It's all About Workflow

Fascinating piece by Bob Mosher about how learning groups often miss the mark with their training initiatives because they don't consider the workplace that their learners actually perform their tasks. He sums up workflow analysis like this:

Workflow analysis is a systematic design approach that starts by making the workflow itself visible based on the performance objectives trying to be achieved. Since I’ve been involved in this business it has never ceased to amaze me how, for years, I had little to no idea about the world my learners returned to after my training event, be it in the classroom or via another training modality. Workflow design has shown me that I was literally building training solutions in the dark. I knew what the subject matter experts wanted me to build, but that was typically a content ask, and not one based on the everyday context the learner lived in.

 The chief point here, I believe, is that learning objectives are often written with little understanding of what type of environment the participants will return to and try to implement what they learned. This lack of understanding also drives the consistent return to the same old solutions. A wise man once said:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.