The University of Tennessee Center for Industrial Services (UT CIS) is hosting a special one-day only Performance Partnering Workshop featuring Dick Handshaw.  "Now more than ever, the training profession needs individuals with performance consulting skills," says Bill Stetar, UT CIS productivity consultant.  "This workshop will help those who want to become better business partners to their customers by helping them achieve measurable results. It’s a great opportunity for trainers and educators to learn from Dick Handshaw, one of the best in the business." Handshaw uses positive examples, role play, and feedback to help participants develop proactive interviewing and re-framing skills. "The purpose is to help these professionals turn a training request into a performance consulting opportunity," says Handshaw. "  Stetar agrees. "Companies tell us they want their trainers not just to teach courses, but help improve operations and avoid unnecessary costs." The workshop takes place October 19, 2011, 9AM-4PM Central, at the UT CIS Polk Avenue Training Center, 193C Polk Avenue, Nashville TN 37210. Cost is $195 per person, $150 per person for ASTD members. Fee includes course materials and lunch. To register online, go to http://cis.tennessee.edu/train/programtraining/Pages/Human-Performance-Technology.aspx To register multiple people or receive the ASTD discount, contact Patty Wells, Senior Registration Assistant, The University of Tennessee Center for Industrial Services, 615-253-6371 or patty.wells@tennessee.edu.

Handshaw, Inc. and founder Dick Handshaw are featured in the September 2011 issue of the Greater Charlotte Biz Magazine. The magazine targets 100,000+ business owners, managers and executives in the 16-county greater Charlotte region. Handshaw was a featured local business profile and the article includes information on the history, service offering and core competencies offered by the company. Handshaw, Inc. provides training services, performance consulting and technology solutions to its clients. To read the article visit: http://www.greatercharlottebiz.com/article.asp?id=1245

Last week I was fortunate to attend the eleventh annual U.S. Coast Guard Human Performance Technology Workshop in Williamsburg, VA.  Over 500 attendees from the Coast Guard and other military branches, as well as various civilian contractors and HPT professionals attended the conference titled "Performance Improvement:  It’s What We Do!"  As we listened to Rear Admiral Stephen E. Mehling make his opening remarks about his command and their many accomplishments it reminded me again how fortunate we are to be U.S. citizens and to be defended and represented by such a high quality military community. It is easy to see that the Coast Guard HPT professionals are an impressive team of people that are dedicated to their work and performance improvement. They also have a very high value for mentoring.  Each year a member of the Coast Guard community is recognized for outstanding mentorship in HPT and that person receives the prestigious Charles E. Swaringen, Jr. Award. The winner must have made a significant impact on the professional growth and improvement in the area of HPT of more than one individual during the preceding year. Mentoring is something we all most likely have experienced during our lives as either a mentor or mentee or both. As technology continues to drive much of our activities, behaviors, and mindshare, this workshop reminds me that nothing can replace quality time spent mentoring or helping another professional improve his or her skills. There are many high quality and very successful training interventions and performance support capabilities available in the market today, but no one has been able to duplicate the total value of a human mentor to the quality of life and work of others.  The lesson learned for me from this workshop is to take more time to mentor others close to me. My salute to the Coast Guard HPT community for making mentoring a very high honor and priority. Brent Jennings, Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Handshaw, Inc.

Contrary to what some learners might think, instructional designers don’t write assessments to taunt, trick, or otherwise torture our victims…I mean learners.  We write assessments so that we can assess our learners’ performance at the end of the instruction.  But, what if the test results show low scores?  Does it really mean that learners have not met the performance objectives, or could it mean that we’ve written bad test questions?  To rule out problems in the test instrument, design your assessment with these goals in mind: Goal #1: Reliability.  If a test is reliable, it means you get consistent results.  You should be able to give the test to Learner A three times, and each time he or she should receive approximately the same score.  If your test does not prove to be reliable, the cause could be errors within the test instrument, such as badly written questions.  The cause could also be errors in the use of the test, such as it is administered incorrectly, or errors within the learner’s response, such as if the learner is distracted. Goal #2: Validity.  If a test is valid, it means that it measures the content it sets out to measure.  Your test might prove to be invalid if the wrong testing instrument is selected, the test is poorly constructed, or there are too few or unrepresentative test items.  There are four types of validity, on which you can find much in-depth information, that answer these questions: Content validity - Does the test measure the instructional objectives which are being taught? Predictive validity - Can the relative success of a learner be predicted based on the score of the test? Concurrent validity - Does the test accurately measure how learners perform on the job? Construct validity - Does the test measure qualities or factors outside of the performance objectives? Goal #3: Usability.  If a test is usable, learners can take it effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily in the environment in which it is given.  The test should be easy to administer, score, be economical to use, and have a good format. If your assessment meets these goals, you can be confident that you’ve designed a solid assessment. Beth Hughes is a Senior Instructional Designer at Handshaw, Inc. She takes projects through the entire process of instructional design and development, incorporating learning principles, instructional needs, and methodologies into the best learning solution for each client. Beth earned her M.Ed. in Instructional Systems Technology from UNCC.

I get the great pleasure of interacting daily with decision makers in a variety of roles, within a multitude of differing organizations, in a wide range of industries.  So when I start to hear similar challenges from all those diverse people, I’m naturally inclined to listen even more closely to what they’re saying.  These days, no matter how they describe it, clients are clamoring for assistance with aligning individual performance to business goals, whether the goals exist within their own department or go all the way to the top. The requests come in many forms from booking Dick Handshaw for a series of Performance Partnering workshops, to an opportunity to partner with a client to assess the validity of training requests, or simply a desire to have our consultants and designers execute analysis the right way.  The bottom line is our clients are more concerned than ever with the bottom line. Dick talks in his workshops about the responsibility that employees have to be stewards of their organization’s resources.  The great recession and the slow recovery (preceded by the rise in stature of procurement resources in the 2000s) have put an even greater level of scrutiny on how decision makers allot their organization’s funds.  What better way to show the executives how well those funds are being used than mapping results of solutions directly to the goals those same executives set for the organization? Jim and Dana Robinson published their first Performance Consulting book in 1995.  Some have given them credit for coining the term around the same time.  So, performance consulting is by no means a new approach.  In fact, just think of all that has happened in the world at large, and specifically in corporations, since the book was published.  The myriad of political, financial, ethical, and social developments of the past 10-15 years prompted Jim and Dana to publish a second edition in 2008.  As always, they were right on time.   Depending on how much you choose to believe from the media, financial and otherwise, we’re in for a prolonged period of recovery.  Those with buying power within organizations may find their decisions on how and what to spend continually put under a microscope.  As a result, showing alignment between individual performance and business goals will be the greatest justification for their expenses.  And, of course, it is and always has been simply the right thing to do. David Carmichael, Vice President, Operations at Handshaw, Inc.

It may be a well-kept secret to many people here in Charlotte, but there is a very active ASTD Chapter operating in the Greenville/Spartanburg area. I will be doing my presentation entitled, "Instructional Design:  How to Sell the Real Value" for that group on the evening of Tuesday, November the 15th. This is a good example how small our world of learning professionals can be. I started my initial contact with this group through my good friend Paul Barber who used to live and work in Charlotte and helped me start an ISPI chapter back in the late 1990s. Now my primary contact is Beth Freeman, who worked with me at my first job out of graduate school at First Union National Bank here in Charlotte.  Even closer to home, she and her husband Ben were my next door neighbors about the same time.  Don’t worry, Beth, I’m not telling how long ago that was. It’s remarkable how long networks can stay with you in this field. I have been to two meetings with this group, the most recent of which was a workshop with none other than one of my favorite presenters, Thiagi.  The chapter has a great place to meet and is very welcoming to visitors.  I am looking forward to another visit. I’ve been spending much of my time lately conducting workshops for clients. I delivered our "Performance Partnering" and "Results-Based Instructional Design" workshops for Bank of America’s Global Learning Group. I delivered two sessions of each workshop in person and am now adapting them to be delivered in a virtual classroom format.  Bank of America, or NCNB as it was originally known, was one of my first clients. I’m also delivering two courses to my newest client, Quintiles, Inc. in a virtual classroom format. I’ll spend much of November delivering "Performance Partnering" and new workshop called "The Gaps Map."  Although Quintiles is a new client, my connection to them also goes back a ways.  In 1992 I was nominated as one of three finalists in the North Carolina Entrepreneur of the Year Contest.  Quintiles was the finalist that won that category. Given that they are a global company with over 20,000 employees today, I would say the judges made a good choice. It’s an honor to be working with them.

For as long as I have been in this business—and that’s twenty seven years, but who’s counting—my best ideas for new services or products come from my clients. My newest workshop offering called "The Gaps Map Workshop" is the direct result of a request from Amanda Browde with Quintiles, Inc. Amanda was interested in having me conduct the "Performance Partnering Workshop" as four virtual classes for her audience of over twenty Performance Partners who reside in just about any time zone you can name. She also wanted them to go beyond just doing the proactive consulting or reframing meetings and be able to identify performance gaps. This lead to the development of the new "Gaps Map Workshop," which along with "Performance Partnering" will be delivered in virtual sessions lasting two to three hours each. Participants will still practice role plays and receive feedback thanks to live audio and web cams. In trial runs, we think the learning experience in the virtual sessions will be just as valuable as the experience in live classes. And I can complete all seven sessions with the global participants by repeating each one from my office at different times—without getting on a lot of airplanes. One of my favorite features of this course is that we used three Quintiles case studies for the sample video that demonstrates how to gather gaps logic in a meeting with a client. I think it will be much easier for participants to learn how to interview for the Gaps Map logic using business cases that they are familiar with. They will practice their interviewing skills to complete the Gaps Map using two other scenarios that were developed by Amanda and her colleagues at Quintiles. Each new client that uses the course will have the opportunity to create their own demonstration video and case studies for role plays. We have added this course to our line-up on the website. You can read the short description of it below. Thank you, Amanda, for a great idea. The Gaps Map Workshop Identifying Gaps Logic is something Jim and Dana Robinson made famous during their long and distinguished careers. Their books are widely read and will be available for a long time. The trick is not just understanding the gaps logic, but how to ask the right "Should, Is, Cause Questions" to complete the Gaps Map in order to understand the entire Performance Relationship. The interview is the part of the process that requires a little practice and feedback. In this perfect companion piece to our popular "Performance Partnering" course, we will view good and bad video examples of how to conduct an interview to begin completing a Gaps Map.  Participants will practice the skill during the workshop in realistic scenarios and receive feedback on their performance.

Dick Handshaw will be sharing his presentation "Training Request?  Ask Questions First" at the Training 2012 Conference & Expo.  The conference will be held in Atlanta, GA from February 13th - 15th and Dick’s session will be offered on the first day from 9:45 - 10:45am.  To learn more about the conference, visit www.trainingconference.com.  To receive a $200 discount on your Training Conference registration, use Discount Code:  CA2SP (valid on new orders only, not valid on Leadership Summit, one discount per attendee.)

Last week on November 15th, I had the pleasure of addressing a small but very enthusiastic group of members of the Upstate South Carolina ASTD Chapter at their very nice meeting space in Greenville, SC. A large percentage of the audience were practicing instructional designers so we enjoyed a great deal of discussion during the presentation, "Instructional Design—How to Sell the Real Value." Of course, the presentation really isn’t about selling the value of instructional design at all. The whole idea is to create real value and let the results sell themselves. The Upstate members offered the best Southern hospitality. We had such a good meeting that we decided that to reconvene in March for a workshop. My thanks to Beth Freeman, Vice President of Programs, for her attention to detail in the planning and execution of this event. I also want to thank Beth and her husband for joining me for dinner after the meeting.  Beth and her husband Ben used to be neighbors of mine in Charlotte before I even started Handshaw, Inc.  If you do the math, that means we go back about thirty years. It was great catching up.  I look forward to seeing Beth and the great folks of Upstate ASTD again in 2012.

I’ve never written about Virtual Instructor Lead Training (VILT) before. I didn’t think I really knew much about it other than attending a few sessions about it at conferences. But after finishing my 27th one yesterday, and all since November 7th, I think I know something about them now. One thing I know is they work better than I thought they would.  In fact, I think the learning in the virtual session was every bit as effective as the live sessions I have conducted. I wish I had some data to back that statement up. I am merely stating an opinion at this point. The one aspect of these sessions that intrigued me the most was the use of webcams. I conducted these sessions with two different clients: one of whom used webcams and another who did not. Both clients were taking the exact same classes. The topic was divided into four two to three hour sessions with a limit of six learners for role play sessions and fifteen learners for the explanation and demonstration sessions. The explanation took place with a few slides and lots of discussion and questions. The demonstrations were done with short videos to show good and bad examples of consulting meetings. Fortunately, the video presentations worked flawlessly in both virtual presentations, using a different system for each client.  Role plays were conducted with one learner playing the part of a client and the other playing the role of the consultant.  Upon completion of the ten to fifteen minute role plays, feedback was given by other participants and by me based on an eight principle check list.  Although I had done this hundreds of times in face to face classes, I had never tried this instructional strategy in a virtual environment before. It is my contention that the group with the webcams more closely simulated the face to face experience. I would propose that as human beings, we are still conditioned to look at faces when conversing for any length of time. Sure, we can stay focused for a short phone conversation of twenty minutes or so, but what about staring at slides for an hour or two, listening to a voice or voices, but never seeing the speakers? Again, my expectations of the webcam’s ability to bridge this gap were low. I found myself staring at the different faces and being completely involved in the conversations for two and sometimes even three hours. I was amazed. Is anyone out there familiar with any research done on the topic of webcam use in virtual classes and its effectiveness?  Or have you had any similar experiences you would like to share?

This will be my last blog entry for this year. I’m sure I will think of lots of new things to write about next year, but for this year, I would like to say thank you to some special people. First of all, thank you to all of our clients who have supported us this year and in years past. I hope we have been able to make your lives better and I hope we have helped to make your organizations work smarter and better.I also want to thank the wonderful people I am privileged to work with here at Handshaw. You are hard-working, talented and dedicated. Your passion for your profession and your clients shows through in everything you do. We have had a very successful year in 2011 and we are all grateful. We are working right now on strategic plans for an even better 2012. I know I have my clients and my colleagues here to thank for that success. Here’s wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a very prosperous New Year. Sincerely,Dick Handshaw

I had a good year last year teaching performance consulting skills to a few hundred people within my client base and at conferences and professional societies. By far the most common reason anyone attends these classes is because they are dissatisfied being order takers for training requests and they want to have a measurable impact on the business. Another possible motivation for improving skills in performance consulting should be the current economic situation. One would think that with increasing layoffs and tightening budgets, two factors would come into play: Given the cost of both taking and developing training, corporations would be motivated to eliminate training that is not needed, of poor quality, or redundant. Given that fewer employees are left to do the work of many, those key remaining employees must be valued and trained to achieve maximum productivity. I just finished reading an article in the November/December issue of Performance Improvement, titled "The Effects of the Recession on Worker’s Moral, Ethical and Interpersonal Behavior" by Joan Marques and Nancy R. Luna. It seems that at the very time when economic needs dictate a move towards performance consulting based on the reasons cited above, the effects of the economic recession on workers themselves may be discouraging the practice of performance consulting. Here’s how the article supports my hypothesis that while recessionary times may dictate a greater economic need for performance consulting, potential performance consultants may be less inclined to adopt performance consulting as a practice. There were two hypotheses in the study that got me thinking about the adoption of performance consulting in the workplace: "As the effects of the economic recession increase, positive perceptions among workers decrease." "Greater job security contributes to worker’s levels of happiness on the job." Since practicing performance consulting requires an optimistic view that your actions can make a positive outcome in business for your organization, increased negative perceptions of your organization and its prospects for success does not contribute to making potential consultants take up the practice. Furthermore, since there is some level of risk involved, not many would be performance consultants want to risk a good job by taking unnecessary chances. So, at the very time when we need more performance consultants to speak up, there may be human factors working against the possible solution. The only antidote I can find to this conundrum is leadership. Would be performance consultants need to know that someone in a leadership position will value their efforts and support them when the going gets difficult. Jim Robinson once told me that once he and Dana successfully built a strong performance consulting practice within an organization, many times the leader of that group would leave and business often returned to the prior reactive state. So it seems that the need for building performance consulting practices within organizations could last in Jim’s mind at least, "for about the next one thousand years." This is the part where I ask for your opinion. Is the economic recession making it more difficult to introduce performance consulting to our organizations? Or will the economic needs of the recession ultimately make it easier for us to implement performance consulting?

On Thursday evening, January 12, ISPI Charlotte’s 2012 year got off to a great start with an outstanding program.  We met in our new location in the UNC Charlotte building uptown with a great turnout.  It appears the new location will be a healthy change for us.  Our presenter Cal Wick told us a story about a learning solution that his company designed for one of his clients that appeared to be a great success.  The only problem was that when he visited the company a few months later, everything seemed to have reverted back to the behavior that was causing problems before the learning event.  Now who hasn’t been there?  Cal promised himself that he would figure out how to make the learning transfer stick and he would do it before he died.  Cal looked pretty healthy and I think he has figured out the answer to this problem for all of us.  For me, the take away of the evening was his Application Scorecard.  This scorecard is made up of ten events that should occur before, during, and after the learning event to make the learning stick.  Each of the ten events is scored on a five point Likert scale.  Like most good learning plans today, it starts with the business needs and then it goes on to make sure managers are involved and held accountable.  It measures how learners learn from each other and measures on-the-job results.  The entire process is easy to understand and easy to use. I highly recommend you visit Cal’s website at www.forthillcompany.com or email him at Wick@forthillcompany.com.  Thank you Cal for getting ISPI Charlotte off to a great start in 2012.

It appears to be widely accepted that performance objectives are a good thing because most instructional designers write them and most organizations use them. But since their introduction by the likes of Mager and Gagne decades ago, I find many instructional designers are unsure of the many things for which they can be used. As an advanced organizer for learners:  Gagne says that objectives help learning by giving learners an advanced organizer, or a cue for what’s coming up in the course they are about to attempt. While I do not dispute Dr. Gagne, I did conduct some research of my own in the early 90s when I had the opportunity to track whether several hundred users of an online course opted to read the first page of a course that contained objectives, or if they opted to skip the page. In my sample, only 10% of learners opted to view the page, which means that 90 % felt no need to even view the learning objectives for the course. Upon interviewing some of those learners to see if they would mind not having the option to view objectives, the 10% who opted to view them strongly stated their preference for always seeing objectives before beginning a lesson.  My attempt at getting out of doing some work failed. Score one for Dr. Gagne. As a contract among everyone on the design team to describe required outcomes:  Here is one use for objectives from which a number of parties can benefit.  This would be an example of Franklin Covey’s concept of starting with the end in mind. The primary parties to benefit here are the client or project sponsor and the lead instructional designer. The objectives serve as a concise and definitive description of the required behavior of the learners upon successful completion of the instruction. If the objectives are well-written, they also serve instructional designers to better understand the required level of learned capability, and ultimately help facilitators to understand exactly what is required of their learners.  Well written objectives are your best tool to manage expectations among all members of the project team. As a means for formulating assessment strategies:  This is my favorite outcome of good performance objectives. It is also somewhat dependent on using my favorite format for writing objectives, and that is to use Gagne’s five part format. The key is in the Action portion of the objective that describes how to perform the required task.  At Handshaw, we write one objective for each main task on our task analysis. Writing the Action portion becomes very easy because we simply use the sub-tasks from the task analysis to describe exactly what steps a learner takes to perform the task, which becomes a detailed and accurate way to describe how the task should be performed. Once you read a couple of sample learning objectives written in Gagne’s format, you will easily see how they describe exactly how the task should be measured, which tells you everything you need to know about how you will assess that learners have met your objectives. And, once you know how the task should be measured, it becomes clearly obvious how the task should be taught. This in turn defines your instructional strategy and often media selection without having to guess what might work. This is certainly one of my favorite parts in the instructional design process where the outcome of one step becomes the input to the next. Well written objectives will help you select and construct good testing instruments every time. Future blog entries will deal with how to write good objectives efficiently and how to use your objectives to get the most benefit out of the time you spent writing them.  We will also look at how referring to your objectives can help you handle scope changes.

Last week we looked at some pros and cons of why we should even spend time writing Performance Objectives. I think the evidence is certainly stacked in favor of having them, whether learners use them or not. Now let’s talk about how to write them so that they benefit your design efforts. We can all agree that we don’t have time for anything that doesn’t benefit our learning solution design. Last week we discussed Gagne’s five part format. While there are many other experts on objectives, this one is still my favorite. The five parts are: Situation - The stimulus for why the task should be performed. Learned Capability - The verb that describes the level of learned capability. Object - The object or the "what" of the capability verb. Action - Describes "how" the learner will perform the task. Tools/Constraints - Describes specific tools or methods that must be used and any constraints such as time or mastery level. This may be considered an optional part if tools and constraints don’t apply. Here is an example: Main task:  Recommend the best product mix. Situation - Given a prospective customer Learned Capability - the learner will be able to recommend Object - the best product mix Action - by asking probing questions, presenting related benefits and handling objections Tools/Constraints - in every sales transaction. At Handshaw, Inc. we write our performance objectives exactly as you see the example above. This format makes it easier for us to write objectives and it makes it easier for our clients to read and understand them. One thing you have to know is where to get the information. We always do a task analysis and that is what makes it easy. Here is how we do it: The situation comes from whatever event prompts the learner to have to perform the task, which in this case is the presence of a prospective customer. The capability verb and the object come directly from the main tasks in the task analysis, which in this case is "Recommend the best product mix." The action portion comes from the sub tasks underneath the main task, which in the case were: ask probing questions, present related benefits and handle objections. Note that each sub task also contains a verb and an object. The relevant constraint in this case is that the task must be performed as described "in every sales transaction." The most common mistake we see is that some people try to write performance objectives without first completing a task analysis. You may be able to identify things that are important, and may be important, but without analyzing the task first you are likely to leave something out or make mistakes. Making up performance objectives without the aid of a task analysis does not guarantee that learning will be linked to business needs or to performance on the job. Another common mistake is in the use of capability verbs. Gagne calls it a capability verb because it should be linked to one of his levels of Learned Capability. This could be a topic for another blog, but let’s just say that the verb "understand" is not one of them. It is difficult to measure one’s level of understanding. Many tasks require the performance of a procedure which Gagne defines as Rule Use. In order to perform a procedure you use a set of operating rules to complete the task. He recommends using the verb "demonstrates" as a capability verb which accurately describes the required level of Learned Capability. Next time, we’ll discuss how to get the most value out of our performance objectives once we have written them.

Two thousand people made their way to Atlanta this week for this excellent conference. The conference host and master of ceremonies again this year is North Carolina’s own Tony O’Driscoll.  The keynote sessions were even more plentiful and as entertaining and informative as last year. Each session includes two to three interesting thought leaders who present their topics and then chat with each other at the end of the session. It’s nice to see this combination of scripted and unscripted exchange of information expertly facilitated by Tony. There are so many breakout sessions that it’s harder than ever to decide which one to go to. There are the usual master presenters like Thiagi, Judy Hale, Jane Bozarth and Darryl Sink, along with many practitioners with great case studies and best practices in everything from performance consulting, to learning design, to technology related topics. There is definitely something for everyone. Something new for the conference this year was the creative social media campaign to promote speakers. Speakers were asked to write short articles in topics related to their presentations which were tweeted and published in the weeks leading up to the conference. I have never done a version of my session on reframing training requests in an hour before, but I managed to do it here on Monday morning. I had a good time slot right after the first keynote and it was well attended. If you haven’t been to this conference, put it on your list for next year. It will be in Orlando and I’ll see you there.

If you practice writing objectives in this five part format for a while, it becomes a relatively easy and efficient process—that is if you start with a task analysis. Now that you have them, let’s make sure you get the most benefit out of your performance objectives. Can your learners use your five part objectives as an advance organizer? Probably not in their current format. If they are done correctly, using all the sub tasks from your task analysis in the action portion, they don’t exactly roll off the tongue.  So they may need a little editing to make them learner friendly. Performance objectives are most valuable as a design tool. They help you define and verify exactly what the learning outcome should be and they help you design your measurement strategy. Your five part objectives are just what you need for Subject Matter Experts and project sponsors. While a task analysis is useful for many SMEs, the performance objective is another way to present the information contained in a task analysis. If people don’t always respond well to your task analysis, they will almost always be able to understand and relate to your performance objectives. These five part objectives are your best shot at getting everyone on your design team to agree on exactly what the learner outcomes should be. I often hear designers complain about scope creep and that clients keep changing their minds about what the learning should contain and how things should be done. When I ask them if they use performance objectives tied to a task analysis, they usually say, "No, I don’t have time for that." This is where I like to quote my good friend Damon Hearne, who has been doing this as long as I have, by saying, "If you don’t do analysis, be prepared to do design over and over again." The best use of your performance objectives is as a design tool to help you design your measurement strategy and to select and create your testing instruments. The action portion of the objective practically designs your tests for you. Consider the following example:Main task:  Write a five part performance objective. Situation - Given a list of incomplete objectives Learned Capability - the learner will demonstrate Object - the rules for writing five-part objectives Action - by rewriting each objective Tool/Constraint - in a five-part format. By looking at the action portion which explains how the learner should perform the task, it becomes obvious how to measure mastery of that task. A Multiple-Choice question won’t do; neither will a True/False question. You must give the learner a list of incomplete objectives and evaluate how well the learner can actually write them into a five-part format. This is an actual objective from my workshop on how to write performance objectives. Here is another another example from teaching a class on scuba diving. Main task: Perform buddy equipment check. Situation - Before entering the water Learned Capability - the learner will demonstrate the procedure  Object - for checking your buddy’s dive gear Action - by testing the bladder inflate button, testing the bladder air release button, checking all buckles and fasteners, checking the regulator for air flow, checking the safe second regulator for air flow and checking for proper weights Tools/Constraints - with 100% accuracy. You don’t really have to know anything about scuba diving to know how to test this important performance objective. We have a saying around our dive shop, "it’s only life support." Obviously we are going to observe the person performing this equipment check and grade the results with a checklist. And yes, they have to get them all. It is easy to write this objective, even if you know nothing about diving. You would observe an expert performing this equipment check, write down all the steps you observed as sub tasks under the main task of performing an equipment-check, and then use the task analysis to write the objective. It works every time. Let me know how you write objectives. There must be somebody out there who has a few good tips for me.

I get to do two of my favorite workshops during the month of March. I guess that’s sort of a birthday present for me. This Friday, the 16th I will be at my home ASTD chapter, the ASTD Research Triangle Area. I visited them last spring for an evening meeting and was fortunate enough to be invited back to present a full day workshop entitled, "Learning Analysis?  You Can’t Afford Not To." The morning will start off with our popular Task Analysis Game, which will give participants a fun way to learn how to do task analysis the Handshaw way. Teams of three to five participants will then have the opportunity to develop a task analysis for a project they are currently working on. Just before or after lunch, they will receive feedback from the group on their outcomes. The workshop will conclude with more hands-on practice with Audience Analysis, Learning Culture Analysis and Delivery Systems Analysis. All participants will receive a 30 page workbook which will help them put their new skills to work on the job. On Thursday, March 22, I will be with the Upstate South Carolina ASTD in Greenville, SC. I visited their chapter last November and was delighted to be invited back for a workshop. They chose the half day workshop entitled, "Training Request?  Ask Questions First." In this session participants will see a short video demonstration of how to successfully reframe a training request. They will see how eight principles can be applied to help the client see his or her request from a different point of view and give permission to gather more information when appropriate, instead of jumping to a quick solution. Next, they will see short video samples showing somewhat comical, but identifiable common mistakes that could be made. The bulk of the workshop will feature role plays from each of the participants as they practice reframing requests with a client partner. The real learning opportunity is when they each receive feedback from the group and the instructor according to how effectively they used the eight principles to reframe the training request. If you would like to sign up for either of these two workshops, send me a quick email. There isn’t a lot of time, but as of now both programs are still accepting registrations. Dick.handshaw@handshaw.com

When I was a kid growing up in a small town in western New York, most of my friends wanted to be a fireman or a doctor or something recognizable at least. I myself wanted to be a veterinarian.  My point is that I don’t think any of us ever picked Instructional Designer or Performance Consultant in our early career planning. As I heard someone say recently, most learning and performance professionals come to this field by accident. Everyone has an interesting story to tell. It is, however, a profession. Designing learning programs and performance solutions isn’t something that just anyone can do and do well without education and training for the profession. I happened on a Master’s program quite by accident and it was through that experience that I chose to become an instructional designer. The amount of continuing education and professional development that I have had since then is about ten times what I learned at Indiana University. I have had the opportunity to attend many conferences and local ISPI and ASTD meetings to hear other presenters share what they have learned in their careers. I am now having the opportunity to attend these events with my own workshops and presentations to help other professionals learn. Our field is constantly evolving—and not just the technology. Many of the old best practices are still being applied in new ways to meet the needs of today’s designers and consultants. I have met many wonderful people in my recent travels to conferences and ASTD and ISPI meetings.  I have the greatest admiration for all who continue to improve their skills and learn new things. So if you’ve been putting off that Master’s degree, start on it now. If you think you are too busy to go to your local ISPI or ASTD Chapter meeting, rearrange your priorities. Find a good conference and pay for it yourself if you need to. It’s your chosen profession, now. You owe it to those you serve to be as good at it as you possibly can be.

Based on considerable experience last fall with some Virtual Instructor Lead Instruction (VILT), I became interested in the use of webcams and their effect on learning in a VILT environment. My experience involved small class sizes of six learners so we could conduct role plays and hear feedback from the participants and the instructor. In half of the role plays all participants were able to see each other and the instructor via webcam. In the other half of the role plays, we conducted the sessions with audio only. I became so interested by what I observed that I began to look for research on the role of webcams in VILT and their subsequent effect on learning. Not being able to find what I was looking for, I decided to conduct my own research study with the help of a Davidson College Senior, Jennifer Green, who is majoring in Psychology with a focus on methods and Industrial-Organizational Psychology. That’s when Jennifer uncovered several studies about a phenomenon known as "Social Presence." These studies dated back as far as 1976, with the most recent being in 2006. I quickly realized that it was the creation or lack of social presence that created the difference between the two types of learning experiences. The following definition of social presence is taken from a study called "Social Presence as a Predictor of Satisfaction within a Computer-mediated Conference Environment" by Charlotte N. Gunawardena and Frank J. Zittle from the American Journal of Distance Education Vol. 11, No. 3, 1997. Short, Williams and Christie (1976) postulated that the critical factor in a communication medium is its "social presence," and defined this as "the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships…" (65). This means the degree to which a person is perceived as a "real person" in mediated communication. They define social presence as a quality of the medium itself and hypothesize that communications media may vary in their degree of social presence.  The capacity of the medium to transmit information about facial expression, direction of gaze, posture, dress and non-verbal cues all contribute to the degree of social presence of a communications medium. We found some research measuring the effect of social presence on learner satisfaction, but we did not find significant research regarding the effect of social presence on learning, or actual performance. Our study will focus mostly on the ability of the webcam to affect social presence and whether or not this effect has any bearing on learner success. We are currently looking for individuals or organizations that would be interested in taking part in the study. By doing so you would also receive a free training seminar in the performance consulting skill of reframing a training request. If you would like to participate, please respond in the space below, or email me at dick.handshaw@handshaw.com.

This is a big year for the annual conference of the International Society for Performance Improvement. This year’s conference marks our 50th Anniversary. To mark the international flair of our society, you’ll have to have a passport unless you live in Canada. The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada. I am very pleased and honored to have been selected to do two presentations for the conference. On Thursday, April 19th, I’ll be presenting a pre-conference workshop from 8:30 to 5:00 on Performance Partnering. I’ll be presenting the same topic as a 90 minute session at 10:00 am on the Saturday the 21st. The only real difference between the two presentations is that in the workshop, everyone gets to do practice role plays and receive feedback. In the 90 minute presentation we will have time for just one role play for the group to observe and provide feedback.  The role play topics will be conducting a proactive consulting interview with a new client and reframing a training request from an existing client. I have probably observed well over 300 of these role play sessions in the past couple of years and they really are fascinating. Everyone acts using their own personal experiences so the role plays are very realistic and have a high fidelity to real situations. Everyone in the workshop or 90 minute session will learn to provide feedback based on a pre-determined checklist. Participants learn how to conduct the role plays by seeing how the items on the checklist are performed on a sample video role play. They will also view some short videos showing common mistakes. The instructional strategy seems to work well, as most individuals master 6 out of the 8 items on the checklist during their first role play. I will finish my year as Chairperson of the Chapter Partnership Committee as our committee hosts the Chapter Leaders’ Workshop on Friday, April 20th from 8:30 to 5:00. We will launch and test the brand new Chapter in a Box tool for starting or revitalizing an ISPI chapter.  We will do this through a hands-on exercise where participants design and prepare a new chapter for start-up. We will also have guest speakers and an afternoon session in which we will learn about different services that can be offered by chapters. I hope you can join us in Toronto for our 50th Anniversary celebration.

I’m not making the assumption that all Instructional Design teams need transforming, but I have worked with many teams over the years that have made a conscious decision to change. The best way to determine if your team needs to make changes is to conduct your own gap analysis. First, create a vision of what you want your team to look like. Now, take an objective look at your current results and accomplishments. To complete your gap analysis, look at the performance that is yielding your current results and try to identify what kind of performance will be required to attain the results described in your vision. This way you can define your business gap and your performance gap. We see a variety of performance gaps described by our clients. Some have issues with scope creep that require project rework and extended schedules. Some are concerned that training doesn’t really improve performance to levels required by employees’ jobs and want to move away from a content approach to more of a task based approach. Others have issues with measurement of skills with regard to reliability and validity of testing instruments. Many are concerned about doing too much training at too high a cost. There are three steps that we have identified to achieve adoption of new or changed practices in instructional design: The first step is the easiest—skill development. Improving task analysis skills is one of the first ways to close many of the gaps listed above. Writing performance objectives that describe more measureable outcomes is another tactic that will close gaps. Learning to select appropriate testing instruments and writing better test items is another way to improve results. Skill development classes usually need to be followed by some coaching and mentoring on the job, but improving skills is not difficult or time consuming. Perhaps the most important and difficult part of creating change in an instructional design team is leadership. The leader must be able to articulate a vision that will ultimately yield better business results for the organization as a whole. The leader will have to seek to inspire champions in the client base as well as within the team itself. And most important, the leader will have to exemplify the change he or she wishes to make in the team. The third critical aspect of transformation will be to align team members’ expectations and contributions. A common goal of many transformations is to develop some consistency of best practices for designing instruction.  It might be faster and easier to give the team a methodology that is proven and ask them to use it, but this rarely works. It is more time consuming, but far better to let the team develop the best practices they will use and hold them accountable for using it and improving it. After all, the people who are going to have to use the process day in and day out are the best ones to develop and improve the process. Ownership is a key to success and the team will really enjoy the process of creation.

This is one of my favorite quotes from my friend and mentor, Jim Robinson. It came to mind this morning as I was talking to friend and associate, Chris Adams, just as we walked out of a session at the 2012 ISPI conference in Toronto. A lot of us find our way into the learning and performance improvement field quite by accident. Most of us perform our jobs quite well without advanced degrees or formal training in our chosen field, but how long can we keep that up? Most of us will agree that professional development is important, but we are especially busy in a world when we are all doing more with less. Sometimes we feel we have little choice but to give our attention to the urgent deadline, the problems at home, or the next meeting. There comes a time when our career planning calls for something that will improve us and make us better equipped to prioritize the urgent and to handle it better. Because of my job, I attend lots of conferences. At this ISPI conference, I am reminded again how much work and discovery is being done in our profession every day and how important it is for me and my associates to keep up with discoveries and research in order to give the best advice and work to our clients. Dick Clark, the still living one—one of the greats in our field, reminded us how important it is for us to question new fads and ideas until we see evidence that these new practices actually do bring about the results for which they were intended. You won’t learn about these things, things that may surprise you and change the way you approach that looming deadline, unless you take time now and then to learn more about our profession and become a better performance improvement professional. Do some planning now. Find a conference to go to next year. Better yet, check out your local ASTD or ISPI chapter and find out what educational events they are offering in your own area. Invest a little time in yourself. Thank you ISPI for a truly excellent (even if under-attended) conference. I hope next year more people will put the urgent on hold for three days and attend the 2013 ISPI Conference, On the Road to Reno. And congratulations, ISPI, on your 50th Anniversary. What a rich legacy your members have left us.

After the wonderful ISPI Conference in April, that will be a tough month to beat. This year’s conference was my favorite one I have ever attended. If you are thinking about a conference to go to next year, think about ISPI in mid-April in Reno, NV. It is THE conference for anyone in the performance improvement profession. My first stop for the month of May will be on May 10th in Chattanooga, TN. There is a very enthusiastic ASTD chapter there that is also interested in performance improvement. I’ll be doing the very same 90 minute session on "Performance Partnering" with them that I did in Toronto for ISPI. I hope they like it as well as the Toronto group did. If the conversations I have had with two of their chapter leaders are any indication, I’m really going to enjoy this one. The risky part about the session I’m going to do for them is the impromptu role play where I ask for two volunteers from the audience to role play a reframing conversation. Reframing a training request the right way can be a bit challenging and I’m always worried I won’t get any volunteers, but I’m pretty sure this group will come through. On May 17th, I will be participating in a webinar for the eLearning Guild. My topic for that is a new presentation called "Instructional Design: Demonstrating Value through Results." I have never been a fan of webinars until I attended a session done by Karen Hyder from the eLearning Guild a couple of years ago. Thanks to her session I tried a couple dozen webinars with clients last fall. Those were small group sessions and were quite successful, but I still have not had real success with a larger session of sixty or more people. I’m about to get my chance. The best thing about doing a webinar with the eLearning Guild? They are very organized and they give you a coach! They are not going to take any chances that their presenters are not going to perform to their high standards. And the best part for me—I got Karen Hyder for my coach. I have learned a lot, she improved my session tremendously and I am really looking forward to this session. If you are interested in attending, please click here to learn more about the series of webinars they will be hosting on May 17th. I hope you can join us.