I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a team development workshop for a group of market analysts. It is always a treat when the leader of a group recognizes the need to draw in OD or learning and development support at major milestones in a team’s life cycle, and that is what was happening here. The team was adding a new member and looking at the year ahead. They wanted some help to set the direction and determine how to work together effectively and interact with internal customers. As part of the workshop, we looked at the team’s customers, products, goals, and relationships. I had them take the DiSC® profile, and we spent some time interpreting the results. Then, to help put the lessons learned from DiSC® into action, I ran them through this 5-Step Simulation™:

1. Set the Stage. An internal customer comes to your Market Analysis team and asks for updated near-term (1-2 year) projections related to a pet project he is working on. You have a good working relationship with this customer–an executive in the Marketing group–but the most recent data is much more pessimistic than the projections you gave him several months ago. The overall market fundamentals are still sound, but the conditions that affect this particular project have turned. In your professional judgment, you will have to tell this customer that his project may be a very risky business idea. [The facilitator holds the team leader aside as the key resource, making the team members go through the bulk of the simulation work together. The team leader will judge the results and provide details for the facilitator to work with, making the scenario more realistic by identifying real people and real situational factors to consider.]
2. Make an Initial Decision. You have worked with this executive several times in the past, and you can get a sense for his DiSC style. Given your goals and aspirations for the year, how do you prepare to deliver the market assessment to your customer? [The team is allowed to probe the facilitator for details and explain their process. The facilitator responds, with help from the team leader.]
3. Make the Key Decision. Given your preparation and some early comments from your customer, how do you actually deliver your market assessment? [The team members are encouraged to practice the interaction, with the facilitator playing the role of the customer. The team leader observes, and may throw in a challenge or two, if comfortable doing so.]
4. Make the Closing Decision. This is a key customer within the company for your team. Given how that interaction went, what–if anything–do you do to follow up on the conversation? [The facilitator and team leader mostly listen, but may offer additional things for the team members to consider.]
5. Reveal the Result. How would this actually have worked out, in terms of results and relationships? [The team leader offers his or her assessment of what the team did. The facilitator probes for the team's use of their knowledge of DiSC behavioral styles in the interaction: preparation, holding the conversation, and following up. For some teams, this may be an opportunity to stress the importance of following up to be a consultative partner, and not just a transactional provider of information to the customer. The DiSC aspects of bulding a relationship with a person with a particular style can be helpful to highlight here, as well.]

In this example, the simulation was used as a reinforcer and practice opportunity. The team was new to the DiSC concepts, and had worked through their individual profile results and the ways in which they might work with others. After this practical application, they had the chance to talk in more depth about how they saw their own  styles playing out in the simulation and regular team interactions. They continued the team development work with analysis and action planning for how they wanted to work together as a team and collectively with their customers. The team leader and the team members felt that the activity was very helpful for them because they had the chance to put real customers and real situations into their practice with the simulation.

The 5-Step Simulation™ method can be a good way to make the detailed insight information that learners get from personality or behavioral assessments come to life. The story-based aspect of the simulation brings out details and helps them connect the theory to the real world they work with. Consider using a simulation to expand the insight your learners get into the realm of real-world practice!

(DiSC® is a registered trademark of Inscape Publishing Inc.)

• Performance outcomes
• Audience needs and characteristics
• Budget
• Delivery capability (instructor or developer skill, physical space for ILT, technical constraints for e-learning)
• Time/deadlines
• Sponsor expectations and preferences

The fidelity—or degree to which your simulation faithfully represents reality—will come from the balancing of all of these things. As the designer’s skill increases (considering not just the technical skill, but the consulting ability and interpersonal side of things, too), his or her flexibility increases, too. In the early stages of designing training simulations, designers can get a lot of mileage from templates, content libraries, and pre-written simulations like the 5-Step Simulations™ product. These provide the ingredients for the recipes. As comfort and skill grows, the designer can improvise more and more, and take more risks and stretch assignments.

At the high end of fidelity is something like an aircraft flight simulator. It is very complex, completely represents a standard aircraft type in complete detail, and can simulate hundreds of different situations with great realism. At the low end of the fidelity scale are classroom games, or the common “Jungle Escape” kinds of simulations where the learners really aren’t simulating reality in their actions at all, but are making decisions that have an abstract connection to the topic. Most useful learning simulations fall somewhere in between. Remember to put in enough detail to make the simulation feel emotionally like real work, and not so much that the details get in the way of the main activity you are simulating.

Where should your simulation fall on this fidelity spectrum? It’s a judgment call. You get to make it, because you are the designer.

The same sort of general principles I encourage designers to follow in the 5-Step Simulations™ method all apply to safety simulations. Here they are, again, for completeness:

1. Make the simulation feel like real work
2. Strip away excess complexity and focus on the key dynamic
3. Make the situations, choices, and outcomes believable
4. Allow choices to influence outcomes
5. Keep the rules in the background

With safety sims, we want people to recognize hazards and to make good decisions to avoid or mitigate the hazards. A good safety program will cover both high frequency, common hazards and low frequency, critical impact hazards. Common hazard training is easier to do alongside or integrated into work skills or work process training. A 5-Step Simulation™ embedded in training for a mining equipment operator might look something like this:

Step 1. Set the stage with a particular scenario. Example: You are running the four-rotor miner. As you have been mining over the last hour, you feel the miner pulling to the right, off the planned path. This isn’t critical, because you can easily correct the miner’s path manually, but you have called for maintenance to take care of the problem.
Step 2. Introduce a safety-related decision the employee must make. Example: The miner starts pulling to the right harder and more frequently. The control panel readout shows a “Caution” condition. Still, you can correct the pull manually, but you have to keep paying attention to the machine. This makes it a lot more difficult for you to watch the belt or the ore vein. What do you do, and how do you do it?
Step 3. Offer another decision the employee would have to make as a result of what he or she did in the previous step. Example: The supervisor calls you up and tells you that shaft superintendent has noticed that the production from your miner has dropped. You explain the problem. Your supervisor tells you that he will call maintenance for service, but that it probably won’t arrive before the end of the shift. He says he is counting on you to keep the numbers as high as you can. “Keep it safe,” he says, ”but keep the machine running.” Looking at the the control panel readout again, you are pretty sure that the miner will need to be stopped and reversed to get back on the main line of the vein. What do you do, and how do you do it?
Step 4. Based on the result of the previous decisions, give the employee another decision that will determine the outcome of the scenario. Example: The readout on the miner’s control panel is just a hair away from an automatic shutdown. You can tell just by looking that the ore quality is down, too. You know that you could shut the miner down and wait for maintenance. Or, you could stop and back up a few meters and try to realign it for a better run at the ore. You could try to overcorrect and get the machine back to the planned path, too, but that might be even harder on the machine. Your boss wants you to keep producing, but none of the options looks good. What do you do, and how do you do it?
Step 5. Take stock of the decisions the employee made in this scenario AND the detailed descriptions of how he or she took action at each step. Analyze both the decisions and the methods for productivity and safety implications. (Also, if your company culture supports it, analyze for impact on relationships.) Reveal the results and talk through the implications and lessons learned. Example: In this scenario, putting extra stress on the equipment increases the risk of a breakdown. Deviating from the planned path also increases the risk of tunnel or shaft integrity. There are safe procedures and guidelines for determining when and how to adjust. Let’s talk about how you applied those guidelines in this situation…

The same sort of concept can be used for emergency response scenarios. Replace the relatively routine scenario with one that requires the employee to respond to a special crisis or hazard. If you can simulate the physical environment well enough to let the employee practice recognizing the hazard and taking appropriate action, that is even better. Think of an airplane flight simulator as your model, then adapt that idea to your own setting and simplify the details. Pay attention to the second principle, above–strip away excess complexity and pay attention to the key dynamic. Give just enough detail to simulate the environment, and give as much detail as is needed for the learner to work with the hazard or condition that you want him or her to recognize and handle.

Simulations are an effective and comparatively low-cost way to prepare for both safe work and responses to emegency situations. The five step model we propose from LearningSim can be a good way to organize your thinking around these types of training simulations.

Have a safe week!

The inherent problem with instructional design is (and forgive me if I sound like I’m whining, here) that everybody thinks they can do training. In the Western world, everyone has been to school. Everyone has been to some kind of training. Everyone has taught something to another person. And so, because it didn’t seem difficult, everyone thinks they could do training and have it work. This is a half-truth. There is a lot of wasted time in many training programs. But, there is valuable time that only seems like waste, too. Time that learners spend thinking, reflecting, and planning is time that many leaders don’t value because they don’t understand how adults learn.

To be fair, business leaders are almost always pressed for time. They are often forced to choose, “What do I have my employee not do in order to go to training?” They are under pressure with many priorities and results to choose from. At the same time, they recognize the value of learning and development. Naturally, they want to make the best possible trade-off between time in training and time on the job. And, because they have trained people and been trained before, they think they know how to design training to “cut out the extra stuff.” This leads many of them to ask the instructional designer that hated question, “Can we get that in half the time?”

The designer’s dilemma is how to balance time against effectiveness. One can always cut time from a training program, at the cost of effectiveness. But there is a point of diminishing returns. There is a point at which there isn’t enough time for the learner to really grasp a concept he or she can apply to make a change in thinking or behavior on the job. It is difficult (if not impossible) for a designer to quantify that drop in learning impact. It is not hard at all for the business leader to quantify the value or cost of time the learner spends away from the job. I have seen many designers pushed to the point where they feel they have to give in and “just do the best they can with what they’re given” in terms of time.

These are situations in which switching the instructional paradigm can be valuable. Changing from an instructor-led training strategy to e-learning, or from presentation and discussion to experiential learning, or from formal to informal learning can help the designer redefine training outcomes and cut the required time. Usually, the trade-off is that the alternate method requires more development time, resources, or expertise on the part of the designer, the facilitator, or both. If the savings in learner time is important, then it’s probably a good trade-off to make. If the new method also increases relevance and “stickiness” of the learning, it’s an even bigger bonus.

Simulation-enhanced learning can be one of those kinds of tools. Cutting the time spent on presenting concepts and facts, and instead getting quickly into learning by doing, it is possible with many topics to achieve time savings of 50% or more. This requires a good simulation design approach and some extra creativity and effort up front, but the payoff may be worth it.

So, the next time the client asks, “Can we do that one-day program in two hours?” think about using simulations as an alternate instructional method before you respond. You may surprise yourself by saying, “Yes we can.”

Can I dispense with some of the legalese in the license agreement? Probably so! Can I streamline the process of unlocking the content to get people using the 5-Step Simulation™ content faster? Definitely! Those are a couple of the changes I will be looking at making.

In the meantime, I’m still thinking about safety and team-building simulation topics. More to come in the next few weeks.

If everything goes as planned, this will also streamline LearningSim’s user license mechanics, too. The downloadable content process does away with the requirement to “unlock” the content by getting a license key from the LearningSim website. As an advocate of trust in the customer, I am very much looking forward to that!

So, watch this blog for more information about simulations and learning, and watch HRDQ (http://www.hrdqstore.com/) for 5-Step Simulations™, soon!

—Steve

Here are the topics I’m thinking about:

• Engagement - Power, Authority, & Commitment: This 5-Step Simulation™ is intended for leaders and aspiring leaders who need to engage others in the work of the team. It helps learners to see the difference between two types of influence strategies—the use of position power or legitimate authority (“Top Down” techniques) and the use of consultation or inspiration (“Engagement” techniques). In this team-based simulation, leaders have to organize and assign work, solve production problems, and get the buy-in of followers. This is a group simulation that requires three teams of 3-6 people. Skills/Competencies Applied: Leadership, influencing others, employee engagement, problem solving, leading teams, providing direction, inspiration, consultation.
• Decision Making - Dealing With Ambiguity: This 5-Step Simulation™ is intended for leaders and professionals who need to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It may also be useful for other employees or in preparation for a leadership or project manager role. In this simulation, the learner has to analyze a situation and determine what information is needed to make a decision, decide what decision approach is needed (“deciding how to decide”), and how to make and communicate the decision. This simulation may be done individually. Partners may be used, if desired and realistic for the real-life decision making environment. (If leaders make decisions by consulting with peers in your organization, then partners may be appropriate. If decisions get made alone, then partners are not recommended.) Skills/Competencies Applied: Decision making, analyze information, problem solving, leadership, innovation, dealing with ambiguity, uncertainty.
• Giving Feedback - When a Team Member Doesn’t Contribute: This 5-Step Simulation™ is for managers and individual contributors. A team member has to confront another person on the team about his failure to contribute his fair share of the work and information to the team. This simulation requires a partner. The partner has information that the learner does not have. Skills/Competencies Applied: Giving feedback, managing performance, gaining agreement, leading teams.
• Giving Feedback - Dealing with a Safety Issue: This 5-Step Simulation™ is written for supervisors and managers. A supervisor has to confront an employee about a safety issue. While the employee’s behavior isn’t very risky overall, it increases the likelihood of an accident and, more importantly, hurts the safety culture of the team. This simulation requires a partner. The partner has information that the learner does not have. Skills/Competencies Applied: Giving feedback, managing performance, gaining agreement, upholding standards, ensuring safety.
• Team-Building - Fundraiser Decisions: This 5-Step Simulation™ is intended to explore team skills—decision making, planning, coordination, and execution. This simulation works best where the participants already know each other as workgroup or team members, but this is not required to make the learning experience effective. In this simulation, the learners have to choose a fundraising project, plan it out, divide and do the work, and handle practical problems that arise in the execution phase. Group Simulation: This simulation is designed for groups of four to eight learners. There are three projects for the team to choose from. Larger groups or classes can allow teams to choose their own projects or divide up the options among the large group. This is not designed as a competitive simulation, but it can be made into one with slight changes in the instructions. Timed Simulation: This simulation has a time limit to keep the pressure on the learners. Allow 15 minutes for the Planning Phase (Step 2), 20 minutes for the Coordination Phase (Step 3), and 15 minutes for the Execution Phase (Step 4). Smaller groups should have shorter time limits, and larger groups might extend the time limits. Skills/Competencies Applied: Communication in teams, planning , coordination, execution, delegation, natural leadership, planning, team decision making, problem solving.

Comments are welcome, of course!

It has been a while since I last posted. The CD version of the 5-Step Simulations™ product continues to sell through Trainer’s Warehouse at a slow but steady pace. I am looking at the possibility of seeing if HRDQ will also carry it.

I have four new simulations in the works: two more specifically for team-building and two additional feedback simulations. This will expand the set of feedback simulations so that an instructor could have enough to run one simulation and then have the learners “swap roles” and give the other person some practice in the same content area.

Another idea is to create a non-editable set of team-building simulations and package that for higher volume sale. This might be “Team-Building Activities: With the 5-Step Simulation™ Method,” or something like that. The CD would have between four and six simulations and a price point of $36.95, maybe. (Just a SWAG there, rather than any real market study.)

So, just because I don’t spend a lot of time on the LearningSim business doesn’t mean it’s not going well! If anything comes to mind as a suggestion, please let me know what you think. Comments and questions are welcome!

–Steve

Quick Rules of Thumb

Rule of Thumb #1 - Estimate 40 hours of administrative work per class session.

Rule of Thumb #2 - Reduce the estimate by 50% for additional sessions of the same course, after the first.

Rule of Thumb #3 - Increase the estimate by 50% if internal marketing or communication is required.

Rule of Thumb #4 - Estimate a 1.0 FTE job for an enterprise LMS system administrator, without including any class session administration duties. Don’t assume that one or more training administrators can do the system administration job, and don’t assume that the system administrator can do any administration of training delivery.

Rule of Thumb #5 - Training administrators who also assist the professional L&D staff are effectively limited to spending no more than 75% of their time on direct administration of training delivery.

Rule of Thumb #6 - One full-time training administrator can handle between 8 and 12 class sessions per month, under ordinary conditions.

Basis for the Rules of Thumb

A training administrator often has to do several important tasks:

• Setting up a course (8 hrs). The administrator is responsible for entering the details of a new course into whatever system of record-keeping is being used. (Ideally, this happens just once with an LMS and it is done.) The administrator often has to track down the training manager to get all the details-especially the course description, objectives, length, qualified facilitator list, facilities and materials required, and so on. Entering the data takes about an hour, but it can easily take eight hours of work to set up one course, after everything is said and done.
• Setting up a class session (16 hrs). Setting up a class session in a learning management system often takes less time than setting up a course because the major details for a session are already associated with the course in the LMS. However, the logistic work for specific class sessions take a lot of time-site scheduling, entering the session on the calendar and managing the details associated with that process, scheduling facilitators, sending invitations and reminders, and the process of ordering refreshments, audio-visual equipment, materials, and supplies. For fairly ordinary class sessions, it can take sixteen hours (two days) per session to do this work. The more that similar sessions can be scheduled at once through a single set of resource providers, the more time can be saved.
• Preparing for a class session (16 hrs). Training administrators most often acquire or produce materials to be used in the live class sessions. (This is for live instructor-led training. For e-learning courses, this may not be relevant at all!) Arranging for materials for a single class session (of 20 participants or so) typically takes about eight hours. Getting the materials to the right place at the right time typically takes another four hours. Coordinating the communication between facilitators, site staff, and participants can easily take another four hours. Again, the more that similar sessions can be coordinated at the same time, with the same team, the greater the time savings.
• Following up after a class session (8 hrs). We typically ask training administrators to pack the extra material back into the storage closets and to enter evaluation data into the system. An administrator may also send follow-up information to facilitators, sponsors, and/or participants and may run evaluation or attendance reports for managers. Including the communication and coordination, this can easily take eight hours per class session (but about four hours seems more common).

A training administrator may also be asked to handle some other tasks, and these take time above and beyond the course and class session administration.

• Internal marketing and communication. Training administrators may be asked to handle the creation, publishing or printing, and communication of information about training or learning programs. The time required for this can vary extremely widely, depending on how big a role the administrator takes. If no special graphic design, art, or visual layout skills are required for the specific assignment, then coordinating the marketing and communication of a course will typically add about 50% to the training administrator’s time investment, in addition to the more routine administrative tasks. If the administrator is asked to design materials, estimate this on a project-by-project basis.
• System administration and providing user help. A learning management system requires a system administrator who has three interlocking skill sets-training administration, ability to make people feel comfortable using web-based technology, and the operation of complex software applications. (Enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software experience qualifies and is helpful, but it is not required.) An enterprise LMS requires a dedicated administrator at least at a .5 FTE level, just to perform the many tasks associated with its management and day-to-day functioning. Some tasks, such as: (1) delivering user training, (2) working with e-learning providers to test and install new courseware, and (3) running and sending management learning outcome reports typically bring this person to a 1.0 FTE. This is without any significant training administration duties for class sessions! The LMS system administrator will often do the course setup, and training administrators will handle class session setup, preparation, and follow-up.
• Assisting learning professional staff. Training administrators often provide general administrative support to the professional and management staff for the learning function, and this can be a major responsibility. It is typically fair to assume that a training administrator who serves in any assistant capacity to the professional group will spend at least 25% of his or her time doing so, and this will limit the amount of direct training administration work he or she can accomplish.

Taking the exceptions and all of this regular workload into account, it is reasonable to expect a 1.0 FTE training administrator to handle about 8-12 class sessions per month. New courses, more complex courses, and courses with unusual logistic requirements or executive involvement will take longer. E-learning or web-based courses require significantly less administration time, as well. Typically, a training administrator might be involved in setting up one or two new courses a month, and just scheduling recurring class sessions for existing courses in a more routine way, so the estimate of 8-12 class sessions per month seems reasonable and has been borne out by experience in different companies.

Get the white paper: Business Simulation Game - Design Checklist

For more information on business simulation games, check out the Pixel Farm Interactive site, and then click on Library. I strongly recommend the video of the “Business Simulation - Sudden Impact.”