Taking an Artistic Approach

I had a boss once who loved to draw on the white board. It became something of a joke on his team, that at the beginning of a meeting we would hide the dry erase markers before he came into the room. It never stopped him; he started carrying them around. Only recently do I truly appreciate his approach.

Sidebar for a personal story: My daughter’s soccer team recently ended their season and part of my end of season gift was a coloring book and crayons and the missive that it was something to help me reduce my stress (something of a gag gift). At home after the party, I sat down with the coloring book and colored a picture. I took the time to work slowly and carefully, experimenting with different colors and used shading to highlight areas. It took me back to a calmer time: I worked on the image for me, not for my boss, or my kids, or for the executive committee – just for me. I loved it.

I am known among my peers as the visual learning guy. I push hard on the team to use fewer words and more pictures in both the training materials we produce and the presentations we create. If an image is worth a thousand words then we should we be creating voluminous training in images, not pages of text. Too often, the push back is, “I can’t draw” or “I’m not creative.” Let me say now that everyone can take this approach give some processes and tools.

1.       Take some time to tap into your creative side. A quick search on Google yields a plethora of sites on coloring to relieve stress. I’m not saying you should make it a daily habit, but why not take a few minutes once in a while to doodle? It unlocks a thinking habit that thrives on free association and random connections that you might not have considered. Those links are the foundations of innovation and might lead to bigger and better ideas.

2.       Incorporate a process for thinking differently. The Six Thinking Hats framework developed by Edward de Bono is a wonderful starting point for organizing meetings and encouraging a style of thinking. Assign the role of Green Hat to various team members and have them work at being the creative, “blue sky” thinker. By assigning the role to a person you give permission for ideas to flow and remove limitations.

3.       Encourage mind-mapping as a technique for organizing information. On many occasions I find myself in meetings struggling to grasp how all the parts of a program or initiative are tied together. The various stakeholders have input into the problem and the resulting maelstrom can be hard to decode. A mind map can help illustrate the interconnectedness of all the ideas and make concrete the linkages that the entire team needs to see.

4.       Seek out visual representations of complex ideas. I have two sites I visit regularly to keep my mindset firmly planted in a visual approach. One is the RSA.org channel on YouTube. This British think tank does a fabulous job of linking thought leaders to artistic displays of the concepts. The images drawn in the videos make the presentations so much more vivid. Another is visual.ly a web site that shows how information can be presented visually and, in my opinion, more memorably.

Finally, let me say that visuals don’t have to be high end art work to be effective. A very simple visual can speak volumes to the reader and communicate at more levels than a paragraph of text. Visuals are great for learning, meeting management, brainstorming, even project management (what’s a WBS but a visual of all the tasks in a project?). Don’t fear the creative side, embrace it and take your projects and work into a different, better, more holistic place.

How are you using and visuals and creativity to work more efficiently in your role? If you aren’t using them now, how could you?

Quality, Cost, Time. Pick two.

I stumbled into my next topic while listening to Fresh Air on National Public Radio. In this episode, Terry Gross, the host, interviewed Economist Uwe Reinhardt to discuss the hidden costs and economics of health care. During the interview, Reinhardt relates an interesting story that summarizes the difference between European and American views on health care. Specifically, it illustrated a mindset that everyone knows they will get health care, and yet also realizes it won't be immediate. It reminded me of a rule I live by when advising my clients in the development of learning solutions. The rule is known as Triple Constraint. It's a project management concept introduced to me early in my career. You can Google Triple Constraint and get almost 700,000 hits.

For those of you for whom this is new info, Triple Constraint refers to the relationship between Quality (Scope), Cost (Resources) and Time (Schedule). I'm no Project Manager, and I cherish the PMs I know and get to work with, so I'll oversimplify this rule for purposes of this message. According to the rule, you can't have it all. I've been on plenty of projects during which time the needs of the business, or the requirements of the tools had to change to respond to external or internal factors. In these cases there was a change in scope (quality) of the deliverable. As a good partner to the operations, I was tasked with explaining that it would either take longer to make the change or cost extra. Never a fun conversation. Regardless of the cause of the change, my Ops partners needed to know that change costs, in either time, money, or both.

Organizational culture impacts design and development as well. Some organizations have a "get it done now" mentality, so that every project is urgent. Others have long, convoluted approval processes in which every VP needs to throw in two or more cents. Still others very strictly control spending and resources budgeted (plan on seeing this more often in these tough times). In every case, most organizations want the same thing: the best learning tools, for little or no money, right away.

So how do you get ahead of the problem? How can we, as learning professionals, manage our projects to quickly create inexpensive, high quality learning solutions ?

1. Define behavioral outcomes. The behavior change drives the design and allows the training team to pick only the activities and content that will affect changes in the learners.

2. Good enough is good enough. Everybody loves a fancy product. Fancy takes time and probably costs extra. If it doesn't, I'd question the quality of the product. Pick the very best activities and then do a great job packaging those items.

3. Know your end user. The deliverable has to fit within the world of the end user, not yours. Keep that in mind in the early stages and it'll save you time later. If end users can't use the tools, behavior won't change and you'll spend extra cycles fixing your tools.

4. Collaborate with business owners to set clear expectations. Get with the business owners, the front line operators, and make sure they have a say in what the final outcome looks like. They will appreciate being involved in the solution and will be ready when the tools are handed off.

5. Provide choices. My favorite strategy is to provide a menu, with pictures, of what proposed solutions might look like. This strategy allows me to offer "good, better, best" choices and allows the business to choose how much it wants to spend on the solution.

Making clients see that they can't have it all takes patience (easier said than done, trust me). Keeping them involved every step of the way will certainly alleviate tension when changes to the budget or timeline are required. In the end, your clients will respect your professionalism, business sense, forthright partnership and quality products.