An appropriate title for my first blog post, don’t you think? My primary focus at The Iona Group is in our Learn practice area. This practice area focuses on helping our clients develop and deliver effective learning programs. Our work is primarily in the area of eLearning, although we work hard to recommend the right solutions for our clients and eLearning is not always the right approach.
In any case, I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking lately about what makes good learning and what makes it successful. When you think about it, learning in a corporate setting ultimately has one purpose and one purpose only: to change behavior. To achieve positive business results we need the right behaviors to change, but that is a different topic. What I want to focus on here is how to get people to do things differently from what they are currently doing.
There are three things that affect behaviors: beliefs, attitudes and knowledge. Often, corporate learning only focuses on one of the three: knowledge. This can be problematic because knowing what do to and doing it are often two different things. For instance, think about smoking. There is overwhelming evidence to support the negative health effects of this activity and this information is widely available. And yet, according to a 2006 study by the US Department of Health and Human Services, every day 1,300 children between the ages of 12 and 17 try their first cigarette and go on to become regular smokers. So information alone is not always enough to change people’s behavior.
When I sit down to work on a project with a client I always ask three questions: Who is the audience? What is the message and what do you want people to do differently as a result of your message? What I find is that in general, people have thought a lot about the message and only a little about the audience and what they want the audience to do differently after receiving the message.
A great example of this is safety training. Safety training can be some of the most important learning companies offer their employees. But simply providing people with safe practices and procedures does not necessarily mean they will be followed. The key is to affect people’s attitudes about safety – that it is important and change their belief that following safe practices and procedures – whatever they are – will make a difference. In a recent series of safety training and messages we worked on for one of our clients, we did this by tying our messages to the idea of people returning safely home to their families every day. By connecting safety at work to its impact on loved ones at home, we aimed to produce a more lasting and effective message that would result in people taking safety to heart.
By beginning with the end in mind, and focusing on how to impact peoples’ knowledge, attitude and beliefs, training will become more relevant, more interesting and more personal, resulting in learning that will change behavior and achieve the desired results.
