Book Review: Talk to the Elephant by Julie Dirksen

Julie Dirksen’s book, Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change, has been available for a year. Don’t wait a day longer to get this book!

With warmth and an empathetic nod to our experience as architects of learning, Julie teaches us—role models for us—how to design learning to achieve behavior change.

Julie begins the book by telling us she’s an instructional designer, but she is so much more! A brilliant ID yes! But also, a keen observer of our craft and context. A voracious learner herself, having invested thousands of hours reading the works of researchers and other behavior-change experts, all the while talking to L&D practitioners to understand our needs.

The metaphor — “Talk to the Elephant” — is employed to inspire us to go beyond content and information and connect with our learners’ full humanity. As Julie shows, we cannot be fully effective by aiming to influence only the rational, intentional, conscious components of our fellow humans.

The book begins by highlighting the importance of systems. By describing how learners and their coworkers are embedded in complex environments, Julie nudges us to widen our gaze to learning factors beyond knowledge to other precursors of behavior.

Many illuminating frameworks and ideas are shared:

  • Stop blaming the learners. Great advice because blaming learners is simply not helpful to us nor to the success of our learning programs.
  • Behavior change requires a process, so we must design for the whole process (see page 29-31, also page 40).
  • We should consider how our learners—as employees in their work situations—will get performance feedback. We should realize that if feedback is not immediate, or is not individualized, or is not clear, that employees’ behavior may be difficult to shape and maintain (see pages 20-25).
  • The “change ladder” idea provides a list of reasons a person may not be able or willing to perform a behavior. So valuable, I’d like to call it the “Dirksen Change Ladder” (see page 35).
  • Communicating the benefits of our learning nuggets is critical, and more important than what we often do, which is to describe shallowly the “shoulds” and the “shalls.”
  • Motivation is a continuum, and we’ll get better results if we look to move our learners along that continuum from amotivation toward extrinsic motivation toward intrinsic regulation—as much as possible and where appropriate (see page 91).
  • Attitudes and beliefs are not specific enough to be the basis of a behavior-change intervention—we should focus on behaviors (see page 115). Julie offers a great question to use when talking with those who are asking us to build learning for them. “If I took a picture or video of someone demonstrating [that skill you’re asking us to train], what would I be filming?”

Reading Julie’s book, you’ll gain new insights and empathies that will help you design learning more effectively. The examples are excellent. Essential reading.

If I have one quibble with the book, it is the reliance on the COM-B model of behavior change. The model is too simple in its three-component version, too unclear in its six-component version, and too unwieldy with the full “Behaviour Change Wheel” configuration, which adds nine intervention functions and seven policy categories. Adding to the disconnect is that the COM-B model includes components that are not directly relevant to our focus on learning as L&D practitioners. Julie nicely focuses on parts of the model that are relevant to us, but a framework that tightly nudged our thinking and action would be even more practical.

Julie Dirksen has been the leading advocate in encouraging us—as learning-and-development professionals—to take more seriously the full spectrum of factors required for behavior change. With her excellent new book, Talk to the Elephant, you and I can develop practices and approaches to help us move from concepts to learning to performance improvement.

You can reach Julie or learn more about her work and workshops at https://usablelearning.com/.

You can get her book here (on Amazon in the US): https://amzn.to/48Loyoo, and at many other bookstores worldwide.