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.