The 5 Moments of Need Blog

Improving Overall Performance at Volvo North America

This blog is excerpted from episode 29 of the Performance Matters Podcast where Bob Mosher speaks with Mary Ruth Bell and Diana Gallant, of Volvo Trucks, around what drove them to move their instructional design to The 5 Moments of Need methodology.

Bob Mosher (BM): Today is one of my favorite topics that we have been having more and more lately because it also one of your favorite topics. It’s one of our highest rated podcast series, and that is Experience Matters. And today we are fortunate to have two wonderful colleagues, dear friends, and frankly, real experts at this: Diana Gallant and Mary Ruth Bell, both from Volvo Trucks North America.

Why don’t we start with each of you sharing a bit about your backgrounds, organization, and the makeup of your team.

Mary Ruth Bell (MRB): Thank you, Bob. I have been with Volvo for 32 years, with the last twelve of those years being spent with what’s called our Trucks Academy. When you typically hear the word “Volvo,” people think of cars, but we support the truck side of the Volvo family. Specifically, we support our dealer organizations, so we are not training or responsible for training the internal employees, we have dealer groups throughout the US, Canada, and Mexico. Diana and I got paired up several years back on a couple of projects and she started encouraging me to think around The 5 Moments of Need. So with that, Diana, I’ll toss it over to you to give your background.

Diana Gallant (DG): Thanks, Mary Ruth. I have been a practitioner of Instructional Design for about 20 years now, and in 2017 I discovered The 5 Moments of Need Certificate Program. And as Mary Ruth said, I immediately went to her as not only her as a subject matter expert but to her as an instructor delivering a lot of the instruction for the Academy, and I said, “Mary Ruth, we need to do this together. This is what we’ve been looking for.” So, in my 20 years of instructional design, I just felt like we’d hit the jackpot. So that is what jumped us into the journey. It started with the Certificate Program.

BM: Brilliant! So, let’s jump in, what have been the business drivers for causing you to use The 5 Moments and how has it helped in your design?

MRB: It was during The 5 Moments of Need Certificate Program that Diana and I both were in at the same time, and we had a project on tap that we felt would be an excellent opportunity for the methodology. We were working with our Service Advisor Group and it was a strange business dynamic because we saw that need and we struggled to find a business owner for that process.

So, Diana and I just kind of took the reins and said, “Okay, we’re going to go about this a tad bit differently and we’re going to go ahead and create The 5 Moment of Need structure for this instructor-led event.” It has been extremely well received within our organization and so by that success story we have been able to move forward, and we now have business partners that are asking for us to use the same methodology to create new courses.

BM: Please tell me a little bit about your own change in thinking. You are both wonderfully steeped—obviously from your pedigrees, resumes, the training. Will you both share how this has changed your thinking and what that journey was like to shift and go in this direction?

MRB: So, here’s the most profound change that happened to me. Being an instructor/facilitator and the subject matter expert, I obviously wanted to teach everything I knew to every student that walked through the door. And honestly, it was like a fire hose.

The biggest “Aha!” moment for me during the Certificate Program that I have been able to use going forward and still today use, is the criticality—what is the criticality of what you are trying to get across. It just made so much sense and it helped to simplify the experience both from the facilitator side as well as, I believe, from the learner’s perspective.

BM: You know, I love that perspective because it still complements the classroom, doesn’t it? And as trainers—I don’t know about you—but I know for years, I stood up there knowing in my heart and staring at those faces that I was probably at times over-teaching. I probably a lot of times was going into way too much content, but we’ve got them for that rare moment, and we’ve got an outline to follow.

I think so often that 5 Moments is looked at as an anti-classroom model—or against ILT. But we’ve found that when you do 5 Moments in the right way—to your perfect example—it really does take a lot of burden off the instructor, and lets the classroom be more of what it probably should be.

So, Diana, give us a little bit about your journey. What’s your mindset been like in going through this with all your experience and background?

DG: I’ve always had a performance-based mindset, so it’s like I’ve been chasing models that sort of focus on that. I think the piece that struck me so much about the methodology for 5 Moments is it goes right straight to the heart of what does it take to perform in a role, of the supports around, with the knowledge, et cetera, that need to support that performance. And I think one of the most powerful aspects that we’ve really grabbed onto is the visual component of making invisible things visible in terms of workflow.

BM: I love that!

DG: Not only do the visual maps and these cognitive maps that are such an important part of the methodology—not only does that help me as a designer understand the job from a holistic perspective—but it also builds this bridge of understanding with performers who, when they see the visual maps of what we put in front of them and ask them to validate, suddenly there’s this effortless connection of, “We’re partners in this and, oh my! You really understand our world!”

And it shows that we’ve really made that attempt to understand their world, which helps in building the trust and collaboration right from the get-go. To me, it just gets right to the core of performance.

BM: We’ve had more SMEs, like you guys, tell us over the years that after going through an RWA they have truly been able to see the nature of the work that’s performed every day. So, Diana, I love your point about the fact that this really makes the work transparent to both those of us who are designing it to meet the need—but also to the organization at large.

So, friends, tell us where you are today. Give me an update where you are in the journey as of now.

MRB: Well, we are in a really good place right now. We have a new director that came on board about six months ago and completely understands performance support and the underlying methodology. He is supporting Diana and I in a big way. In the past we had a bit of a challenge getting traction for the software requirements, so we did kind of a homegrown, interactive PDF type activity for one of our projects. It’s good, but it’s not excellent.

But this new director is giving us—not exactly free rein—but certainly more opportunities to research the technology. Though in Diana’s words, “it’s not necessarily the technology, it’s the methodology that’s important.” And I think we’ve had to keep that flag ahead of us just to keep going as we’ve met the ups and downs of pitfalls, maybe, is the way to say it.

BM: Sure! And there are some! There’s no doubt. It’s growing for all of us, for the L&D team as well as for the organization. And I applaud the fact that you have a director in there that gets it.

So, what has it been like to bring change of this nature to Volvo? You were steeped in training, a lot of Instructor-led Training. So, this is really a dramatic culture change, if you will, for Volvo. How did that go? What was it like to go through that part of bringing the organization on board?

MRB: The biggest challenge for me was that people still want to test, they want to prove. They want this hundred-question test to prove that somebody can do something. And Diana and I have met quite a bit of resistance from the fact that the performance support is more in the moment. And testing is not appropriate.

BM: Yeah. As we all know, those kinds of tests or even that kind of overt performance, particularly maybe, right after a class or a lab—might show a moment of time but it really doesn’t show the application of things going forward with the use of the EPSS. How has the EPSS been addressed or accepted within Volvo? Is that a new term for your folks? Did you have to kind of bring that whole thing on for them to understand?

DG: We’ve always led in educating our stake holders, whether they are the business, or our own team, or the performers themselves. We always lead with the methodology before we even talk technology. Because if we don’t get the methodology in place then you’re just throwing a tool at it and it’s not going to accomplish anything.

But I would like to say the proof is in the performance, just hearkening to Mary Ruth’s statement about testing and how people are constantly asking for it. You know, we kind of redirect the conversation to help them understand how they can really get more targeted to business outcomes by looking at the proof in the performance.

To hear Diana’s proof in the performance example and Mary Ruth’s advice for getting started on shifting to a performance-first organizational strategy, download and listen to the full 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.

To try your hand at empowering the flow of work with an actual project, join us at our upcoming Summit.

Designing for the Performance Zone

This blog is excerpted from episode 31 of the Performance Matters Podcast where Bob Mosher and Carol Stroud, senior consultant at APPLY Synergies, discuss letting go of the training mindset and moving to a performance-first way of thinking.

Bob Mosher (BM): Welcome friends, to another Performance Matters Podcast. Today, we are talking Strategy Matters with a dear friend and one of the rock stars and earlier adopters to this whole thought—Carol Stroud. Carol, welcome.

Carol Stroud (CS): Hi Bob, it’s good to be here today.

BM: Carol is one of the early folks to get into this. Can you tell us a bit about your journey? How did you get here so people have a context of your framing of what we’ll talk about?

CS: Right on. I came from a traditional instruction design background. I completed a master’s degree way back in the ‘90s in what I thought was forward thinking which was eLearning and distributed learned. I was fascinated by how someone could learn through the interface of technology, that’s why I went into the eLearning world. I hung around in there for a while—about eight or nine years. I worked in academia mainly, different universities and colleges and then worked for a book publisher who wanted to put online courses on in conjunction with books they were publishing.

So that’s where it started out. But I found that I didn’t have access to lots of great technology that allowed me to build highly interactive learning situations. Most colleges and universities I worked with were designing basic eLearning and I found that that was pretty limiting in terms of what I was able to produce.

After academia, I moved into the corporate world, thinking, for some reason, that applying these principles in the corporate world was going to be different!

It turned out, not so much. Because corporately, they were really stuck on regulatory training and tracking whether it made any impact to performance didn’t matter.

That’s where I started to lose hope, certainly around the implementation of eLearning.

So, I started to do more research and found Bob and Con out there talking about performance support; this is what it means, this is how to do it, and that’s how I ended up joining one of your first workshops at Masie—way back in 2008. That was a major shift for me. Once I heard about The 5 Moments of Need, that’s where the coin dropped for me.

BM: It’s really wild for me, Carol, because I listen to these stories and we’ve interviewed others who have gone through a transformation and we all seem to come to this epiphany. So, tell me one thing. Why do you think L&D folks struggle with this performance mindset shift though? What do you think is the turning point, or new lens, with which they need to look at this through in your opinion?

CS: I think perhaps it is a letting go of old ways of doing things—there is that sense of insecurity when you must do things differently. Right? And go, “Oh. Well. This isn’t the way I used to do it.”

But I think in a lot of cases, and it’s not just the L&D folks, it’s organizations who perhaps have a sense that things need to be done differently but they don’t know what it looks like.

And if you can see what it looks like, and what I’ve found with L&D folks, if we talk about what this looks like to support performance in the flow of work, then we are able to connect their current skill sets and how they can be still used, but used differently, that allows for a rapid turnaround in terms of being able to get a solution out there quickly. I think that’s the missing piece. I think that a) they need to understand what it looks like, and b) know they are still valuable in the process. Because if you bring something in new, they may feel that “Oh, I don’t want to learn something new and my skill sets aren’t of any value in this process,” that’s not true. We still use those skill sets. We just use them in a different focus in order to make it happen.

BM: One of my favorite things that I have ever heard you say is that there isn’t a problem you haven’t been able to solve with this.

CS: Oh! Yeah!

BM: And your face lights up when you say it. Can you elaborate on what that means to you as a designer?

CS: Yes. Where that came from was, I started out in organizations and they would come to ask for a solution for what they felt was a known issue. An example was, “Our staff are not using this particular piece of equipment very well. We want to do training on it to improve that performance gap.”

So, it started with lots of known things. “Oh, we know about this one. Can you help us with that? We know about this one. Can you help us with that?” And moved to, “Well, we’re going to design this (in this case, a brand-new building) and we are going to integrate several services into this building because we want it to be a one-stop shop for our, in this case, patients. But we have no idea how to do this. But we have a vision for doing something differently.”

From those conversations we ended up saying, “Okay. So, let’s do an RWA—a Rapid Workflow Analysis. Let’s describe what we mean by doing things differently. What is that performance?”

We got all the right players in the room, all the different perspectives in the room. And we walked through describing what doing things differently in this facility would look like.

Once we were able to get that articulated, then we knew what we would support. Right? Then we knew how they could bring their new technology in and how was that going to play into it. And then, how would we develop performance support so everyone would know how to do business in the organization which they were going to be brand new at.

That’s when it became apparent to me, “This can solve any kind of problem!” Because, whether we have a sense of what the issue is, or whether we have a sense of what we don’t know, the systematic nature of the methodology exposes these new ways of doing business—by the subject matter experts in the room. It’s their process. They owned it. They helped articulate it. We got to their consensus on it. It wasn’t us coming in and telling them, “This is the way you’re going to do it.” Because the process is facilitated, they developed their new solution. We just brought a way to the table to help them articulate it.

I always ask, “Okay, what’s the problem?”

BM: In this methodology, and people ask all the time, “How do you walk into companies you don’t know and do this?” Why, in your opinion Carol, are we able to do that?

CS: Because of the way this works. Yeah. Because we are the facilitators of the process. We don’t own the content; we are uncovering it. We know the questions to ask to help pull the content out of those people who own the process. So, you’re right. We don’t need to know. We’re not the subject matter experts in any of these areas.

BM: Carol, we haven’t talked in this half hour or so once about a course in eLearning an LMS or even an EPSS, right?

CS: Right!

BM: Those are the tools in the toolbox. But what we’ve talked about is a fundamental shift in how we become a partner to the business. What we understand about the business and what we help them understand about themselves. And most importantly, what we help enable the worker to do.

CS: Correct.

BM: And that’s why all of us got in this. I know I did.

Carol: Yes. And clearly there’s a big gap in what you can accomplish in a training situation with all the human factors that are involved with that, right? Like how much can somebody actually learn in “x” number of hours or even in twenty minutes of something. And then not apply it. And then try to apply it three weeks later. Well, of course, there’s no retention. There were all sorts of failures in that process for why it wasn’t going to work.

The weakest link is the human being in all of this. We have a certain ability—capability—in order to learn and understand and retain and recall. And when you put that all in the context of daily work and daily lives and the—you know—the stresses that are out there. That all impedes on our little weakest link. So, one of my favorite writers is Steve Krug and he writes about usability, particularly around the design of websites. But his books are called Don’t Make Me Think [Don’t Make Me Think and Don’t Make Me Think Revisited].

There you go. Don’t make them think. It doesn’t mean handholding. But it does make it as simple and on point and targeted to what it is you need them to do. And you cannot do that if you don’t know what they are going to do. So, let’s start at the very basics and identify that performance. Then everything else lines up. But without the performance I think you’re just still in the swirl--training swirl—out there.

For Carol 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.

To try your hand at empowering the flow of work with an actual project, join us at our upcoming Summit.

Turning The 5 Moments Inside Out with Autodesk

This is excerpted from episode 28 of the Performance Matters Podcast. In this episode Chris Blocher, principal learning content developer for Autodesk, chats with Bob Mosher on how he and his organization are transforming their learning to meet each of The 5 Moments of Need to increase workforce performance.

Bob Mosher (BM): We’re honored today to have a dear friend of mine, Chris Blocher from Autodesk. Chris, could you start by sharing the context of your journey along with a bit of your background, so the audience knows a bit more where you’re coming from?

Chris Blocher (CB): Sure. I’ve been in the content world for almost twenty-five years now, starting with a publishing company back in Boston and working my way through Training and Learning which is where I met you, Bob, and ultimately landing here at Autodesk. Autodesk is a software company based in San Francisco, California and there I am the principle Content Experience Designer for Fusion 360. I also work through Content Strategy for them.

BM: You have a wonderful past, could you give us a little bit about what is the pull or push or desire to go into The 5 Moments. Why The 5 Moments of Need now for your organization? What’s been the driver?

CB: So, we, as most large companies do, have a lot of restructuring and reorganizations that happen internally. In the recent year or two we’ve landed in kind of a sweet spot where a lot of content ideas that we’ve had in the past that I’ve bounced off of you at times, we’ve been able to bring to bear. And it’s kind of a “planets aligning” situation where we have a management that is very focused on making our software as discoverable and learnable as possible, as well as the design organization that is supportive. And we are working now with a development organization now. So it’s kind of fortuitous.

BM: Yeah, that’s an interesting alignment, frankly, that you’re all getting behind the customer and the use of the product. That’s pretty impressive, having been a part of a software company myself at one time or another. So what’s your interest in applying this now? What’s your focus with the 5 Moments?

CB: Again, with so many organizations inside of one product, we all generate a lot of content for various purposes and there was a lack of awareness in many cases and just a misunderstanding about who was responsible for what kinds of content.

So we wound up in this new situation where suddenly we were all thrust into the same room, if you will. And the discoveries were happening. “Oh, you do this kind of content? We do too!” “Well, why do you do that? Why do we do that?” You know?

I kind of think of it as a game of 52 Pickup where you take the deck of cards and kind of throw it on the floor and then it’s a matter of getting those cards back in order in the deck. And so, we’re still discovering repositories of content that we didn’t know about and going through responsibilities, as they were somewhat vague, and everyone was doing their best to fill in what they perceived as gaps in the content pool.

So, we would take these gaps and we would wind up duplicating efforts. And in some cases, we would do it better than the other teams, whereas in other cases we do it less usefully than the other teams. So the quality of the content in various scenarios was differing too much. We had multiple different patterns and processes for developing the content.

It was The 5 Moments of Need that really gave us a rallying point. And by making it about the subscriber and their moment of learning need, it really got everybody to the table. That was a powerful realization for us.

BM: You know what I think is so powerful about your story, Chris? And you have been gracious enough to allow me to peek in at times and look at your good work. I think one of the more misunderstood values of this methodology—we talk about the Pyramid all the time and listeners are probably familiar with that—but we spend an awful lot of time at the top of it and that makes sense because it’s all about where the person enters and accessibility to steps. People think of help systems obviously, when they think about performance support and such. But your move toward content aggregation, content centralization, the lower parts of the pyramid are really, I think, some of the unsung heroes of this methodology. Because so many organizations have a content nightmare. The legacy systems are terrible. Their metadata, if they have it, is lousy. They are siloed, like you described, so one doesn’t talk to the other which creates redundancy and all that kind of stuff. I think you’ve done a remarkable job of really getting some rich content out there and available to your learners.

So give us a point in time. Where are you in the journey?

CB: So right now, we are kind of cycling on the Engage aspect. We are constantly finding new people that we need to tell, and then gain resources from them. So what we wound up doing was kind of circling back on that repeatedly and what I was struggling with was the storytelling aspect of it.

You know, you tell the story once, twice, three times, you kind of are at wit’s end. I won’t say aggravated but it’s like, “Why doesn’t this make sense?” At that’s where I give credit to my manager. He has the patience of Job and is much better at keeping things at a higher level, giving the people what they need to know so that we can get the resources that we need to move forward.

So, the engage level has been churning a little bit, but we are making progress. We are able to get all the ecosystems tied together. We have our own search engine that enables that and allows us to tap into the various ecosystems. This is kind of how we are bringing it together.

One of the things about The 5 Moments that—only after going through the training did it make sense to become certified in The 5 Moments of Need—was the Engage model. I have been relying on that spreadsheet for a long time now and I constantly return to it because when things feel like they are getting too loose or they are getting out of control, I return to that LEaP model to bring myself back to center, and also to make sure we are crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s.

BM: So obviously, we talked about the fact that you have these repositories, and I don’t mean this meanly, but you have all these product groups and siloes that naturally form because of that. Totally understandable. But that has created, again, for you this remarkable content management strategy. And I think that’s an area our listeners would love to hear more about. It’s an area we don’t talk enough about, in my opinion. And obviously, it’s integral to the solutions you have built.

So, can you tell us a little bit more about content management as a discipline there and sort of what you’ve gone through in discovering that and making it better?

CB: My introduction to The 5 Moments of Need was attending a conference, there I was able to learn about different ecosystems—content ecosystems—that exist in larger companies just by listening to the various presentations that were given.

So there was one particular paper that really stood out to me in there and I still rely on it to this day—and of course, it escapes me so I’ll have to come back to that, Bob—but the way it worked out was that the paper showed five ecosystems. Six, actually, including the Human Resources side of things. That’s when the light went on for me.

I was always looking at The 5 Moments of Need from a software perspective. Only then did I realize that it was primarily being used for internal training purposes. So, when we first discussed doing this podcast, I jotted down a draft title of “Turning The 5 Moments of Need Inside Out” because I’m looking at outward subscribers rather than internal employees.

But that one paper was kind of the light that went on for me. I was seeing that the Moment of Apply was inside our products. And when they were doing the work. But that was content that was not yet available to the CXD organization—Content Experience Design. That was in development because it was all hard-coded in.

We were covering the New and More aspects of it with the Help documentation and videos and the Change aspect was handled primarily by Develop and Product Management. Then lastly, Solve was covered by our internal support team and our Customer Success organization.

So once I understood the ecosystem idea, I then looked at it as “We have all those inside of Autodesk,” so I took it upon myself to kind of figure out how we could connect these ecosystems. I was talking with somebody in our Search Engine team at one point and I said, “Don’t you crawl all of these locations?” And he said, “Yeah, we already do.”

So I just had a conversation and said, “Then how do you get that information?” And it really boiled down to metadata and targeted websites. So, what we did was look at the metadata that was available in the various solutions and see what we could steal.

And that was where we started our focus, at the Moment of Apply. Because we already had New and More achieved with the Help documentation, we knew the metadata there was very stable and set because we owned it.

Where we are still having challenges is with Moments of Change and Solve. Rather than metadata for most of that content, we are relying on the search engine for key words. So we are able to kind of switch back and forth between metadata and key words.

The quality of the returned content solution may differ when we go to key words, but our search setup is such that we are focused on Autodesk-approved resources. So, we are not getting external influences.

To hear how Chris and his team are working together to make this change, their biggest challenges, and his advice for others making this shift to a performance-first mindset—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.

How to Successfully Go Virtual

This blog is excerpted from episode 24 of the Performance Matters Podcast where Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher discuss our new “normal” and the absolute need to go virtual with our training—in the workflow.

Bob Mosher (BM): Welcome back friends! It’s an interesting time in our world and industry. I am more than honored than to be joined by my dear colleague, Dr. Con Gottfredson, as we go into our topic today.

Con Gottfredson (CG): Thank you, Bob. As always, it’s great to be with you and talking about these important things that we are privileged to discuss.

BM: It truly is. This is a challenging time. We are thinking of all of you. Thoughts and prayers are out in our industry as we all struggle to deal with this personally, while at the same time, we continue to do our best to serve those that we do through learning. In many ways, re-evaluating and re-inventing who we are. And that is what today is about.

We’re hearing a lot, Con, in the world today about virtual instruction. I was on a call the other day and I must have heard, literally 50 to 100 times, “We’re going virtual! We’re going digital!” And we all get it. That’s the only current option as we are being required to literally work out of our homes. But almost immediately after those comments, came, “Who knows how to do this? How do you design it?”

Just “going digital” is the easy part. How do you design learning and how do you deliver it? That’s tougher, right?

CG: Yeah, well. There’s a vast chasm between the word virtual and the word learning. Or the word virtual and the word instruction. Making sure that people can actually learn virtually and that we are instructionally sound in what we do virtually. That’s a big deal. And unfortunately, it’s not going to happen if you just dump a traditional face-to-face learning model into the virtual world.

BM: And Con, I think I’d push it a bit farther than that because, of course, this is our rallying cry, I’d even push it past learning to performance. How do you go virtual and impact performance? I think the means is instruction. The means is delivery. The design. But I think with The 5 Moments and our performance-first mentality, I think we have a unique opportunity.

Out of anything in life there is opportunity. Now is the time to get the funding, to get support, and to do things radically different. And I think our opportunity here as learning professionals is to turn this industry on its ear so that when we emerge from this, we may not be who we were.

BM: So, let’s talk about the GEAR model which we came up with a number of years ago.

CG: Yes, our virtual workflow learning model. We have since operationalized it again and again and again with remarkable success. Today, we want to take a high-level look at this model to help you understand the instructional elements behind it.

BM: So, friends, GEAR. G-E-A-R—the word “gear.” I’ll take a crack at the first part, Con. And to Con’s point, we’re going to stay fairly high-level today.

“G” for Gather. Why not? That’s what we pivot on now. We get people in the classroom. We gather virtually. I think when people think of virtual instruction they put a whole lot of weight, if not everything, on the fact that this is what we’ll do. We’ll get people together virtually versus physically and we’ll teach them.

So, one to two-and-a-half hours was the average people could cognitively handle, depending on the complexity of the content. The other thing that’s powerful because we have that EPSS running—we’re going to keep coming back to that—you do not need to, nor should you, teach everything. Don’t chop up eight hours of class into eight different hour breaks. You probably can do four hours of an eight-hour class in smaller chunks because you have the EPSS to help during the workflow work. So, the Gather is saved as a gather should always be—physical or otherwise—for what we call the most critical skills that you identify that an instructor must be sure are taught, practiced, and communicated.

CG: Gather initiates the learning process. It doesn’t close it. Gathering initiates learning and then you move from that Gather, or virtual session, to the workflow where with the help of an EPSS or performance support, you have what we call Expand and Apply activities.

The Expand activities in the workflow are intended to provide access to resources that would allow people to deepen their understanding of what they need to know. But also to translate what they’ve learned in that Gather session and what they need to be able to do in their Apply activities to translate all of that understanding to their own work environment—to think about that, to reflect on that in terms of their work. So, it’s a deepening and expansion of knowledge and adapting that to their world.

That’s the Expand—the “E” part of GEAR.

The Apply part of the Gear Model is just that. This is where, in the workflow, the learners apply what they have learned and what they have picked up in their Expand activities to the real world of their work in meaningful chunks and in meaningful groups of activities that will further their skill development. All of that supported by the EPSS.

BM: Sure. And one another thing with Apply that I think is important to emphasize too, Con, is that in Apply you can go beyond Gather. Right? We said earlier we were only going to cover the critical skills in Gather. But in the Apply activity—and when you wrap a real-life scenario around it—the less-critical skills are going to be needed. They are going to need to be learned. They are going to need to be discovered.

One of the common things we get with Critical Skills is, “So you say you’re skipping stuff.”

We’re not skipping anything. Especially with the Gear Model, we’re going to move those lessons, those learnings, into the workflow while doing. They’ll still be covered, they’ll still be learned, and in the final stage of Receive feedback, we’ll be sure it’s all understood.

So, here’s where I want to circle around to the beginning. When we do our final analysis, you Gather them in groups. You let them review their work. They turn it in. We give them feedback. We use rubrics to give all kinds of feedback and such. They learn from each other. They Gather as a group. They hear each other’s experiences and they see some remarkable examples.

And in the end, friends, this is where the real learning happens. Because we’re not talking and reflecting on a practice. We’re not talking and reflecting on something said during Gather. That’s all covered during Gather.

Here, they get to talk about what they did in Apply, which is the application of true learning. And they get great feedback, positive and otherwise, and they get to learn from each other. And the pilot group said unanimously—that in the end—through Gather we think that’s virtual learning, getting them on line, virtually gathering—they unanimously told us that of the four letters G, E, A, and R, R was by far the most popular, that’s where the most learning occurred, followed closely by Apply. The last thing was Gather. They knew it was important, they knew they had to do it. But the least impactful part was what we think of as an industry and traditionally view as virtual instruction.

So, a really powerful model to take people through.

To learn more on the GEAR model and how you can begin implementing it—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.