It’s the Knowledge, Stupid!

We all probably remember the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was made famous by political strategist James Carville, who hung it on a sign in Bill Clinton's Little Rock campaign office to keep everybody "on message" in the 1992 presidential election. And it worked. Well, I think we should revive the phrase immediately and hang it boldly in our cubicles to keep us all on message in the learning community—it’s the knowledge, stupid!

We talk a lot about training, instructional design, learning management systems, pedagogical methodology, etc., etc. In doing so, we inadvertently drown out discussion of the most fundamental factor in facilitating learning in the workplace: the knowledge. And the most important knowledge, as mentioned in previous posts, is proprietary—the knowledge that is walking the halls of every organization in the heads of employees. I’m sorry, I know this is going to offend some of my colleagues, but ‘It’s the SMEs, stupid,’ not instructional designers, who have the knowledge, and finding ways to get that mission-critical knowledge out of their heads and made easily available to learners when they need it is the key to achieving Rapid eLearning.

The eLearning Guild recently completed a very interesting survey, entitled “The Rapid eLearning Development Research Report.”

You will probably have to join the Guild to download the paper, so please do it—the Guild is a great resource. Let’s go through some of their findings:

• Is Rapid eLearning needed? 78% of respondents said that demand for faster development and deployment has increased. That looks like a yes.
• Where does the content (the knowledge) for eLearning come from? Not surprisingly, 86% of respondents said SMEs are the source.
• What is the most common tool developers employ with SMEs to obtain or derive their knowledge? 70% said interviewing.
• If a more rapid approach is needed, what are the main culprits slowing things down? 53% said “access to SMEs” and 60% said “content review and approval” (presumably approval by the same SMEs of the content that developers created after interviewing them).
• And what about the financial bottom line? 70% or respondents said they see a moderate to significant demand for reducing costs for eLearning development and deployment.

So, let’s try to weave these data points into a realistic narrative. More rapid approaches to eLearning are definitely needed. The source of the underlying knowledge is SMEs. Rather than enabling SMEs to make their knowledge directly available to learners, training developers interview them to find out what they know. But the biggest obstacles to reducing the time for development and deployment are the inability to get the time from busy SMEs for the knowledge sucking interviews and getting them to review and approve the content after the developers took the SME knowledge and tried to formalize it. And here’s the most interesting part, since we pretty much knew all of this already—only 6% or respondents thought that more efficient and effective use of SMEs is a defining characteristic of Rapid eLearning!

Say what? Let’s try this one more time. SMEs have the knowledge, but we can’t get their time to share their knowledge, then we can’t get their time to review the content we produce, and yet more efficient and effective use of SMEs apparently is not even perceived as an important characteristic of making eLearning more rapid! And what did they think is key to achieving more rapidly designed eLearning? 77% said infrastructure and technology… 70% said that reducing costs is a major prioity, yet we think the answer is buying more tools and techology?

How did we get so twisted in our thinking? Why is it that we can’t see the SME elephant standing in the middle of our eLearning development and deployment process? How do we get back “on message” and start addressing the root cause of our problem. The only viable strategy is to “Distintermediate or Die”—the subject of my next post.