What does it take to change someone? Not just their behaviour, but who they fundamentally are? This is the question at the heart of learning design – a discipline that’s frequently undervalued, and almost always confused with traditional training.
While most L&D professionals find themselves trapped in outdated rituals of content delivery, the true learning designer crafts experiences that genuinely change people.
Nick Shackleton-Jones’ recent encounter with a troublemaking child reminded him just how powerful – and how rare – effective learning design really is.
The boy on the train
It happened on the train back from London. It was pretty packed. A woman got on with her son – maybe four years old – and she sat beside me, while he sat opposite me in the window seat. There was a sorry excuse for a table: a small plastic ledge deliberately too small for a laptop, on which I had perched an open can of coke and a box containing the other half of my sandwich.
I was interested to see how the young lad would behave. He didn’t keep me waiting: almost immediately, he took a small toy truck and used it to push my drink off the edge of the table. I caught it just in time. I looked up at his expression and it was clear that he was expecting some kind of payoff – a reaction from me. He didn’t get it, so he proceeded to smash his toy car repeatedly into my sandwich, which I removed. It struck me as odd that his mum was trying to say something to me, rather than him.
In any case, he decided he would find better playmates elsewhere and disappeared under the seats before reappearing, clambering up a standing commuter like a monkey climbing a tree.
To my surprise, some of the passengers accepted this behaviour, laughing and simultaneously describing him as ‘such a naughty boy!’ in a tone that suggested this was some kind of accomplishment.
I had lots of reactions to this experience, which I shared via TikTok on the train platform.
Lots of people had reactions to my reactions – and I reacted to many of those. Overall, I learned that people are quick to blame the mum. My own impression is that some boys are born particularly unruly and that parents have to shape them into socially acceptable individuals.
The role of the learning designer
It occurred to me that this was an example of learning – of the process by which people come to be the individuals that they are: they have experiences, they react to the bits that matter, they store those reactions, and those reactions change their behaviour.
The task of a learning designer is to create experiences that cause people to react, and to enable people to change and develop based on their memories (stored reactions). No doubt, if someone asked you to reflect on your life and recall the turning points – the things that made you the person you are today – you would give me a list of experiences. Some big, some small, but all things that mattered to you. That moved you.
Education is not learning
Learning can be so simply described in terms that hold true for bees, birds, rats, cats and humans. But still, we remain mired in medieval nonsense, and the fundamentals of learning design remain ahead of us.
What have we been doing while we could have been designing learning? Education. A ritual where we sit in rows and find ourselves bored. A singularly dreadful learning experience copied and pasted over and over again, because of historical accident – education. And when our children and colleagues tell us it was ‘boring’, they mean there was very little to react to. Very little learning.
L&D (should) make people who they are
The tragedy is that learning and development is perhaps the most important career of all – doctors and nurses patch people up, but we are the only profession licensed to make people who they are.
Many people enter into learning and development with the idea of making a difference. However, they quickly find themselves trapped in a repetitive, stereotyped pacing of a training ritual that they realise makes no difference at all. A ritual that they are being asked to repeat because their stakeholders believe they know what learning is – and it looks a lot like school. ‘Put this content in the course,’ they say. Some in L&D complain of feeling like ‘order takers’, some leave out of sheer frustration, and others accept their Sisyphean lot.
Start your learning design journey
If you wanted to begin doing learning design, take these three steps:
Step 1: Refuse to consider ‘content’ or ‘topics’ as your starting point
Instead, begin with the intended outcomes – for example changes in how people behave, think or feel. Require your stakeholders to be clear on what the return on investment should be.
Step 2: Talk to your intended audience about what matters to them
Discuss what challenges they face. You cannot change what matters to a person without knowing what matters to them today. For example, you might discover that a new starter worries about how to dress or where to park.
Step 3: Brainstorm experiences that connect the outcomes to what people care about
For example, new starters might meet with peers who joined a year ago to chat about what it was like.
Learning design is the job of pioneers
In designing experiences, you will need to experiment to see what works, because there is currently no science for learning design. That is to say, we don’t yet have a scientific method for mapping what matters to a person nor a reliable way of predicting exactly which experiences will alter them – but that is the joy of being a pioneer.
Be ready to face pushback, not only from stakeholders who think you are some sort of corporate schoolteacher, but also from peers waving instructional design certificates. But by adopting this learning design approach, you will make a difference, and nobody ever made a difference by going with the flow.
