Tag Archive for: thalheimer

Will Thalheimer Joins TiER1

From Will Thalheimer

A PERSONAL ANNOUNCEMENT

After 22 years as a solo consultant at Work-Learning Research, I’m making a dazzling, flying leap to a whole new mountain. I am thrilled to announce that I have joined TiER1 Performance as a Principal!

Some of you who have followed my work over the years may have questions. “Why, Will Thalheimer, are you making this leap? Why TiER1? What about all the articles, documents, posts, videos, and models you’ve created—will they still be available? If my organization needs you to provide guidance, consulting, workshops, or speaking, can we still get your assistance? What about your public availability? Will you still pay $5,000 for the Learning Styles Challenge? Will you still be a leader at LDA? Will you still wear blue shoes to your keynotes?”

These are all great questions! Thanks for asking!

If you prefer to skip to my video announcement, you can see that below or access it on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/Gh7ryPf2EDM.

Who is TiER1 Performance?

TiER1 is an amazing and benevolent powerhouse of an organization! It’s a full-service performance-improvement company that helps organizations activate their business strategies through their people. TiER1 is employee-owned and a Certified B-Corporation, meaning it looks out for customers, employees, communities, and the environment. TiER1’s mission is to improve organizations through the performance of people—to help people do their best work, and to build a better world.

I am in awe of TiER1’s results in helping a vast array of companies and organizations, including Abbott, Boston Beer Company, Delta, Lilly, FedEx, GE, Google, NASA, National Science Foundation, Proctor & Gamble, Salesforce, and Takeda.

I am in awe of TiER1’s people! The range of expertise is amazing: eLearning, change management, organizational development, cognitive science, creative, communications, technology, industrial-organizational psychology, project management, performance experience design—and most importantly, a getting-stuff-done mindset.

I am in awe of how my TiER1 colleagues work with clients and work with each other. I am in awe of TiER1’s values! I am in awe of TiER1’s leadership, which comes from everyone in the organization, by the way, and also from the top! I’m sure I’m in the glow of the honeymoon, but I couldn’t be happier to be a member of the TiER1 team!

To sign up for the TiER1 Performance Performance-Matters Newsletter grab this link: https://tier1performance.com/performance-matters-newsletter-signup/

What About Your Work-Learning Research Assets?

The Work-Learning Research materials and website will not go away! Everything will still be free to the public. I will still maintain the website in my spare time, and you’ll still be able to stay in touch with me via my various websites and mailing lists.

What About Your Books?

I’m still working on the second edition of my Performance-Focused Learner Survey book (It’s 99.34% written). Probable publication date will be mid 2021. I’m also still working on my new book, The CEOs Guide to Training, eLearning & Work: Reshaping Learning into a Competitive Advantage. Probable publication date early 2022, but I’m going to try to get this out earlier if I can. You will learn about the release of these books if you’re on one of my mailing lists. See below.

What About Your Public Activities?

I will still make myself available—when scheduling allows—to share research-inspired practical wisdom through keynotes, conference presentations, webinars, podcasts, articles, blog posts, and more. Matt Richter and I will continue our Truth In Learning Podcast. I will continue to lead my Presentation Science Boot Camp online workshop and my Performance-Focused Learner Survey online workshop—now through TiER1 Performance. I will still be active in LDA (the Learning Development Accelerator), leading with Matt Richter and the Executive Advisory Board, and facilitating Learning Insights Weekly, a weekly collaborative learning experience for LDA members. I will also be leading work-performance-focused learning events for TiER1’s Performance Institute—an incredible new learning space coming in March. Sign up below to be notified.

Are You Still Available for Consulting, Speaking, Workshops?

YES! I’m still the same charming consultant you’ve always known and loved, but now I can work in partnership with an amazing team—a full-service performance-improvement company. Where before, I could only do small to midsize projects, now I can work with my TiER1 teammates to take on huge and strategic projects, helping your organization transform its practices, pivot its business strategy, reimagine its L&D function, build a learning-measurement system, organize major change initiatives, build out a whole curriculum of online learning, and much, much more. Also, stay tuned for something I will be helping to give birth to—the TiER1 Performance Institute.

What About Those Blue Shoes?

The blue shoes will still be my go-to option, but more important even than a comfortable signature style, let us all hope that someday soon we will all be together in the same room—able to once again admire each other’s shoes!
Best of all, BLUE is TiER1’s dominant branding color!

How Can I Get in Touch with You?

First, I recommend you sign up for the TiER1 Performance Matters newsletter. Here’s the link: https://tier1performance.com/performance-matters-newsletter-signup/

Second, if you want to set up a meeting with me to talk about your organization’s needs, here’s my calendar link.

Finally, if you’d like to send me an email, you can do that by putting the pieces together: w . thalheimer @ tier1 performance .com

Sorry for making you do some work on that email, but I would prefer less spam! SMILE

My Announcement Video

In today’s video world, some of you may prefer my six-minute video announcement.

20 Benefits of Learner Surveys

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In 2016 I published a book on how to radically transform learner surveys into something useful. The book won an award from ISPI and helped thousands of companies update their smile sheets. Now, I’m updating the book with the knowledge I’ve gained in consulting with companies in the learning-evaluation efforts. The second edition will be titled: Performance-Focused Learner Surveys: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form (Second Edition).

In the first edition, I listed nine benefits of learner surveys, but I had only touched the surface. In the coming book, I will offer 20 benefits. Here’s the current list:

Supporting Learning Design Effectiveness

  1. Red-flagging training programs that are not sufficiently effective.
  2. Gathering ideas for ongoing updates and revisions of learning programs.
  3. Judging the strengths, weaknesses, and viability of program updates and pilots.
  4. Providing learning architects and trainers with feedback to aid their development.
  5. Judging the competence of learning architects and trainers.
  6. Judging the contributions to learning made by people outside of the learning team.
  7. Assessing the contributions of learning supports and organizational practices.

Supporting Learners in Learning and Application

  1. Helping learners reflect on and reinforce what they learned.
  2. Helping learners determine what (if anything) they plan to do with their learning.
  3. Nudging learners to greater learning and application efforts.

Nudging Action Through Stealth Messaging

  1. Guiding learning architects to create more effective learning by sharing survey questions before learning designs are finalized and sharing survey results after data is gathered.
  2. Guiding trainers to utilize more effective learning methods by sharing survey questions before learning designs are finalized and sharing survey results after data is gathered.
  3. Guiding organizational stakeholders to support learning efforts more effectively by sharing survey questions and survey results.
  4. Guiding organizational decision makers to better appreciate the complexity and depth of learning and development—helping the learning team to gain credibility and autonomy.

Supporting Relationships with Learners and Other Key Stakeholders

  1. Capturing learner satisfaction data to understand—and make decisions that relate to—the reputation of the learning intervention and/or the instructors.
  2. Upholding the spirit of common courtesy by giving learners a chance for feedback.
  3. Enabling learner frustrations to be vented—to limit damage from negative back-channel communications.

Maintaining Organizational Credibility

  1. Engaging in visibly credible efforts to assess learning effectiveness.
  2. Engaging in visibly credible efforts to utilize data to improve effectiveness.
  3. Reporting out data to demonstrate learning effectiveness.

If you want to learn when the new edition is available, sign up for my list. https://www.worklearning.com/sign-up/.

The second edition will include new and improved question wording, additional questions, additional chapters, etc.

Matt Richter and I, in our Truth-in-Learning Podcast, will be discussing learner surveys in our next episode. Matt doesn’t believe in smile sheets and I’m going to convince him of the amazing power of well-crafted learner surveys. This blog post is my first shot across the bow. To join us, subscribe to our podcast in your podcast app.

L&D Industry CrowdThinking Project

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CrowdThinking Project on L&D Professionalization

At the L&D Conference 2020, which starts in a few days (seats still available), we are hosting the CrowdThinking Project, a two-pronged crowdsourced exploration designed to create a future-vision for the L&D field.

You and I, as learning professionals, are effective–but certainly, if there were more and better structural supports within the industry, within our organizations, within ourselves; you and I might be even more effective in our work.


First Part

The first part of the CrowdThinking Project is a survey of people like you to gather data along seven factors that influence our effectiveness and professionalization.

  1. The competencies, skills, and abilities we have as professionals
  2. The requirements and training/education needed to enter the L&D field
  3. The feedback we get on our effectiveness (learning evaluation)
  4. The support we get from our trade organizations
  5. The support/guidance we get from our graduate programs and universities
  6. The support and constraints from our business/organizational stakeholders
  7. The effort, direction, and perseverance we lend to our own development.

I developed this survey with the help from Fernando Senior.

This survey is open to all L&D professionals. I ask you to share it widely with your colleagues and friends in the L&D field.

 

Second Part

The second part of the CrowdThinking Project will take place within the L&D Conference (sorry, only if you’ve enrolled). Fernando Senior will take us through a modified world-cafe-style dialogue, focusing on four key questions.

  1. Consider your current circumstances in your L&D work situation—and more importantly, how those circumstances will change as a result of future trends in learning, technology, business, and society. Given the future you imagine, what will be the most important challenges to your work in L&D?
  2. What capabilities will L&D professionals like us need to acquire in anticipation of these upcoming challenges—to maximize our level of professionalization and our effectiveness?
  3. Whether today or in the future, how can we L&D professionals evidence and document our level of professionalization or maturity—in ways that will be understood and respected, and in ways that will add to our effectiveness.
  4. What other factors—besides our knowledge, skills, and attitudes—influence our ability to maximize our effectiveness? And, how will we be able to utilize these factors in the future to support our effectiveness?

 

Third Part

We will generate a report or reports on the findings of the survey and the discussions with recommendations for how the L&D field can continue to maintain and develop professionalization standards and practices.


How You Can Help

The most important thing I’d ask you to do right now, if you are in the workplace learning field is:

  1. Complete the survey (it’s not short. It takes 30 minutes)
  2. Ask others you know in L&D if they would consider it.


Joining the Conference

The L&D Conference 2020 runs over six weeks, it’s going to be truly amazing, and it starts in a few days (June 22 to July 31). Here’s the conference website: https://www.learningdevelopmentconference.com/

This is my conference. I’m the co-host along with my podcast partner, Matt Richter.

I know it’s last minute, so if you have trouble getting the funding figured out from your organization and want to get started, feel free to contact me to see if I can help.

Use this contact page to email me: https://www.worklearning.com/contact/

Do NOT buy Performance-Focused Smile Sheet Book

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Today is May 15, 2020.

This week, I asked my publisher to take all 254 remaining copies of Performance-Focused Smile Sheets and throw them in the recycling bin!

Yes! The book was one of the most important books written in the learning-and-development field over the last decade.

But I threw it out!

Why?

Because I’m writing a new, completely revised edition based on my experience developing learner surveys for organizations around the world. My learner-survey approach has been used at The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Bank, at Bloomberg, at Roche (Genentech), at Oxfam. It has revolutionized the moribund smile sheet!

But time doesn’t stand still, and I’ve gained a ton of insights building learner surveys over the past five years, hearing from clients and others, pilot testing learner surveys, and creating smile sheets for my own workshops.

The new book will have an all new set of recommended questions. It will have information on open-ended questions. It will describe how learner surveys fit into the new LTEM framework (the learning-evaluation model that is replacing the Kirkpatrick-Katzell Four-Level Model around the world). The new book will also share the thinking behind the new learning-evaluation approach, LEADS (Learning Evaluation As Decision Support), which I’m developing.

When will the new book be out? Within three months!

The book may still be available in some pipelines, but I’m working to get it off the shelves. My advice is don’t buy it!

Wait for the second edition, which I’ve re-titled, Performance-Focused Learner Surveys.

Stay tuned!

And sign up for my newsletter at https://www.worklearning.com/sign-up/ to be the first to know when the book is available.

Thanks for your patience,

= Will Thalheimer

The Business Case for the L&D Conference

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The L&D Conference—a quixotic attempt to reinvent conferencing. Aligning conference activities with how we humans actually learn. It’s an online conference, taking place over six weeks. It enables attendees to learn in the flow of their work. So they can use what they’re learning, share with their teammates back in the office, try things out, get advice, stay motivated and inspired to apply their new learning. The conference is the brainchild of Matt Richter and I, and we are now joined by marketing guru Ashley Sinclair. We are so excited to share this with you!

Unfortunately, when people think of online conferences, they think mediocre webinars strung together over one or two or a few days. THIS AIN’T THAT! We would NEVER design a conference that ignored the fundamentals of human learning!

We think you’ll like:

  • our global conference
  • our world-class speakers
  • our research-inspired sessions
  • our rollicking debates
  • our panels
  • our discount house
  • our sponsorship opportunities

BUT IF YOU NEED MORE CONVINCING—or you think YOUR BOSS might need convincing, we can help.

Download this gorgeous document. It makes the business case for joining us in the first L&D Conference.

And actually, the document does more than that. It persuades, in glorious detail, why this will be the best, most effective, and boldest L&D conference ever.

 

Click this Sentence to See the Detailed Document

 

Click this Sentence to See the Less Detailed Webpage

 

Matt Richter Shares Zoom Secrets from a Learning Perspective

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Matt Richter, my podcast brother, and presenter extraordinaire has agreed to share with me and my Presentation Science audience at short 35-minute session entitled:

ZOOM FOR PRESENTATION SCIENCE: PRACTICAL TIPS AND SURPRISES

 

 

I’m making this session available to everyone.

Day and Time

Monday April 6th (2020)

11AM New York Time

 

Zoom Coordinates

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/197015730

Meeting ID: 197 015 730

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Meeting ID: 197 015 730
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/adcRKWndGM

 

Will Thalheimer Interviewed by Learnnovators

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The LEARNNOVATORS team (specifically Santhosh Kumar) asked if I would join them in their Crystal Balling with Learnnovators interview series, and I accepted! They have some really great people on the series, I recommend that you check it out!

The most impressive thing was that they must have studied my whole career history and read my publication list and watched my videos because they came up with a whole set of very pertinent and important questions. I was BLOWN AWAY—completely IMPRESSED! And, given their dedication, I spent a ton of time preparing and answering their questions.

It’s a two part series and here are the links:

Here are some of the quotes they pulled out and/or I’d like to highlight:

Learning is one of the most wondrous, complex, and important areas of human functioning.

The explosion of different learning technologies beyond authoring tools and LMSs is likely to create a wave of innovations in learning.

Data can be good, but also very very bad.

Learning Analytics is poised to cause problems as well. People are measuring all the wrong things. They are measuring what is easy to measure in learning, but not what is important.

We will be bamboozled by vendors who say they are using AI, but are not, or who are using just 1% AI and claiming that their product is AI-based.

Our senior managers don’t understand learning, they think it is easy, so they don’t support L&D like they should.

Because our L&D leaders live in a world where they are not understood, they do stupid stuff like pretending to align learning with business terminology and business-school vibes—forgetting to align first with learning.

We lie to our senior leaders when we show them our learning data—our smile sheets and our attendance data. We then manage toward these superstitious targets, causing a gross loss of effectiveness.

Learning is hard and learning that is focused on work is even harder because our learners have other priorities—so we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much.

We know from the science of human cognition that when people encounter visual stimuli, their eyes move rapidly from one object to another and back again trying to comprehend what they see. I call this the “eye-path phenomenon.” So, because of this inherent human tendency, we as presenters—as learning designers too!—have to design our presentation slides to align with these eye-path movements.

Organizations now—and even more so in the near future—will use many tools in a Learning-Technology Stack. These will include (1) platforms that offer asynchronous cloud-based learning environments that enable and encourage better learning designs, (2) tools that enable realistic practice in decision-making, (3) tools that reinforce and remind learners, (4) spaced-learning tools, (5) habit-support tools, (6) insight-learning tools (those that enable creative ideation and innovation), et cetera

Learnnovators asked me what I hoped for the learning and development field. Here’s what I said:

Nobody is good at predicting the future, so I will share the vision I hope for. I hope we in learning and development continue to be passionate about helping other people learn and perform at their best. I hope we recognize that we have a responsibility not just to our organizations, but beyond business results to our learners, their coworkers/families/friends, to the community, society, and the environs. I hope we become brilliantly professionalized, having rigorous standards, a well-researched body of knowledge, higher salaries, and career paths beyond L&D. I hope we measure better, using our results to improve what we do. I hope we, more-and-more, take a small-S scientific approach to our practices, doing more A-B testing, compiling a database of meaningful results, building virtuous cycles of continuous improvement. I hope we develop better tools to make building better learning—and better performance—easier and more effective. And I hope we continue to feel good about our contributions to learning. Learning is at the heart of our humanity!

Presentation Science FREE to Teachers and Professors

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Given the challenges TEACHERS and PROFESSORS are facing with the Coronavirus Pandemic I’ve decided to make the Presentation Science Online Workshop available to Teachers and Professors for FREE (now through April 30th).

The workshop provides a strong science-of-learning foundation that will help educators make informed decisions as they move their courses online, create video recordings, or use any free time to update their classroom learning designs.

PLEASE share this with educators you know.

https://academy.worklearning.com/library/presentation-science/90041/about/

 

About the Presentation Science Workshop

Presentation Science is an online self-paced workshop designed specifically to help people who are trainers, teachers, professors, speakers, CEOs, Executive Directors, managers, military leaders, salespeople, team leads–anybody who uses presentation software–to help their audiences learn.

Inspired by learning science, this workshop will help speakers and educators to (1) keep their audiences’ attention, (2) support comprehension, (3) motivate audience members to take action, and (4) support them in remembering what’s been taught.

The workshop is also an excellent TRAIN-THE-TRAINER experience and organizations wanting to engage in a private cohort can make arrangements with Will Thalheimer (workshop creator and host) to do that. You can see the specific pricing options here: https://www.presentationscience.net/pricing.

And for more information about the workshop, see PresentationScience.Net.

Great Book by Neelen and Kirschner

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Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner have written a truly beautiful book—one that everyone in the workplace learning field should read, study, and keep close at hand. It’s a book of transformational value because it teaches us how to think about our jobs as practitioners in utilizing research-informed ideas to build maximally effective learning architectures.

Their book is titled, Evidence-Informed Learning Design: Use Evidence to Create Training Which Improves Performance. The book warns us of learning myths and misconceptions—but it goes deeper to bring us insights in how these myths arise and how we can disarm them in our work.

Here’s a picture of me and my copy! The book officially goes on sale today in the United States.

 

Click to get your copy of the book from Amazon (US).

The book covers the most powerful research-informed learning factors known by science. Those who follow my work will hear familiar terms like Feedback, Retrieval Practice, Spacing; but also, terms like double-barreled learning, direct instruction, nuanced design, and more. I will keep this book handy in my own work as a research-inspired consultant, author, provocateur—but this book is not designed for people like me. Evidence-Informed Learning Design is perfect for everyone with more than a year of experience in the workplace learning field.

The book so rightly laments that “the learning field is cracked at its foundation.” It implores us to open our eyes to what works and what doesn’t, and fundamentally to rethink how we as practitioners work in our teams to bring about effective learning.

The book intrigues as can be seen in sections like, “Why myths are like zombies,” and “No knowledge, no nothing,” and “Pigeonholing galore.”

One of my favorite parts of the book is the interviews of researchers that delve into the practical ramifications of their work. There are interviews with an AI expert, a neuroscientist, and an expert on complex learning, among others. These interviews will wake up more than a few of us.

What makes this book so powerful is that it combines the work of a practitioner and a researcher. Mirjam is one of our field’s most dedicated practitioners in bringing research inspirations to bear on learning practice. Paul is one of the great academic researchers in doing usable research and bringing that research to bear on educational practice. Together, for many years, they’ve published one of the most important blogs in the workplace learning field, the Three-Star Learning blog (https://3starlearningexperiences.wordpress.com/).

Here are some things you will learn in the book:

Big Picture Concepts:

  • What learning myths to avoid.
  • What learning factors to focus on in your learning designs.
  • How to evaluate research claims.

Specific Concepts:

  • Whether Google searches can supplant training.
  • What neuroscience says about learning, if anything.
  • How to train for complex skills.
  • How AI might help learning, now and in the future.
  • Types of research to be highly skeptical of.
  • Whether you need to read scientific research yourself.
  • Whether you should use learning objectives, or not, or when.
  • Whether learning should be fun.
  • The telltale signs of bad research.

This book is so good that it should be required reading for everyone graduating at the university level in learning-and-development.

 

 

Click on the book image to see it on Amazon (US).

 

Jane Bozarth Pledges $1000 to the Learning Styles Challenge

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I’m thrilled and delighted to share the news that Jane Bozarth, research-to-practice advocate, author of Show Your Work, and Director of Research for the eLearning Guild, is pledging $1,000 to the Learning Styles Challenge!!

 

 

Jane has been a vigorous debunker of the Learning-Styles Myth for many, many years! For those of you who don’t know, the Learning-Styles Notion is the idea that different people have different styles of learning and that by designing our learning programs to meet each style—that is, to actually provide different learning content or activities to different learners—learning will be improved. Sounds great, but unfortunately, dozens and dozens of research studies and many major research reviews have found the Learning-Styles Notion to be untrue!

 

“Decades of research suggest that learning styles, or the belief that people learn better when they receive instruction in their dominant way of learning, may be one of the most pervasive myths about cognition.”

Nancekivell, S. E., Shah, P., & Gelman, S. A. (2020).
Maybe they’re born with it, or maybe it’s experience:
Toward a deeper understanding of the learning style myth.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 112(2), 221–235.

 

 

“Several reviews that span decades have evaluated the literature on learning styles (e.g., Arter & Jenkins, 1979; Kampwirth & Bates, 1980; Kavale & Forness, 1987; Kavale, Hirshoren, & Forness, 1998; Pashler et al., 2009; Snider, 1992; Stahl, 1999; Tarver & Dawson, 1978), and each has drawn the conclusion that there is no viable evidence to support the theory.”

Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015).
The scientific status of learning styles theories.
Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271.

 

With Jane’s contribution, the Learning Styles Challenge is up to $6,000! That is, if someone can demonstrate a beneficial effect from using learning styles to design learning, the underwriters will pay that person or group $6,000.

The Learning Styles Challenge began on August 4th 2006 when I offered $1,000 for the first challenge. In 2014, it expanded to $5,000 when additional pledges were made by Guy Wallace, Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan, Bob Carleton, and Bob’s company, Vector Group.

Thank you to Jane Bozarth for her generous contribution to the cause! And check out her excellent research review of the learning-styles literature. Jane’s report is filled with tons of research, but also many very practical recommendations for learning professionals.