D is for Design
Design ensures that training addresses the intricate challenges of our rapidly changing world. We offer some initial thoughts on how to approach and create a training design that will support the capacity of participants to address these challenges.
Yes, some designers are tempted to quickly put together a content outline, an agenda with some presentation and a few activities and call it a design. Research and practice has made clear that these impatient efforts tend to waste resources, as well as participants’ individual time, and end up being fragmentary, formulaic, and frustrating for learners.
Designing a course is a precise craft that if accomplished skillfully, patiently, professionally, and creatively results in something akin to a work of art that has a positive impact for generations.
To ensure this we approach Design systematically. This is significant because a course development effort that makes a difference in participants’ lives professionally, personally or as part of organizational communities, is a complex endeavor.
The highest quality design involves integration of big picture visionary approaches that are grounded in skills and processes, and brain based learning recommendations. A well thought-through design will integrate in emerging higher human capacities
Each of us has a habitual preference for more intellectual research and content steps, or more creative strategies, methods, activities, media. Whatever your preference, be aware that the course design process may easily get out of balance and become less effective by only following habitual preferences.
Design for the “whole person” by implementing your whole brain capacity.
It’s clear that design of a course that will make a difference in lives, workgroups, and organizations is an important responsibility. Here are some considerations to make your effort successful.
1. Recognize that quality design requires a collaborative process.
Each designer has assumptions that may skew the effectiveness of the training for others. Involve the perspective of others, including those with different sets of assumptions, to help you move beyond limitations.
Invite world views beyond your own; this enhances the potential effectiveness of your course
2. Realize that design involves steps of analysis, research, planning, designing, testing and refining.
Be aware that there is not any step in the process that is optional, even if you are asked or pressured to design and deliver quickly.
The necessity for each step is based on decades of research, field experience, and studied good practices of design.
Each step prepares a foundation for the next step in the process. Skipping any step weakens the foundation of the course.
3. Take feedback well from many sources.
Built into the process are several opportunities to obtain commentary, critiques and reviews from subject matter experts, stakeholders, potential participants, trainers and other course designers. Please see these opportunities for feedback as potentially valuable in improving the quality of training.
Notice any tendencies that you may have to stay in the comfort zone that “my idiosyncratic way of design will work for everyone.”
4. Record all good ideas whenever they come but stay in the step-by-step progression.
You may suddenly have a great idea for something that’s the focus of another step. Say for example, you’re working on initial research and you have a terrific idea for a learning activity. Please record the idea for later use, but stay focused on research.
Recognize any tendency you may have to leap to those steps that are personally appealing to you and may seem particularly enjoyable.
Designs are necessarily complex and sophisticated, but this intricate, creative effort may bring wondrous realizations about the core of a specific training, why it is important, and in what way it enhances your passion.