Paul McKey - Synergistic Design

A recent article in a major newspaper the “Death of the dotcom degree” described the failure of ‘virtual’ universities (The Sunday Age 20090222). While I can’t disagree with the core of the article, that online learning as delivered by most universities around the world is unpopular, I do challenge the reasons they gave for this being so. While the article blames the product I would lay blame squarely with the providers who develop the product.

Our universities have failed dismally in the development of online learning. Yet writing off online education at this point in time is equivalent to looking at the technology of the car in 1900 and concluding that this will never evolve into anything. The problem then was exactly the same as we have now. Universities and other online providers have seen a change in the medium but failed to change the form or the message to exploit its possibilities.

At the turn of the 20th century car makers were doing the same thing. They modelled the objects of the new paradigm on the familiar of the old. They called the car a horseless carriage. It took a generation to ‘get’ the difference between a horse and a car. We are in an equivalent space with online learning now.

The paper quotes Clifford Stoll, one of my favourite sceptics, with describing online degrees as third rate. I couldn’t agree more. The lecture-essay learning management systems developed 15 years ago still dominate. They are true horseless carriages in that they were designed to deliver the existing antiquated teaching and learning model with ‘modern’ technology.

My daughter is at university this year and by all accounts the online subjects she is taking are still seen as a way for the university to avoid funding qualified and experienced staff, to avoid funding adequate technology infrastructure and to avoid the redefining of themselves as a 21st century business. In other words online is seen as a low cost means of faking modernisation. Hence third rate product.

So let’s look at some of the elements of the modern online degree product.

The business model is still predicated on the top down delivery of information and units of knowledge. It still treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled up. We also have no way to charge you other than via a price per unit of knowledge hence you have to do them all to graduate which ensures the institution’s cash flow. I have managed training organisations for twenty years. I know this model well. The bricks and mortar, single career degrees, and low volume models are quaint and expensive nostalgia. The jobs of the future are going to be online, generalist and heavily dependent on interaction with new ideas, new people and new threats and opportunities. We need to increase the quantity and the quality of our education systems. A challenge that will fail with existing business models.

Even the specialist ‘virtual’ universities such as Universitas21 aren’t performing well since they are really just a distribution network for the same tired old product.
Universitas21

The teaching and learning practices are dumbed down to support the current business model. With an ageing, technology ignorant, population of teachers they deliver the product in the only way they have known - mainly chalk and talk with some added interactive elements icing the bland cake. You can get away with this on campus but not online. It will take a generation for education to come to grips with the possibilities of today’s technology and changing learning requirements even if we stood still. Only by absorbing the technology and the changing socio-cultural trends can one consider how they might be used/needed for learning in the 21st century. They can’t just be bolted on.

Technology, as usual, is both the solution and the problem. As it has done since the invention of the wheel it presents us with the joy of possibilities and the pain of change. As part of the recent Horizon Report we looked at the possible new technologies coming into teaching and learning in the next five years. However I just don’t see the infrastructure nor the cultural change occurring to support these technologies. Institutional administrators who are ignorant of teaching practices let alone technology will not invest in either. Better to stick with what you know - bricks and mortar. http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-releases-horizon-report-focused-emerging-technologies-australia-new-zealand

And that brings me to the people. There is an old saying in business that if you can’t change the people then change the people. I said it in my masters thesis 13 years ago and I still haven’t seen it happen - the best way to build the online university is to go down the road and break new ground, with a new vision, new culture and new people and embrace new technology and new business and life realities. Existing universities have the power yet neither the knowledge nor the will to develop high quality online learning experiences and products. Hence the whole sector is held back through this subconscious collusion to maintain the status quo.

So until universities actually put their minds, hearts and budgets to really embrace online learning their product will be continually third-rate and students will be served up ill-fitting, out of date horseless carriages while being told they are really very modern, functional and safe cars.

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It is the end of January already. One twelfth (or 8.33%) of the year gone. Yet an opportunity to turn a new leaf.

Blogs are beginning to bore me, and to drink my own medicine, why should you care? Because dear reader everyone keeps telling you you should blog and/or care about blogs. And making this blog meaningful is my responsibility otherwise you, and I, should switch off. How can we keep blogs meaningful?

So far in this blog over three years I haven’t actually told you much about my personal whims except as the astute reader knows all my thoughts are between the lines, in the topic chosen and in the language used. So I can’t hide. But I promise never to do this to you. http://thecatsite.com/blog/ (Unless of course one of my sheep has to go to the vet then you will hear the whole story in up to the minute reports and blurry photos).

And then there’s Twitter. I have no problem with Twitter per se, it is just the concept of building ‘Followers’ that has me running scared though. It is getting into the heads of some Tweeters out there who are becoming ego-maniacal about how many followers they have and why some leave them. They are actually starting to believe their own bullshit. But funnily the use of the term Followers always gets me thinking of Jonestown every time I hear it. Imagine if Jim Jones had Twitter!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

But I digress. What got me started was my Follower (note the ego-free use of the singular. Just keep the contributions coming) wanted to know more about the processes I use or go through to develop original ideas for using technology in business, experience design and learning. My Follower wanted my blog to be more personal (I am already getting self conscious using the personal pronoun which has been beaten out of me by many years of academic writing).

My follower suggested that sometimes my ideas are a bit of a leap (of faith?). A little creative let’s say. And I couldn’t agree more. Yet it depends where you are standing. Many of the institutions and businesses, large and small, I work with are quite conservative. They like to use conservative practices like strategy and planning as a means for change. So yes they might find my methods ‘creative’.

I have always tended to consider most strategic planning sessions as a diversion to facing up to issues and embracing real change. A form of action to do nothing. The more conservative of our institutions, large corporations, universities and schools love this stuff. It feeds a lot of consultants so they don’t complain. But invariably after the two year strategic plan has completed you often get the feeling that everything is different but nothing has really changed.

And it appears I am not alone. In a recent article of the Australian Financial Review (AFR 24/12/2008) titled “The Strategy Fad is Dead, Long Live Thinking” it is argued that the rational approach of strategy has not served us well. The ‘fad’ started in the 80s with Michael Porter and was quickly embraced by consulting firms around the world who turned it into a ’science’. Unfortunately as we have just found out there is no recipe for success yet selling recipe books has been big business for thirty years.

No the good firms don’t follow formulas. Yes they have strategies, yet they are loose and adaptable. We are discovering more about the influence of creativity in success and how it can be encouraged and relied upon. As the article states “a real strategy is neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach”. Ah now we’re talking. While the rational conservatives want plans, metrics and control I tend to get a lot more excited about developing and supporting the appropriate culture or the corporate ethos and ‘ways of doing things’ than being prescriptive about specific strategies to follow. A ‘good’ company and its employees will always know the right thing to do in most situations. Smart companies just know before everybody else!

Anyway the point is that this year I am going to tell you, dear follower, more about the way I think. It might get a bit irreverent. For example I will tell you how a background in creative arts like, music, film and painting, help me solve problems and form new solutions. How electronics engineering taught me to develop practical outcomes. And I will share why I think going to an art gallery, and reading philosophy and great novels will possibly get you further than reading anything by Jim Collins.

And I won’t bore you with my cat stories. (pssst wanna see a picture of my sheep? go on you know you want to. Click Here )

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It would be wise and pertinent to write something witty and profound here but…

After a week of sifting sand with my toes and floating slowly across the azure waters of Byron Bay my mind seems devoid of all wit and profundity. I am sure it will all come back to me but probably not tonight as we count down to the new year.

Have a great 2009.

I recently participated on the Advisory Board for the New Media Consortium Horizon.au report which charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression in coming years. That report was released on December 1st.

From the Report:

” In defining the six selected areas—Virtual Worlds & Other Immersive Digital Environments; Cloud-Based Applications; Geolocation; Alternative Input Devices; Deep Tagging; and Next-Generation Mobile—the project drew on an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable leaders and practitioners in Australia and New Zealand business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC community itself. The Horizon Project’s Australia-New Zealand Advisory Board probed current trends and challenges in post compulsory education as they uniquely are expressed in Australia and New Zealand, explored possible topics for the Report, and over several rounds of rankings and dialog, selected the final technologies.”

The report is available here:

http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-releases-horizon-report-focused-emerging-technologies-australia-new-zealand

Larry Johnson and his team at the New Media Consortium have done a fantastic job in compiling this report. Over the next few entries this blog will delve into some of the predictions for a deeper understanding of their impact upon practice and business opportunities in the learning and performance space.

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The age of dumb capitalism is over. Dumb capitalism based upon excessive consumption fuelled by easy credit has run its course.

With quality not quantity the new buzz in financial markets this will filter all the way down the retail chain because as the easy money (or credit) disappears the consumption patterns of everyone from individual customers, through small business and large corporations will become far more cautious and selective.

So for businesses the business plan of “just sell more stuff” has also expired. This could be fatal for many small businesses since the majority I come across have no other plan. Most have not experienced a downturn and have no knowledge of how to counteract the effects of one on their business.

Sacking staff, prices and services is both a short term and ultimately defeating strategy. That’s a quantity strategy. What is required is to follow your customers into the area of quality. Yes they will make fewer purchases but that doesn’t necessarily follow that they will make cheaper and lesser quality purchases.

Many firms also start discounting in a downturn. This results in a race to the bottom. You will most likely lose existing customers on the way since when price dominates you just become one of the pack.

A smarter strategy is to consider how you can help your existing customers and how you can weather this downturn together. For instance how can you maintain quality while giving them a break on finance? Instead of discounting give them a little longer to pay which has the same effect. Instead of lowering the quality of your services or stock allow them to pay in instalments.

What you really need in a downturn is not fear and drastic measures but creativity. Being creative seems not that important when things are going well. It is critical when they are going bad though.

Like all downturns we usually get warning signs and the time to act is as soon as they are confirmed. This is the time to take stock with key staff and advisers to consider both a protective strategy and a rescue strategy. The former is proactive, and includes creative approaches such as those mentioned above, while the latter is reactive in case certain key indicators do go horribly wrong. Assessing them both now, before the ‘proverbial’ hits the fan, is wise.

The key to a protective strategy is that it must be both creative and actionable and go beyond the clichés of sacking staff and cutting prices.

To develop that strategy take your advisory team somewhere nice, away from the doom and gloom news, take a good facilitator with you and spend time getting people into a creative groove so they can develop a protective plan that actually improves your competitive advantage in the current climate.

Bold moves like this are the sign of a good business and good businesses not only survive downturns but they actually emerge from them even stronger.

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Training, what we do to small furry animals, usually requires repetitive, simple tasks that will hopefully be recalled via a recognised stimulus such as a bell ringing.

Learning, what we humans are very good at, usually occurs when we are allowed to explore and experiment, or fail and succeed, in an area that is of interest to us.

Reducing the former in our corporations and increasing the latter would seem like an obvious way to go in this enlightened age but unfortunately this is not so. Corporate training is still dominated by stand and deliver training methods.

One of the best ways to shift from a training only focus is to adopt what educators call a constructivist approach to learning. In a nutshell this means less authoritive telling and more discovery and questioning. And yes it is difficult, particularly if you come from the old school of tell ‘em and tell ‘em good.

In addition the nature of corporate learning content is changing to a more user-generated design which reflects people’s usage of You Tube and Facebook etc.

However the majority of Learning Management Systems (LMS) in use can not incorporate this type of material and usually restrict content and program design to a linear training model. How can we adapt them to deliver contemporary content at reasonable cost?

One of the best places to start is to change the way you design your Learning and Performance (L&P) program in the first place. Many corporate trainers only ever apply linear design and development methods. Long and expensive timeframes are the result.

Instead, using a cyclical design approach allows rapid and continuous improvement of learning programs. Emphasising critical success factors at each design step, not just during the evaluation phase also increases flexibility and reduces maintenance costs. Redbean has used a five step cycle with great success for some time. These steps are:

Inform - Install - Implement - Operate - Improve - Inform…

Click image to enlarge -

Short program cycles are necessary to keep online content fresh and engaging for learners. Large monolithic programs are outmoded and have a poorer return on investment in terms of cost and learning outcomes.

Unfortunately until a new generation of Learning and Performance Systems is developed we need to adapt our current applications through smarter program design. By adopting a cycle approach at least we can renovate programs if and when the corporate learning technology catches up with ‘real world’ events.

For more on -
Redbean’s Learning Program Design

Josh Bersin Corporate Learning Trends Report

A related article on Learning Space Design

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Redbean - It is always interesting to go into other environments and use the technology that people in those environments use every day. At first the concepts and processes are often alien until you observe how the ‘natives’ use the available tools. Even before this you may not understand either the use or the need for the tool until you are confronted with a real world example that forces you to look for a solution. Once again watching the natives solve a problem and noting their tool selection can help guide you.

Last week I was immersed (literally) in just such an environment. I went sailing. Now I have sailed smaller boats all my life and also a few larger but low tech boats as well. And for many people even a simple boat using commonplace technology developed hundreds or thousands of years ago can be a very alien environment. Especially when the wind starts blowing.

I however was immersed in a fairly new Beneteau 361 in the Whitsunday Islands on the Great Barrier Reef. Being a yacht worth around US$120,000 this was a fairly sophisticated piece of equipment. Sailing boats are designed to provide a self-sufficient and safe existence anywhere on the 70 percent of the planet covered in water. They do this through complex systems of sails for locomotion, engines for power and through increasingly more digital equipment for navigation and communication. And that, despite my years of digital familiarity, is where my ‘experience’ went sour.

The navigation instruments that should be making life easier for a sailor are so difficult to use that most people (who I have talked to) just give up on them or, like Microsoft Word, use only a small portion of the functionality. The interface design is so bad in many of these expensive instruments that it is safer not to use them rather than battle with the arcane algorithms required. We are also seeing this in car nav systems. By the time you work out where you are, you have either run over several pedestrians or hit the reef. The focus seems to be on gaudy bright colours and flashing symbols which provide an interface that is reminiscent of computers twenty years ago. Other similarities to those dark days include a lack of standards, really bad interaction design and proprietary software. It’s like 1990 all over again.

The marine communications industry has many harsh environmental hurdles to overcome including water, salt, limited DC power and distance. Considering this the functionality of their equipment is quite reliable. Yet the first company (and this industry includes some very large companies) who can provide an intuitive and functional navigation system will be on a winner. They badly need the iPhone of navigation. In fact now that the iPhone has GPS built in I might just use that.

Of course the best part is turning all the crap off and just going sailing. It always amazes me just how exciting it is to drive five tonnes of boat through the water at a meagre 10 knots with wind power alone. This is the bit that puts a smile on your dial.

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Redbean - Case studies have been around for a long time but are going through a resurgence as people rediscover they are one of the fastest ways to understand a problem or opportunity in your organisation. They range from short promotional cameos through to the in-depth industry studies championed by Harvard University as a teaching method. In between is the targeted case study. These can provide valuable insights for both business analysis and improvement of a particular phenomena.

Case Studies provide many benefits to an organisation, including;

* A Promotional tool – to share with clients and/or magazines to promote your products and services
* A Recruitment tool – let prospective staff or investors see your working culture
* Business insights – these are used for business improvement and strategy setting
* A Training Tool - describe complex sales scenarios and processes
* Benchmarking - a larger study can provide feedback and benchmark data on performance within a business sector or project
* Case Studies are fast and inexpensive research.

A well written case study is a useful research tool to help understand or explain any phenomena affecting your business. They are designed to uncover what is going right, and wrong, with either products and services or even teams and projects. They can evaluate and analyse or just observe and report what is. They can look at the business, technology and people, in isolation or all together.

Redbean uses the case study as a first step in Experience Design. It can answer questions like are the customer expectations being met? Is the product/service delivering? Are the staff adequately skilled? Is this project wasting time and money? What other opportunities are we missing? What are the competition doing? And our favourite - what is really going on here?

And because case study research uses the principles of anthropology it looks at what is without affecting the process. Unlike traditional market research which is better at describing a static picture of attitudes and desires, case studies can report on dynamic events and ongoing processes from multiple perspectives.

Should I pay for a Case Study?

You asking me? I’m a consultant!

A short advertorial case study will usually just require some desktop research and a phone call with some key players. A good copy writer can make your project or product sound interesting and exciting and provide you with a great promotional piece. They are either done quid pro quo with a magazine looking for copy or you may pay a fixed price for your own use and reprint rights.

A more in depth and useful case study which looks at one phenomena of your business is a bit more involved and at the very least will involve on site interviews, document research, observation time and several edits and analysis.
Be wary of long distance research. It tends to get it wrong. Good researchers go and see for themselves, meeting the people or perhaps being a secret shopper. Seeing the scenario and context of a problem makes it come to life. While not there to snoop (unless that is in the brief) researchers should always lift a few rocks, look around some corners and have the odd “off the record” conversation. If the client is serious about finding out what is going on they will appreciate this level of detail. You may even use the case study to compare with your competitors.

Case studies are typically inexpensive and return richer information and better value for money than empirical market research methods.

Case studies written by experienced and objective researchers are one of the most useful tools any organisation has available for understanding quality and improvement, regardless of their purpose. And Smart businesses are always striving to improve quality.

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Redbean - Australia’s second largest supermarket chain, Coles, has a new CEO, Ian McLeod. In his first public appearance the AFR reported that McLeod was “horrified” by the state of several company-owned outlets. He then went on to provide a valuable insight for anyone considering the experience design of their organisation, products or services. It is not one single thing that provides the poor or great experiences - it is a combination of a number of things.

Macleod who has been touring supermarkets in Europe and North America has been appointed to turn around the ailing chain worth an estimated $US15 billion. He listed the “operating standards, the display, the cleanliness, the infrastructure, the range and the availability” as the key culprits but went on to say that people are not “going to suddenly see a blinding light of improvement”.

Experience design is insidious. It is only through careful attention to both the big operational factors and the tiny and seemingly irrelevant nuances that a good design, and hence experience, can be achieved. But their value has been made clear in this case. Several billion dollars has been wiped off Coles’ value as the market realised what the customers did long before, that the place was rundown and out of touch. Run your business into the ground and pay the price.

Rebuilding the experience let alone the confidence of 100,000 staff and the millions of customers will be a tough assignment. A major overhaul is required especially considering the public’s growing dislike of the impersonal processed food chain.

In the past ‘Big Fix’ operators in white shirts and skinny black ties would be called in to do some business reengineering. That might still be appropriate for the supply chain logistics but my advice to Coles is to engage some experience designers. People who can modernise the supermarket experience by integrating the customer information and interaction in a way that makes those customers come back week after week because they want to - not just because it is cheap.

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Redbean - It could be said that Web design is an uneasy alliance between a number of disparate groups dominated by the functionalists and the aesthetes. Within the functionalists camp we have the technicians and the usability industry while the designers and artists like to concentrate on aesthetics. Within each group are further sub-groups who can also have conflicting and hence competitive goals in the design process.

Ben Hunt describes the goals of these two groups:
“I define Aesthetic richness as a function of beauty, attractiveness, emotional depth, and visual impact.
Functional richness equates to usefulness, which is an aggregate of ease-of-use and functional power.” http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/sphere_of_design.cfm

It can be argued that both these camps are selfish, tribal and competitive and design to satisfy their personal, commercial and sometimes political goals. So instead of getting great sites that highlight design synergies most web sites end up as a compromise of ideas, political will and ideologies. Independent designers and non-commercial sites tend to be more adventurous yet appeal to a minority while most corporate, government and education sites usually reflect the ‘committee’ mentality with which they were designed and hence please nobody in particular.

What these groups are ultimately missing is what Bill Buxton says in his new book “Sketching User Experiences” -
“Despite the technocratic and materialistic bias of our culture, it is ultimately experiences we are designing, not things.” http://www.billbuxton.com/

I find most design engagements in organisations tend to be a battle of egos designing ‘things’ rather than the well considered experiences they and their customers require. As my son reminds me - “form follows function but style rules”. And style, that wonderful exciting thing that nobody can quite describe yet everyone can recognise when they sense it, can only come from designing great experiences.

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