Nancy Duarte: Creating Stories that Resonate #storytraining

These are my live blogged notes from an eLearning Guild/Citrix presentation with Nancy Duarte, author of Resonate and Silde:ology. 

The story: a likeable hero, she encounters roadblocks, she emerges transformed (the perfect three part story structure)

Organizations need to keep creating ideas to continue to reinvent themselves. The lifecycle of an org (start, grow, mature, decline)…so we need to reinvent ourselves all the time.  And that’s what good presentations can do.  They can spawn ideas to reinvent…

good stories make our hearts race.  But there’s often a gap from storytelling to presenter…and the presenters just fall…flat.

Powerpoint so often used to present reports.

But when you have a high stakes opportunity to persuade, you need to use story.

How do you incorporate story?

Every great presentation should have a beginning, middle and end.  But there needs to be a turning point between those acts.

The audience is the hero of the story.  They have all the power in the room. They’ll determine your fate.  The presenter is the mentor.  They help the hero get unstuck, or they leave a magical tool.  When someone leaves your presentation – you should be giving them something of value.

Joseph Campbell came up with an 18 part story structure:  ordinary world, a call to adventure, refusal of the call, meeting with the mentor, crossing the threshold (as you persuade them…)

The shape of great speeches:

What is – what could be – and you call out the gap…

It’s like sailing – as you sail against the wind, you need to capture resistance.  Think about your audience, what  will they throw back at you.  What will be there resistance?  Plant that resistance into your presentation. Your audience will get to your point of view quicker, if you plant that resistance into your talk.

Your ending should paint the picture of what the future is going to look like.  A picture of your hope.

She goes on to analyze Steve Job’s speech unveiling the iPhone. 

A STAR moment “something they’ll always remember”

The stakes are higher for making better presentations! TED and Twitter…people will trash your presentation if it’s not up to par.

If you have an idea, a dream, a way to move your company forward, you need to latch onto that and share it and change the world.

Questions from the crowd:

If you’re doing product training – let’s hope you have a good product!

Nancy encourages everyone to find their passion…people won’t invest in their communication skills unless they’re passionate about  what they’re communicating about…

If you’ve got to complete something in three days, odds are that the stakes aren’t that high.  Instead it’s “grind this out for the planning meeting.”  Categorize the importance of things and fight for the ones that are really important. When it’s really hard stakes, then fight hard for  the time. And then knock it out of the park.

When you’re doing a webinar – stand up, move around, use your hands.  Post pictures of people in your space to help you remember that there are people on the other side of the technology!

Make sure it’s bite size chunks of content.  You need to be more interesting than their email.

Be a consumer of great communications.  Watch TED talks…and then PRACTICE your skills.

For training programs where the SME wants to include everything and the kitchen sink – remind them that this isn’t a report, that we need to focus on the story.

www.duarte.com for more!

Learning to Fly

A few weeks ago, after an Easter candy sugar fueled meltdown, my six year old daughter learned how to ride a bike without training wheels.  In about 20 minutes. 

Here’s how it went down:

“Hey, let’s take off those training wheels and see what happens…”

“Really, mom? OK…”

I held onto the back of her back a couple of times and then just let go. She was off.  A few weeks later, she’s zipping up and down our street like an old pro, a face full of wild exuberance.  It’s good to be a kid.

Some thoughts from her experience:

• She started at the beginning and went through the paces.  A tricycle for a few years, then training wheels. (scaffolded learning support)
• She had my support and encouragement when we took off the wheels.  I held the back of her back and quietly let go when I could tell she had balance on her side. (a gentle guide)
• She was motivated.  Her older brother has been riding for awhile and she likes to keep up with him.  (Note: he did not learn this whole bike riding thing nearly as quickly).  (social learning)
• Plus, bike riding is really FUN. (intrinsic motivation)
• She was ready. (learner readiness)

What have you learned lately? And how did you learn it? How is her experience different from yours?

Karl Kapp Book Tour: The Gamification of Learning and Instruction #gamiLI

It’s the Cammy Bean stop on the blog book tour for Karl Kapp’s newest book: The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-Based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education
Karl Kapp is a professor of instructional technology in Bloomsburg University’s Department of Instructional Technology in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. He’s one of my favorite professors that I've never actually studied with (although he has taught me a ton).  Over the years, Karl and I have had wonderful arguments about gamers and gender and instructional design. He took me on my first tour of Second Life and opened my eyes to the possibilities of virtual worlds. He wasn’t my professor, he just wanted to share. So thanks, Karl, for sharing with all of us yet another thoughtful book about a topic on everyone’s minds these days: gamification and learning.  And now I’ll share a few thoughts of my own…
If you think gamification is just about putting badges into your courses, then this book is for you.
If you're still on the fence about whether games work for learning, then this is certainly the book for you. 
If you need to gain buy-in for games within your organization and need to know what theories to cite to support your arguments, this is the book for you.  
If you need some examples of how games can be used in learning, yep, this is the book for you.
But if you really want to start designing and creating games, go out and play 'em.  
But still, that's not enough. There's a practical element we’re going to need if we’re really going to get this learning game thing right, so I just want to take a moment to focus on what it will take to build a game within an organization.  
In Chapter 9 "Managing the Gamification Design Process", Karl talks about the process for designing a learning game and who you'll need on your team.  At the moment, I suspect this project team list will be too daunting for most internal organizations:  

"The following team members typically are involved with a project for the gamification of learning and instruction. Not all of these individuals will be involved every time. It depends on the size and scope of the project. However, a project manager, instructional game designer, artist, at least one subject-matter expert, and a programmer or two are almost always involved." 

(Karl then goes on to talk about the need for animators, music/sound technician, and other specialized roles.)
Karl says if you don't have an instructional game designer (and these are hard to come by), you should go out and get an instructional designer who likes to play games.  But if you then consider that many organizations, especially smaller ones, are working with "home grown instructional designers" (who are maybe just powerpoint jockeys or really good at Captivate, but not actually instructional designers in the truest sense), then I'm not sure that many organizations will be able to do this in-house -- or at least not do it well.  I'll go out on a limb and say this bodes well for the growth of the outsourced instructional game design companies!
Karl doesn't talk much about budgets or time frames in all of this, but something to bear in mind.  Seems like it takes more time and more money than a lot of organizations have for a lot of their "learning" projects. Karl, what say you? (And he'll probably say something like, "it doesn't have to take more time or more money".)   
Jeannette Brooks of Articulate wrote about the book just yesterday and talked about how Storyline (Articulate’s soon to be released development tool) will put “gamification within easy reach of any e-learning developer.”  What do you think? Will Storyline make this all possible?  I suspect there’s more to good game design than the tool though, right?
So should there be more learning games? Absolutely.  Will more organizations design and build them.  Absolutely.  Will there still be a lot of the same old training solutions coming out of the same old training departments?  Most likely...
So I'll leave you with this cautionary tale from Karl Kapp:

"Too often the learning profession embraces a new concept as the answer to all learning problems and overhypes the concept to the point of backlash. It is important to approach the gamification of content and learning carefully and methodically. If gamification is seen as a panacea and applied to every single learning event, it will quickly become trivialized and non-impactful. Stay focused on using gamification for the right learning outcomes."

(Which is to say, don't be part of the problem. Instead, go out and read Karl’s book and find out why gamification isn’t just badges and points, but much, much more….)
Game on.
Follow the conversation on Karl’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/gamificationLI
And be sure to buy the book:  The Gamification of Learning and Instruction.

And a final note about our modern lives and the need for games…
This really has nothing to do with Karl's book, but more just a pesky rant I've got in me about games and gamification in general.  It seems our modern world has lost so much purpose...we need and want to be entertained because most of the challenge is gone (a very first world problem)...or we need to be numbed to the challenges we do have.  And now we need to dress up our boring jobs with games because otherwise who wants to learn them or even do them...I don't know. Kind of makes me sad…

A conversation on measurement and metrics (#ASTDLN)

These are my notes from the final workshop session at ASTD Learn Now in San Francisco.  Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson of Ontuitive are leading a conversation on metrics and measurement. 


The things that we currently measure about learning are things that the learner doesn't really care about.  (% of course completions, pass/fail rate, # student days, etc.)

Bob Mosher -- there is value in smile sheets.  Research shows that if people like you're training, they'll take more.  There is defendable data when 12,000 people say that class was good.


When we measure the first two moments of learning need (new and more) we can measure with knowledge & skills gain -- certification, demonstrable skills, compliance.


Gloria Geary, Why Don't We Just Weigh Them? http://www.gwu.edu/~lto/gery.html


When we move to the world of performance support, we need to gather data to show that we make a difference to the organization to achieve its aims -- we need to measure competency and measure moments 3-5.  We need to tie it to on the job performance gains:

• time to proficiency
• lower support costs
• completion of job-related tasks
• increased user adoption
• optimized business processes
• customer/employee loyalty, morale, and/or retention
• sales close/cycle time

But we need to be measuring what has a critical impact to the business.  We need to be measuring moments 3-5 (apply, solve, change)


There are three ways we can measure:

• digital monitoring (we can track activity, see where they click, see where they spend time).
• performer monitoring (quick checks)
• “others” monitoring

We can do quick checks and ask the learner how they’re doing – but not for those things that would be catastrophic if we don’t do them right.


Shouldn’t the real measurement be whether or not they’re selling more chairs (assuming they’re selling chairs, of course)? What’s been the business impact?


Critical Skills Analysis – determine along a spectrum where things have critical impact to the business. Work with SMEs to create a rubric for the lines of business and for different skills.  
These are the lines of business perception of critical business actions – these aren’t the learning team’s perception…Bob and Con show a 1-7 ranked scale – a critical impact rating.  At one end is complete catastrophic results – e.g., someone will die.


Make sure you’re investing in measurement in the right places.  Figure out what’s happening in the right places.  Figure out what’s happening to improve performance support and to improve critical business impact.


We can’t measure everything. Don’t try to boil the ocean.  Measure what matters.  How deep do I go?


The new analytics:


Chad shares some data you can get from a mobile app:

• time spend on a page
• frequency of use
• sharing info
• type of info accessed
• conversion points (are they doing what we’ve designed the experience to do?)
• Other things…does access frequency go up or down over tie? Does engagement time go up and down?)

Analytics more in line with what marketing people look at.


Sample analytics that they got:

• 20-25% of visits last between 10-30 mins (this was for a mobile quiz game that took about 2 mins – so people were spending more time here)
• users returned to the app in less than one day
• Game rules only comprised 1% of the time consumed – this was the manual/user guide – it confirmed for the developers that they had designed a good UI. 

This was data measured outside of the LMS. The digital analytic world – google analytics – it’s a new era in data. 


Yahoo Web Analytics – free tool used with advertisers.  To determine what % of business is coming from different channels.  At yahoo, using it to determine what learners are doing – what content they go to, what pages are useful, it allows them to understand behavior.  If there’s content out there that no one is looking at…then why?  This allows you to determine where they go and how long they stay – and to view it buy country/demographics.  Who’s using it?


Business example – health insurance provider using a performance support system:

• 84% of sales force used the embedded learning solution DAILY
• 6% increase in DAILY work productive – finding correct info, not waiting for answers, not bothering others (measurable, observable behaviors)
• 2.4 hours saved per week per employee
• So that means they had more time to sell.  $454K saved based on audience of 3,000 users

How would you go about gathering data at the moment of APPLY?

Chad Udell on Tools for Mobile Development (#ASTDLN)

Chad Udell (@visualrinse) of Float Learning is doing a quick rundown of tools he uses to help design, manage and build mobile projects.  This is day two of the ASTD Learn Now conference in San Francisco.


UI Stencils http://www.uistencils.com/ Use these templates and tools for rapid prototypes that are to scale for the device you're building to...


Project management tools like basecamp, assembla http://www.assembla.com/


Prototyping tools

• Fieldtest - web based tool to create fast mobile prototypes. http://fieldtestapp.com/ (focused on smartphones and up = android, iOS, windows mobile)
  Chad shares a prorotype he created that you go checkout:  http://fldt.st/10d1c7f
• App cooker http://appcooker.com/ An ipad app for building iphone and ipad apps (very meta) $25...

Once we've got the design prototypes...the tools to build the application:

Chad cannot recommend any of the rapid learning tools for dedicated mobile development.  

"Anything that's out there now, is not doing it well.  if you want to build high quality mobile learning apps, you have to use dedicated mobile tooling."

HTML, CSS, and learn some basic design for user experiences for mobile.

jQuery mobile  http://jquerymobile.com/ It's just like webdesign. Dreamweaver has this stuff built in for the newer versions.

(And Chad exhorts everyone to stop being scared of HTML - it's just an outline -- it's not programming!)

PhoneGap -- http://phonegap.com/ the only open source mobile framework that supports platforms.  Helps you bundle up content to an app that's distributable to a marketplace (android, apple, etc.) Adobe purchased phonegap and is building it into all of their tooling.

Misconception that apps have to go through the app store.  Apperian...helps you avoid putting proprietary content into the App store. www.apperian.com

Ah-ha’s and reflections from the first day of LearnNow (#ASTDLN)

The group shares some of their key moments and reflections from yesterday’s workshop session here at ASTD Learn Now conference in San Francisco.  I’m co-facilitating this conference with Bob Mosher, Conrad Gottfredson, and Chad Udell.


One project at a time.  We can start with one small piece and not try to do everything at once.


Thinking about blended learning vs. blended training.


The pyramid (see my notes from yesterday)


Two clicks, ten seconds.  We need to get people to the information they need quickly. 


The five moment of needs: new, more, apply, change, solve.  Moving the training org to think about all five of those moments and not just the first two.


We need to get to SUSTAIN.  Focus really on what’s needed.  All of the time expended on this long classes, etc. that people just forget after the event.


The implication for the formal learning if you change to thinking about this five moments of need – you re-design the formal event now to map into this new vision.

Implementing Social Learning (#ASTDLN)

My slides from my session at ASTD Learn Now in San Francisco.

Implementing Social Learning

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