Usually technical teams will have the best intentions and these are manifested in their desire to be thorough and cover everything possible about the given technical process, product or service.  These good intentions lead to the creation of training programs that contain a lot of data and information.  Essentially, I have seen these training programs become what I refer to as an information dump – and sometimes they can be pretty stinky!

Life can be easier for the technical team and for the training team if they consider the first question of our guiding principles when designing training programs.  This question is: How will the learners use the knowledge when they are back in their job?   Answering this question from the perspective of each different group of employees and stakeholders allows instructional designers to start identifying what will be most useful.  In addition, by considering these different perspectives we can create guidelines for the subject matter experts (SMEs) to discern what of their expertise will be most useful.  For example, if the stakeholders are managers, SMEs would put more emphasis on the technical knowledge needed to manage the technology and less towards understanding all the details of the technology.

As obvious as this sounds, it is important to focus on what is important for the “other”. It is not about the “I” (what I think is important as a technical expert), rather it is about what information is a “need-to-know” for the learner to achieve peak performance at their specific position within the organization.

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It is not a secret that chefs have experienced a steep rise to celebrity status with their ability to reach millions of people through multimedia channels.  By creating new dishes and combining new flavors, these chefs offer their craft as art, each infused with their own personality, to deliver unique eating experiences that adapt and evolve with ever-changing trends and tastes.

Instructional designers have experienced the rise of the Internet, mobile devices and an ever increasing array of software tools and platforms giving them the ability to reach more learners in different ways than ever before.  There appears to be a parallel between the creative work of the chef and the creative work of the instructional designer when developing either elearning, virtual classroom, instructor-led training or any blended training and development program.

Let’s start with success.  The success of the chef is delivering a great (delicious) eating experience.  The success of the instructional designer is delivering an effective learning experience.  Defining an effective learning experience can merit an article on its own but let’s extrapolate a definition from the model of personal development of the Center for Creative Leadership which states that you must strike the right balance between: challenging, supporting, and evaluating individuals.  This would mean that instructional designers must deliver recipes that strike the right balance between these three factors.

The chef uses the best ingredients and brings them together to create palate bliss.  For the instructional designer, the ingredients are the principles of adult learning and the subject matter.  The instructional designer has to use the principles of adult learning and the subject matter expertise to deliver a learning experience that will strike the right balance between challenging, supporting and evaluating the learner.  When this balance is achieved, the instructional designer can generate the state of flow in the learners.  Otherwise, individuals will be either bored if not challenged, worried if not supported, or lost if not evaluated.  As an illustration, here is a graph from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  that depicts the emotional state of the learner depending on the level of challenge versus skill level.

Every time an instructional designer delivers a learning experience that generates flow within the learners, they have created learning bliss, much like the celebrity chef creates palate bliss when the delicacies are consumed. So to all the instructional designers who every day strive to become celebrities: bon appétit!

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