Two cool ideas for performance support
Here are two clever tools that could give you ideas for ways to support your learners.
1. What’s that bird?
We’re out in the woods and hear a bird.
“Red-legged wrangler?” I say.
“I don’t think so,” you say. “Maybe a sharp-eared snipper.”
I pull out my iFlyer scanning wand and field guide. I scan the bar codes next to the wrangler and snipper. The wand plays each bird’s song and we discover that, as usual, you’re right. And now we’ve reinforced our knowledge of two more bird songs.
How could this technology help your organization? Language learning? Pronunciation help? Verbal instructions so people can focus on the procedure and not have to keep looking at text? Explanations of unusual items or tools?
2. Your external brain
Admit it. Your gutters need cleaning. In fact, you need gutter shields. But what was that company you wanted to use? The one whose ad you saw in a newspaper that you glanced at in a coffeeshop 3 weeks ago?
Luckily, you had your iPhone with you when you saw the ad. You took a picture of the ad and with one click sent it to your Evernote account. And now all you have to do is enter “gutter” in Evernote, and there’s the ad, because Evernote can read the text in your images.
Evernote also stores regular text notes, PDFs, audio, clippings from the web…. I’ve installed the free Evernote client on my desktop (Mac), laptop (Windows), and iPhone, and they all sync, so I can toss content in and get it out no matter where I am.
How could this kind of system help employees? Some ideas:
- Record whiteboard sketches
- Store boilerplate code and text
- Scan in printed documents so they can be searched and tagged
- Store procedures that you don’t need to memorize
One of my main uses of Evernote is to remember procedures that I do only occasionally, such as entering a copyright symbol, sending an international fax, or fixing the shifter on my bike:
It’s all about performance support.
What’s “performance support?”
Also known as “job aids,” performance support is any system that provides information, tools, or guidance where they’re needed and when they’re needed. Your grocery list and the GPS system that tells you to turn left at the next intersection are two examples.
Why should we care?
Mark Berthelemy has said it better than I can:
The role of the learning & development team is to:
- provide expert resources that managers can use with their teams
- provide communication tools that allow communities of practice to develop
- support specific interventions that have clearly defined business needs
- support and encourage a management culture that has learning at its core
People might think that our job is to train people with courses and workshops. But there are about 60 gajillion ideas out there for ways to offer structured and not-so-structured support when it’s needed, not just in the LMS or classroom.
These technologies and tools help us keep our courses lean and focused, and sometimes make a course unnecessary. And the fewer information-dump courses we make, the more time and budget we have to make the truly necessary courses lively and powerful.
What’s your favorite high- or low-tech job aid? Are you an Evernote junkie, too?
on November 6th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Ah, you talk such sense, Cathy. Thanks for this!
on November 6th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Dang! Adding barcodes to books was my idea two years ago! Lol. I was going to use barcodes to save people the bother of typing in long urls in the next edition of my book. I wasn’t in a hurry to implement my grand idea because cell phones in the U.S. don’t support bar code reading yet altho phones abroad do. This function is expected to be added here within the next two years. That said, I have a personal bar code reader that’s small enough to put on a key chain. I love it. It allows me to scan barcodes at the bookstore and later connect to my PC and put those titles on my Amazon wish list.
This is the one I bought (no affiliation, just a dweeb who loves barcodes)
on November 6th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
One of the cool things about the iFlyer is that you get extra bar code stickers to put in your own field guide or wherever they make sense to you.
Kathleen, I had heard about using cell phones to scan bar codes and am waiting for an iPhone app for that. Currently there’s just one, and it only reads those square QR codes. The mobile scanner you have looks like a great idea.
on November 7th, 2008 at 4:56 am
Hi Cathy,
Thanks for the link.
To be honest, my primary job aid is Google Desktop Search. It helps me find that report, proposal or chunk of code I wrote six months ago which had some really good ideas in it.
on November 7th, 2008 at 8:44 am
[...] Two cool ideas for performance support Making Change Cathy Moore 6 November 2008 [...]
on November 8th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Hey Cathy–as a recent Evernote convert, I’m loving your ideas for how to use it as a performance support tool. Something to definitely ponder some more. . .
on November 11th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Allison Rossett and Lisa Schafer (in Job Aids and Performance Support) make a nice distinction between planners and sidekicks.
A planner is a job aid you use before or after a task; a sidekick is one you use during it.
So you might look at that road map in Utah while planning your trip. You’re accessing information about which roads go where.
You could use the same map as a sidekick during your trip, checking it as you drive (or as your partner drives, if you want to get where you’re going).
A GPS in the car would be a more tailored sidekick — it’d be more integrated into the task.
Bill Deterline wrote once that the simplest job aid he knew of was the outline of a battery inside an electronic device. You don’t need to know which end is positive or negative (that’s nice-to-know stuff); the outline tells you how to put the battery in.
on November 11th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Dave, thanks for mentioning Job Aids and Performance Support. I’ve been reading that book recently and highly recommend it to people who want to think outside the course.
Your comment about the battery outline brings up the idea that people in training have a unique opportunity to view the process from an outsider’s perspective and point out simple improvements that will lighten the training load.
We don’t have the SME’s experience, so we can point out that, for example, the big “Edit” button at the top of the screen suggests that we would be able to edit our entry, while actually it does something else entirely. The SME is often so used to working around glitches in the process that they don’t even see the glitches anymore.
on November 11th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Cathy:
To follow your example, consider that the process for shutting down Windows begins by clicking the Start button.
on November 16th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
An update: Pelotonics, a project management and collaboration system for businesses, now uses Evernote. “Users can now link Pelotonics to Evernote and easily bring notes into their Pelotonics account,” according to the Evernote blog. “Once a note is in Pelotonics, it can be assigned to a user or project, set as a task, attached to a message, or saved as a file.” More on Pelotonics:
http://www.pelotonics.com/
on December 23rd, 2008 at 7:02 am
Hi Cathy,
Your blog is very helpful and informative.
Thanks alot for this great post!