Direct: from Brain to Action

What are the three biggest headaches in eLearning?

• Getting the knowledge out of the expert’s brain
• Embedding the knowledge in the learner’s actions
• Everything in between

Worse, these are intimately related. When experts and learners are at a distance from one another, it is incredibly easy to miscommunicate. It is equally easy for the message to get misplaced on the way. To combat this, instructional designers have developed a meticulous methodology to guarantee that the knowledge leaves and arrives safely. However, as change drives education and training to respond more quickly, that attention to detail is under stress. Increasingly, it looks like we are facing a choice: fast,  good and cheap- pick two.

How can you deliver knowledge efficiently?

While it seems new to the eLearning community, this dilemma is not unique. Goods producing industries and service industries have faced this challenge for decades. They have also found ways to resolve the conflict and deliver quality, speed and value. So why not approach the problem the way that Toyota makes cars? Why not adapt the principles of “lean thinking” to the knowledge supply chain – end to end. That takes some new ways of thinking and thinking about some new things.

The Principles of Lean Systems

The concept of a ‘lean’ business processes is at least a century old. Many credit Henry Ford’s Rouge River factory in the 1920s as the first major business process that was seriously lean. A ship with iron ore unloaded at one end of the plant and steel smelted from its ore emerged in the Model A automobiles at the other end. Nothing was allowed to impede the smooth progression from raw material to finished vehicle. In the years since, Ford’s vision has been refined. Now, many operations experts consider the Toyota Production System to be the gold standard for lean. For my taste, Spear and Bowen’s definition of Toyota’s approach reduces Toyota’s success to four key principles:

1. All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing and outcome.
2. Every customer-supplier connection must be direct and there must be an unambiguous yes-or-no way to send requests and receive responses.
3. The pathway for every product and service must be simple and direct.
4. Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization.

Source: Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System, Steven Spear and H. Kent Bowen, Harvard Business Review, Sept 1999, p98

Lean processes are not unique to automobile manufacturing, or even to manufacturing in general. They can occur in a wide range of businesses, from supply chains, to services, to the military, and even healthcare. The essential ingredient is the passion to apply and follow sound system design principles. There are several versions of the principles. In their 1996 book Lean Thinking, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones outlined five principles, which I would paraphrase as follows:

1. Determine the customer’s definition of value.
2. Identify all of the steps in the process and determine their contribution to customer value.
3. Remove any avoidable steps that don’t create value. Redesign the process to eliminate currently unavoidable steps that don’t add value. Arrange the residual value-creating steps into a transparent, integrated flow.
4. Let customers pull valued items from the system – replacing them only as needed.
5. Pursue perfection in the process through continuous improvement.

Adapted from Womack and Jones

A Lean Knowledge Supply Chain

To translate these concepts to the world of eLearning takes a bit of imagination. iPOV has been exploring this for nearly a decade. To this point, we have identified a short list of critical tasks that have to be done:

• Visualize the entire supply chain: Think about the entire journey that knowledge must take from the expert’s brain to the learner’s actions. Don’t just think about how is managed, or how it is delivered, or how it is assessed. Those are all important parts. But they are not the whole journey. In order to improve the process, you must understand how the different tasks flow together and how an upstream task can impact a task far downstream.
• Identify opportunities to create ‘standard work’: It seems counter-intuitive that anything involving knowledge could be subject to standardization. However, while the knowledge itself is highly varied, the package containing it doesn’t need to be. Consider a training video. It doesn’t matter what the camera saw. In a movie, it is all reduced to a sequence of image frames played at 30 frames per second. Once it is a movie, an Einstein lecture is processed the same as a Madonna concert. You can’t standardized the content of the video, but you can standardize the processes that handle and distribute it.
• Measure the flow time: How long does the whole journey take? How long does it take to pin down the SME? How long does it take to get them to write/review the knowledge? How long does it take to get approvals? How long does it sit before it is released? How long does it take to schedule learners to view it? How long does it take to measure the effect? How long does it take for the results of those measures to filter back to the start of the process? If you don’t understand where the time is going, there is no way to pull it back.
• Identify and isolate the waste: This could be a blog article by itself (and probably will). In our optimized, technical world, it is really hard to find any process that is as wasteful as the one that delivers industrial knowledge. Delays, mistakes, rework, overwork, lack of attention, distractions, and misunderstandings are legion. Name an eLearning development and delivery project that didn’t undergo at least 4 or 5 edit cycles. To remove this waste, you must first identify it, label it, and understand it. Only then will you be able to get mad about it and do something to eliminate it.

iPOV has proven again and again that, if you can address these issues, you can develop high quality eLearning materials in record time. We love talking about how we do it. We love talking with other folks that are trying to do it too.