Tacit Knowledge And Performance Improvement

There's a concept that's been around for some time in training. That concept is tacit knowledge (TK), and the term defines what I think is the holy grail for training analyses and designs to convey to learners: The between-the-lines knowledge that expert workers have that they use to accomplish work. When I say "between-the-lines", I mean the bits of knowledge they form and/or pick up throughout the course of their daily work. These bits often contribute to a greater quality of the work. This is what we as WLP professional seek to identify and to communicate.

Wikipedia has a good synopsis of TK. After reading through the information and examples there, I reflected on my own collection and use of TK and the ways in which I came to collect that information and ultimately use it in context. I specifically recalled a job I had after graduating high school. I was working in a rebar production facility, starting out as a general worker. The number of individuals staffing the place was quite low, and so specific skills were at a premium when someone was on vacation or sick. As time progressed I learned the basics of forms bending for different types and kinds of bars through simple curiosity, and small opportunities to take over when someone had to leave for a few minutes. I took in knowledge through observation and impromptu action learning moments; teachable moments as others call them. Repetition was part of the job as well so the environment made it difficult to forget after a few goes. By the end of the thirteen month period I worked there, I had added myself as a skilled worker within the workforce. To this day I remember a lot of the specific bits of TK. I remember how the bars had to be set in the machine, the quirks of the aged equipment that would prohibit or maintain performance, ways in which the equipment would break down, the signs to determine potential breakdowns that didn't happen according to the manuals...this was all important stuff for a skilled bending technician in the workplace.

I recalled a later career experience in my first career position after getting my undergraduate degree. I had joined an elearning company (which is now part of SkillSoft) early on when it was hiring many people to build its workforce. Over the course of several years we became such a close and efficient team that when the company tried outsourcing some development to an outside vendor, the results were not satisfactory or up to standards. As a team we had a working language; we knew how each individual member operated, we knew who could solve specific problems quickly, why certain tools functioned certain ways, etc. And once I had considered this past experience, I had an idea.

Tacit knowledge, in pretty much all the cases I have seen it referenced, has been discussed in relation to individuals. But what about groups? I Googled "group tacit knowledge" quickly to see what turned up. Amazingly, very little did, and digging harder reveals little more. I found two items that discuss the concept within the context of a group. Those are here (a study from 2008) and here (book chapter from 1998). I also found one short paper from 2007. I was struck by how little information there appears to be on the subject. I would think that there would be more about this.

Taking things into consideration however, I think there may be some difficulty in today's workplace in studying group-based tacit knowledge, and in implementing any findings. Many of today's workplaces are high turnover environments relative to past decades. This brings the potential to break "unit cohesion" when attempting to gather or even develop a group with deep expertise. In that sense it may remain more advantageous to pursue TK at an individual level. However, in my current work context, group tacit knowledge could potentially be a very real thing. Employees stay with the company a very long time, and while project teams break up and reassemble in different mixtures every few years, there is a lot of internal networking and collaboration. The goal of any training effort for each of these projects would be to collect the "group-operational" knowledge and pass that down to the wider workforce for faster take-up and more immediate performance increases.

I have ideas now of who in my contact list I need to talk to about this, and some of the questions I need to ask. Feel free to comment and leave your experiences and suggestions.

Informal Learning And the Empowerment of Curiosity

ASTD, in a study on informal learning conducted in conjunction with the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), published a short synopsis of the results of their study yesterday. As the post on ASTD's blog states:

...e-mail emerged as the top-ranked informal learning tool at 68%. Accessing information from a company Intranet came in at a close second, with 65% of respondents citing its use to a high or very high degree...

Without having seen the report in full yet, I think these numbers are pretty spot on. Most recently, the work environment in which I worked had a significant number of informal learning tools. In congruence with ASTD/i4cp's results, email and intranet were the most available forms, though I would place this particular company's intranet above email in my wholly experiential rankings. The company went to great lengths to provide a rich intranet site with access to company and world news, separate portals for each global site, blogs, benefits information, more than I can even recall here. The intranet site was a vital function of the business for employees, and itself provided several informal learning tools like a company wiki for groups to collaborate on and other infovorous groups to consume.

But ASTD/i4cp's study had me reflecting on my own informal learning activities within the workplace, and without. Informal learning is the kind of mode one does not always realize they switch into. Yet, I use informal learning rather extensively on a daily basis. Reading a news story can reveal a topic or concept I may never have heard of previously, or have had limited exposure too. The Internet allows me to change my level of performance on the topic on the spot. In the workplace, the quality of the intranet site allowed me to fill my self-identified information gaps quickly, or at the very least put me on the right path.

And my appetite for informal learning has only grown with the purchase of an iPhone, and now any topic no matter the level of its mundanity or marvel gets a quick Wikipedia perusal or Google search. In fact, as my wife and I were deciding what to eat while dining out the other evening, I looked up a type of fish neither of us were familiar with. I think informal learning will continue to grow as more and more people of all ages become empowered to make learning more of their own responsibility than ever before. Informal learning is the antidote for what I would call "catalyzed curiosity", and can satiate both formal and informal queues to initiate learning. This study points the way for WLP professionals as we continue applying technology to learning, and I look forward to future developments for this method .

Review: Adobe Captivate 4.0

Well, as I hinted all the way back in February, I wanted to review Adobe's latest rev of the now training-staple Captivate elearning development application. Now that I am not in the midst of a course project nor traveling, I have the opportunity to appropriately review Captivate as I have been itching to do. I was very happy when Captivate 3.0 broke cover last year, and I am glad 4.0 follows on so closely after, as it includes plenty of features to warrant its efficacy as a purchase over 3.0. Captivate 4.0 is not a minor step up; it is a much more robust piece of development software than even 3.0 was over 2.0.

Nature of the Review

I was able to give Captivate 4.0 a good test run while working last quarter's final project deliverables. The following is not meant to be an exhaustive review of every feature, nor is it intended to simply echo the high-profile items Adobe outlines on its website. What I want to convey in this review is a general report on the software and the quality of my experience using it on a project.

Interface

Captivate 4.0's interface is largely identical to that of prior versions, with the addition of a few new buttons and other assorted switches. The first improvement you'll find is the addition of several new options for starting a blank project, importing PowerPoint slides, or starting with a template. Some of these are in version 3.0, but they have been improved and added to here.

As with Flash CS4, Adobe has oriented Captivate's timeline to the bottom underneath the work area by default. I think Adobe is making this move to draw an ergonomic connection between the various timeline workflow programs in their lineup (Premiere, Flash, etc.). The timeline can be moved easily if required, though.

In the work interface with a project open, the new Send for Review button is a nice touch for those important peer-checks of work or SME reviews. This feature has been appended to the old Publish dialog, and has most of the settings of the other deliverable types. Adobe's website has a short video about this process and the use of Adobe AIR apps that can allow users without Captivate to add review comments to development files. I did not have a chance to test this hands-on this time around, but will certainly apply it in the future.

Adobe also makes available buttons that access deeper functionality without having to find them in dialogs. The Edit PPT button was particularly helpful, and allows you the option of exporting a flash movie of a single slide if you so choose. The view dropdown is also added for easy switching between storyboard, edit, and branch view without using menus. Overall, if you like Captivate's interface as it is, then you will like 4.0; if you dislike the interface, at least take solace in the fact that the interface is incrementally improved.

Content Creation and Editing

Last quarter's course project had me bringing in some Microsoft PowerPoint slides my client sent. Captivate 4.0's compatibility with Microsoft's latest .PPTX file type certainly helped extend the options available to me for developing the training content (I have Office 2007), and I was happy to see that while the PPT slide import process still takes a long time, it is quicker than in the past. If you wish to edit a slide from an imported PowerPoint file, Captivate will now open up a PowerPoint shell (not the whole application) long enough for you to edit the slide(s) or presentation. This is a nice way to modify your original without having to re-import anything or everything back into your Captivate project from scratch. Very good thinking here.

My project included Level 1 and 2 assessments at the end of the elearning portion, and Captivate continues to perform well here. I would however mention some difficulty in getting the quiz and survey to behave in the same presentation together. The results page for the quiz kept assuming control of the survey, thus throwing off the numbers and variable names, and making it likely that my reports would not be accurate reflections of student inputs. Perhaps I was incorrectly configuring my assessments, and that two can coexist in the same project; I fixed the problem via a bit of a bandaged fix in the end, but the automatic assumption of control by the quiz was one thing I wasn't able to resolve completely to my satisfaction. This is by no means a harsh criticism of Captivate's otherwise robust assessment and reporting capabilities however. They function quite well overall, and remain one of the cornerstones of the application.

What's the Most Important New Feature?

It would scarcely be possible to apply all of 4.0's new features in a single project, and I must confess my own was not quite of a design that warranted use of all the bells and whistles. For a quick synapsis of the new features, Adobe's Captivate 4.0 page highlights the big ones. I definitely made use of the new TOC aggregator feature that can be activated as a publishing option for a project. This option, found under Project > Skin Editor in the TOC tab, allows you to add an Adobe Presenter-style panel with slide titles and other info. The panel can be made visible or hidden, and makes for a nice compact tool for your end users.

The text-to-speech facility is also a major boon for us instructional designers that do not have audio talent available, and who may not have time to record our own narration. Adobe allows you to download voice packs that can then be chosen within Captivate. Then, just choose the slide, add the text to be read, and you're done. This is a very welcome feature that accomplishes a lot of work in a pinch, and it's very easy to switch voices quickly, though each slide with TTS must be reprocessed if a voice is changed. But you could mix things up and have a female voice on some slides, and a male voice on others. Very flexible.

It's not ideal of course, as TTS systems (including this one) often mispronounce words and misinterpret various constructions of text (aside from the robotic delivery), but the application is certainly better for this addition.

What About Stability?

I must admit that in the past, Captivate 2.0 and 3.0, while great for developing materials for my training interventions, were memory sponges and destroyers of CPUs far and wide. Additionally, I felt that those prior versions were quite buggy and inconsistent in their performance and behavior on systems of limited capability. The good news is that Captivate 4.0 is a significant improvement in this area. The new version made due much more readily with the hardware resources on my aged and aging PC. But the bad news is that Captivate is still a major soak on hardware resources, and it is best to have few other applications open while working in this latest Captivate. The combination of PowerPoint and Captivate open on my desktop PC was often too much for the machine to handle smoothly, so my workflow was broken up some by the constant fight for resources. I freely submit that my PC is long in the tooth so to speak, but Captivate as an application feels heavy in regular use, and I can't help thinking that it would function so much more efficiently if rebuilt from square one. It's more efficient now than ever, but that's not saying much, especially when compared to strong competitors like Camtasia and Articulate.

Reliability of 4.0 was also markedly improved over my experiences with prior versions. I could leave the software open for long periods of time while away, and I could work for hours with relative smoothness of program operation. Here I must also point out though, that 4.0 still suffers from some bugs, many of which I have been seeing since 2.0. Perhaps I am the only one that experiences performance issues with Captivate, but after having used versions of the software on a couple different laptops, and my home desktop PC that has copious hard drive space, two gigs of RAM, and a video card more than up to the task, Captivate 4.0 runs more slowly and more tediously than I had hoped. In particular I sometimes experienced a bug whereby a freshly loaded Captivate sensed that a prior session was still in operation, and thus refused to capture the screen due to the prior instance's still-running capture engine. Other bugs involved copying the contents of one file to another with two instances of the program open. It is probably not advised to run multiple Captivate instances simultaneously, but this makes moving and copying content over easier. Using the project merge feature wasn't quite what I needed either. Still other cases involved the configuration of various publish settings that for some reason did not take in the final exported deliverable. In my opinion, there are still many ways in which Captivate can be improved, particularly from an operations standpoint.

What's the Verdict?

There is little question that Captivate is a welcome (and timely) improvement on 3.0, and that it is a must-have upgrade for any training department. The vastly increased flexibility with button actions is one such reason. I have enjoyed the great number of new features Adobe has included, and Captivate is likely to be my primary elearning development environment going forward (though Articulate is quite strong as a competitor).

If there's only one thing I wish Adobe added to 4.0 (aside from a serious bump in resource efficiency and several bug fixes), it's the ability to have more than one Captivate file open in the same instance of the application. I'm not sure why this hasn't already been rectified, but it seems to be a pretty big gaffe in this day and age, even if the program has evolved a lot from its RoboDemo days. In the end, I definitely recommend upgrading to Captivate 4.0, as its added capabilities more than make up for the cost.

Was this review helpful? Let me know in the comments!

Training Challenges: Helping Others Help Themselves

training,clients,solutions,design,tools

One of the most common problems training organizations face is the hot dog stand sort of view that their clients have of them. Clients get used to training as the fix to most or all of their problems, and with this mindset they often come to the internal training organization with a to-go order that they look to be fulfilled by training resources. Clients expect training products - typically ILT and/or WBT modules in my experience - to solve whatever performance issues they face.

As such it is necessary for a training organization to find ways to help their clients analyze what their true needs are. This is certainly not a new thing; training departments everywhere go through this on a daily basis right now. The question we in the training and performance improvement space need to ask ourselves is, in the rapidly evolving Web 2.0/Elearning 2.0 world, what are our best and most easily implemented options for providing clients the tools they need to help themselves?

Gaining Perspective

As with any human endeavor, it's often best to check our perspective at the door as the first order of business. After all, our perspective colors all things, and a client is more likely than not going to come from a place that is not unrealistic in its own right, but may not be truly aligned with what the group's actual need is. The client must be prompted to consider their position first before acting. Is training really needed? Will a job aid or mentoring suffice? What about the gap indicates training is the best solution? Does a member of the client's team possess the ability to help solve the problem?

Applying Web/Elearning 2.0

With all of the new possibilities provided by the recent evolution of social networking tools and the web, how do we as training/HPI professionals best capture the moment at which delegation occurs? Using my most recent experience as an example, the training organization that I was a part of had a small collection of resources for training professionals to use in meetings with stakeholders to determine the true needs of the client from a training perspective. These tools focused solely on training however, and the process was very manual.

Hindsight being 20/20, I have some designs I would choose to implement that would alleviate some of the burden of this step. For example, what about using an internal forum/blog that clients can access to ask questions and receive feedback from the training group(s) about whether training is the right option for them? In another case, apps like Adobe Captivate or Microsoft PowerPoint could be used to design and develop branching questionnaires that clients go through that help them identify the nature of their problem, and guide them to the best possible solution selections (and perhaps even provide them the templates they need to create the solution themselves at the end).

Web/Elearning 2.0 tools have come about only recently, and they are typically seen as the vehicles by which content is generated, organized, and packaged for delivery. Perhaps it is time to consider how to leverage these implements before training design even begins. How could your organization benefit from applying these applications as such? Does your organization already do this?

Instructional Design and HPI...Cosmic Convergence?

As I continue in my Masters coursework at Capella University, each successive quarter project has increasingly driven home the sense that Instructional Design (ID) and Human Performance Improvement (HPI) are converging. Never has this been more apparent than my project this Q1. I am helping a friend and former manager at a company (who shall remain nameless...research ethics) who is seeing this very same convergence.

His training group has reached an impasse and has been unable to make significant improvements in the behavior of the workforce through training alone. To compound matters, the work environment is extremely dynamic and fast-paced, while having a very (to my eye) myopic focus on performing to benchmarks set by HQ. While benchmarks are not bad things, focusing on those alone will cause an organization to lose focus over the long term. My friend's training group has found itself in the classic struggle of nearly every training organization: How do we quantify and show our value-add to the business?

The problem goes beyond simple ROI measurements of training, and moves further into questions regarding the things that perhaps should be tried that are not. The culture in the environment tells them, in the traditional sense, that no problem can be solved without training. But HPI as a field of study shows that this is not the case. As such, due to the trend I am seeing with my friend's organization, I felt compelled to pose the question to my professor, and to myself, as I continue my studies. Are ID and HPI converging? The answer is certainly not known at this point in time, but there are signs out there, and as practitioners of ID (and later on HPI in my case) it's best I keep my eye out. My professor also sees some cause to think that the two fields are no longer parallel. Here's an abstract for a study I found on this phenomenon after a quick Google-timeout. Stolovitch and Keeps also help keep things in perspective.

Zen and the Art of e-Learning

Chris over at eQuixotic is one of my favorite bloggers in the e-learning community. I can appreciate the view that training programs are often presented poorly, and ultimately leave their audience wanting more. I recently found this post about the book Presentation Zen. I think Chris's post is a must-read for elearning developers of all stripes and backgrounds, and it's one of my recent favs.