Paul McKey - Synergistic Design

Redbean - I have for many years watched organisations and governments squander their cash and time on education programs desired (not designed) to get people to change their behaviour. Most of these programs are based upon the false premise that knowledge will lead to insight and so influence and change behaviour.

In the main these campaigns fail. The most famous being such public health initiatives as the “drugs are bad” campaigns so beautifully sent up by Southpark. Ok?

Two notable exceptions have been the reduction in tobacco smoking, supported by bans on smoking in certain places, and the HIV Aids reduction through safe sex behaviour, supported by the free distribution of condoms and needles.

Both of those campaigns also provided what is missing from the value chain of the standard education program of Knowledge>Insight>Behaviour Change, the critical message that salespeople have known for years - The WIIFM or What’s In It For Me?

The one word equivalent of WIIFM is meaning. Knowledge is great yet without meaning (to each individual) it is just more information or noise. Blanket education programs are inefficient since they hope they will snag a few individuals who get the message while they miss the majority.

However the flip side of this problem is my main interest. If we could make meaning for our customers or clients, would they then change their behaviour to support our cause, business or product? The answer, as every religion and quasi-religous environmental or political group in the world knows, is YES, of course they would.

What is this meaning stuff? A new book “Making Meaning: How successful businesses deliver meaningful customer experiences” sets out to describe just how meaning can be put into the every day interactions with our customers and clients.(Rhea, Diller and Shedroff, Peach Pit Press, 2007). There is nothing new here except it’s proactive application and as you read the elements of meaning you will concur.

You can read the Making Meaning - Free Article at the publisher’s site.

So why do governments still spend millions on meaningless ‘education’ or ’social norms marketing’ campaigns or the new breed of ‘preventative’ health campaigns without any evidence they will be any more successful than in the past?

Climate change is the latest need for change that will suffer from the meaningless campaign. Governments around the world (with a few notable exceptions) are betting on the old educate>behavioural change horse yet again. By the time any significant shift in our lifestyles occurs it will be way too late for that old horse, and us.

How can meaning be created? In the case of sustainability and climate change it might have to be through direct legislation and fiscal or punitive measures to get people to sit up and take notice. These measures would work because they have direct meaning to the individual. When fuel is unaffordable then we will discover the bicycle! Find that meaning for your campaign and you’re on a winner. And the best way to do that is through the discovery processes of experience design.

The solution remains the same for any government or organisation that wants to drive fundamental behavioural change for either the public good or commercial reasons - find the meaning - to the individual or target group.

The only formula that works for humans that I know of is Knowledge>Meaning>Insight>Change and if your marketing or education campaign doesn’t contain that formula, it’s meaningless.

More Business Improvement Articles from Redbean

Redbean 20070330 - I recently attended the South by South-West (SXSW) Interactive, Music and Film festival in Austin Texas. Seeing first hand what both small and large players in these three industries, which generate so much activity on the Web, are doing only confirmed for me that we are in the midst of the third phase of the Web revolution.

The first Web revolution was all about the technology. Plumbing and wires, switches and electronics, access, language, protocols, trust systems and so on. Many people don’t realise it but before you can order your book from America or your wine from Australia someone had to lay a cable 12,000km across the Pacific ocean. This is an ongoing exercise with a new $300M Sydney-Honolulu cable announced only this week.

The second Web revolution was all about business. Tim-Berniers Lee proposed his World Wide Web in 1989 yet it took several years for momentum to build. And because the first phase of networks had been so successful all the requirements were in place for a rapid uptake and dissemination of Web technologies and content.

But the Web through the nineties was mainly an amateur, disorganised and eclectic mix of academia, small business and social activists. Business got involved by selling shovels to the gold diggers and an enormous inflow of investment dollars gave the Web ‘credibility’. Unfortunately this rush of ignorant cashed-up investors also lead to the rise of the dot com era. The crash that had to happen did however sort out the wheat from the chaff.

So this brings us to the third revolution. In my model of Synergistic Design I contend that any of the three primary system perspectives, of business, purpose or technology, can instigate change. Then the other two must respond. In this case technology instigated the first change in global information systems. The purpose of this system responded and became the phenomena we know as the Web. But business leapt ahead and tried to make money out of an unripe fruit. The Web of the nineties was crude and of variable quality. Web1.0 was the necessary prototype for Web2.0, the suite of protocols, technologies and functionality which will drive this next phase of the Web. Business will respond again with a better understanding of how to make money out of this phenomena. But this is now just evolution, not revolution.

In parallel to the development of networks and business models in the past ten years has also been the revolution in the tools and skills to produce digital content. As the price of production tools, storage, and communication networks reduces and the availability of skills, distribution channels and demand increases, the real revolution of user-generated content has begun. Publishers of software, games, news, films, books and music have built systems to protect their commercial interests and to date have been successful in defending their oligopolies. Partly because they also held the means for quality production. But those days are gone. Now anyone can attain the skills and technology to produce broadcast quality content in any medium. This equates to a revolution in the Purpose of the Web.

The last bastion of the publishers is really distribution, physical and legal. But with the advent of media convergence, ubiquitous communication systems, interactive Web2.0 and Web3.0 technologies, the physical constraints of distribution will fast disappear. So that brings us to ownership or legal protection. Once again a street level solution, in the form of a Creative Commons license, has been found by the Web community to circumvent blockages. Even Digital Rights Management (DRM) which many considered a sinister means for controlling distribution can now be used for good as well as evil.

What this all adds up to is an unprecedented revolution of development, sharing and consumption of user-generated content. MySpace and YouTube are just tips of the iceberg.

What’s driving this? In a recent paper I described this iceberg as having three layers - Integration, Interaction and Independence. Integration and Interaction summarise the evolution of the Web. Independence however is the deeply human need and desire which is driving this current revolution. This independence, from institutions, places, systems, and even our physical identities will be an ongoing driver of new technologies, functionality and business opportunities. Some analysts are saying this next phase of online growth will last for 10-15 years. I think they are being conservative.

Perhaps the best way to describe this apparent conundrum of independence through increasing convergence is to remember that human nature doesn’t actually change that much. For many the Web is just a new means of expressing what Shakespeare observed several hundred years ago, that “all the world is a stage”. And for an independent producer, of anything digital, the increasingly large and accessible audiences could provide the opportunity for an unprecedented creative and commercial freedom.

For more see:

Creative Commons
Steve Jobs on Music DRM
Dr. Elliot McGucken on DRM

This week I attended the Flexible Learning Framework’s Industry e-learning Showcase and Exhibition held at the Shangri-la Hotel in Sydney. This event was designed to showcase the results of the seed funding provided, to various industry sectors for e-learning, through the Industry Engagement Project.
Flexible Learning Framework

Unfortunately, and despite the genuine efforts of a number of people involved, I came away from this event somewhat disappointed and concerned. At best the event was naive, at worst it was a sad indictment of Australia’s continuing under-investment in both education and information and communication technologies and hence our incapability to compete in new media industries.

The naivety stems from the fact that industry in this country is not greatly interested in improving training or any of its methods such as e-learning. Business is, rightly, interested in improving performance. There are many ways to do that other than just improving the efficiency of developing and delivering more training courses.

The education and training sector can invariably only address the efficiencies of an organisation, related to turnover, skill levels and operational efficiencies and costs etc. Rarely can it, nor does it, address the real need of business for competitive advantage, or effectiveness. To think that e-learning is going to provide increased profit and growth for any business or industry sector, without increasing effectiveness, is naive.

There is a certain missionary zeal at play here in the hope that more e-learning will improve the educational outcomes of an underfunded system. Australia has slipped form eighth to eighteenth in per capita spending on education in the past twenty years which prompted the Australian Financial Review to call the results of an OECD report into education levels a “national scandal” (AFR 20060823 ). More e-learning will not fix that.

In my Masters thesis of 1996 I predicted the Vocational Education and Training (VET or VTE) sector to be most likely in the successful uptake of e-learning. I was wrong. ( Masters Thesis - Chapter 5) Mainly because there has been no demand from industry. Australia sits fat and happy crushing rocks and shipping them offshore and everyone revels in the rewards of our resources boom. Yet in most other areas of intellectual pursuit Australia is in a competitive decline. In the ICT sector we import nearly 100% of products and a fair proportion of services. Ireland, India and SE Asia are surpassing us rapidly.

Accordingly my disappointment in the quality of the content and programs on show this week. The skills levels in media development in both the VET and industrial sectors are very low. The Flexible Learning Framework acknowledges that and does some of its best work in trying to rectify that issue. But this event shows it has a long way to go. The abysmal amount of funding for these projects (around $20,000 each) produced mediocre results. You get what you pay for.

Industry wants help with the application of learning to increase effectiveness and performance. To gain credibility the VET sector must focus on outcomes, not inputs, and show how to transfer a capability (such as e-learning or skills) into performance. The mindset must shift from the current one of training as a cost to one of learning as an investment. This investment has not been forthcoming at either the industry or national levels for some time and I argue Australia will suffer the consequences for many years (both economically and environmentally) when this resources boom invariably ends.

January 24 2007 PostScript:

Kevin Rudd leader, of the Labor opposition in Australia, today announced an education revolution was required in this country. In a policy document to support the speech it is stated that Australia spends well below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average for early childhood education and has one of the lowest retention records for secondary school students. And it quotes statistics showing Australia’s productivity has declined in line with education funding.
“There is now incontrovertible evidence that education should be understood as an economic investment,” it says.
“Australia has been insulated from this underlying deterioration in its economic performance in recent years” the paper says.
“The resources boom has masked the impact of slower productivity growth… A smarter workforce is vital if Australia is to compete with the emerging global giants China and India, it adds.

Sydney Morning Herald, January 23 2007.

ELearning has a high failure rate. Quality issues aside one of the main failure points is poor implementation. Learners left alone in the new environment of eLearning often find themselves wondering what to do to succeed. Face to face communication is sometimes hard enough yet how do you get the most out of online discussions or engage in team projects at a distance? Time management, dealing with the technology and tackling tricky quizzes are all skills the learner must now manage alone. Many just give up in frustration.

One sure way to improve implementation for learners new to eLearning is to use the classroom. Using a facilitator to introduce people to the methods and techniques of self-paced and collaborative learning will quickly develop capability and confidence. Learning new skills in a social setting improves learning and helps them concentrate on the task. Others and the facilitator are nearby to help or discuss tactics. They are learning about learning. While a classroom and facilitator may be more expensive to begin with the return on that initial investment will be repaid many times over through confident and engaged learners who can then succeed with eLearning.

The Purpose of any organisation relates directly to the industry sector, product or service which defines what it does. Bankers bank and bakers bake. Each satisfies a demand. Competitive advantage usually rests on satisfying that demand by doing it cheaper, better, faster. Each develops specific processes, services and products. Business describes their strategy and provides the resources while technology supports the how it is done.

While business and technology are both fairly generic their application to a particular purpose is normally unique. Critical technology for a baker is an oven and for an airline it is aircraft.
Consequently certain purposes require specific processes and business practices which have no, or limited use, for any other purpose.

Learning and development programs require a complex mix of learning environments, content, administration and promotional needs in addition to teaching and learning methods.

This category will accumulate the latest innovations, ideas and practices which affect the methods and processes of learning and performance support. This includes such topics as system design, instructional design, teaching and learning theory and practice, content and web design/development and learning environments,