Resolutions: More flavours, Less Texty

There are two things about the web today - WEB 2.x! - that blogs don't take advantage of:
1. Why are blogs so texty? Most blog posts are resolutely print-like save for the hyperlinks. Why?
2. Why are blogs so readerly? Web 2.x is the Read/Write web. Why don't more blog posts allow collaboration?

Why are blogs so texty?
Smashing Magazine explored texty blog posts in their Death of the Boring Blog Post piece in November, from a design perspective. But there's more to this than boringness and design. Some of the most inspiring things I saw on the web last year weren't text but something else.

I loved this presentation by Alan Cooper on Agile - "The Wisdom of Experience" (it's from 2008 but I found it last year via @choosenick's - AKA Nick Marsh - Service Design blog). And I loved @iOPT's  - AKA Donald Clark - series on Agile Learning, which culminated in this Periodic Table of Agile Learning.

While I was posting on using less texty documents to Make Your Intranet Suck Less I thought: why am I not doing the same with this blog?

I've added the odd, slightly sketchy image to the posts. And I've embedded a few 'objects' like Slideshare presentations, animations, Audiboo and YouTube movies. (How to make your intranet suck less has probably the biggest selection of embeds.) But the embedded objects have always been supported/framed by text. Why do I always start with a Presumption of Text?*

Looking back at posts over the last few months, there are quite a few which would have worked better as Slideshare presentations, for instance. There may even have been a few suitable for Audioboo, film clips, animations or cartoon strips. Visitors should have to work as little as possible to get the point. Good writing's important (here's hoping that gets better too) but some media are intrinsically more effective for certain types of message. The Presumption of Text is based on convenience - for me, not you.

So, here's New Year's resolution No. 1 - make this blog less texty.

If you want to see what this might look like, jump down to the end of the post for details.


Why are blogs so readerly?
People are big on talking up 'community' and the Read/Write web. Why aren't there more collaborative blog posts? Comments are all well and good. But they don't permit deletion.

It's only 'collaborative' if people can add to AND take away from the work. Commenting is mere eLaboration.

I searched everywhere and failed to find a way to embed a wiki into a blog post. But I did find how to embed a Google Wave. I can think of loads of cool things to do with this - and I'll go into that in future posts - Slow Motion GMT-friendly #lrnchat anybody? But for now, here's me asking you to help me out with my texty problem. There's a link to a How To article embedded in the Wave and here. If you're still not sure after reading it, drop a comment and I'll stick up some screenshots or something. If I can do it, I'm pretty sure anybody can :).

What other forms can I use on this blog to make things clearer, quicker and more shareable?

The Wave is embedded below.
You'll only be able to see it if you're logged into your Google or Wave account.

[What to do if you don't have a Wave account? I have loads of invites and they're being turned around in less than an hour these days, so ding me in the comments or on Twitter and we'll sort you one out. (Please, no bots or chancers - anybody else is fine)]:

*There are some good reasons for getting all texty, of course.

• The fact that email subscribers and other people might be reading this on a mobile device, for instance. Half the things I subscribe to make almost no sense at all on my phone. It was only when @dajbelshaw asked me to turn on email subscriptions for this blog that I realised this might be a problem here. Any feedback appreciated - nitpickers and fusspots especially welcomed. All of us non-professionals on the web need all the Usability help we can get, I think.
• Immediacy and relatively low levels of self-censorship - this is why I started the Hypergogue blog. Posts over there are much simpler, more frequent and more, ahem, wrong.  I think I'm subconsciously trying to pick a discussion with people.
• The 'form' of the blog post is relatively well-understood and people are skilled skimmers, scanners and filterers.
• Screen readers
• Cut and paste-ability

PS I'm going to try an experiment when I get back to the UK (I'm in Japan at the moment) and rewrite one of the posts in another medium or form. Any requests? My own preference is this one Science, Baby Einstein, Teletubbies and workplace learning because I know that only one person got what I was on about - despite it being on the subject perhaps closest to my heart. (Or perhaps, because of. . .) But it doesn't have to be one of mine - it could be one of yours. Drop a comment or, even better, stick something in the Wave.

2010: Discount Teaching and Hypergogues

What's it like to be a teacher?
You find teachers pretty much everywhere, here's a non-exhaustive list of people who teach:

trainers, parents, managers, lecturers, professors, business entertainers, gurus, actors, newsreaders, journalists, writers, bloggers, webmasters, teachers, coaches, mentors, colleagues, every single person on the planet

Some people seem to think teaching should be a bit like this:


Others, of a more analytical bent, think it's like this:


However, there's a good deal of evidence that teachers are actually doing something more akin to this:

Examples of teaching like this are everywhere. (English grammar is an especially exemplary example of this.)

I would suggest that teaching is a little like this (from xkcd):

Though some would take issue with this. (There are a vocal group (a minority? a majority?) who claim that teaching is something that you can only do if you are accredited.) But I think this is pretty near to the truth for large numbers of people who teach.

Here's my version, just to be clear (click for bigness):

Jakob Nielsen writes in his latest post, Anyone Can Do Usability, that in usability:

Skill levels form a continuum from beginner to expert; it's not a dichotomy. Every time you learn something, your performance improves. Usability and cooking are particularly suited for continuing education, because anything you learn will remain useful for many years to come. This is why I place so much emphasis on usability training: you get better results for every extra bit you learn.

I feel the same way about teaching and I would add it to the pot along with usability and cooking. Everybody should be doing it. (And almost nobody should be doing only it and nothing else.)

Jakob Nielsen's big idea is Discount Usability. Usability is so important that everybody should do it. We should embrace the amateur because:

The true choice is not between discount and deluxe usability engineering. If that were the choice, I would agree that the deluxe approach would bring better results. The true choice, however, is between doing something and doing nothing. Perfection is not an option. My choice is to do something!

(I'm not even sure that this is true. I'm not even sure that the 'deluxe' approach would bring better results.)

If you look hard enough, you'll find people teaching everywhere. Here's a couple I came across today while busy procrastinating during the writing of this last paragraph. (plus one which I share every chance I get because it's one of my favourites - guess which one?)

• Scientists arguing. 
• Making a game. 
• Badgering your followers on Twitter (check out the story bit on Elissa Miller)

So, Merry Christmas. I'll leave you with my big question (and project) for next year:

• What do you need to know in order to be a 'teacher'?
• Do you have to go to an accredited training centre to learn this stuff?
• What is it that teachers need to know in order to do what they do well?

I'm pretty convinced that the answers aren't only to be found in schools. And that the marketers and the Knowledge Managers and the Gamers and the UX guys and the Service Design people (and all the other bloggers, Information Architects, programmers, business people, scientists, agents provocateurs, policy wonks, geeks, nerds and dweebs) have got a lot to teach us.

I'm also pretty convinced that the word teacher is ineluctably associated with schools (which is a shame, because many people I know aren't at all convinced that school is about teaching. . .)

So, I'm calling the project, Hypergogue: a totally made-up word for people who teach but don't necessarily have the word teacher in their job title. And the project has two goals:

• to be a resource that people could use to teach themselves to teach
• to be a resource that learners could visit to find out how good (or bad) their teachers are

There's a posterous blog where I'm collecting interesting tidbits. There's a Twitter list of Hypergogues (not to be confused with Venessa Miemis' excellent list of metacogs.) There'll be a website ready for Easter. (It's currently here if anybody has any suggestions of what they'd like to see on it.)

I'd love to know if you think this idea is good/bad/terrible/vaguely unsettling/incomprehensible. So please leave a comment or @ me on Twitter.

See you in January when I'll be sharing my ten new year's resolutions (with some linky goodness, natch) and asking for help: why is it that I hate eLearning so much and can anybody persuade me how wrong I am?

2009, Year of The Google

It's the end of the year and I've got two more blog posts in me. This one and a brief Happy Christmas tomorrow, just in case there are people still at work in need of something with a sugary spurious Learning & Development-based centre. It's traditional towards the end of the year to look backwards, so that's what I'm going to do in this post.

There's going to be a lot of posts this year about Twitter. Here's an early contender for the best of that particular bunch by Venessa Miemis who deals much better than I could with the realisation that Twitter is really really important.

And, if I was talking about me personally, I'd have to agree. 2009 will always be the year that I got Twitter and Twitter got me. I'm smitten and can't imagine life without it.

But, I'm guessing that, like me, you have to spend a good deal of your time in the offline world working with offline people. People who aren't on Twitter. People who don't read blogs. For them, 2009 was the year of The Google.

I've been lucky enough to take part in a number of strategic planning events this year, as manager (before I quit my job - yay!), as board member and as facilitator. Strategic Planning events are often pretty samey in the way they're organised. Participants cover forests of flipchart paper to SWOT PESTs while wearing Six Hats and drinking indifferent coffee.

This year, unusually, the conclusions were similar too. People have finally noticed that The Google is affecting everybody. They realise that there isn't a single business in the private, public or non-profit sector that won't be affected by The Google. Everybody's terrified.

This might seem like old news to you. But I'm talking about people whose only connection to the web is via Microsoft Outlook. People who pay underlings to Google stuff for them and book train tickets. These are people whose idea of hi-tech is to send amusing email attachments to each other. All of them can see that the Google is going to affect them or wipe them out - possibly without even trying.

In one of these strategic planning days I took part in, The Google was in every box of the the PEST and the SWOT. And these aren't IT businesses. These are organisations from right across the board. Even a tech-savvy reader like you would struggle to see the immediate effect that The Google might have on them. But they can feel it. (This is one of the silly things about strategic planning days - the findings are often code for 'stuff we probably should have realised last year'.)

Of course, they don't really mean Google Google. Just like we 'Google' things on the web when we actually mean 'search', these people mean disintermediation, obsolescence and displacement.

And they're not just afraid of the bad stuff. They're also beginning to realise that they have whole departments of people they don't need any more. And that those long-term contracts with suppliers which used to feel canny, now feel like handcuffs. They realise they're going to have to face all this and fire some of their friends and restructure whole organisations. Some of them realise that paying people to Google stuff for them won(t wash for much longer. They're not looking forward to any of this. (Yes! We can save hundreds of thousands of pounds a year! Oh, sh. . .)

Because of Malcolm Gladwell, everybody's familiar with the idea of the Tipping Point. So I won't carry on overegging the lily any more.

But 2009 was the year of The Google. For every company and organisation in every area of public, private and not-for-profit enterprise.

Even those in education and training.

2010's going to be fun.

Intranets as a learning resource

This is a guide to setting up something like an intranet as Knowledge Management and Learning resource. I've used a capital 'L' in learning to make it seem more important. This 'intranet' is suitable for a couple of hundred employees and could be a permanent thing for an organisation. Or a temporary thing for a project.

Note: I use the term 'intranet' very loosely throughout. I'm talking about the alternatives to using anything from a custom-built solution to something like a SocialText wiki or Microsoft Sharepoint.

First, some back story:
I once took over the leadership of a team of Learning Consultants (notice the capital letters). One of the first things I noticed was the impossibility of their ever refinding any of the work they had done previously. They had been lucky enough to have a 'Resource Development Worker' who knew where everything was. Then she left and they were screwed. I locked myself in a room to investigate and search out the handover notes my predecessor had promised were there on the network drive.

I ended up deleting hundreds of thousand of files. This for a team of five people. How did this happen?

The miracle of copy and paste is not unlike folding a piece of paper. How thick would a piece of paper be if you folded it fifty times? The answer is surprising. Starting a new project, people would simply copy and paste whole folders of files into new locations for convenience. Even doing this a few times makes things interesting. In one section I found literally thousands of folders with an average content of less than one document. In some sections there were folders containing literally thousands of files. It's fair to say they'd had their share of lumpers and splitters.

I never found the handover notes. The team was one of about 50 in the organisation who all had similar problems. A significant proportion of people sent themselves documents simply to store them in their inbox, away from meddling clickers in a system of their own choosing. Even though the Mordac-style IT manager had set a limit of 100MB on email accounts (and set up the system to block email after the limit had been breeched).

Think about this: customers' emails weren't getting through because our own IT department was blocking email accounts in order to save space that people were using in order to escape from a filing system containing millions of unusable files. Your organisation is probably the same.

It doesn't have to be that way. I took my team 'into the Cloud' with Salesforce.com (despite Mordac's squeals of protest and a threat 'not to be held responsible when it all went terribly wrong). But this is what I wish I'd done.

How to set up a Knowledge Management and Learning resource in your organisation -
A quick, dirty, naive step-by-step guide:


1. Check your premises

Knowledge managers should lead by example when it comes to finding creative solutions to practical problems.  The first step along this path is to question our premises.  When we fail to do this, we pursue outdated goals and methods, thereby relegating our KM programs to an increasingly irrelevant position within the firm.

Above and Beyond KM, KM's worst enemy by @VMaryAbraham

It's a cliche. But you have to ask yourself what you want to achieve. Search the web and you'll find guides to looking for the perfect Learning Management System or intranet solution. But these are often clunky and bloated. And the smaller, neater solutions are limiting. The limited feature-set of something like the 37signals software apps is elegant and perfect for administrivia. I tried Backpack with the team I mentioned above and they liked it, but only as a replacement for Outlook.

Knowledge sharing does not have to equal intranet.

2.  Abandon the idea of an IT budget

If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, "I'll take them all please." Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?
And if they don't work, why are you running them?

Seth's blog, Do ads work? by Seth Godin

Knowledge Management systems are no different. When I was looking into sorting out the mess in the situation above, I didn't have a budget, initially. What I was supposed to do was to negotiate with the IT Manager and 'make my case' for a piece of his budget. Which plainly wouldn't have worked as his budget was tied up maintaining rooms full of largely redundant servers.

What I did was work out how much money we were losing through lost customers. And how much I though we could gain from getting new customers. If you gain more than you lose, then you're fine. (Sorry, reality is slightly more complex than this - but not much)

The number I came up with astonishing. So much so, that I took it to the Finance Director for her to check with a sheepish expression on my face. (If you don't realise why this was such an unusual thing for me to do, then I'm happy for you.)

You can afford this.

3.  Forget the idea of 'ownership'
Either you all own it or nobody does.

This is the weakest point of my guide. Having a manager to 'drive adoption' is stupid. But not everybody likes their job or feels strongly about helping things get better.

4.  Use off the shelf solutions. And lots of them
Tumblr is free. Posterous is free. Wordpress is free. The internet is free. Facebook is free. Twitter (or Yammer) is free. There's loads more where they came from.

These solutions are tried and tested. People know how to use them and like them. All of them are capable of serving RSS feeds too, which means you can do interesting things with the information:


You can get information out of systems in lots of different ways. RSS is amazing.


5.  Blow all your money on toys
If I had my time again, I wouldn't spend my money on 'solutions'. I'd make it brain-friendly and spend it on toys. Like Flip video cameras. (Incidentally, just in case you think I'm being frivolous about 'toys', consider this. One of the terrible open secrets of the IT industry is that organisations start using something like Sharepoint because the managers need it on their CVs as it's an industry standard. You probably know an IT or Knowledge Manager - ask them if I'm exaggerating and wait for the rueful smile. How's that for a toy?)

Spend more money on input devices than anything else.

6.  Turn yourself inside out
If you find information useful, the chances are your customers will too. Give them access to your Knowledge Management systems. In the example I gave above, we ended up storing half of our new files and documents on the customer website - it saved us the trouble of having to email them out all the time.

Keep your Knowledge Management systems separate from your administrivia.

7.  Build for people more than data
Knowledge Management experts seem to fall into two categories: those who focus on people and those who focus on information. The latter camp will talk about taxonomies and controlled vocabulary and metadata. And this is all very useful stuff. But, given a choice on how to find out some information, most people prefer to ask.

In the story above, I told you that I deleted hundreds of thousands of files. What I didn't tell you about was the team's outrage. When I asked the IT department if we could recover some of the documents, they gave me a form to fill out. I gave it to the team - and it never got filled in. None of the data was important enough to be worth the trouble of filling out a form.

When we looked at some of the breakthroughs we'd made in our work, we discovered that many of them came from trips to the bathroom or - amazingly - by picking up lost documents from the group printer. ("What, you're working on this too?!")

Knowledge Management systems are about making your experts visible to each other. Your experts are all your staff. 

Basically, I'm talking about blogging, chatting and Personal Learning Networks. It works for millions of us online, it can work at work too. How wrong am I?

How to make your intranet suck less

An intranet can be a powerful tool for learning in organisations. But, very often, the company intranet sucks. One way to overcome this is to make them more social. But this is easier said than done. Here's one suggestion to make intranets more social and less sucky.

Virtue of patience

This morning I visited a Tokyo primary school to see my seven-year-old nephew in concert and was amazed to see they'd laid on a whole orchestra. Why not stick to something simple like the recorder? An orchestra seemed like a bit of a song and a dance to me. I suppose I should have known better. Japanese teachers are just like the rest of us - they like an easy life. But, unlike the rest of us, they're not dumb enough to go for the 'easy' option.

The kids treated us to the theme from the Mickey Mouse Club with ten kids playing the 'call' of the first few notes on a melodian answered by another ten providing a 'response' on xylophones. Add in a bass drum, some tambourines, triangles, drums and, yes, some recorders and you have yourself a show. Each kid simply needs to learn about ten notes and the patience to wait till it's their bit. Guess which is harder for the average seven-year-old?

Virtual Learning

Learning organisations should take of this. Intranets are often used for mundane clerical tasks or as glorified filing systems. But they have the potential to be so much more. You only have to look at something like Facebook or Twitter to see this. This hasn't gone unnoticed by managers.

But success in launching an in-house version of Facebook is far from inevitable, especially if it's half-baked. One company I worked with included some simple (ie rubbish) games on their intranet so that staff had 'something to do at lunchtime'. You can guess how well that went down. It's an example of what's called the creepy treehouse effect in education. From this, the company concluded that further efforts weren't worth it. And guess what? Unless your company has the resources of, say, Facebook your intranet will always seem half-baked.

Here are some other facts which get in the way:

• Specially-designed 'enterprise' versions of social media are often ugly, sucky and buggy.
• Learning Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environments are as ugly, sucky and buggy as anything on the market.
• Managers want to make sure staff are 'on message' so moderate everything
• People don't compare their intranet to another intranet. They compare it to Amazon or the BBC website.
• Intranets are full of documents written by managers.
• Company documents are formal. They're rarely fun.
• Intranets tend to reflect the silos of their parent organisations. They often have bits for each department and the HR bit and the training bit. This makes them a Usability nightmare (and results in madness like email bulletins reminding people people not to use email for tasks that can be completed using the intranet - this does happen)
• Crappy Information Architecture. Sometimes no Information Architecture.
• For every Facebook there's a hundred iYomus which fail.

I don't have a magic cure for the problems above. But I do have an observation. Most organisations will struggle to get anything that feels half as intuitive or with anything like the lobster-trap power of Facebook. So it's silly to even try. But you can have something useful if you remember that intranets are like school concerts. They're easier with an orchestra.

It's at about this point in a typical blog post that my analogies begin to stretch and fray. So, I'll come straight to the point. An orchestra in this case means as many types of content options using as many types of media as you can think of.

What kind of stuff am I talking about?
Some people might make podcasts. If podcasts seem complicated, people might like to record a little interview or they might make Audioboos:

Or make a simple animation:
GoAnimate.com: Teaching Personas Scaffold Classroom Management by monica22284

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Or slideuments:

Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management - People at the Center

View more documents from T-Systems Multimedia Solutions.

Or multimedia slideshows:

Introduction To Knowledge Management

View more presentations from nickmilton.

Or short films from Ignite days, Pecha Kucha breakfast sessions or Ted talks. Or they might just post semi-random comments on interesting work-related resources. Or semi-random resources on totally random oddities and weirdness. I'm sure I've missed out loads of stuff here. (Or maybe added in too much? Who knows? This is the kind of stuff you don't find out till you try it.)

Loading up shedloads of 'content' is pointless. The main point of the intranet should be social. It's about developing Subject Matter Networks. It's about making your experts more discoverable. It's about Permission Learning. The stuff you upload can be rough and ready around the edges. And it doesn't need to last forever.

Oh, please don't it last forever. How many intranets have I seen with a document with the footer reading something like, "Produced aeons ago, due for review an aeon ago"? If somebody visits an obviously dormant website on the internet, they leave and never come back. Your intranet is no different.

Next post - The naive guide on how to set up a brain-friendly Knowledge Management system to leverage the virality of workers' social graphs in your Small to Medium Enterprise.

Leveraging the virality of bold brain-friendly learning

Twitter is good for people saying stuff like. . .
Jargon is so comforting. Here's a tasty piece that I've put together Frankenstein-styley from a number of people on Twitter to protect the innocent:

Seeking to leverage the virality of employees' social graphs for bold brain-friendly pull-learning initiatives?

The saddest thing about this sentence is that it actually kind of makes sense. The trouble is, if a full-on 'change agent' comes to your workplace and starts spouting off like this, they're not liable to get far. Can we rescue our Change Agent from this sticky situation?

Sticky situation. . .
Michael Eury (@stickylearning) has a great post on Viral Expansion Loops, among other things. He knows all about them - and now I do because he's part of my social graph.

Here's the basic idea of a Viral Expansion Loop in organisational development:

• Design a learning resource (eg a wiki, intranet, LMS/VLE)
• Add content
• Add in a bit social networking magic (friending, commenting, <3-ing)
• Sit back and admire your handiwork**

Here's a short film explaining how a viral expansion loop starts:


In other words, it's Facebook or Twitter or Ning or Wikipedia or (cough) Babysham. But at work.

Bold Brain-Friendly Pull-learning Initiatives
As if that's not exciting enough you can also use your virally expanding social networking platform for learning - Facebook as a platform for eLearning 2.0!.

Economics of Corporate Learning

View more presentations from jaycross.

Instead of pushing people towards consultants and trainers and clunky eLearning courses, you reap the rewards of your employees socialising and learning from each other. They're pulled towards the honeypot (or the lobster trap) of the network and learn in the way that nature intended - by volunteering to share, observing peers and playing games.

A cynic might say that all this simply encourages people to do the things that come naturally but that the bureaucratic structures of pathological organisations prevents them from doing.

But let's forget the cynics. Back to our hapless jargon-ridden Change Agent. How can we express this idea in a way that even the most old-school, jaded, unnovative, just-two-more-months-till-retirement sexy executive will shout, "Hallelulah!"**

Or should we even try? Is this just another passing phase?

Tomorrow's post: why your intranet should be more like a Tokyo primary school concert.

PS Bonus points for anybody who can spot my rather Freudian typo on the above.

** Of course, without getting too carried away. Not forgetting to measure ROII, for instance. (That's not a typo, by the way)

[Image: Geek and Poke, daily geeky cartoons.]

For more on intranets (and the bold part of above is the bit where we scrap our current intranet solutions), here's a report on Intranet Usability from Jakob Nielsen. Note that it's mostly about 'tasks' and productivity. Which gives you a fairly clear idea of what most intranets are used for - booking travel, annual leave and downloading Word documents.


I'm not at all convinced that using an enterprise version of Facebook, for example, is the right way forward for any organisation that can't afford to make their own version that's at least as good as the real thing. This is one of the key lessons of Harry Beckwith's Selling the Invisible - you don't get to set the quality standards for your products, all your competitors do. Whether they're in your industry or not. It's not just the staff at theme parks who have to smile like the people at Disney. If you're intranet (or your eLearning) isn't like a 'real' website, people will switch off.

The Armageddon Problem

First, this is a post about teaching. So here's a little note about what I mean when I say, "teaching."

Teaching happens almost everywhere and pretty much everywhen. In fact, it is almost as common as learning. Some people are schoolteachers. They do a lot of teaching but they also do a lot of stuff that isn't teaching. They don't have a monopoly on the word 'teaching'.*

And, by extension, any training that teachers (see above) do to help them teach is teacher training. Moving on...

A Big Mistake
A while back, I was putting together a team for a big Learning and Development project. It was a small team working on a change project with frontline workers, the lowest paid and least skilled workers in their organisation. I knew I needed a data/systems person, so I started looking for one of those. I also needed somebody else and the choice I had was simple - a trained teacher or a rookie-teacher but experienced frontline worker.

Obviously, the trained teacher wouldn't know much about the area we were working in, but would be able to design processes and help create environments for learning. And vice versa for our rookie. Which one did I go for?

This, by coincidence, is roughly the central plot device of the 1998 film, Armageddon.

For those of you who haven't seen the film, Armageddon is about an asteroid heading to Earth with potentially catastrophic consequences. NASA decide to send a team of oilmen to land on the asteroid to drill to its core, plant explosives and avert disaster. Although the oilmen are 'the best' at what they do (we're talking Bruce Willis here, people), they're all rookies in astronaut years. Hi-jinks ensue.

Around the time of the film's release, I read an earnest article criticising the film from a Learning & Development perspective (not that the nerdy author realised this). Put simply, they said, it would be easier to train astronauts to drill into an asteroid than it would be to train oilmen to become astronauts. Drilling? It's not exactly rocket science.

To my shame, I actually used the phrase 'Armageddon Problem' during discussions of my hiring dilemma and eventually decided to hire a professional teacher. It was easier to 'skill up' a qualified trainer than to train up an experienced worker. Teaching, unlike drilling, is rocket science, I thought.

Let's revisit the problem and see what I would do now
Note that originally, I went for the 'easiest' option. That was stupid. I had two rational choices. I could've sought to reduce the risk of failure or I to maximise positive outcomes.

Would my rookie have caused the project to fail? Almost certainly not. Teaching's just not that hard. Not if you know what you're talking about and you're committed.

Would my rookie have achieved more? Almost certainly yes. For a start, we'd have given a frontline worker the chance to become a better teacher. And the difference in results between a very very good trainer and an average one aren't that great. Plus, my rookie would have all kinds of insights into the processes and experiences of our learners.

As a minimum, we could reasonably expect:

• Project with professional teacher = success
• Project with rookie = success and an experienced teacher

Why did I make this mistake?
Everybody does this. The example I've given is, I believe, relatively clear cut. But this is exactly the same choice we make every single time we hire a teacher. It's the easy option.

A problem with professional teachers is that they're often baseball players, to use Jeffrey Sonnenfeld's term. They often care more about their profession than they do about the work or the service or the organisation itself. They're like HR people, most CEOs and lawyers in this respect.

Every time you hire a teacher, you rule out any chance of somebody else learning to teach.

Postscript
As somebody's who done a lot of teaching, I also know that appearances can be deceptive. I'd say the chances are it's just as hard to help somebody learn how to drill into rock as it is to train them to be an astronaut. There's something about drilling that involves tacit knowledge and intuition and know-how that I imagine is absent from NASA's shiny machines. (I'm quite willing to be wrong about this. I find the idea of astronauts thumping their control panels like Doctor Who quite appealing.) The point is, I just don't know. My 1998 self says drilling is not rocket science. My 2009 self says rocket science is not drilling.

*There are other words that describe people who teach but who aren't schoolteachers. Like 'trainer', 'coach', 'mentor', 'guru', 'manager' etc. I'm using 'teacher' because it's the one with the most affordance and because this is my blog. I do have an alternative suggestion and I'm in the middle of building a website to showcase it.