Can you take a systems approach to creativity? Many would argue you can’t. At Allen, we’ve created an environment that nurtures & promotes creativity. This environment relies on:

• Catalytic processes
• A culture of innovation
• Smart, talented people

Here is our process for creativity—it can serve as a catalyst for creativity even if it doesn’t guarantee that light-bulb moment.

This process is probably pretty self-explanatory. You may have to cycle through it a couple of times before something works. For us, this is a sub-process within the design phase.

The second element that goes into creating a creative environment is culture. Here are some of our cultural values:

• No project is too small for innovation.
• Don’t wait for the client to raise the bar.
• Treat client projects as if they were our own.
• Each project should reflect the designer’s resourcefulness & passion.
• Each project should also leverage our collective experience & talent.
• Interesting people design interesting courses.

Such values can be used to set goals, check mindsets, and assess our success.

The third aspect that we think is vital to creativity is having great people. At work, we tend to put on our Clark-Kent alter ego. Most of us have another side. Leveraging the full range of our team’s experience helps us generate resourceful, passionate, even heroic ideas. Here are some of our super talents:

• Instructional designers that teach, act, & run marathons
• Artists that moonlight as DJs, cartoonists, & musicians
• Programmers that are aspiring novelists, basketball stars, & moto racers
• Project managers that rescue shelter dogs & volunteer in their communities while cooking, singing, & blogging

I was recently challenged by a prospective client to show them our creativity. I showed them several examples of past projects, and I was surprised that they couldn’t see it immediately. I think that this is because there is a difference between technical and artistic creativity. Technical creativity is problem-solving—it’s creativity that gets work done in a new way or introduces new ideas to meet business needs. Artistic creativity resides within the realm of the arts. Arguably, we use both on several of our projects, but I think it’s really the technical creativity that matters for instructional designers and for learners. Creativity must meet a defined performativity criterion.

I’ve been involved with an ongoing project for over a year now, and I’m currently converting three web-based courses to ILT courses. The courses deal mostly with soft skills and sales processes; the content was based on learner and SME input from a Needs Analysis that was conducted last year. Learners can choose to participate in either classroom or web-based settings—or both. We created all three web-based courses first, and we are now building the ILT courses. As with all transformations from the web to the classroom, activities and explanations change—sometimes drastically.

In the web-based courses, we built comprehensive Flash interactive scenarios. As we started to convert the web-based, we wanted to do something with the pieces we created. Our first thought was simply to stream the activity through a PowerPoint and allow learners to vote at the decision points.  This learning wouldn’t be as effective as we felt it could be though.

So, we went back to the drawing table and decided to create a game of some kind. Although we already had all the content, the process of making a board game was much more intense than expected. This partly stemmed from trying to adapt existing content to a cohesive game style. Here is a snapshot of the process.

In the original web-based activity, learners would decide what to ask the customer; they would hear the response; then they would receive feedback.

Our first concept of the game included cards that represented each decision point. When we tested it out in the office, it was too confusing.

Here is the original card concept.

After the initial test, we changed the concept a bit. We thought this board would feel more like a game. We were still using Word for the drafting process, and we hadn’t consulted an artist yet—which is pretty obvious.

Since the cards wouldn’t be placed on the board, the cards became larger: one for each decision point. We thought this would simplify the process.

Here is a shot of all the decision points on one board.

At this point, we took what we had to our client. After discussing and re-evaluating how this would be used in the training, we decided that including so many pieces wouldn’t be beneficial for learners or for production purposes.  So, we put all the decision points in the Participant Guide and designed the gameboard to be part of the guide as well. This also allowed for learners to re-create the game after the training.

At this point, we had enough of an idea that we took it to a graphic artist. As you can see, amazing things happen when a graphic artist gets involved.

He gave us two versions. We were first thinking of a Candy Land type of layout:

Our client also liked the idea of having more of circular board, maybe something like Trivial Pursuit.

You’ll also notice the scoreboard that shows up in this version. We mocked that up first in Word. Here is the first iteration:

Our graphic designer made it look much better:

After consulting with our client, we finally came up with a product that worked for the intended learners.

Here is the final gameboard:

The first reviews from the client have been very positive. Their test groups enjoyed the concept. We also included the Flash activity as an executable in the PPT, in case they would like to run it with a class.

Converting this web-based activity to an ILT interactive piece has been very rewarding. It was fun to create and fun to test. This was only one activity in one of three web-based courses. We’re currently creating games for the others. I’ll be sure to share when those are finished.

I spent last week with one of our manufacturing clients, and it struck me (yet again) that manufacturing and ISD are very well suited to each other. Both rely on a systematic approach to performance and production. I felt like I was among kindred spirits as we mapped curricula, flowcharted development processes, and designed a high-level strategy for meeting their business goals. Although this particular client group is relatively new to elearning, their background in manufacturing (including lean and six sigma) meant that they were already converts to the gospel of systems design and the idea that we would be collaborating together to design an instructional system rather than a training course.

This group faces the same challenge as many manufacturing environments—the experienced boomers on the floor are nearing retirement and management is concerned about capturing that experience before it walks out the door. One of the things that we worked out last week was the design of a process for capturing that knowledge. By the end of our visit, this is what the process ultimately looked like—please note that this is a sub-process specifically for content-gathering and not a replacement for your standard ISD processes.

1. They begin by collecting any the existing materials used by experienced team members at more than 50 plants in North America. These materials may be videos, PowerPoint files, reference manuals, job aids, equipment specifications, etc.
2. Working with a designated subject-matter expert, they engage that expert in reviewing and assembling the best of what’s currently available.
3. They then create a PowerPoint prototype of the content—not the design—which includes all of the relevant content and existing assets.
4. For the test, they bring together several subject-matter experts together at one of the plants. They assemble a test audience of both novices and veterans. We also have the instructional designers on site to capture all of the expertise and all of the stories that are not documented in the PowerPoints.
5. We then do a comprehensive analysis of the content that has been gathered—identifying what exists, what needs to be updated, what schematics may be need to be located or created, what video needs to be shot or reshot, etc.
6. Based on that analysis, the lead subject-matter expert helps us to fill in those content gaps as much as possible. We then know what media assets may still need to be created and begin a more typical design phase to produce the WBT modules associated with those topics.

It’s not rocket science, but it is the result of a thoughtful analysis of their particular context and the realization on the part of everyone on that the team that we need a systematic approach to tackling the problem.

Sometimes I think that we’re too quick to dismiss level-one feedback as we target the upper realms of Donald Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation or even Jack Phillips’s ROI. Although such lofty aspirations are noble (and necessary), we can overlook the easy, quick win of gathering learner response after a training intervention. And while survey results make for attractive bar charts, I tend to prefer the open response comments that typically appear at the end of the survey.

Level-one feedback has been on my mind for the past few weeks, ever since we at Allen plastered a bunch of level-one comments onto the walls of our small conference room. (We’ve mixed in a few client comments with the learner comments.)

Besides interior design, here are some other uses for level-one feedback:

• Communicating it keeps everyone (training folk, managers, and execs) focused on the real-world needs of learners. It reminds us who our learners are and to factor them into our training decisions.
• If you’re looking to change attitudes and cultures, level-one feedback is going to be a good barometer for knowing what attitudes are changing and what problems may still exist.
• It can be motivational or inspiring to other learners. You can use excellent feedback as testimonials of the program.

Training and learning are human activities. Level-one feedback often indicates that human connection and promotes further connection. To motivate you to gather your level-one feedback, I’m including some self-congratulatory samples:

• “The course was very in depth & extremely informative.  It helped that it was interactive, as well.  I feel more confident about approaching potential customers now, as well as having concrete ideas.”
• “I thought it would be boring but it was fun. I learned a lot. I have been selling for a while; no one ever trained me so I know this will help. And I look forward to the other subjects. I am so excited.”
• “I feel like I learned more in the last 6 weeks than in the last year, and I think that is largely due to your clear and organized teaching approach. Thank you for sharing all of your wisdom–both about the class and about life after the class– it is something that will stick with me for a long time.”
• “I was scared at first, but I took a chance at registering online & taking the training course. I feel a lot better about myself & the training has helped.”

I teach a senior seminar once a year up at the U. A few weeks ago, the associate director for the department in which I teach attended the class with a few guests, just to observe. We talked for a few minutes after class, and I’ve thought quite a bit about what she had to say. I was struck not by her feedback on my performance as an instructor but by what she had to say about my students. She was impressed at how conversant the students had become in the theory. For many of the students, this was their first exposure to some rather complex psychoanalytic and post-structural theorists, and yet they were able to meaningfully apply what they were learning and demonstrate that knowledge in dialogue with other students. Of course, I was pleased that the students were doing so well, but I hadn’t stopped to think about why. I hadn’t made many changes in my syllabus from the year before, and what I was doing in the classroom was basically the same. One of the changes, however, and one that I think may be directly linked to the students’ improved facility in discussing and applying theory was the use of the discussion feature in Blackboard. This year, I replaced one of their formal papers with a requirement to contribute at least four meaningful postings to the online forum. As the term began, the postings were a little tentative as students built up confidence. Most of the students were starting new threads with each posting rather than responding to other student’s threads. I found that I had to respond to a few postings or the students would be getting no response whatsoever. By the second or third week, however, this changed dramatically as students selected topics for their term projects and began to use the forum to test out their ideas with other students working on similar topics. Soon, there were as many responses as there were new threads. I deliberately refrained from participating to encourage more peer-to-peer commentary, but I read all of their postings in detail. Often the online discussion would transfer over into a live discussion in the classroom. Here are some things I would recommend:

• I wasn’t naïve enough to think that they would voluntarily contribute to the forum without a little external motivation. I required a posting to be approximately 150 words in length in order to receive credit. It was short enough that they didn’t have anxiety about writing the posting but long enough to push them to get into more detail about what they were thinking.
• I counted responses and new threads equally—so that students would be encouraged to respond to each other.
• I gave them points for their postings but I didn’t grade them. This freed them to explore ideas that they wouldn’t have wanted to put into a formally graded paper. It allowed them to talk about the theorists that they didn’t quite understand.

What the forum did was to give them a safe place to practice, without concern for their grade, and without the more public focus that they would get in class. I think it also helped to prepare them for class, to prepare them for their formal writing assignments, etc. I’m quite proud of them. Here’s a snapshot of some of the threads that they started.