Speaker 1: So I'm Karen North. If I haven't had the pleasure to meet you, I'm really excited to be here. And let's talk performance support. I'm just gonna go ahead and hop on into it. If you're not connected with me, the bottom is a great ways to connect, but just stay with me for a few minutes and let's get into it. So before I get into it, I wanna know what you all think about performance. So when I say performance, let me know in the chat, what do you think that means, performance? It can mean a lot of things. We hear about it in our workplaces. We may hear about it in our schools, our neighborhoods, our communities. Oh my goodness. There are a lot of awesome answers coming in. So I'm just gonna read some that I see come in. I see a goal setting, taking action, observable behavior, scale of outcome. Oh, this is incredible. You all are great. I'm seeing all kinds of great answers here. All right. Focused work, coaching, the way you deliver operational duties. I love that Kate, wonderful. So I'm gonna break down a little bit of how I kind of define performance. I'm one of those weird people. I don't like giving definitions to things. I kind of like the way that they're operationalized. And a lot of times when I try to figure out what something means, I go to the research and I go to just reading about kind of the research that's been done around a topic, because the cool thing is about learning and development, we do have a lot of research backing up what we do. So let's take a jaunt if we shall to the highway to the performance zone. Yes, and I do know that this is a Venn diagram, but please just hang with me. So according to Dickelman in 1996, which I know was a very long time ago, but it still has merit. If we're gonna be talking about performance and performance is the, like in the middle here, here are kind of, oh, you all can't hear me. Wonderful, all right.

Speaker 2: Chris says- Oh, we can hear you, we can hear you. Don't worry about it, you're all good.

Speaker 1: Okay, all right, sorry. I thought I said I couldn't hear, okay. So if we're looking at what that looks like, there's kind of these three constructs that I want to explore. So the first one would be appropriate to the task or process. So what that means is people know what to do, and it's very clearly defined what it is that they're going to be doing, okay? The second construct here is as appropriate to the person. Drop me an emoji here if you've ever taken something or been part of a training, you're like, I don't know why I'm here. Anybody, oh yeah, I see them coming in quite a bit, yes. So why does that happen? I don't know. I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons and we're gonna explore that here in a minute, but I think for us to really delineate what performance is, it needs to be very appropriate to the level that someone's currently at. And then of course, the hardest part is what I call the Goldilocks or just the critical features or just enough information so they can practice and it's very clear what it is that they are doing. So, so often we know that we don't get this from our stakeholders, right? Drop me an emoji if you get what I call the fire hose of content from your stakeholders. Oh yes, here they come. So yeah, me too, my team as well. So that is pretty, pretty common. So I think what it also might be helpful is I'm gonna go into several examples of learning experiences that you may be used to. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna transform them in a performance support lens using micro learning. All right, so here are three common learning experiences that you may be facing in your organizations. And full disclosure, I will tell you being vulnerable here, I have created all three of these in my career. Now, I try not to, if I don't have to anymore, but I'm gonna go through the three of these and I'd love to know if you have experienced things very similar to this. So the first is what I call the spray and pray. Oh yes, the spray and pray of everybody gets the exact same learning experience. It's just throw it out there, everyone needs to know it. And it would be almost like if Oprah was in L&D, you get a learning experience and you get a learning experience. Have you ever dealt with that? Let me know. Oh yes, okay. Looks like several of you have, absolutely. And so in these learning experiences, often I feel like we are in a position to where we are actually just casting a wide net and delivering content without thinking about the human on the other side of what it is that we're doing. Because I know that when I see a spray and pray and my transcript are scheduled, I will actually do everything I can to put it off to the last possible minute. So think about that. I'm saying that I am in learning and development, I love it, but I would rather work than go to training. That's pretty sad, isn't it? Something to think about. All right, second kind of learning experience that happens way too often is that ticket, that one time special event of, hey, we're gonna go and you're gonna get trained on this and then you're just gonna go do it. Have you ever seen those in your learning experiences? Let me know in the chat or the emoji, it looks like I have a ton of thumbs ups coming in on that as well. And actually, when you think about it, when we build things like that, we are kind of saying that we expect people to have 100% mastery, one and done. Does anybody have an example of where that's ever happened? Truly, that we can hold people to 100% mastery standard? I don't know about you, but I certainly don't think that that's good. Dr. Michael Allen has a quote that says, when it is time to perform, that's not the time to practice. And so when we think about these one and done events, a lot of times they are not able to support people in the time that they need. All right, and finally, I love Ariana Grande, but how many of you have done the thank you, next, thank you, next? I'm gonna click and get my certificate at the end and go back to work. How many of you times have you done that? I can't carry a tune in a bucket, so humor me here. Yes, so you're so grateful for that next button, truly, because you can get back to work and get back to things that you feel like happens frequently. So a lot of times this happens, again, not to pick on the spray and pray, but a lot of times it happens with compliance or it can happen when something needs to get out the door rapidly. And unfortunately, it does happen. But the good news is it doesn't have to be that way. So how about we take these and let's transform them and sprinkle in a little bit of micro learning, what do you say? Let me know in the chat if you're ready for that. Okay, all right, so let's start with a spray and pray. All right, so when you get a request or you are given a training that is a spray and pray, if you want to transform it, there's a couple of different things that you can do. First is you want to make sure that you stay on target and know who it needs to go to and why. That's a very tough question sometimes to ask, but I like to have a little game that I play where I pretend I know nothing about anything. And through that, I'm able to get my stakeholders to discuss a little bit more of, well, do they really need it? Oh, it needs to go to everybody, but are you sure? And a nice way to quantify this is to think about every member of your organization. And let's say you're spraying praise an hour, do the math very quickly. Is that really worth that amount of money to the organization? Probably not. So asking that question is imperative because if we don't do it, no one else does. And that's a big responsibility that we have. Additionally, with this kind of content, we need to relate it back to what it is someone actually does. So taking that content and building it out in a work-based scenario. Have a great example of this. I have members of my awesome team that I work with here, and we got a request to kind of build something about how to use a camera in a machine that we have. And we started with a multiple choice test, which was great, but it could be better because we took those same questions and applied it in a great way. So what we ended up doing was we actually made a little simulation of the machine, seeing the screens with hotspots where people could click the correct buttons in the order like they would on the floor. And it's much more effective that way because it is applying it to what they are going to be doing on the job. Last time I checked, a test and a job, not really a good combination. And the awesome thing with that is that can be your learning experience, but then couple it with some micro learning resources. You know, where are those quick hits? And I'm only talking about five different ways you incorporate micro learning here in just a moment, but making sure that you're focusing on the critical tasks of what people will be doing on the job and making sure that it's clear that they can get that information as quickly as possible and in a way that they can use it. Because I don't know if you've all seen Field of Dreams, but it's been my experience. If you build it, they won't necessarily come if it's not accessible. All right. So next, let's go over to our ticket, okay? So the learning is a one-time experience. So what we need to do here is we need to realize that learning is actually a process. I have a really good friend of mine who has actually never even ridden a bicycle. And so she always hates when I bring up this analogy, she's like, oh my gosh, Kara, I've never even ridden a bicycle, stop it. But I know when I learned to ride a bicycle, I fell down a lot and I needed some training wheels as I was learning to do it. And that's also the process on how we learn, right? We don't get it right the first time. Actually, I think failure is a big part of the learning process because that's when we consider kind of more information. And a lot of times we forget how important it is as we're learning. So instead of this kind of one and done, think about ways that you can make it an experience. So you might want to think about pairing it with a communication, explaining out why this is happening. Found out through Malcolm Knowles' work that adults like to know what's in it for them and why it applies to them and why they need that. So giving folks that information sometimes can help tee it up to be a better experience. We also had a recent project where we built a learning experience. And on the backend, we even thought about supporting leadership and giving them some talking points on what they could do in order to make the meeting afterwards a little bit better to reinforce this. Because I will tell you, no matter what we do, if we don't have the partnerships of our leadership, it's not gonna work. Because training doesn't fix an accountability problem. It never will. And so knowing that is also half of the battle as well. And then also at the end, putting some micro learning with it. Again, just those quick little hits of, hey, here's how you do this. Hey, you need more support. You can go here. And again, making it in a place that people can find it is also very, very critical. All right, now let's fix Ariana. All right, so the thank you next happens a lot, but let's have them earn the learn, all right? So let's make sure that they are applying that content and they are doing it in, again, a task performance way. And when I say that, the example that I gave about the camera, that's a great example of that, because instead of it just being this kind of passive thing, they're actually actively taking the information and applying it in a way that is critical for the roles that they do. And one way that micro learning can help in this specifically is to support the common goofs that happen. And a lot of times you can get this information by doing something, no, this is a dark art. It's called a task analysis. It's been around for a very long time, but I find a lot of people don't really know what it is or haven't really tried it. But basically what a task analysis is, is it is a procedural kind of step-by-step of what someone does in their job to execute on a task. And it includes the steps, it includes the information that they need, it includes the decision points that they have. But my favorite column of doing a task analysis is how do new people mess it up? Not to shame anybody, but truly if we know that people fail and people kind of stumble in that part, then we can build curriculum around that to support that on the job. And micro learning is fantastic for that. So was that helpful at all? Let me know some of the emojis. Was that helpful to kind of see these three ways and see how we can transform them with performance and micro learning? All right, awesome, thank you all. The chat has just been extremely hard to keep up with, but I'm trying to watch it. All right, so let's go through five examples of what micro learning performance support would look like. So the first one here is what I will call a wizard. And a wizard is essentially just like a decision tree. If you're familiar with kind of those Visio process supports of, you know, you see those documents of, you know, should you do this? Yes, no. Should you do this? Yes, no. We're in manufacturing. We have a lot of those technical documents. So making sure that we can bring those to life and have them just in time to where someone is not kind of digging around trying to find the right document, needing some glasses to kind of find out where to go and their finger to kind of trace the arrows around. They're fantastic for decision-making and they're also fantastic for troubleshooting. Back when I was working at Amazon, we used these very frequently with our customer service associates when people would call in with issues with their Kindle, they would pull up a little wizard and like, okay, have you pressed the on off button for five seconds? Yes, okay. Then you go to the next step and then you go to the next step. So I can't show you some of the work that we have done in our workplace for intellectual property reasons, but I made a little spoof of one that maybe you can understand a little bit better. So this would be an example of what a potential wizard could look like. And yes, I had to be a little tongue in cheek here. I had to be a wizard. I mean, you are a wizard, right, Harry? Okay. So it would look something like this and I built this in Storyline, just very low fidelity, but it starts with kind of what the topic is and then it asks you questions and then you kind of click through to figure out going along this decision tree process, which is a little bit more interactive and it gives people, again, that just-in-time support that they need on the job. All right. Another example is, you know, video is extremely helpful in a lot of the work that we do, but video is only good if it is good enough to get the information out there. So if you have a more lengthy video, an option that you could do is actually do timestamps or you can kind of segment it out, but I prefer really short videos anyway. That way you're gonna get people to probably watch them a little bit better. And so there's a couple of different ways you can do this. If you use TechSmith Camtasia, wonderful thing that they have in there is called markers, that you can put markers on your timeline and then it'll export out like little chapter headings for you to where when you publish it, it will already have those timestamps underneath, especially if you publish to YouTube. Oh, it's so easy. It's amazing. But you can also do this with a tool like Articulate Storyline. So we have done this again in the organization that I work at and I can't show you that. So I made my own little version here. So it would look something like this. So if I was doing, you know, learning experience about raising camels, which I would love to do one day, it would look something like this where I have my video on top. And so the way that this is kind of set up is, you know, the video is about, I'd say 70% of the frame. And then underneath you have your scrub bar. And then this box down here is actually interactive to where you can click on the text and it will do a jump to timeline to that particular timestamp. So hopefully you can see how this would be very friendly to people if they needed that information. Instead of watching the full six minute video, it gives them that performance support, that just in time to get the information that they need and get back into whatever it is that they're doing. All right, next is, you know, text messaging. As silly as it sounds, I think especially in the last few years, mobile has been more critical than ever to our learning strategies. So imagine if there's something that's going on and just getting a quick little text notification about it, like if there's a system outage and how to work around it. And even if the text doesn't have that much time or that much room in it, excuse me, for the characters, nice little tool like Seven Taps, you could put a little link in there and then link out and remind people how to work around with that particular system. Very critical. All right, one more would be a job aid. Something to guide people through a particular task, a nice little one pager is a great way to give people some support around whatever it is that they're doing. If they need kind of that reminder of something that they've done in the past, it's great. And then finally, what I call a notification or a Cisco. And Cisco is stuff you should know about. I learned this term back when I was at Amazon. We had these little kind of nudges we would push out in our proprietary system that our customer service associates use. So with that, you get the little nudge and then they would be able to read what's going on and then get back into whatever it is that they're doing. So there's five different examples of how you can use micro learning in different ways for performance support. So to wrap up, remember, performance problems are sometimes outside of our powers. We cannot change the hearts and minds of people. That would be manipulation. But what we can do is we can take our content, we can relate it to the people that receive it. We can make sure that it is in alignment and the information is not too much. And we can make sure that they know exactly what it is that they need to do in order to perform. And with that, I will welcome Christopher back for Q&A.

Speaker 2: I've been here the whole time, Tara. I've been here the whole time. Can we get some emojis on that one? And by the way, while we're looking for some questions as I'll ask, kind of transition into the Q&A, I think one of the things that's so important about what you said is I think sometimes there's this tendency to see performance support as less than, right? We can, in our industry, you can be like, well, there's courses and learning experience and that's good. And then we can do performance support if we don't really have budget. And to me, it's not less than, it's equal. It's about really figuring out what do you need to do? So I love, let's not like make performance support the secondary thing. And I love the different creative examples that you brought. So while we're just chatting, cause we can chat for a few minutes, by the way, I loved your presentation. Any specific questions from folks in the group, you can either ask them in the chat or in the Q&A, but Kara, I am curious, cause with the performance support piece, how do you personally, how have you handled it? Because there is that tendency sometimes where a stakeholder's like, yeah, but can't we really make it a course? I feel like we really need to make it a course. And you're like, to tell them to do these few steps, like, I don't, how do you navigate that one?

Speaker 1: I will say it's easier now that I'm in a leadership role. I think when you're an individual contributor, you're kind of at the mercy of your organization and leader, but of course it's not perfect. You kind of have to pick your battles sometimes, there's this thing called relational equity. And even though you may push back and say, yes, we need to do it this way, at the end of the day, there may be a bigger fish in the pond that demands you do it a certain way. So being realistic with that, but also another thing too is earlier, actually last year, I purchased Kathy Moore's MAPIT book for every member of the team. And we read that together as a team, and then we started implementing a lot of those strategies as well. So one of the biggest questions we ask whenever we even get a request in is what else have you done to try to fix this? And you actually, I don't think you'd be surprised, how people are like, well, nothing, we just need training. So getting on kind of that consultative hat and really start to talk more to people, that's a nice way to kind of make it a win-win for everybody because you're really trying to help them solve a problem and they may or may not know how complex the problem is.

Speaker 2: Okay, I love that. And I think that that advice is so sound because I think sometimes we have that action bias where we tend to want to jump to, oh, you said training, great, let's like figure that out versus hang on, what's actually happening? Can we just talk about that for a few minutes and figure out what does good look like on the other side? What are they doing today? And then you can unpack that and go, oh, okay, well, that sounds to me like we just need to help them with these few things. I think we can make that a performance support resource versus a full-blown course or a 60-minute video type of a thing. Great advice. Last question, and then I've got some things, is one that got one plus, any do's and don'ts? Like if you had 30 seconds to say do's and don'ts of performance support, what would they be?

Speaker 1: Do a task analysis. I think it's really critical to know actually what someone needs to do with the content. Don't make any assumptions about anything and go beyond your SME. Don't assume that the SME knows everything. A lot of times the SME may have one perspective but the people doing the work would be completely different approach and perspective.

Speaker 2: Okay, I love it, I love it. Everybody, let's get some more emojis for Kara and all her great knowledge that she shared with us on performance support. And again, I think this is a fantastic thing that we can use to augment our learning experience. It doesn't mean you do away with macro learning and go, oh, everything's a job aid. No, that's not it. We don't swing the pendulum that way, but we say, hey, here's an important way we can augment what we do with a different approach. So thank you, Kara, for making it and joining us and sharing your knowledge.

Speaker 1: Yes, thank you. Everybody.