes from and how can we get beyond that? Or be better at it?

EM: The problem, Bob, and you’ve seen this at various conferences that you and I have helped host and keynote, is that it’s much easier to talk about doing something than to do it. You probably have all gone to a workshop on how learning is changing and have the person get up and use a PowerPoint presentation to tell you how learning is changing.

BM: Right!

EM: There is a delta. There is a gap between our aspirations to be different and the extent we are tribally locked in. Then, many of us teach the way we were taught. Many organizations use the word “agility”, but the structure doesn’t promote that. And I think one of the really interesting ones—and it does go back to data—is that we’ve looked at all the wrong data. Look, I could beat up Kirkpatrick but he’s not the problem.

What we have is that we often try to measure our delivery rather than measure our impact. And if we were to measure our impact, and if we had really good trustable and immediate data, we would do it very different.

So, let’s just imagine that you were in charge or running orientation and onboarding and you were literally able to get, a week after an orientation program, to see the extent to which those individuals had integrated into their workplaces. They felt comfortable being there, they were aspiring to “x” and you might actually start to say, “Well, I got to this point, but I would actually like to be better. What could I change about what I do?”

And I think our problem is that we are still in the publishing mode in work. We know how to tell our stories, how to put up our slides. We even know how to have them turn to each other and do a work activity together. But we’re not really basing it on what personalized learning is all about.

And what we would argue in those situations is very simple. Let’s teach them what they really need to know now. Let’s index it against what they know already. Use the language. Let’s prepare them so they are now able to learn it more at that moment of need or change. And let’s look at—from a user design point of view—when am I giving them information, examples, that aren’t sticking. They’re just not sticking.

BM: Love that! Let’s pivot on this content a little bit, Elliott, if you don’t mind. You’re gracious enough to invite me into your curation lab and I so enjoy it because it’s a fresh look at a topic. Can you share with us some of your takeaways from that lab? What’s the reality of content curation? Because it’s the backbone of “personalized.”

EM: Yeah. A lot of stuff—

BM: It’s getting us away from “everything’s a course, everything’s a PowerPoint.”

EM: Yeah. I try to use examples from outside of our Learning world. Everybody that has ever stayed at a hotel, nearly all of us, has trouble with the TV. It’s a different cable system and you can’t figure out where your regular news or real estate show is. But my problem is I’m often in an area when the weather says there’s a hurricane coming in “Chanooza County” and I don’t know what county I’m in and I don’t know whether to duck or what.

This is what curation is about, Bob. Meaning that the learner has an avalanche and an overwhelming panorama of content. The key is not to give them more but to give them the right stuff in the right format at the right moment. And then to make sure you get the right impact with that. So, I use the word “optimize.”

Now our dilemma is that nobody owns curation in organizations. Maybe—and it’s always a difficulty—somebody will say, “Oh, by the way, we’re using LinkedIn learning for curation.” And I go, “No, you’re using LinkedIn learning for their collection of content. And that’s great. But they’re not curating the PDFs from the safety department. They’re not curating the TED Talks that people are watching. So, we don’t yet have a curator.

Probably I can think of five major Fortune 500 companies that have a curator. And the other piece of this is that—and this goes back to—people learn differently. Some person really wants to see a bulleted, 16-point step-by-step, some want to see an infographic, some want to watch a video, some want to have a job aid that’s right next to them.

And in the old days, they were lucky to get one. Now, if they go to Google or Bing and they type in the topic, they are liable to get a hundred and fifty—and some of it is crap. Some of it violates the standards of their organization. Some of it is fake news. And some of it is awesome. But there’s no “Yelp” for content.

This is the overwhelming element and bluntly, nobody can lock the gate anymore. Even if you build a firewall, they’ve got a device in their pocket that doesn’t stop at the firewall.

I actually believe that we may get to this, Bob—and that is to provide more and more curation at the individual level rather than at the enterprise.

Where in a sense, the learner has a curation tool and then they wire in filters and recommendations and other things from their organization.

BM: Wow! Hey, my friend, as always, I’ve so enjoyed the conversation. I so value your friendship and our relationship. Congratulations on the fifty years. I’ve been blessed to be a part of some of that and I can’t wait for the next.

For Elliott and Bob’s entire discussion, along with insights from Elliot’s new book, “Everyday Learning”, download or listen to the 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.

McKinsey’s 5 Moments of Need Journey

This blog is excerpted from episode 23 of the Performance Matters podcast where Bob Mosher speaks with Katie Coates, Senior Learning Manager at McKinsey Global, on her organization’s 5 Moments of Need solution, the business drivers for this shift, their journey thus far, and the lessons that have been learned along the way.

Bob Mosher (BM): Today—one of my favorite subseries, Experience Matters! We are honored to be joined by one of our heroes in this industry—Katie Coates from McKinsey.

She is one of those rare L&D leaders who is not afraid to risk—not afraid to fail forward if you will, and truly is a leader in all that she does. Katie, welcome!

Katie Coates (KC): Thank you so much, Bob! It is great to be here with you. Thanks for that wonderful introduction, I’m honored.

BM: So, deserved, and on that note, would you give us a bit more about your background and the current state of your team, so we have a better understanding of the current lay of the land there at McKinsey?

KC: I’ve been in Learning and Development for over 25 years. Currently I lead Learning for our Internal Firm Services. So about 13,000 professionals in our IT, Human Resources, Talent, Recruiting, Finance, all of the organizations that support our business. Our team—right now, we’re pretty new so the firm has recently started investing more in this area. I have one curriculum manager that works with me and a couple of delivery folks that help us deliver our programs.

BM: So, why The 5 Moments? Could you give us a little bit more about the journey that brought you to this approach?

KC: Our managing director talks a lot about the pace of change right now. It’s moving faster than ever before. And it will never be this slow again. And when we look at the complexity of the world and of our work and of our requirements, we really must start thinking about how do we do this? How do we become more flexible, more agile? How do we really focus on performance of our people to give them the skills and the knowledge, the mindset, that they need to really perform in this environment? As you know, we spent some time learning from you and Con about The 5 Moments of Need, and really looking at our internal Learning group and how we focus on performance first, instead of training or education. But really, what does it mean to actually do your job? I think that’s critical given the business environment now.

And we are in a space where we are in test and learn modes. So, we’re trying all kinds of new strategies; The 5 Moments of Need, Performance Support, bringing learning into the workflow. It’s just pivotal.

BM: I love the blend! It’s all part of that journey of what true blended learning is. So, Katie, tell us a bit about what have you worked on? What have been your milestones, projects, or even outcomes that have helped you and your organization mature in this thinking?

KC: We provide consulting services. We help organizations solve wicked problems. And part of the deliverables that our consultants provide to clients are written materials. These are PowerPoint presentations, or we call them pages or decks. And one of the first things that consultants learn when they join McKinsey is how to create pages in the McKinsey way, in the McKinsey format, and the McKinsey methodology. And what we found is that there is so much out there—even if you do know PowerPoint—when you come into McKinsey, there is a McKinsey type of PowerPoint—all kinds of add-ons and things like that. There’s also a way of thinking about creating and structuring documents. So, we use logical structuring for how we build out our pages. And the logic that’s around that—top down and bottom up—type of logic. So, there’s a lot for a new consultant to really wrap their head around as they start to do this type of work.

So, the very first project was to create a performance support tool which is very different from what we’ve seen out there. We’ve seen a lot of support tools out there that are helping sales professionals, but this was more about taking a softer skill, if you will, and building it into a performance support solution. And we built it.

It’s a small window that pops up with the consultant as they’re working on the PowerPoint and it walks them through “How do you produce a page?” “How do you choose the type of chart you want to create?” “How do you create that chart?”

We provide them with tons of resources and example pages they can pull from and leverage to create a new page. It’s very, very powerful.

We rolled it out as part of our new hire orientation, so when they join they get access to this support tool. To-date we’ve had around 8,000 professionals touch this tool. And, as expected, they use it for quite a bit of time after they leave the new hire orientation and then it kind of dwindles down. But that’s kind of what we expect to happen over time.

BM: So, what’s your feeling, Katie, about soft skills? Because one of the big things we hear often in performance support is, “Yeah, you guys, I get it. The pop-up thing. You’re embedding it in PowerPoint. Get that. The old days of RoboHelp or even Help itself within software. But you can’t do this for soft skills.”

With the journey you’ve been on, particularly in this first project, what are your feelings on that—what I frankly call a myth about performance support?

KC: It took some convincing for me too, right! I had to dig into it to really figure it out. But you can break anything down into a process. So, we took this and we broke it down into, “How do I create the story line--the story I’m trying to tell? How do I design the page? Then how do I produce the page?”

So, when we did our Rapid Workflow Analysis (RWA), we looked at this and we broke it down into those three big process buckets. And then within that, you go into “What are the key activities and what are the quick steps for those activities?” Then you use the pyramid approach of “What else do you as an individual need? And what other resources do you need to complete the task?”

So, you can break it down. I’m working on another project right now. We’re just in the beginning stages but we’re trying to provide support for all our people managers—our people leaders. We call it “How do I?” “How do I hire someone?” “How do I develop them?” “How do I evaluate them?” “How do I expand them and help them grow in their career?” And then, “How do I handle issues?”

BM: Let’s now talk a little bit about lessons learned. So many people that listen to theses podcasts are not 5 Moments enamored yet, or they are growing into it. You’re a bit deeper into the journey but obviously, as we all do, you still have things to learn.

But think back. What would you do differently sitting where you do now when you look back on the journey?

KC: I think it is about communicating clearly throughout the process. One of the big hiccups we had in the first project was with the learning leaders across the centers. My thinking was more versed in The 5 Moments and in performance support solutions. And when I described this, they got it, but they were having a really hard time seeing it in action. I ended up having to go to India and get my hands into it with them. I think if there was something we had to do over around communication with that team, is it would be in person—really working hands on together. It is the Learning team you really must convince and educate. I think that’s one big area where I would have done it differently. I would have had a few more examples and clearer communications with that group to help them really understand what this all meant.

BM: So, I’m just starting out, let’s say. I’m thinking about going this way. You sort of spoke to that in the longer journey. But the feedback we get is that these stories are so empowering to folks. It builds their courage, right? They hear this and go, “My gosh, I want to be there someday. But frankly, I’m way back here.”

What would you tell yourself in that first day you sat in that seat listening to this methodology for the first time?

KC: Well, I would say, starting small is important. You really pushed us on this. You start small. You pick one thing that you can really work on and do the proof of concept. That was really powerful for us, to do something very small.

So, we took one piece of the written communications and built it out. Then we tested it with learners. We had learners help us develop it—that is key. You have to have the business matter expert, someone who really understands and is in the guts of the business, as part of the design journey and process. We also tested early and often with our learners. That really had an impact on us being able to do this, and do it effectively, then get it out the door. I think that’s one thing.

Secondly, don’t put too much pressure on yourself. It’s the crawl-walk-run model. We’re in walk now and I’m comfortable with that. I think it’s a good place to be. So, I think sometimes when you put pressure on yourself, you think you’re going to do this quick and get it out the door and everything’s going to work perfectly.

But it takes time to build the story, it takes time to get everybody engaged in this, meaning your business leaders, your Learning and Development professionals, your learners—and your managers of the learners too. They are important in this process as well. Then all your coaches and trainers and facilitators—all of those. There are a lot of stakeholders you have to engage. And when you start small you can start to do that more effectively.

That’s my advice. Learning a lot through our work with you, Bob—it’s really about how you pick something small, test, and learn. You’re going to fail. Fail early. Fix it. Get back on things and make it work.

BM: It’s a wonderful pace to go. Sustainability is different than a flash in the pan.

You, in your journey, have taken that crawl-walk-run approach, building on clearly understanding that you have to be successful in each of those efforts, but the broader win is keeping your eye on that bigger picture in the landscape all the time.

KC: That’s right! That’s absolutely right.

BM: We cannot thank you enough, Katie, for the wonderful leader that you are, for the risks you take, for the way you and your organization are so wonderful at sharing your story so that others to can learn.

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