Inspiration

A Call to Action: Once! Now!

/ Susan Hendrich / 1 Comment

Bestselling author (and personal superhero) Kevin Kruse laid down some serious wisdom today. I am highlighting Kevin’s message here for two reasons:

  1. By sharing Kevin’s time management notion of “Touch it once” in this post, I’m doing just that – taking a cool idea that can be executed in less than five minutes and acting on it now, rather than adding the idea to an endless pile of “I oughtas.”
  2. By sharing this creative cadence with you, perhaps we can collectively amplify the drum beat of chaos-free productivity.

Here’s Kevin’s “Touch It Once” Cadence Call…

January 24, 2012 0 Comments

10:00am. My hour of power for health is complete, and I’ve finished an hour of focused writing time. Time to open my email accounts…deep breath.

The Google alert on my own name shows that my previously scheduled blog post went live this morning. I hop over to kevinkruse.com to make sure it’s all good and notice a typo (“they” should read “my friend”). Damn, I’ll have to fix that in a few minutes after I scan the rest of my emails.

“No! Touch it once,” my inner voice reminds me. I quickly open WordPress and fix the typo.

Next email is from a freelancer giving me his EIN number so my accountant can prep a 1099. I’ll have to send that along with a note to my accountant later.

“No. Touch it once.” I hit Forward, add a few lines and off it goes.

Next email. New invoice from an advisor. “What?! I wasn’t expecting this,” I think to myself. Double-click the PDF. Yep, it’s right. Damn, I just finished paying bills yesterday. I’ll have to stack this for my next scheduled bill pay session.

“No. Just do it now. Touch it once.” Fortunately he takes credit cards. Open the form, type in my info. Email it back. Good, only 3 minutes.

Next email. I joined the Pennsylvania Society. Somebody needs to know if it’s a non-profit or not. How the heck do I know? Who can I pass this onto? Oh,

“touch it once.” I open a new tab in my browser and go to their page. Quickly scan 2-3 of their pages. No mention of 501(c)3 status. Reply to email: don’t think so.

“Hmmm, I should write a blog post someday about how the voice in my head chants “touch it once” as I clear my inbox each morning. Yeah, that would be a good one. Wait!” Open WordPress, start typing the new blog post. Title, “Touch It Once.”

Touch it once. Touch it once. Touch it once. It’s the cadence call of efficiency and productivity.

Whether I’m going through my paper inbox on my desk, or the email inbox on my computer, if the item at hand can be taken care of in less than 5 minutes I do it right then and there. If I can delegate it, I’ll do that. Otherwise I’ll schedule time to complete it.

Touch it once.

[Now clicking the Publish button] 

Check out Kevin’s blog post for more.

Free Learning Job Aid Toolkit

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

Are You On The Move! Yet?

The Move! toolkit contains over 50 ‘one page’ job-aids with involving methodologies in five distinct areas : Individual, Team and Organizational Development as well as Project Management and Instructional Design & Facilitation.  You can browse through all the tools here.  Tons of helpful resources, and best of all…they’re FREE.

A. INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

Performance Management Process / Objective Setting SMARTT / Build-Up coaching session / GROW model for coaching / Coaching Styles / Constructive Feedback / Questioning & Listening / Behavior Wheel / ACHIEVE Model / Individual Development Plan / Checklist for effective coaching / Appraisal Interview /

B. TEAM DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

Team Work Model (GRPI) / GRPI Questionnaire / Action Centered Leadership (Adair) / Intervision / Meeting Management / Multi Voting / Brainstorming / Mind Mapping /Effective Decisions / SWOT Analysis / New Leader Expectation Activity / SADIE problem solving / SORA problem solving / Intake Teamdevelopment

C. ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

Consulting Process / Intervention Strategy / Business Needs Analysis / Stakeholder Analysis / Initial Customer Contact / Contracting Checklist / Force Field Analysis / Scenario Planning / SARAH coping with change / Change Loop / Balanced Scorecard / Community of Practice / Autonomous Motivation (Self-Determination Theory) / Confrontation Matrix / Environmental Scan

D. PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Project Process Map / Project Planning (GANTT) / Critical Path Method / Cause & Effect Analysis (Ishikawa) / Impact – Effort analysis / Risk Analysis / Project Learning Review / Stakeholder Activities / Focus Groups / Individual Interviews / Data Analysis / Responsibility Matrix

E. INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN TOOLS

8 Field Analysis (Kessels & Smit) / Learner focused versus content focused / Experiential Design model / Checklist Learning Activities / Types of Process Interventions / Guidelines for debriefing group activities / Involvement : look at training / Scenario Template / Statement Game / Checklist for instructional design / Learning Activities /

 

Do You Have Klout?

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

What is Your Klout Score?

Klout is the measurement of your overall online influence. Klout scores range from 1 to 100, and higher scores represent wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout looks at 35+ variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. They believe influence is “ability to drive people to action.”

Ex: True Reach = size of your engaged audience (based on followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages). Want to learn more about Klout?

So…do I have enough Klout to get you to respond to this post?

About Klout

http://mashable.com/follow/topics/klout   

Klout is a San Francisco based company that provides social media analytics that measures a users influence across their social network. The analysis is done on data collected from sites such as Twitter and Facebook and measures the size of a person’s network, the content created, and how other people interact with that content.

Overcoming my bias

/ Susan Hendrich / 2 Comments

A few resources for you on overcoming biases. And, yes, we all have them…

Learning objective: Recognize implicit bias

  • Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has become the standard for measuring implicit bias
  • A Class Divided (The Brown eyes / Blue eyes story)
  • Johari Window (A simple and useful tool for illustrating and improving self-awareness, and mutual understanding between individuals within a group. I use the “Unknown” box to illustrate bias)
  • The Hermann Grid activity (Sometimes we see things that do not exist; First impressions are not always right) 

Learning objective: Identify specific techniques for overcoming bias

Learning objective: Describe ways to build trust

Learning objective: Explain how initial perception can create a self-fulfilling prophesy

Story on Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: “The monk and the travellers”

One day a traveller was walking along a road on his journey from one village to another. As he walked he noticed a monk tending the ground in the fields beside the road. The monk said “Good day” to the traveller, and the traveller nodded to the monk. The traveller then turned to the monk and said “Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you a question?”.

“Not at all,” replied the monk.

“I am travelling from the village in the mountains to the village in the valley and I was wondering if you knew what it is like in the village in the valley?”

“Tell me,” said the monk, “What was your experience of the village in the mountains?”

“Dreadful,” replied the traveller, “to be honest I am glad to be away from there. I found the people most unwelcoming. When I first arrived I was greeted coldly. I was never made to feel part of the village no matter how hard I tried. The villagers keep very much to themselves, they don’t take kindly to strangers. So tell me, what can I expect in the village in the valley?”

“I am sorry to tell you,” said the monk, “but I think your experience will be much the same there”.

The traveller hung his head despondently and walked on.

A while later another traveller was journeying down the same road and he also came upon the monk.

“I’m going to the village in the valley,” said the second traveller, “Do you know what it is like?”

“I do,” replied the monk “But first tell me – where have you come from?”

“I’ve come from the village in the mountains.”

“And how was that?”

“It was a wonderful experience. I would have stayed if I could but I am committed to travelling on. I felt as though I was a member of the family in the village. The elders gave me much advice, the children laughed and joked with me and people were generally kind and generous. I am sad to have left there. It will always hold special memories for me. And what of the village in the valley?” he asked again.

“I think you will find it much the same” replied the monk, “Good day to you”.

 “Good day and thank you,” the traveler replied, smiled, and journeyed on.

Hurray for brevity. Less IS more!

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

Want your learning audience to retain more and perform better?  Then lighten their cognitive load.

Cognitive load theory says that “the more a person has to learn in a shorter amount of time, the more difficult it is to process that information in working memory.” Add to this processing difficulty the fact that we retain less when overloaded with data, information, and concepts. The idea behind cognitive load theory is that reducing the volume of information to be learned to only the “need to know” level lets the learner retain more of the information and make the necessary transfer of learning to be able to perform a skill or task.   And that might just be a very good thing when it comes to designing training.

“By reducing the load on the cognitive system, summaries may enable students to carry out the cognitive processes necessary for meaningful learning.” 

From When Less Is More: Meaningful Learning From Visual and Verbal Summaries of Science Textbook Lessons, by Richard E. Mayer, William Bove, Alexandra Bryman, Rebecca Mars, and Lene Tapangco 

What does this mean about people’s desire and tolerance for information?

Twitter taught us that we’re in a sound bite zeitgeist. When it comes to information and learning, we want it short. Sweet. To the point. Quick. Rapid. Just the facts. Twitter? Yammer? What’s the matter?  

Despite growing research supporting this “less-is-more” notion, it can be hard for subject matter experts to let go of the urge to create an information dump when designing training. Experts sometimes get stuck in the mindset of, “more is more,” and struggle to see how presenting a more basic volume of information might lead to better learning. Parsing out the nice-to-know from the need-to-know is the great challenge of the instructional designer.  Having a little less-is-more research in the back pocket might just come in handy for the designer who’s trying to convince a subject matter expert to limiting content to the need-to-know level.

Check out Cathy Moore’s “Making Change” blog post about an early study that showed the positive impact of reducing the amount of text presented to a summary on the ability to retain and transfer learning.