[00:00:00] Devlin: Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us live. We are here with Nick Shackleton-Jones. Hello, Nick.
[00:00:05] Nick: Bonjor.
[00:00:06] Devlin: Bonjor. So Nick has been a leader in the L&D space for two decades now, and now Nick is running his own consultancy. We are here to discuss How People Learn. So this is a book that Nick wrote where I guess he compiled a lot of his findings over and thoughts around this over the years.
[00:00:22] When I read it for the first time, after the first like chapter or two, my mind was blown and I was like, 'this model that Nick is presenting, the effective context model makes so much sense to me. It feels very intuitive.' So I was like hooked to learn more. So I'm very excited to be chatting with Nick here today, and I'm sure all of you are as well.
[00:00:40] I have some questions prepared in case you all are new to the model and to Nick's approach. So we will just get right into it since we do have an hour here together. So Nick, let's start with the Affective Context Model.
[00:00:51] Can you tell us a bit about what that model is?
[00:00:55] Nick: Yeah, I can. It's lovely to be here actually. Thank you. Yes, the Affective Context Model. So I'm gonna start by [00:01:00] disambiguating something cuz you said we're here to talk about How People Learn and then you showed the book and people might think I'm here to talk about the book.
[00:01:05] I'm not. The weird thing is I published a book called How People Learn, which I hope describes for the first time how people learn. And I think a lot of people thought it was gonna be one of these boring corporate books, which just does a quick roundup of some of the current thinking and research.
[00:01:20] It's not. So I've ended up having to explain that. No. It's a book which introduces say the first general theory of learning, which is the Affective Context Model. Sounds like a big claim. It is. So let me try and substantiate it and explain it. I started my career many years ago as a psychology lecturer, teaching learning theory, cognitive psychology, became very interested in technology and thought I could change the world.
[00:01:41] Because I thought I would leave lecturing - which I did - get a corporate job, have some budget, apply all this learning theory and cognitive psychology to learning technology and create super learning: supercharged learning that was a massive improvement on anything that we'd seen before.
[00:01:56] And I did have that opportunity and I did it, and it makes not a damn bit the [00:02:00] difference. And what I learned by that is that, the theory isn't right. What you've actually got is a patchwork of different behavioral, cognitive, psychodynamic theories, none of which really explain how learning works.
[00:02:13] Now, I started going to learning conferences, as many people listening will have done. And the same questions were bobbing up and they still are, 30 years later! They would be like "how do you demonstrate return investment? How do you design learning, correctly? How do you evaluate learning?
[00:02:27] How do you build a good learning system?" What I eventually realized is that you cannot answer any of those questions if you don't have a fundamental understanding of learning. And so I went in search of that and to cut a long story short, that's the Affective Context Model. The Affective Context Model makes sense of something that you'll have seen, if you've looked at any cognitive psychology around memory, is that memory is reconstructive.
[00:02:50] That begs the question though: what is it reconstructing from? So the people like Donald Hebb, who in 1949 coined the phrase neurons kind of "fire and [00:03:00] wire" and all this kind of firing and wiring is storing something. And we have this sort of sense that it is, what is it storing? What are we reconstructing from?
[00:03:07] And neurons that fire together wire together, but what they're storing is your emotional reactions. And so this is the radical idea and you just pause there to express just how much of a departure this is. What I'm saying is that we do not remember anything that happens to us. What we store are emotional reactions to things... our subtle, incredibly subtle, emotional reactions to things, and we reconstruct our experience from those stored emotional reactions.
[00:03:34] And this, it turns out, is a tremendously powerful explanatory model. It explains why, as you'll know if you read the book, if two people are sitting on a train and one of them cares about architecture and the other cares about plants, they have different reactions. Two people are sitting in a classroom as I discover time and time again, they remember different things and it's based on what they care about.
[00:03:54] If you have a boring day, You have not reacted strongly to anything and you remember nothing. If there's a fight on a [00:04:00] train on a Monday morning, you get into work and that's the first story you tell and that's the thing you remember. So it explains, and it provides a basis for us in learning and development in education to begin understanding what learning really is and how to actually do learning design in a way that works.
[00:04:16] So I've rabbited on a bit, but I hope that goes somewhere towards answering your question.
[00:04:21] Devlin: Yeah, that, that was good. I like that you emphasized the gravity of it, because again, that's what got me so excited. Again, I, I've sat through the learning psychology classes, been really interested in psychology myself, read so much about cognitive information processing, behaviorism, like the traditional like approaches to how we learn and then reading this.
[00:04:39] Yeah, it is. A bold take. Like I was talking to you about before the session, I immediately went to Google. I'm like, "I wanna learn more about this." But then I was like, "oh yeah, you're like, you've created this in, from this book." Yeah. And you mentioned, yeah, second edition is on the way.
[00:04:53] We're gonna dive even deeper into it. For people here who haven't read the book, there are plenty of examples in the book, like the one you mentioned in the [00:05:00] train, and it's a very compelling argument. And it makes a lot of sense too. I know a lot of people here get excited about story driven learning experiences and we emphasize like this, like emotional, how important connecting with people's emotions are. Not just in learning and development, but...
[00:05:14] Nick: Yeah, and I can see that Joelle has just put a note about when she was in the classroom, the student only remembered the puns. If you think back to your own student days, it will typically be the things, big embarrassments. Big successes, sometimes small things, like something somebody said to you that you remember.
[00:05:31] There's a Professor Lewin, who actually has got some very popular videos. He teaches physics online, and what he does is he gets on a huge human size pendulum and swings back and forwards. And people are shocked by that. And they laugh and they're amazed and intuitively he gets that that emotional reaction is the only thing that will make that stick with people.
[00:05:50] So it's something that we intuitively have sensed for a while, but we're only really, I think, beginning to understand now.
[00:05:56] Devlin: Yes. Okay. And I think you, yeah, [00:06:00] and you spend the rest of the book, and we're gonna get into this here for this session, it's like, what do we actually do with this new model?
[00:06:05] Like how do we actually put this into practice in a way that's going to help people learn now that we have this deeper understanding through this model. You talk a bit about "push and pull learning," and I think that's like a key differentiation for what we're gonna get into next. It is.
[00:06:18] Can you tell us a bit about the difference between those two types of learning?
[00:06:22] Nick: Yeah. But let's first address Lee's point, like shock value. Sure. I If you want something to stick with somebody, walk up to them in the middle of the street and punch 'em in the nose, I'll never forget that.
[00:06:32] I'm not saying you should do that, but for sure. That's the wrong way to understand this because. You can't, that's not the way to get everybody. The reality is people react more to things they care about. That's what it starts to get interesting, is you want somebody to stick with some, somebody find out what they care about.
[00:06:49] Because if somebody really cares about food and you say, I went to this amazing restaurant, they will absorb that information. So yeah, shock value, but that's just cheap tricks, right? If you really [00:07:00] wanna do learning design, you have to understand what people care about because that's governing what they store.
[00:07:04] So you asked about push and pull and that leads directly into it because you can push significance, you can make somebody care about something that they don't. And a lot of my work has been designing experiences, for example, that make people care about inclusivity by giving them an experience of being excluded.
[00:07:23] You can do that, you can build a simulation which makes somebody feel utterly excluded, where people mispronounce their names, ignore them, don't make eye contact, talk over them, and 20 minutes of that and people are devastated by their experience. And you can say, "now, that's why inclusivity matters."
[00:07:40] So you can push significance. The other way I used to use "push" is I used to have to teach as a young 20-something lecturer, middle-aged people like I am now myself, who were learning about technology for the first time and weren't terribly interested in it. And I used to start by saying "what do you care about?"
[00:07:56] You care about gardening. Okay, let me show you some gardening websites [00:08:00] so you can take what some something somebody cares about and you can build on it. That's what you do with pain. If you wanna teach an animal something, you take something you know they care about and you can use shock as the behaviorist did to build significance for other things.
[00:08:14] You can make them afraid of something by pairing it with something already afraid of. So behaviorism depends on affective context to work. This is an interesting thing, but let me explain. Push and pull. So you can either push significance with an experience. People on this call will remember experiences which have changed the way they felt about something.
[00:08:34] That's what I mean by push or more commonly, you can work with pull, and what I mean by pull is every time you hit a challenge or a problem, you Google or YouTube your way through life, you are pulling information because you care. And that's how that dynamic works in our world. In every part of the world, you've either got the things that people care about, where you can give them resources and and guidance, or you've got things that you want them to care [00:09:00] about, where you have to push significance.
[00:09:03] Does that make sense, Devlin?
[00:09:04] Devlin: Yeah, at a very high level Yeah. Push is when we're giving something to you. The common like corporate approach to learning right now is take this course, take these courses.
[00:09:13] That's people pushing something, pushing, learning on people, whether they're not gonna actually learn from that approach. It's debatable, but pull again is yeah. When you're like on YouTube or on Google, like you're saying and you're pulling the resources you need. When you need them.
[00:09:27] Nick: Yeah. Somebody on the line, I'm gonna answer this. "Can you give real life examples of push and pull?" So I do exactly that. Yes. When I was at BP, I worked at BP, we used to build simulators and leaders would go with their teams into these simulators and they would engineer, like engine failure, like a crisis.
[00:09:44] And that pushes significance, right? Because you go through that experience and things go wrong and you react in the wrong way and you understand, you know, why that matters, because that experience made something matter to you. I used to work [00:10:00] with a guy called Jim Weatherby, actually at BP, who was ex-NASA, captained, I think, more NASA missions than anyone else.
[00:10:05] He used to say, you can tell when a simulator is really working because it makes you sweat. So, nice. We intuitively get that if you're gonna get somebody to care about something and change them and transform them. You have to give them in experiences, which we, which is emotionally impactful.
[00:10:20] But you said pull as well. Pull is a checklist. When somebody joins an organization, you can put a checklist out there or 10 top, 10 mistakes to avoid making, and that will be one of the most popular resources that you can provide for people because they really care about that stuff and they will pull.
[00:10:36] Another one we had is how to dress. New starters in a business often want to know, they're desperate to know, " how do I dress?" And so simple guides, short videos, all that kind of stuff doesn't need any instructional design because Google doesn't. When we Google things, there's no instructional design.
[00:10:50] We're pulling from Google. And that's what I mean.
[00:10:53] Devlin: Yeah. And that differentiation again, just to emphasize. Yeah. You're pushing experiences if people don't already care about them. [00:11:00] Yeah. If I don't already care about it, we're pushing experiences so that people can have these experiences that will hopefully lead to them caring more.
[00:11:06] Yes. Once they already care. They're gonna care enough to pull the resources that they need to do whatever they're trying to do because they already care about it. Yeah. So that's how you differentiate between the two. Does you know, a flow chart, does the person already care about this?
[00:11:18] If yes, a pull approach will be good. If No, we need to design an experience that's gonna lead to people caring about this design an emotional experience. You got it. Okay. And the one point I don't wanna pass up, but really good like for the examples of push learning, when you were talking about simulations, what makes a good simulation?
[00:11:38] I don't know if you know where I'm getting at with this, but like you mentioned about it being like affectively similar to the real thing and that really resonated with me.
[00:11:47] Nick: Yeah. To make a good experience you have to, I've seen a lot of learning simulations, which, like chess games, right? Like leadership simulations where you just click on the right decisions.
[00:11:59] And anyone who's been in [00:12:00] leadership know that leadership is about having somebody face-to-face arguing with you or in tears, and those little click the right option doesn't really prepare you for that. So a good simulation, just as in NASA, a good simulation has to feel like the real thing, otherwise it won't be preparing you for the real thing.
[00:12:16] And the other thing is it has to build on existing motivators. So it's no use building a simulation of something that somebody doesn't just care about. One of the nicest examples of push learning, I think I didn't design it, but somebody was trying to do some safety training and get across the importance of some of these manual handling procedures.
[00:12:34] And what they were finding is just trying to push all of this content on people wasn't working because they didn't connect what they cared about. So they made people wear a red bag on their hand for a day to simulate, to make them feel how it would be if you lost a hand because you didn't follow this process, how debilitating it would be.
[00:12:54] How embarrassing it would be, how frustrating it would be and that really brought it home, I think is a good example of an experience. [00:13:00] But I'm gonna bounce around a bit cuz somebody asked, Will asked about TikTok. I love TikTok. TikTok is a real learning platform. When you go to learning conferences, you won't see any learning platforms.
[00:13:08] You just see educational platforms. They were trying to push content on people, but TikTok is exciting for two reasons. It's either really useful stuff. Or if you spend any time watching it, what it does is it caters for the stuff you care about. That's what the algorithm does, so it starts to feed you stuff which you care about, so you pull more.
[00:13:25] That's why it's so effective, but it also does something else, which is really interesting. It excites you about new things like. The train spotting guy, I can't remember his name, Fred he's become a massive celebrity because of his sheer exhilaration every time he sees a train. And that's infectious.
[00:13:41] Just as at school our best teachers were infectious, right? He gets so excited by trains that people like "I, I wanna be part of this. I wanna follow this guy and share in this excitement." So you can see those two dynamics working beautifully on TikTok, and this is how kids are learning. I really mean that is that, but they're learning about the stuff
[00:13:58] they care about. How to be cool, what's [00:14:00] popular, what's funny. What's in what's not in. That's why TikTok works, because it works with the things people really care about. If you drag people into a classroom and just say, "we're gonna teach you about all this stuff," it's no wonder none of it sticks.
[00:14:12] Yeah. Because it's not what they care about.
[00:14:15] Devlin: Yeah. Great points and powerful example about the Red bag hand stimulation. But yeah, you can see how that would make people feel a certain way. Probably not gonna be forgetting that in the same way if you were doing some kind of 2D, multiple choice e-learning simulations.
[00:14:30] So yeah, creative solutions too. Probably not used to seeing solutions like this, but yeah. Can imagine how effective they would be.
[00:14:38] Nick: Gabrielle's got a really interesting question. It's one that has vexed me. " How do you navigate creating experiences that could be considered triggering?"
[00:14:47] Here's the problem. If I look through a program, a learning program design, and none of it is challenging, then no learning is happening. All that's happening is some form of entertainment. Somebody gets up and [00:15:00] dances around. Nobody's changed by that. If you think about your own life and your learning, you will have been changed predominantly by the challenges that you faced in life.
[00:15:08] And so when we design a learning experience, that's explicitly what we're trying to do, challenge people. So Gabrielle's question is a very good one. One I've grappled with over the years, which is how far do you push people? Because you've gotta push them. If you want them to change, you want to learn, but you don't wanna push 'em too far.
[00:15:25] And that's such a central question. I'll give you an example, which brings it to life. I work with a big aircraft engine manufacturer, a global organization. They had their leaders basically were all promoted from technical roles. They're very good at technical stuff, so they promote to leadership and predictably, they're very poor with people.
[00:15:38] How do you fix that? We designed an experience, like a speed dating experience where you have two concentric circles. One facing in, one facing out. Every five minutes you rotate and you've gotta really get to know the person standing in front of you what they care about. What motivates them, what their preferences are, and force 'em to do this, and keep rotating.
[00:15:58] And after a few rotations, [00:16:00] some of them are saying, "I'm just exhausted." Exhausted of talking to people and listening to. But that's it. We are challenging you to step up as leaders and be more focused on the person sitting in front of you and that will feel challenging.
[00:16:14] So yeah, the answer is "well, you have to be sensitive. You have to have flexibility within a program." Those of us who have kids will know that, some kids can just absorb failure and challenges very easily. Others are much more brittle or delicate. So you have to have formats which allow for that.
[00:16:33] Devlin: Okay. Nice. So haven't reached a full answer on that. It's gonna depend a bit on the audience, it seems and it's something you've continued to grapple with and explore because I can imagine some of these examples you've already given do really challenge people, but yeah, how far is too far, I guess is the question?
[00:16:49] Sometimes? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Great points. And so we've been talking about push learning like these simulations. What are we pushing on people? Do you have any other [00:17:00] examples of what effective pull learning looks like? know you already went through a few, but Yeah. Do you have anything else to say about that?
[00:17:05] Nick: Sure. So I coined this expression in a while back, so somewhat regret because any catchy phrase, is always a simplification, but "resources, not courses." And it was like it brought about a sea change, I think, in the industry because the basic idea was look, for heaven's sake, stop dumping content on people.
[00:17:25] It's just pointless. We push all of this content at people through e-learning modules in classrooms, and they will, they tell us time and time again. You can look at Jane Hart's Learning in the Workplace Survey, if you like. It's, they don't have time for it.
[00:17:37] And it's not, they don't have time for learning. They have plenty of time for learning via Google and talking to a person standing next to 'em. They don't have time for education. And by education they mean all this horrendous, irrelevant stuff, which is thrown at them by the HR teams. And so the mindset shift was, "hey, Why don't we just create helpful stuff?
[00:17:54] Why don't we just create useful stuff? There are people in our business struggling with all kinds of things. They dunno how to [00:18:00] do this, that the other, and they probably are just defaulting to asking the person next to them or Googling their way through life. Why don't we just focus on creating resources, helpful stuff that people can use at those points of need.
[00:18:12] Checklists, guides, short videos, and. And just turn it around." And we did. And it was massively successful. We turned around at BP systems where we were trying to force feed people things to where we had millions of elective usage. And I'll tell you one, one story about that which I quite like to tell because it illustrates the shift from education to perform support and building resources.
[00:18:33] We had a guy in BP who was an expert in sand management. And he was leaving the company and somebody said to me, Nick, you and your team need to do some knowledge capture with Hans. And so we went off to see Hans. And Hans was scooting around the world delivering one day long lectures, and I think he thought we were gonna record his eight hour lecture so that you could watch eight hours of him talking about sand management on a mobile device.
[00:18:56] And we said, "no. We're not gonna do that would be education. [00:19:00] What we're gonna do is we're gonna talk to all of the people who've been on your course in the last, I don't know, year. Get a list of them, find out what their top 10 questions are," and then we compiled like the a hundred questions for hands and he had five minutes on each.
[00:19:15] So instead of this massive dump of content on people from Hans, eight hours, we had quick answers to questions. People actually had, "how do I do this? How do I not do this? What do I do if this happens?" Kind of stuff that you would use on YouTube. So it's very simple illustration of how to shift from push to pull by involving the audience and actually being audience-centric and design.
[00:19:38] The other simple example is when people join an organization, just talk to them. Talk to your new starts, " what did you struggle with? What tasks did you have? What did you worry about?" And just build useful stuff. Short videos, guides. Checklists you'll find it is transformational if you just start to, to help people instead of just pushing organizational content.[00:20:00]
[00:20:00] Devlin: Yeah, that example is inspiring. It's like such a powerful shift, but it's also so simple at the same time. It's yeah, instead of dumping an eight hour lecture on people, let's figure out what their common questions are, record quick answers to each. So if they do look up that question, here we go, five minute response.
[00:20:16] You don't have to wait through an eight hour lecture and hope you catch it. Yeah, it's it makes so much sense. It's not like you need to dump, it doesn't seem like super time consuming or just seems very manageable. It seems approachable, and it seems like the end result is so much more powerful for people who are looking for these.
[00:20:30] Nick: Yeah, it is, it's surprising how often it goes wrong. So I've seen people try to copy that approach and they say "Nick, it doesn't work." And I said "let's have a look at what you did there.: So you created a system, a resource like hub or something, and "Oh wait, you've just filled it with PowerPoints and talking heads of HR people."
[00:20:46] And it's " oh, okay. So you're not actually addressing the needs of the audience, and that's where it goes wrong."
[00:20:51] Devlin: That seems to be at the core of this too. Talk to the people, figure out what they do care about, figure out what they are looking for and then deliver on that basically.
[00:20:59] Nick: Yeah. [00:21:00] So I can see there's asked that is there a use useful education question, which I love is a really big one. So I'm gonna give the baton back to you, Devlin, and see where you,
[00:21:08] Devlin: I think that's right where we're going next. That's the next question I have for you is: "what does all of this mean for the current state of education?"
[00:21:14] Sure. So I know it's a big one though.
[00:21:18] Nick: So look, I'm not gonna get on a soapbox. I'm just gonna say that it's the book's it's in the book. It's a whole chapter in education, but it's a, it was just like a horrible mistake. I dunno, people might know that there was phenology was this pseudoscience of assessing personality by the bumps on people's heads.
[00:21:34] And this was actually used for recruitment purposes at one period. Can you imagine? They had professional phenologist who would judge whether or not somebody was a good fit for a job based on the shape of the head. And for a while everybody believed in it and it seemed sensible.
[00:21:48] And then somebody basically said it's just rubbish and it all went away. Education a bit like that. So bear in mind that people have been learning for hundreds of thousands of years and it's, it is very simple formula. You do things. [00:22:00] And typically you do those in of graduated challenge. So kids have a simple role to play and anyone who's got kids will know.
[00:22:06] They do simple things in cookery and they gradually investigate. Or you watch people or you do things that most animals don't do, which is storytelling. Some animals do exchange their learning through stories, bees do. For example, bees go out, fly somewhere, find something interesting, come back and tell the story to the other bees through dance.
[00:22:22] But those three mechanisms are basically, Observing or storytelling. Those served humanity all the way up until, the start of the the 1900s. Why did they stop serving them? Kids were learning how to work on a farm with their parents. And then we created factories and the kids went into the factories of their parents and got injured in the machinery.
[00:22:43] So somebody said "let's put 'em all in a box so that they don't get injured in the machinery and have an adult supervise 'em." Okay. What's the adult gonna do? We've got a religious model, which looks a bit like that. People sit in a box and somebody reads to 'em, okay, let's do that. And so education was basically just based on keeping children [00:23:00] from getting trapped in machinery.
[00:23:01] And now it's turned into this massive bureaucracy where people pay tens of thousands of dollars or loaned that amount of money to go to a place where they learn stuff, which almost all of which they'll forget, which doesn't relate to the world of work. So they have a certificate at the end, which encourages employers to offer them a better job, even though there, there's no sort of research basis in most cases for any link between the two.
[00:23:28] And it's just gonna fall apart because some people are at some point will just spot that it's in, in some cases. It's vocational, but in the vast majority of cases it's just nonsensical. 75% of graduates don't even go to work in a related field. So university is great for finding yourself, for meeting new people, for socializing, for getting a sense of identity.
[00:23:51] None of that has anything to do with education. Probably shouldn't be paying $50,000 for it either.
[00:23:56] Devlin: True! Bold takes with Nick, but I mean that [00:24:00] definitely resonates with me. I love how you said it in the book to the "Cash for certificates." That's what it has turned into. Yeah. It's let me pay 50 grand for this piece of paper, so then I'm more attractive on the market, even though may or may not have anything to do with the vocational skills I need to succeed on the job.
[00:24:14] Nick: Yeah. But notice how precarious that's balanced, because somebody might say, "why the heck then, should I pay $50,000 for this?" Because the research shows that you will, your earnings will be slightly higher over a long time. It was so it's worth investing, but why? It's only because for the meantime, employers are accepting that if we hire people with these certificates, they'll, they'll do better on the job.
[00:24:38] And actually there's very little evidence, if any, to support that. And they might not only might they spot that somebody like LinkedIn for example, might start to offer a better algorithm, predictive algorithm, which actually says you can go with a two one in art history or a predictive algorithm for which you pay $15 a month will more confidently predict who will be good at that job based on their experiences.
[00:24:59] And then [00:25:00] employers will be like, "yeah I'm gonna do that."
[00:25:01] Devlin: Yeah, that time is coming, I think. But I think we'll meet plenty of resistance along the way.
[00:25:06] Nick: Hannah says doctors and lawyers. Yeah. That, that's an interesting exception.
[00:25:09] Vocational learning, but I'd love to talk about that because in a, okay, what should it be like? You should model the job on the education. So the education should be like a simulation, like we were talking about earlier, should be an opportunity to practice the thing that you're gonna be doing.
[00:25:24] And there is an element of that in some programs. So doctors might be an example or it could be a lot better. As talking to doctors, they will often tell you a lot of what you learned, in education doesn't apply to the real job. But that's what education would need to do if it were to continue.
[00:25:37] It would need to actually model programs on what people are gonna be doing. And you might think that was horrible because were, people, liberal arts and all of that. But if you had the opportunity to explore, one of the good things about Covid is that my daughter, for the first time in her life saw what my job was like.
[00:25:56] Just imagine that she, we going put her through the whole system with no [00:26:00] idea what it's like to actually work in an office. Oh, it's madness. Yeah. It's a really good point, Hannah, but that's what education should do. It should provide you with little mini simulations of graduated complexity so that you can learn to do something.
[00:26:13] But it's a really good point.
[00:26:15] Devlin: Yeah. I think you made the differentiation between pushing early, so giving people this like playful exploratory environment early on to give people opportunities to discover like what they care about. Is that the idea? And then you kind of transition into a pull model as you get closer to like working age, it seems.
[00:26:31] Nick: Yeah. I noticed that introverts like me tend to prefer to Google and YouTube things.
[00:26:35] Whereas other people will resource their way through life by talking. Chatting as always amazes me, my extroverted colleagues who can just navigate any situation by just talking to people. So there are different ways of pulling on resources at the point of need, but this fundamental principle that our learning is driven by the challenges that we face, that I think is, should be transformative because it's like if you understood that as an L&D department, you'd say, "What [00:27:00] challenges do people face in their jobs?
[00:27:02] Let's, map all of those first a little bit." Like we do customer mapping, in, in other disciplines like marketing or product development. Let's find out what, what challenges do people face, what they care about. And then let's map our stuff, our experiences and our resources against those.
[00:27:17] And that's what 5Di which is human-centered design does.
[00:27:21] Devlin: Yeah. So let's get into that actually implementing this. Yeah, let's, what is 5Di?
[00:27:27] Nick: Sure. So 5Di is an escape trajectory from education. So if you're trapped, as I was, many of us are in this weird bubble of education where you think that your job is somehow to push stuff into people's heads, but you actually want to start doing learning.
[00:27:43] How do you make that transition? It can't all be mystical. So 5Di is a process, which is define, discover, design, develop, deploy, iterate, sounds terribly dull. But it actually works magic I guess, which is how you actually [00:28:00] transform from an educational conversation to a learning one. So what happens in detail is typically in an education conversation, somebody like a commissioner in the business approaches you and says, look, "We've got this transformation coming up or this new system.
[00:28:12] So all of this content needs to go in a course." So use your instructional design magic and put in an e-learning module or classroom course, and then you end up feeling like an order taker and you know it doesn't work, everybody does. But that's what we do. So how do you stop that happening?
[00:28:25] In the defined stage you say, " hang on. Just before we do education, and you start listing out all the topics and we start putting them into a curriculum or whatever. Just before we do that, can you just be clear on how people should be thinking and feeling and doing things differently if this were a success?"
[00:28:42] And so you get your stakeholders to define the outcomes in terms of performance outcomes. So we think our leaders would be having more of these kinds of conversations, coaching better and. And so then you say, okay, so you've got a really clear description of what the outcome should be, a measurable description.
[00:28:59] [00:29:00] Can we now talk to the audience? And some people have thought of about this as introducing design thinking to learning design. It's a bit like that. So we talk to the audience, not so that they can design the program, but so we can understand the challenges that they have and the things that they care.
[00:29:16] So that audience research provides the data, which drives the design process. So you know, from the stakeholders and from the business what the outcome should be, and from the audience, what the what the things they care about every day are. And then your design builds experiences and resources which connect one with the other.
[00:29:34] In essence, 5Di is a way of solving two problems. Big problems. One is that you don't see a return on investment from education cuz you're just pushing content to people and they say, "it's not relevant to me." And the other problem is that people experience education as just a waste of their time, which is why they consistently say they don't have time for learning.
[00:29:53] They don't mean that. They're learning every day. They mean they don't have time for the educational nonsense over there. [00:30:00] So 5Di is a trajectory to shift from education into kind of learning.
[00:30:07] Devlin: Nice. Yeah. And I know, this isn't going to be a masterclass on how to implement 5Di, but I think that was a great overview.
[00:30:13] Seeing these parallels between action mapping, the audience is very familiar with action mapping. We've done some content with Cathy Moore and yeah. You probably see that parallel Yeah. In the beginning. Don't agree. Yeah. Let's start building out some courses or education. Let's focus on the actual performance goals.
[00:30:27] Yeah. What do we want people to actually do differently? And what do we wanna achieve with that? Yeah. Key point that a lot of traditional approaches to learning are missing. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I know some people will want to learn more about this, about implementing this. You could dive into it in the book, but is there anywhere else that people should go to learn more about?
[00:30:46] Nick: Yeah, absolutely. I'm a geek, I'm not really interested in selling book copies. You don't make that much money off a book, if you're thinking of writing a book, it's not unless you're selling millions of them. Yeah. I wrote it because it's something I was passionate about, but I also talk a lot about this stuff for free.
[00:30:58] So on [00:31:00] shackletonconsulting.com, there's a link to lots of videos talking about this. There's tools and templates. I'm actually building out a complete kind of toolkit around implementing this which will be available in the next few weeks. And it will be free and you'll be free to use it and it will, you won't have to license it or anything silly like that.
[00:31:15] Yes is the answer to that question. Watch your space. There's already quite a lot and there will be more.
[00:31:20] Devlin: Great. Alright, so yeah, you can learn more about for free. And yeah, I just keep mentioning the book, not because Nick's " we need to sell copies," but just because of the impact it had on me.
[00:31:29] Yeah, you can learn more about this without buying the book, but yeah, if you are intrigued I highly recommend reading it.
[00:31:34] Nick: I wanted to pick up on S's point. She said, "absolutely agree," which is nice. " When I faced challenges at work, I started looking for resources, solve the problem."
[00:31:41] That's the basic dynamic. Challenges and resources go hand in hand. The challenges drive people to turn to resources. So sometimes when people have challenges, you build resources, but sometimes when you wanna change people, You build challenges. So they will refer to the resources. So a good example is safety training.
[00:31:57] If they don't care about, safety training, there's no [00:32:00] point in producing more resources. This is a really important thing to understand because this is one of the things a lot of people don't understand about performance consulting and performance support. I know Cathy's work, it's actually brilliant.
[00:32:09] It's a big step on from education, but in essence it's learning elimination and I can return to that. If people are interested in that. But one of the things, if you've read Atul Gawande's book, the Checklist Manifesto, which is also great, is he found in that book that you could replace a two week training course with a single checklist and get better performance outcomes.
[00:32:30] But if you look at the research around this, there was a hospital, I think in the UK who tried to apply this approach and it didn't work. The answer is because they didn't care enough about the outcomes to use the checklist. So performance support works great in that context where you know somebody cares about something, where they care about like new joiners, they wanna know what to do, or they're new leaders and they're desperate to know how to get this thing right.
[00:32:53] They will pull all those resources. In some cases you have to challenge people. You have to build experiences [00:33:00] because unless they've seen somebody die in front of them, perhaps they won't care enough unless they've been through, a safety incident in simulation. Perhaps they won't care enough to refer to the guidance.
[00:33:10] So that's why it's so critical that we don't just produce resources, that we also build experiences that make people wanna use the resource.
[00:33:20] Devlin: Nice. Yeah, I could see how clearly you can make the decision between which one of those approaches to use and how they go hand in hand. So yeah, good stuff and good suggestion.
[00:33:30] Nick: Hope, hopefully that answers Gabrielle's question, which is how does it differ from let's say action mapping, Cathy Moore's approach? There's a three stage maturity model that I've published as well. It's education, performance support, human-centered design. It builds on it because the performance support and performance consulting approaches are basically task-based.
[00:33:48] They say, "look, if somebody's got this bunch of tasks to do, here's all the things that are gonna help you do it." But they don't actually change you. They, if anything, they reduce learning. I'm gonna give you an example.
[00:33:59] I'll give you a couple of [00:34:00] examples of learning in relation to make this point. So if I'm going to the supermarket and I'll write a list, that's performance support. That reduces the likelihood that I'm actually gonna remember the 50 items. That's the whole point of the list. If I'm on the London Underground, I use the London Underground Map.
[00:34:15] It's a great resource. It's meant that I haven't had to learn any routes over of the thousands of routes that I've traveled over the years because it's a great resource. It eliminates learning. But what if we actually wanna drive learning? While performance consulting doesn't help you to do learning design helps you to do learning elimination, which is.
[00:34:33] And many organizations need to do that because that's the most efficient route to performance. So you should do performance consulting. You should eliminate the need to learn, you should build resources, but you might also wanna develop capability as well. And they need to build experiences and simulations and things that give people a chance to practice.
[00:34:52] Great. Let's do the task bit. I'll give you one simple example that perhaps highlights difference. Let's say you've got a daughter, it's her first day at. [00:35:00] You could do a performance consulting analysis of that experience and say look, here's all the things she needs to be able to do. She needs to be able to get to class.
[00:35:07] So we'll do a map. She needs to be able to identify her teachers, so we'll have a quick one page guide to all the teachers. But what you wouldn't understand through that performance consulting approach is what's really driving her is the dire desire to fit in, and be accepted, and not make a fool of herself.
[00:35:25] And it's only if you understood that motivation that you could actually build all of the things that, that would work to make that a better experience. Yep. Understand the tasks, but also understand the person and what motivates 'em to learn.
[00:35:39] Devlin: Nice. So yeah you're saying performance consulting is just like the second level up.
[00:35:44] But like beyond that, it's human-centered design, which is this thing of its own, which does bring people to the forefront of your design approach. More so than the tasks or the, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And we can learn more about that on your website as well, you said?
[00:35:59] Nick: Yes, and I [00:36:00] blog quite a lot on LinkedIn nice.
[00:36:01] publish pieces around this, which, poke the industry and then people get quite excited and sometimes angry and then we have a bit of a conversation. But I guess these are challenges of a kind, right? Yeah. And go there and challenge people. Sometimes they change and sometimes they don't.
[00:36:16] Devlin: Yeah, definitely follow Nick on LinkedIn if you're not already. So I imagine people who have been here from the beginning, if they haven't already known who you are, they're quite intrigued to learn more or you're like, who is this guy thinging he's taken down higher education? I don't know, but yeah.
[00:36:34] Yeah, I know it can be controversial.
[00:36:36] I
[00:36:37] Nick: think we will. Oh, I dunno how controversial I wanna be, really. But I suppose I think we'll look back on education a few hundred years. Like we look back on the Spanish Inquisition now. It's just the prospect of putting, millions if not billions of children through an incredibly psychological, psychologically tortuous process, which damages every single one of them, frankly, in some way or other.
[00:36:56] Even once you say they enjoy it, typically because they conform, [00:37:00] and they succeed because they're compliant. But in essence, that's the messages, shut up, sit down, and do what you're told. I think what's most damaging about it is it embeds this idea that you should care about something that someone else cares about, not what you care about.
[00:37:13] Because education doesn't ask you what you care about. It doesn't constantly, take it in the direction you want. Even Piaget said that, so maybe I'm not being so controversial, but that's a problem because it means that you bump out of education into an organization that constantly gets you to care about this deadline and this hitting this accomplishment, and you'll hit midlife.
[00:37:34] Do I actually care about any of this? I maybe I don't. Maybe this is not me. Who am I? That's a terrible thing to systematically do to millions of people to stop them discovering themselves and what matters to them. So I've got a bit philosophical at that point.
[00:37:48] Devlin: But I, no, that's good, when you put it that way.
[00:37:50] I don't know if it's very controversial. I think we can all recognize the education system as it is and as it has been isn't super effective. And yeah, I think it's [00:38:00] bold. And yeah, just like ambitious to say, "Hey, here's how things could be, because I think it's easy to say, oh, this is a problem, but to actually propose a solution or a path forward, which is like what you've done and what you're doing, that's what everyone's looking for."
[00:38:11] So I was excited to see that. I'm like, yeah. Very ambitious, but I love it. It makes sense to me.
[00:38:18] Nick: Hannah's asked about the metaverse. Do you wanna talk about the metaverse, Devlin?
[00:38:21] Devlin: Yeah, I see a lot of thumbs up. What are your takes on the metaverse?
[00:38:24] Nick: I think in a few words, sadly, it's inevitable, cuz the metaverse is heaven and a lot of human progress has been aimed towards heaven. And one of the metaverse is, instead of the definition I guess is it's technology, but instead of being on the outside looking in, like we are now looking at technology on a screen.
[00:38:40] We are on the inside looking out. So we, it becomes invisible to us because we have something strapped on our face or whatever and the technology and the information's just in our world. And it's frightening because it means that it will realize this kind of heaven where you can do and be anything you want.
[00:38:57] This is why people escape into kind of games cuz they [00:39:00] can create an avatar and there'll be less and less reason to show up in the real world. Cuz you can go on a. Look anywhere you want. You don't need to go to the gym. And the other person could look anywhere they want. Who cares if you never actually need to meet in real life, but maybe the other person on this date doesn't say the things you want them to say, let's replace that with an AI. And now you are looking exactly the way you want. You are a superhero. You wanna be closing this gap between the self and the ideal self through technology. And that's frightening. You know it because for lots of reasons, the way people will behave in that environment and what people will do.
[00:39:32] And it's also frightening because it's a pay to go to heaven model. It's a model where you get more, but you pay for it, right? And so we will have created a kind of heaven where you can be immortal and perfect, but only if you pay your subscription fee. I worry a bit about that.
[00:39:46] So yeah. Another philosophical take on the metaverse.
[00:39:49] Devlin: Y'all knows what questions to ask. I've got the good philosophical takes. That was good. I'm glad we got into that.
[00:39:55] How do we tap into emotions for tech-heavy learning, such as learning to code or [00:40:00] wire a room for electrical?
[00:40:03] Nick: Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I've done quite a lot of technical training. I was talking to somebody recently who were talking about gas installation.
[00:40:10] Really interesting. He's a fascinating guy. And he was saying part of the problem is we train them on the technical process, but not on the entirety of the experience. Because the reality is you have to go to a customer and you have to interact with a customer. You have to persuade the customer you have to and that's actually almost the more challenging part of it, and that's what makes it emotion.
[00:40:30] So you shouldn't, the first thing I would say, you shouldn't train technical disciplines in isolation of the broader affective context. Cause when you're doing a technical role, there are typically people who are reacting to you and there's a social context you interact with. So those simulations, as said right at the start, should be more accurately modeled on the entirety of that process.
[00:40:51] The other thing I would remark on is having used Code Academy, which is training for coding that builds on emotions. And it's a lovely example of how do technical [00:41:00] training, because it's continually challenging. I did a bit of coding when I was younger and I used to buy lots of coding books.
[00:41:07] But what I realized after a little while, and many of people have realized is that your learning is driven by technical problems. If you're not using it, you lose it. So you are hitting challenges at work that really matter. Can you do this? Can you do that? This needs to be done now and you get very frustrated about them.
[00:41:25] So the technical training should be mapped back against the problems. And Code Academy does that cause it presents you with, here's a challenge, here's another challenge, and they graduate in complexity and you get the excitement and exhilaration of having done something well and the frustration and the annoyance when something doesn't work.
[00:41:42] So I think that just a, a couple of reflections basically on how important emotions are in any kind of learning, obviously, because all that's all learning is, but especially in technical training where it's very problem solving oriented.
[00:41:56] Devlin: Nice. Great examples. We have a question from Gabrielle.[00:42:00]
[00:42:00] Do you have some tools to help people trying to design experiences or simulations that tap into people's emotions? So any, yeah, I guess the question is, yeah. Do you use performance support as a designer to design these experiences?
[00:42:15] Nick: You can't, so performance support as I said, and I'm happy to go over this a bit more if you like, is learning elimination.
[00:42:21] So you'll find that in some of the classic texts around performance support, whether it's like people like Nigel Harrison, whatever, they don't tend to talk about instructional design because effectively what you're doing is removing the need to learn. That's what good performance support does.
[00:42:34] The better it is, the less people need to learn. If you have a checklist that. You've effectively mitigated learning. So performance support has nothing to say about learning design, in a sense, as radical as that may sound because it's about learning elimination. Learning design is essentially experience design and I think a lot of that sort of lies ahead of us in terms of the science of it.
[00:42:56] There are some resources on, Shackleton consulting. [00:43:00] A lot of it is about mapping the experience that you're designing to the thing that you're preparing people for, essentially a bit like a simulation. So some of the tools and techniques you're gonna need to use are audience analysis around how do people react in this situation when an engine, failure happens on a flight.
[00:43:20] Let's analyze what went on and how people, what people experienced. And then that's recreate that with a high degree of verisimilitude. And that's the key to good experience design, which is effective verisimilitude, probably two of the longest words I've said together in a while. But just, it needs to feel like the real thing, otherwise it's not gonna work as an experience.
[00:43:41] So that's important. The other thing you can do is iteration, we used to do this a lot in consulting, is we weren't always sure if an experience would work. So we'd build an experiment and we'd try the experiment and then gradually we'd build that up to a pilot and then, from a pilot to you know, full scale rollout.
[00:43:58] So that helps. [00:44:00]
[00:44:01] Devlin: Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a more approachable way to talk about it. It needs to feel like the real thing. Yeah. Or as opposed to affective verisimilitude, but I like it. I like it. That makes sense. Yeah. Let's see.
[00:44:14] Nick: Somebody asked, how would you encourage learners to develop empathy? I've seen some beautiful examples of this, so not ones I designed, but I saw one in a contact center where they would play back a call of a particularly distressed customer who'd called, who was I think in this particular case,
[00:44:31] I wish I could remember the details, was suffering from early stage dementia and how that call was handled and it would bring people to tears, but that's what you want. You want people to really put themselves in the customer's shoes. And so that did that very effectively. So how would you encourage learners to develop empathy?
[00:44:49] We also do it with leaders to develop empathy for their teams. And I've done that lots of ways, but one way is to shoot short videos of people talking about how leaders [00:45:00] impacted them, how they felt. Because leaders don't always realize that, they don't realize the significance of their actions.
[00:45:05] Yeah. And having that mirror held up can be quite powerful when people talk about, the hugely transformative effect that a leader had on their lives. So there's no one way of doing it to develop empathy, but for sure it can be developed. You can get people to care about things they didn't care before.
[00:45:22] Obviously cuz that's how we've all been shaped in our lives. Football matches, wouldn't start out naturally. It's not a genetic thing caring about football matches, but you are taken to moving experiences. Wins and losses. You experience that collectively, and then you find yourself years later, taking your own kids football matches.
[00:45:41] Why? Cause you mean shaped by those experiences. Yeah.
[00:45:47] Devlin: Good examples. Good examples. Let's see. I see Gabrielle as a question about resources for people who wanna get better at designing scenarios. And I see someone linked your a page on your site [00:46:00] to stuff you can use.
[00:46:01] Nick: Cool. There is stuff you can use on there, so have a look through, through that and see if there's anything you can use there.
[00:46:06] There will be more coming. I think I probably sort of answered that a little bit in terms of some of those audience analysis tools. You can use a couple of techniques there. I've used the emotional journey, which helps you to map out and give you some sort of rich data around what people are experiencing and what they really care about.
[00:46:24] And then there's also tasks and concerns type lists and other audience analysis techniques. Have a look, see what you think. Dot me a note if you wanna talk more. I can see Lee's question, which is a really simple one to answer, which is what kind of work thesis did you do? I did philosophy and psychology.
[00:46:37] I did joint degree and then I went into master's in philosophy. So I went into business like an idiot asking why we were doing things and got shut down repeatedly over many years. But the desire to know why never quite went away.
[00:46:51] Devlin: Nice. Maybe the question more was like, did you have a specific like thesis or like research topic?
[00:46:58] Nick: Yeah, I did Continental philosophy, [00:47:00] Niche and Heidegger. Heidegger, interestingly, despite his questionable, absolutely terrible decisions, frankly, but he believed that ironically the essence of humans was care. And and that care fundamentally was the basis of our relationship with the world. So it was interesting idea, crossover.
[00:47:20] Devlin: Wow. So this body of work has been building on itself for a while now. Decades. Very nice. Cool.
[00:47:29] Nick: Oh, other people that people might want to read. You talk about Body of Work. Yeah. There's a book called The Decisive Moment. Antonio Demasio is a neuroscience neuroscientist. One of his students, Mary Helen Idino Yang has published a lot on the effective side of learning. Antonio Demasio has a somatic marker hypothesis, perhaps a more academic expression of this what's the, Jonah Lira was the other person who I met with actually. And he wrote a book called The Decisive Moment. She's quite influential in my [00:48:00] thinking.
[00:48:00] And a guy called Jaak. I've called, wrote a book, big book called Effective Neuroscience if you're interested in some of the the research underpinnings. Great.
[00:48:10] Devlin: Thank you for those recommendations. I haven't read any of those, but I think it's time to, to get them on the bookshelf, at least the first step.
[00:48:20] But good suggestions. Maybe we will tackle this final question from Gabrielle. Do you have any suggestions on how L&D hiring managers can find people that are experienced designing the kind of simulations we're talking about? I guess that are well versed in kind of...
[00:48:36] Nick: There's some of these questions that I I realized I slightly deliberately avoided because I'm, the answers are either controversial or really complex.
[00:48:43] One of the things that I stopped doing at BP was hiring L&D people because I realized as soon as they were in the door, I was deconstructing them and I was basically saying, everything and why would you do that? Why would you hire somebody only to take away all of their kind of sense of [00:49:00] confidence in what they were doing.
[00:49:02] It is a bumpy ride. So I started hiring people from different disciplines, people like Gemma Patterson, who's now head of learning at legal in general, actually, who she was from a digital marketing background. She was from Monsoon because I needed somebody who understood content strategy.
[00:49:16] And what it meant to gather metrics in that way. Who understood customer journey mapping? Cuz this is what I needed. I hired a guy called Charlie Neen, who's now running a company called Solved a learning company actually. And he was just been doing events management because I wanted somebody who understood how to create impactful events.
[00:49:32] And I hire a guy called Kenny , who's now I think head of L&D at Netflix or headed that way actually. And he in the UK. And he was, I think a college lecturer at the time, but he was passionate about change and experience design, and he brought this new perspective. So I was very active in looking for people who were from different disciplines and then bringing some of that expertise into what we were doing.
[00:49:56] So yeah I really enjoyed that approach. [00:50:00]
[00:50:00] Devlin: Nice. Very good. Okay. I don't think we'll have time to dive too much deeper into that piece. I think we should maybe call it a session with that. Yeah. Unless you have, there's anything else that you wanted to say, that's great. Really insightful conversation. Nick. Thank you for taking the time with us.
[00:50:17] Nick: That's great. Thank you. I enjoyed it.
[00:50:19] Devlin: I'm looking forward. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this one for a while. Like I said, ever since I read this first chapter I was amazed.
[00:50:25] So I'm really glad I got the chance to chat with you. Thank you for all the great questions from the community and we will see you all soon and you can find Nick on LinkedIn as well to stay up to date about what he's got going on. Thanks everybody as well as the website in the book. So thank you again.
[00:50:42] I'll talk to you all soon. Thank you, Nick. Bye bye everybody. Bye. Thanks.