Triggered Action Planning Confirmed with Scientific Research, Producing Huge Benefits

Back in 2008, I began discussing the scientific research on “implementation intentions.” I did this first at an eLearning Guild conference in March of 2008. I also spoke about it in 2008 at a talk to Salem State University, in a Chicago Workshop entitled Creating and Measuring Learning Transfer, and in one of my Brown Bag Lunch sessions delivered online.

In 2014, I wrote about implementation intentions specifically as a way to increase after-training follow-through. Thinking the term “Implementation Intentions” was too opaque and too general, I coined the term “Triggered Action Planning,” and argued that goal-setting at the end of training—what was often called action planning—would not be effective as triggered action planning. Indeed, in recounting the scientific research on implementation intentions, I often talked about how researchers were finding that setting situation-action triggers could create results that were twice as good as goal-setting alone. Doubling the benefits of goal setting! These kinds of results are huge!

I just came across a scientific study that supports the benefits of triggered action planning.

 

Shlomit Friedman and Simcha Ronen conducted two experiments and found similar results in each. I’m going to focus on their second one because it focused on a real training class with real employees. They used a class that taught retail sales managers how to improve interactions with customers. All the participants got the same exact training and were then randomly assigned to two different experimental groups:

  • Triggered Action Planning—Participants were asked to visualize situations with customers and how they would respond to seven typical customer objections.
  • Goal-Reminding Action Planning—Participants were asked to write down the goals of the training program and the aspects of the training program that they felt were most important.

Four weeks after the training, secret shoppers were used. They interacted with the supervisors using the key phrases and rated each supervisor on dichotomously-anchored rating scales from 1 to 10, with ten being best. The secret shoppers were blind to condition—that is they did not know which supervisors had gotten triggered action planning and which received the goal instructions. The findings showed that the triggered action planning produced improvements over the goal-setting condition by 76%, almost doubling the results.

It should be pointed out that this experiment could have been better designed to have the control group select their own goals. There may be some benefit to actual goal-setting compared with being reminded about the goals of the course. The experiment had its strengths too, most notably (1) the use of observers to record real-world performance four weeks after the training, and (2) the fact that all the supervisors had gone through the exact same training and were randomly assigned to either triggered action planning or the goal-reminding condition.

Triggered Action Planning

Triggered Action Planning has great potential to radically improve the likelihood that your learners will actually use what you’ve taught them. The reason it works so well is that it is based on a fundamental characteristic of human cognition. We are triggered to think and act based on cues in our environment. As learning professionals we should do whatever we can to:

  • Figure out what cues our learners will face in their work situations.
  • Teach them what to do when they encounter these cues.
  • Give them a rich array of spaced, repeated practice in handling these situations.

To learn more about how to implement triggered action planning, see my original blog post.

Research Cited

Friedman, S., & Ronen, S. (2015). The effect of implementation intentions on transfer of training. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45(4), 409-416.

This blog post took three hours to write.

Thankful for So Much!! Paying Off My Student Loans at 60 Years of Age

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Today, after turning 60 a few months ago, I finally paid off my student loans—the loans that made it possible for me to get my doctorate from Columbia University. I was in school for eight years from 1988 to 1996, studying with some of the brightest minds in learning, development, and psychology (Rothkopf, Black, Peverly, Kuhn, Higgins, Dweck, Mischel, Darling-Hammond, not to mention my student cohort). If my math is right, that’s 22 years to pay off my student-loan debt. A ton of interest paid too!

I’m eternally grateful! Without the federal government funding my education, my life would have been so much different. I would never have learned how to understand the research on learning. My work at Work-Learning Research, Inc.—attempting to bridge the gap between research and practice—would not have been possible. Thank you to my country—the United States of America—and fellow citizens for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime!! Thanks also must go to my wife for marrying into the forever-string of monthly payments. Without her tolerance and support I certainly would be lost in a different life.

I’ve often reflected on my good fortune in being able to pursue my interests, and wondered why we as a society don’t do more to give our young people an easier road to pursue their dreams. Even when I hear about the brilliant people winning MacArthur fellowships, I wonder why only those who have proven their genius are being boosted. They are deserving of course, but where is our commitment to those who might be teetering on a knife edge of opportunity and economic desperation? I was even lucky as an undergrad back in the late 1970’s, paying relatively little for a good education at a state school and having parents who funded my tuition and living expenses. College today is wicked expensive, cutting out even more of our promising youth from realizing their potential.

Economic mobility is not as easy as we might like it. The World Bank just released a report showing that worldwide only 12% of young adults have been able to obtain more education than their parents. The United States iis no longer the land of opportunity we once liked to imagine.

This is crazy short-sighted, and combine this with our tendency to underfund our public schools, it has the smell of a societal suicide.

That’s depressing! Today I’m celebrating my ability to get student loans two-and-a-half decades ago and pay them off over the last twenty-some years! Hooray!

Seems not so important when put into perspective. It’s something though.

 

 

Reflections This Morning On Brushing My Teeth

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I use a toothbrush that has a design that research shows maximizes the benefits of brushing. It spins, and spinning is better than oscillations. It also has a timer, telling me when I’ve brushed for two minutes. Ever since a hockey stick broke up my mouth when I was twenty, I’ve been sensitive about the health of my teeth.

But what the heck does this have to so with learning and development? Well, let’s see.

Maybe my toothbrush is a performance-support exemplar. Maybe no training is needed. I didn’t read any instructions. I just used it. The design is intuitive. There’s an obvious button that turns it on, an obvious place to put toothpaste (on the bristles), and it’s obvious that the bristles should be placed against the teeth. So, the tool itself seems like it needs no training.

But I’m not so sure. Let’s do a thought experiment. If I give a spinning toothbrush to a person who’s never brushed their teeth, would they use it correctly? Would they use it at all? Doubtful!

What is needed to encourage or enable good tooth-brushing?

  • People probably need something to compel them to brush, perhaps knowledge that brushing prevents dental calamities like tooth decay, gum disease, bad breath—and may even prevent cognitive decline as in Alzheimer’s. Training may help motivate action.
  • People will probably be more likely to brush if they know other people are brushing. Tons of behavioral economics studies have shown that people are very attuned to social comparisons. Again, training may help motivate action. Interestingly, people may be more likely to brush with a spinning toothbrush if others around them are also brushing with spinning toothbrushes. Training coworkers (or in this case other family members) may also help motivate action.
  • People will probably brush more effectively if they know to brush all their teeth, and to brush near their gums as well—not just the biting surfaces of their teeth. Training may provide this critical knowledge.
  • People will probably brush more effectively if they are set up—probably if they set themselves up—to be triggered by environmental cues. For example, tooth-brushing is often most effectively triggered when people brush right after breakfast and right before they go to bed. Training people to set up situation-action triggering may increase later follow through.
  • People will probably brush more effectively if they know that they should brush for two minutes or so rather than just brushing quickly. Training may provide this critical knowledge. Note, of course, that the toothbrush’s two-minute timer may act to support this behavior. Training and performance support can work together to enable effective behavior.
  • People will be more likely to use an effective toothbrush if the cost of the toothbrush is reasonable given the benefits. The costs of people’s tools will affect their use.
  • People will be more likely to use a toothbrush if the design is intuitive and easy to use. The design of tools will affect their use.

I’m probably missing some things in the list above, but it should suffice to show the complex interplay between our workplace tools/practices/solutions and training and prompting mechanisms (i.e., performance support and the like).

But what insights, or dare we say wisdom, can we glean from these reflections? How about these for starters:

  • We could provide excellent training, but if our tools/practices/solutions are poorly designed they won’t get used.
  • We could provide excellent training, but if our tools/practices/solutions are too expensive they won’t get used.
  • Let’s not forget the importance of prior knowledge. Most of us know the basics of tooth brushing. It would waste time, and be boring, to repeat that in a training. The key is to know, to really know, not just guess, what our learners know—and compare that to what they really need to know.
  • Even when we seem to have a perfectly intuitive, well-designed tool/practice/solution let’s not assume that no training is needed. There might be knowledge or motivational gaps that need to be bridged (yes, the pun was intended! SMILE). There might be situation-action triggering sets that can be set up. There might be reminders that would be useful to maintain motivation and compel correct technique.
  • Learning should not be separated from design of tools/practices/solutions. We can support better designs by reminding the designers and developers of these objects/procedures that training can’t fix a bad design. Better yet, we can work hand in hand involved in prototyping the tool/training bundle to enable the most pertinent feedback during the design process itself.
  • Training isn’t just about knowledge, it’s also about motivation.
  • Motivation isn’t just the responsibility of training. Motivation is an affordance of the tools/practices/solutions themselves, it is borne in the social environment, it is subject to organizational influence, particularly through managers and peers.
  • Training shouldn’t be thought of as a one-time event. Reminders may be valuable as well, particularly around the motivational aspects (for simple tasks), and to support remembering (for tasks that are easily forgotten or misunderstood).

One final note. We might also train people to use the time when they are engaged in automated tasks—tooth-brushing for example—to reflect on important aspects of their lives, gaining from the learning that might occur or the thoughts that may enable future learning. And adding a little fun into mundane tasks. Smile for the tiny nooks and crannies of our lives that may illuminate our thinking!

 

The Snake Oil Story—Preface to Clark Quinn’s Book on Debunking

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This is my preface to Clark Quinn’s book on debunking the myths in the learning field, Millennials, Goldfish & Other Training Misconceptions: Debunking Learning Myths and Superstitions. (available from Amazon here).

Clark Stanley worked as cowboy and later as a very successful entrepreneur, selling medicine in the United States that he made based on secrets he learned from an Arizona Hopi Indian medicine man. His elixir was made from rattlesnake oil, and was marketed in the 1890’s through public events in which Stanley killed live rattlesnakes and squeezed out their oil in front of admiring crowds. After his medicine gained a wide popularity, Stanley was able to set up production facilities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island with the help of a pharmacist. Stanley made himself a rich man.

You may not know his name, but you’ve certainly heard of his time and place. It was the era of patent medicines—false and sometimes dangerous elixirs sold to men and women of all stripes. Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root. Oxien. Kickapoo Indian Sagwa. Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills. Enzyte. Bonnore’s Electro Magnetic Bathing Fluid. Radithor. Liquozone. And of course, Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment.

These medicines were bought by the millions. Fortunes were made. Millions of people were bamboozled, made sick, killed or murdered depending on how you see it. It turns out that, upon being tested, Stanley’s elixir was found to be made mostly from mineral oil, a worthless potion sold by a charlatan. His story of the medicine man and the rattlesnake juice was a more potent concoction than his famous elixir, which when tested was found to have no snake oil anyway.

What causes men and women to miss the truth, to fail to see, to continue happily in harming themselves and those around them? This, unfortunately, is not a question just for the era of patent medicines. It is eternal. It goes back to the dawn of humanity and continues today as well. I have no answer except to assume that our credulity is part of our humanity—and should guide us to be on guard at all times.

What stopped the patent-medicine pandemic of poison, persuasion, and placebo? Did we the people rise up on our own and throw out the scoundrels, the money-grubbers, the snake-oil salesmen? Did we see that we were deceived, or too hopeful, or too blind? Did we as a community heed our senses and find a way to overcome the dangers hidden from us?

No! We did not!

It was not a mass movement back to rationality and truth that saved us. It was the work of a few intrepid agitators who made all the difference. Journalists began reporting on deaths, sicknesses, and addictions resulting from the use of patent medicines. In 1905, Collier’s Weekly published a cover story that exploded the industry. Written by Samuel Hopkins Adams a former crime reporter, with the title, “The Great American Fraud: The Patent Medicine Evil,” the long expose contained sections with headings like, “Medicine or Liquor?”, “The Men Who Back the Fake,” “Absolutely False Claims,” “Drugs that Deprave,” “Prescribing Without Authority,” and “Where the Money Goes.”

The article—or series of articles that today we would call investigative journalism—opened the floodgates and led directly to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, followed later by additional regulations and requirements that continue to this day, with some success, protecting our health and safety.

The ugly truth is that we need help in seeing what we don’t see. This is true too in the learning industry and has been true since at least the early 1900’s when thought leaders in our industry floated bogus claims that people remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, et cetera. Indeed, it was partly the bogus claims floating around the learning industry in the late 1990’s that made me optimistic that starting a research-based consulting practice would find an audience, that perhaps the learning field could be protected from snake oil charlatans.

Bogus claims are not merely inert flotsam to be navigated around. At a minimum, they take attention away from learning practices that are more fundamental and effective, pushing us to waste time and resources. More insidious is that they proactively cause harm, hurting learners and weakening our learning outcomes.

I wish I could report that starting Work-Learning Research twenty years ago has had the influence that Samuel Hopkins Adams had in his journalism. Alas, I am a faint voice in the howling wind of our industry. Fortunately, there are many muckraking research-to-practice practitioners today, including folks like Paul Kirschner, Patti Shank, Guy Wallace, Pedro De Bruyckere, Julie Dirksen, Donald Clark, Ruth Clark, Mirjam Neelen, Jane Bozarth, and more. There are also legions of academic researchers who do the science necessary to enable research-to-practice wisdom to be compiled and conveyed to trainers, instructional designers, elearning developers and learning executives.

I am especially optimistic now that Clark Quinn has compiled, for the first time, the myths, misconceptions, and confusions that imbue the workplace learning field with faulty decision making and ineffective learning practices. As Clark rightly advises, don’t read the book in one sitting. You will find it too much—too many misconceptions and malingering falsehoods, and too much heartache to think that our field could tolerate so much snake oil.

Here’s what we don’t realize. Today’s workplace-learning snake oil is costing us billions of dollars in wasted effort, misspent resources, ill-advised decisions, and distraction from the science-of-learning fundamentals that have proven to be effective! Every time a trainer reads an article on learning styles and adjusts his or her training to make it suitable for visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and olfactory learners; time is wasted, money is spent, and learning is hurt. Every time an instructional designer goes to a conference and hears that neuroscience should guide learning design, he or she takes this faulty meme back to colleagues and infects them with false hope and ineffective learning strategies. Every time a Chief Learning Officer hears that learning events should be shrunk to 4-minute microlearning videos, that storytelling is everything, that all learning is social, that virtual reality is the future of learning—every time our learning executives jump on a bandwagon and send us to training or conferences or hire experts in these multitudinous fascinations—we are diverted from the veritable essence of learning. We waste our own developmental budgets with snake-oil rostrums. We waste time organizing ourselves around wrong-headed initiatives. We ignore what really works, all the while costing our organizations billions of dollars in waste and ineffective learning practices.

Let us start anew today. We can begin with Clark’s book. It is a veritable treasure chest of wisdom. But let’s keep going. Let’s stay skeptical. Let’s look to the scientific research for knowledge. Let’s become more demanding and knowledgeable ourselves, knowing that we all have more to learn. Let’s look to the research translators who know the work that we do as instructional designers, trainers, and developers. Let’s do our own testing. Let’s improve our evaluation systems so that we get better feedback day by day. Let’s pilot, rework, improve, and continue to learn!

As the history of patent medicine shows, we must be forever vigilant against our own blindness and against those who will sell us the miraculous hope of snake-oil cure-alls.

The Learning-Transfer Evaluation Model (LTEM) Updated to Version 12

The Learning-Transfer Evaluation Model (LTEM) and accompanying Report were updated today with two major changes:

  • The model has been inverted to put the better evaluation methods at the top instead of at the bottom.
  • The model now uses the word “Tier” to refer to the different levels within the model—to distinguish these from the levels of the Kirkpatrick-Katzell model.

This will be the last update to LTEM for the foreseeable future.

You can find the latest version of LTEM and the accompanying report by clicking here.

Debunker Club Webinar with Clark Quinn

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The Debunker Club, with over 600 members devoted to squashing the myths in the learning field, is offering a FREE webinar with noted author and learning guru Dr. Clark Quinn on myths and misconceptions in the learning field, based on his new book, just released last month, Millennials, Goldfish & Other Training Misconceptions: Debunking Learning Myths and Superstitions. (available from Amazon here).

DATE:

  • June 6th

TIME:

  • 10AM (San Francisco, USA)
  • 1PM (New York, USA)
  •  6PM (London, UK)
  • 10:30PM (Mumbai, India)
  • 3AM June 7th (Sydney, Australia)

REGISTER NOW:

Dealing with Emotional Readiness — What Should We be Doing?

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I included this piece in my newsletter this morning (which you can sign up for here) and it seemed to really resonate with people, so I’m including it here.

I’ve always had a high tolerance for pain, but breaking my collarbone at the end of February really sent me crashing down a mountain. Lying in bed, I got thinking about the emotional side of workplace performance. I don’t have brilliant insights here, just maybe some thoughts that will get you thinking.

Skiing with my family in Vermont, it had been a very good week. My wife and I, skiing together on our next-to-last day on the mountain, went to look for the kids who told us they’d be skiing in the terrain park (where the jumps are). My wife skied down first, then I went. There was a little jump, about a foot high, of the kind I’d jumped many times. But this time would be different.

As I sailed over the jump — slowly because I’m wary of going too fast and flying too far — I looked down and saw, NOT snow, but stairs. WTF? Every other time I took a small jump there was snow on the other side. Not metal stairs. Not dry metal stairs. In mid-air my thought was, “okay, just stay calm, you’ll ski over the stairs back to snow.” Alas, what happened was that I came crashing down on my left shoulder, collarbone splintering into five or six pieces, and lay 20 feet down the hill. I knew right away that things were bad. I knew that my life would be upended for weeks or months. I knew that miserable times lay ahead.

I got up quickly. I was in shock and knew it. I looked up the mountain back at the jump. Freakin’ stairs!! What they hell were they doing there? I was rip-roaring mad! One of my skis was still on the stairs. The dry surface must have grabbed it, preventing me from skiing further down the slope. I retrieved my ski. A few people skied by me. My wife was long gone down the mountain. I was in shock and I was mad as hell and I couldn’t think straight, but I knew I shouldn’t sit down so I just stood there for five or ten minutes in a daze. Finally someone asked if I was okay, and I yelled crazy loud for the whole damn mountain to hear, “NO!” He was nice, said he’d contact the ski patrol.

I’ll spare you the details of the long road to recovery — a recovery not yet complete — but the notable events are that I had badly broken my collarbone, badly sprained my right thumb and mildly sprained my left thumb, couldn’t button my shirts or pants for a while, had to lie in bed in one position or the pain would be too great, watched a ton of Netflix (I highly recommend Seven Seconds!), couldn’t do my work, couldn’t help around the house, got surgery on my collarbone, got pneumonia, went to physical therapy, etc… Enough!

Feeling completely useless, I couldn’t help reflect on the emotional side of learning, development, and workplace performance in general. In L&D, we tend to be helping people who are able to learn and take actions — but maybe not all the people we touch are emotionally present and able. Some are certainly dealing with family crises, personal insecurities, previous job setbacks, and the like. Are we doing enough for them?

I’m not a person prone to depression, but I was clearly down for the count. My ability to do meaningful work was nil. At first it was the pain and the opiates. Later it was the knowledge that I just couldn’t get much work done, that I was unable to keep up with promises I’d made, that I was falling behind. I knew, intellectually, that I just had to wait it out — and this was a great comfort. But still, my inability to think and to work reminded me that as a learning professional I ought to be more empathetic with learners who may be suffering as well.

Usually, dealing with emotional issues of an employee falls to the employee and his or her manager. I used to be a leadership trainer and I don’t remember preparing my learners for how to deal with direct reports who might be emotionally unready to fully engage with work. Fortunately today we are willing to talk about individual differences, but I think we might be forgetting the roller-coaster ride of being human, that we may differ in our emotional readiness on any given day. Managers/supervisors rightly are the best resource for dealing with such issues, but we in L&D might have a role to play as well.

I don’t have answers here. I wish I did. Probably it begins with empathy. We also can help more when we know our learners more — and when we can look them in the eyes. This is tricky business though. We’re not qualified to be therapists and simple solutions like being nice and kind and keeping things positive is not always the answer. We know from the research that challenging people with realistic decision-making challenges is very beneficial. Giving honest feedback on poor performance is beneficial.

We should probably avoid scolding and punishment and reprimands. Competition has been shown to harmful in at least some learning situations. Leaderboards may make emotional issues worse, and generally the limited research suggests they aren’t very useful anyway. But these negative actions are rarely invoked, so we have to look deeper.

I wish I had more wisdom about this. I wish there was research-based evidence I could draw on. I wish I could say more than just be human, empathetic, understanding.

Now that I’m aware of this, I’m going to keep my eyes and ears open to learning more about how we as learning professionals can design learning interventions to be more sensitive to the ups and downs of our fellow travelers.

If you’ve got good ideas, please send them my way or use the LinkedIn Post generated from this to join the discussion.

Book by Dan Bixby on Product Training

Too often, product training is based on the false assumption that sales people and customer service reps simply need to be fed information about product features and benefits. Fortunately, Dan Bixby has come along and written a book to help design product training that actually works.

Here’s the testimonial I wrote for the book:

“Dan Bixby’s book will help technical experts create training that actually works to improve performance. Backed by years of experience, Bixby connects with practical advice and empathy—and helps experts avoid the most common mistakes in product training.”

You can check out Bixby’s book on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/2wBN110

Will Thalheimer Interviewed by Jeffrey Dalto

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Series of Four Interviews

I was recently interviewed by Jeffrey Dalto of Convergence Training. Jeffrey is a big fan of research-based practice. He did a great job compiling the interviews.

Click on the title of each one to read the interview:

Debunker Club Social Gathering at ATD 2018

In San Diego on Tuesday Morning May 8th at 7AM!

With Special Guest! (Revealed Below)

ATD is holding its annual conference starting this weekend in San Diego. On Tuesday morning (May 8), I’m going to convene us debunkers for a brief social gathering over coffee at Copa Vida, just a few short blocks from the San Diego Convention Center.

Come join me for coffee and caffeinated conversation…just for the fun of it.

We had a great gathering at the ISPI conference in Seattle a few weeks ago. Great conversation, friendly, low key, just a little debunking. Let’s do it again!

JOIN the GATHERING:

  • 7AM to 7:50AM
  • At Copa Vida, 905 J St, San Diego, CA 92101
    Ninth is the nearest cross street.
  • Feel free to join whether you’re attending the ATD conference or not…
  • Look for me, Will Thalheimer

Special Guest at our gathering:

Clark Quinn, author of the brand new debunking book:

Millennials, Goldfish & Other Training Misconceptions: Debunking Learning Myths and Superstitions