Blog - Robert Bogue [MVP]

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Book Review: Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness

In my Sunday school class at church, we're watching an old series by James MacDonald titled "Lord, Change My Attitude." During one of his sessions he mentions a book that he refers to as being out of print – Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness. At the time he made the comment it was true, but in the intervening years the book was revived and republished so when I went searching for it, I found it.

The book carries the subtitle "Being Christian in a Non-Christian World" but that's not why I read it – nor do I believe it does justice to the key truths that are contained in the book. (In short, I'm encouraging my non-Christian friends to read on – and read the book.)

Above all, the book shares a striking clarity of what love is. It goes beyond the magnetic draw that pulls two teenagers together. You can call that lust, or chemical reactions, biology, evolution, or what you will. The book calls love a decision. Few of us think about love as a decision – as a choice we make. We believe that things like marriage are a choice – but love? Don't I just love the people I love? There's no rhyme or reason to it – or is there?

There's some research to explain that some of our desire is triggered by scent – that makes sense because our olfactory senses are tied to our basal brains. However, there's also research to show that the more time with people the more we tend to like them. There are, of course, notable exceptions of the people that we develop a dislike for. So there are rules to whom we like and dislike – but love is different.

Popular music, tv, and the rest of culture talk about the emotional kind of love – that's triggered by biology – but we don't hear about the decision that people make to love. The problem with the emotional love is that it will fade. You simply cannot sustain the same sort of feelings for your spouse as when you first met, we're not wired that way. Biological love – for lack of a better term – triggers the release dopamine – one of the same chemicals that is released with the use of illegal drugs. And just like addictive illegal drugs, high levels of dopamine cannot be sustained indefinitely.

So you have to replace biological love with a choice. It is a conscious decision to put someone else in your life first. I don't mean this in a platitude sort of way – agreeing to put them first but not agreeing to get up and take the trash out because they're not feeling well. I should also caution that I don't mean this in a way that means that someone can never stand their ground with their spouse, instead, I mean that you must do all things in love to your spouse but know when to protect your rights and needs. (I probably wandered a bit off the book's central point here but it's a realization that I find helpful.)

Acceptance is an interesting bit because it seems like we're hard wired to not do it well. We don't trust those who do things differently than us. We don't like people who don't dress like us, talk like us, or think like us. Eastern philosophies speak of detachment and being OK with any observation as long as that observation is true. We as humans are notoriously good at dismissing any information that doesn't match our preconceived ideas. We'll ignore opposing positions and dismiss people who share them because their views don't match ours.

Acceptance – for me – is realizing that truth is relative to everyone's experience. I cannot change others. I can only influence them. I can influence them best when I try to understand them better. So if I want to reach someone I need to understand them, which means accepting that at this moment they are who they are. I realize this is a long chain. In my experience, accepting people as they are – not how I want them to be – has reduced a great source of stress.

The last headline topic is forgiveness. This is hard because I've seen grudges carried in my family for decades. There are family members who simply don't (and didn't) talk to each other because of a misunderstanding decades ago. (No, this isn't a hyperbole.) In those cases I've applied significant pressure to try to reunite the factions and have seen more than a bit of success. Through helping with the understanding of acceptance it became possible to forgive them.

The book describes forgiveness as an environment, a lifestyle. I believe that – even though I won't say that I live it every day. I know that research has demonstrated that maintaining negative emotions has a negative impact on your health. I know that research shows that people who "harbor grudges" are less happy than those who don't. However, I'll share that the line between forgiveness and placing yourself in a place of vulnerability again is frighteningly narrow.

Everyone has the right and need to protect themselves from harmful, toxic people. Forgiveness doesn't mean continuing in a bad situation just because you forgive the other person – however, it means letting go of deep-felt feelings of anger or hurt towards another person. You can simultaneously forgive someone and create barriers between you and them to protect yourself.

Categories: Book Review | 2 Comments

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Book Review: Efficiency in Learning

I recently wrote an article for TrainingIndustry.com titled "Everything You Think You Know about Learning Retention Rates is Wrong" which is perhaps a bit of a hyperbole but it's based on the discovery that the traditional thinking about how people learn is wrong. It's based on Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience which didn't have research to support retention rates and was never intended to be used as it has been. In the article I made the assertion that there's not been a great deal of research on learning rates differing between different modes of instruction – which I still believe. However, in the research for that article I stumbled across the book Efficiency in Learning: Evidence-Based Guidelines to Manage Cognitive Load – and I'm impressed. Ruth Clark, Frank Nguyen, and John Sweller did a great job of converting the research studies that are available into a set of guidelines for developing content that are both easy to understand and are on a solid research foundation.

I've read more than a few books on instructional design and they have had two problems. First, they didn't provide clear direction on what the rules were for making design decisions and second they didn't address situations where the guidelines were in conflict – Efficiency in Learning describes the rules (or guidelines) and what to do when they guidelines are in conflict. In short, the book takes the relatively fuzzy world of how we learn and breaks it down into chunks that can be understood and applied.

The foundation for the book is the theory of cognitive load – that is humans have a relatively small and fixed capacity to process information. We overcome this by building schemas to make complex topics operate as a single unit in our thoughts. We can thereby function in complex situations because we've simplified large groups into single things in our thinking. Learning is, in a sense, creating these schemas so that we can process more complex – and interesting – scenarios. Those who have studied Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives might see learning as a continuum from recognition through recall and up to the higher levels – however, most learning scenarios today aren't focused on remembering simple facts, they're based on being able to use the information – those things on higher levels in Bloom's taxonomy. (I first talked about this on my blog in 2006 in a post on Recognition vs. Recall.) The way that we learn simple wrote facts is different than the way we learn how to think about our world differently.

Within in the context of the book cognitive load is broken into three distinct types:

Intrinsic – the mental work imposed by the instructional goals.
Germane – the mental work imposed by the instructional activities that benefit the goals
Extraneous – the mental work not related to the instructional goals or activities (in other words, noise)

The book shares a total of 29 guidelines designed to minimize extraneous cognitive load and creating some germane cognitive load to further the goals. I've reproduced the goals below to give you a sense of what you can expect. Each of the guidelines is supported by research. The ones that I find the most interesting is those which go against "folk wisdom" about how you should design a learning course. For instance, generally we believe that repetition is a good thing and therefore if we deliver the content multiple different times and ways will lead to better results – except the research seems to show that this isn't true. (Thus why I mentioned Bloom's above – we know that simple repetition helps with simple facts, however, it doesn't appear to work for procedural content.)

I also found interesting the awareness that some of the strategies that help novice learners actually depress learning in experts. In other words, the way that experts need to learn is different than the way that novices need to learn. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) often deliver content in a way that assumes users know basic concepts and because of this the user can collapse those concepts so that they don't need to be actively considered – however, often novice users can't collapse these concepts and as a result end up overwhelmed because they are unable to process all of the variables –in the way that they're delivered.

If you're serious about creating good instructional materials, I recommend you give Efficiency in Learning a read.

The 29 Guidelines:

Use Diagrams to Optimize Performance on Tasks Requiring Spatial Manipulations
Use Diagrams to Promote Learning of Rules Involving Spatial Relationships
Use Diagrams to Help Learners Build Deeper Understanding
Explain Diagrams with Words Presented by Audio Narration
Use Cues and Signals to Focus Attention to Important Visual and Textual Content.
Integrate Explanatory Text Close to Related Visuals on Pages and Screens.
Integrate words and visuals used to teach computer applications into one delivery medium
Pare Content Down to Essentials
Eliminate Extraneous Visuals, Text, and Audio
Eliminate Redundancy in Content Delivery Modes
Provide Performance Aids as External Memory Supplements
Design Performance Aids by Applying Cognitive Load Management Techniques
Teach System Components Before Teaching the Full Process
Teach Supporting Knowledge Separate from Teaching Procedure Steps
Consider the Risks of Cognitive Overload Before Designing Whole Task Learning Environments
Give Learners Control Over Pacing and Manage Cognitive Load When Pacing Must Be Instructionally Controlled
Replace Some Practice Problems with Worked Examples
Use Completion Examples to Promote Learning Processing
Transition from Worked Examples to Problem Assignments with Backwards Fading
Display Worked Examples and Completion Problems in Ways That Minimize Extraneous Cognitive Load
Use Diverse Worked Examples to Foster Transfer of Learning
Help Learners Exploit Examples Through Self-Explanations
Help Learners Automate New Knowledge and Skills
Promote Mental Rehearsal of Complex Content After Mental Models Are Formed
Write High Coherent Texts for Low Knowledge Readers
Avoid Interrupting Reading of Low Skilled Readers
Eliminate Redundant Content for More Experienced Learners
Transition from Worked Examples to Problem Assignments as Learners Gain Expertise
Use Directive Rather Than Guided Discovery Learning Designs for Novice Learners

Categories: Professional, Book Review | 0 Comments

Monday, May 21, 2012

Article: Everything You Think You Know about Learning Retention Rates is Wrong

We've all seen some sort of numbers or graphics depiction about how we retain what we learn. The story goes that we retain 5 percent of what we see/hear, 10 percent of what we read, 20 percent with a visual, 30 percent with a demonstration, and so on. The problem is – this is a fabrication. The root source of this information is attributed to Edgar Dale and while the cone of learning – where the hierarchy is covered -- is his, it didn't have percentages on it – and he cautioned about overly generalizing its use.

Book Review: Duct Tape Marketing

It's hard to think of something that's more practical than duct tape. Whether you're a fan of the TV show MythBusters or you've got your own stories about what you've been able to do with duct tape, you know it's pretty amazing stuff. Duct Tape Marketing promises to help you put together marketing with a limited budget – as other books like Guerilla Marketing do. I stumbled across the book from a friend of mine having forwarded a seminar – that I couldn't attend but I decided to invest in the book anyway.

The book clarifies some difficult concepts. Having watched the corporate search and workflow markets grow up over the past several years, I'm intimately aware of how difficult it is to build a market. Building a market takes time, patience, education, and luck. Duct Tape marketing makes it clear that it's easier to differentiate your offerings in a competitive market than it is to create a market. This truth applies to every marketing situation whether it's SharePoint or Comedy. I know that the biggest challenge I have in helping people understand the power of the Shepherd's Guide is that I've got a model they've never seen before – licensing content for use on their network. Creating that little sub-market inside of the SharePoint space has proved to be more challenging (and rewarding) than I could have imagined.

There are some pretty classical messages in the book like finding your unique market proposition (what makes you uniquely valuable), finding your ideal client (creating a picture of the perfect client so you can always keep them in mind as you're seeking clients), and an elevator pitch (a 30 second verbal commercial you give to folks when they ask you what you do.) – just to name a few. If you're looking for some fundamentals of marketing you'll find that the coverage is there.

In addition to the classic content, you'll find some fairly progressive thinking in Duct Tape Marketing too. There is practical advice on how to create content and pointers to some services that can help you in your content creation journey. Fundamentally John Jantsch believes that the key to success is the creation of content. This shouldn't be too surprising from a book author, however, the conversation is very pragmatic. I loved his coverage of objections – "No one reads blogs" with the honest truth – search engines love blogs and if you've searched for any topic on the Internet it's likely you've seen blogs in the results.

In the end, Duct Tape Marketing is a nice balance between theory, approach, and practice. If you're looking to step up your marketing game, it's worth a read.

Categories: Book Review, Professional | 0 Comments

Saturday, May 05, 2012

Finding a Business Connection

In my blog post, "The Nine Keys to SharePoint Success" I called out Business Connection as the number two key to success. In this blog post we'll delve into what makes a business connection – and how to create it.

Bustling Business

How hard could it be to solve a business problem? A walk through the break room will provide snippets of the latest frustrations of your coworkers. Getting into your car of an evening will reveal more challenges as someone is on their cell phone desperately trying to get home – and address some urgent business problem at the same time. It seems like business problems wash over us without any effort to try to find them.

The challenge is that these problems may not be the most pressing problems that the business has, so how do you find the business problems that matter? There are a few key ways to sniff them out – and to solve them with SharePoint.

Application Backlog

If your organization is very large you'll have a team of software developers – or several teams – working diligently against a never ending list of applications that the business wants. The pressure to complete their work is managed through the application backlog. That is the list of applications that the business wants but there aren't resources to get them done – yet.

The application backlog is very formal in some organizations, having to be pruned, tweaked, and reconfigured every quarter, every year, or for each reorganization. In other organizations the application backlog is written on the development manager's whiteboard. Whatever the process to keep the backlog, it's a gold mine for key business problems. These are the visible problems that the organization believes are the most important. Cherry picking a few items off the backlog that might be able to be solved – or mostly solved – with SharePoint can help to ensure that you've got a real business connection to what you're doing.

Help Me Help Desk

If you can't cherry pick from the application backlog – or you can't figure out how it's managed in your organization – you aren't out of options. Another key source for business problems – in this case undiscovered ones – is the help desk. The help desk answers calls when systems are having problems and also when internal customers need help knowing how to solve problems.

Systems with disproportionally high numbers of calls or calls with long resolution times might be candidates for retirement. In fact, these solutions are often on their "last legs" just waiting for things to break completely so that someone will try to find a solution for the problem that they solve. So, why not preempt the process and try to find a SharePoint solution to the problem before the old system fails completely?

Requests for help are useful to as they tend to indicate areas of solutions where the business is exceeding the design criteria. Sure you can use Excel to close the financials for a global organization – but that may not be the best approach. Searching through the service requests can often expose key needs for the organization that aren't being addressed in the best way.

Ask for Directions

Perhaps asking for directions from management is too obvious, however, often I find that folks are timid when approaching a business person to ask what challenges they're facing. Sure you can infer the business problem by looking at the application backlog or the help desk call report – but wouldn't it be easier to ask about the business challenges?

The Business Doesn't Know What They Want

Occasionally I hear an objection from a well-meaning CIO or IT director who admonishes their staff for wanting to – gasp – talk to the users about what they need. The argument is that IT knows better what the business needs than they do. This is positively dangerous thinking.

On the one hand, I can agree that the business doesn't know the solution that they need – that's not their world. On the other hand, they know the business problems, challenges, and opportunities they are facing better than anyone in IT will ever be able to know. It takes both the intimate knowledge of the problem that the business brings and the technical skills of the IT team to propose and explore solutions which may fit the problem.

The best solutions come from listening to the problems that the business is struggling with and proposing solutions which may solve those problems – or at least part of the problems. One of the reasons that the classic waterfall model of solution development doesn't work and why agile approaches are so in vogue right now is because waterfall doesn't encourage the same single-team mentality that agile approaches do.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

One of the challenges that SharePoint projects often face is that the problem that the solution solves isn't directly a problem that the business is having – at least not tangibly. One of my favorite conversations is "Why are you using SharePoint?" The answers are often "To collaborate" or "To share" -- which is fine, but it doesn't really tell me much about the real business need that SharePoint is solving.

Usually when I press on this point I hear "we have to collaborate better." Of course, no business needs to collaborate better just to collaborate better. There's an implied with collaborating better. It could be improved efficiency, reduced cycle times, or fewer mistakes. The problem is that we need to get to the real reasons for the SharePoint platform. If we can't get to the real reasons for SharePoint – beyond the platitudes of efficiency and better service – then we don't really know what problem we're solving.

The further we are away from the real tangible problem we're solving for the business the harder it will be to get resources, to get users engaged, and to make the platform successful. It's difficult to take a platform and really connect it to business problems – unless you recognize that you deploy the platform and then engage the business with the specific examples of how you've improved processing by leveraging the platform

Throughout this process struggle to get to the real answers on how the business is benefitting. Maybe it's a reduced response time to a RFP by a day. Maybe it's improving the closure rate of proposals through better quality deliverables. Maybe it's something else. Whatever it is try to get your numbers as close to the actual business impact as possible. You may have heard of SMARTer as a framework for getting things done. It's a way to make things concrete so they can be effectively measured.

You don't want the business problems you're solving to be six degrees of Kevin Bacon away from the problems the business wants to solve.

Return on Investment

In most cases a request for an ROI is a barrier because the person asking for it doesn't "see" the benefits of the solution. At some level this will be the case at higher levels of the organization – but often the ROI is a smokescreen barrier that's inserted to force folks to clarify their thinking around the real value to the organization.

As I said in the SharePoint UnROI, the real goal of an ROI isn't the bottom line numbers. The goal is the clarification of the plan for how the business will be successful with the solution. In the case of selling SharePoint's ROI, it might be that you have to bundle a few solutions that you intend to deploy immediately and compare the cost to deliver on SharePoint as compared with the cost to deploy a solution without SharePoint.

ROIs are notoriously bad at showing the impact to the organization for platforms and tooling like SharePoint. It's difficult to get valid assumptions about how much time is wasted each day because of poor information, the number of sales lost due to late, incomplete, or unprofessional responses, or how improved communication would help to transform the organization's productivity. Because the assumptions are hard to make, the problem turns into the Drake Equation. It's an interesting exercise but the confidence in the answer is pretty low.

If you approach the ROI as an opportunity to clarify your thinking and to reduce the uncertainty of the outcome – then it's a good process. The ultimate output of the ROI may not be anything like the real return on investment but at least you've improved your understanding of the business impact.

Rational or Emotional Decision

The final point to consider when delivering a business connection is to realize that as much as we really want to believe we make rational decisions, we actually make emotional decisions and then rationalize them. If you don't believe me, try to cost-justify the purchase of a hybrid vehicle. For most of us it can't be done. I took list prices for a Toyota Highlander and a Highlander hybrid and then planned a fictional 6,000 miles of highway driving and 6,000 miles of city driving and gas at $4 per gallon to determine that the hybrid would pay for itself in 23 years. The life of the vehicle isn't even that long. And yet folks buy hybrid vehicles and flaunt their gas savings.

We've discovered that the lowest cost bid for contracts isn't always the best deal. The intangibles are often weighted such that a higher priced big can win – for good but emotional reasons.

If you're looking at creating a business connection and believe that it's as simple as an ROI, you might need to take a step back and remember that the root of politics in your organization is emotion.

Action

If you're looking to better understand the nine keys to success or how to deliver a business connection, take a look at our DVD.

Categories: Professional | 0 Comments

Categories

Links

Archives

Other Blogs