If your ideas can’t be drawn, they can’t be done. In 20+ years of experience working with clients, we’ve discovered five solid reasons why you should ditch the word docs and snag a Sharpie. It’s time to normalize the work doodles and make stick figures acceptable.

Visuals trigger a different part of your brain.

Did you know that words are more memorable when visuals are involved? When you want your team to remember and share key ideas, it just makes sense to use visuals. It’s science: visual are recorded deep inside the brain — drawings, doodles, and images resonate more deeply than a paragraph of text. We’ve seen it in action. When people draw, they activate different parts of their brain, which helps them understand and tell a different, more detailed story than they’d ever be able tell without it.

Visuals allow you to move faster.

Whether you’re watching the election results color different parts of a map of the United States or flipping through the three-image comics that pepper the back of the newspaper, your brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than it would if it were reading text. Visuals help people quickly and easily internalize new ideas and information.

Visuals create valuable context.

Companies constantly generate buzz words, corporate jargon, and biz blah-blah-blah. (Just take a look at Weird Al’s Mission Statement video.) Visual communications add context by translating the noise into things everyone can understand and apply to their work. Words like “flexibility,” ”teamwork,” “support,” and “impact” are vague on their own, but when visualized they give the words context, and help people understand.. Visuals transform codewords into understandable, actionable information.

Visuals create understanding.

Whether it’s through elaborate infographics or by simple lines and shapes, visuals provide clarity and explain things that are complex. Visuals show where people agree or disagree, and where things are broken, so people can get on the same page and fully understand the same message. When people understand the same way as their co-workers, they can take action.

Visuals inspire action.

In the world of business, people need to understand before they can make decision. Visuals create alignment by breaking down complexity into a form that everyone understands. When everyone on the team is aligned and agrees on all of the parts, a fully-mapped visual is what they need in order to make meaningful commitments to each other. We’ve seen it firsthand with our clients: When people all see, understand, and agree on what they’re trying to accomplish, they are more likely to get it done.

Convinced yet?

Learn more from us about visual thinking below:

• Sign your team up for the XPLANE Visual Thinking Workshop.
• Download the XPLANE Visual Thinking SketchNotes eBook to up your drawing skills.
• Read about how we used visuals to communicate a company’s strategy to a global community and activate it within the organization.
• Contact us to find out how we can help explain your complex business processes with meaningful, impactful maps and visuals.

Written by XPLANE content strategist Lauren Gantner. Cool brain dudes drawn by illustration superstar Ryan Brown.

Why You Should Communicate with Your Employees Using Visuals was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We will tell you what we tell them: “Our experience clearly shows the best answers come from co-creating the solution with your teams. When you hire someone to give you the answer, you give away the most powerful tool you have.”

Your own employees and colleagues know what’s broken, and they have clear ideas about how to fix it. They usually come up with more useful solutions. People support what they help to build. This is the biggest reason to engage your teams. That means co-creating it with your people makes them instant advocates, and even evangelists, for those solutions.

Co-creation in product development may mean collaborating with customers or partners to develop new and better products. Inside of organizations, co-creation means engaging your employees to design better internal solutions.

At XPLANE, co-creation means bringing together a cross-functional team to discover, design, and iterate a solution. Over the years, we’ve heard every reason why co-creation won’t work. Here are the top three:

“We don’t have time.”

Co-creation requires those team members to dedicate time to focus on discovery. If an organization needs new ways for teams to improve processes, it takes time for them to get into a room for 1–2 days and map out how they will work together, hand-off projects, and make decisions.

Co-creation is one of the best ways to both develop workable solutions and activate them. The Harvard Business Review says, “The key to improving experiences is letting stakeholders play a central role in designing how they work with one another.”

“Our people can’t do this.”

Co-creation helps develop the best solution because people know internal processes; structures; systems; and more importantly, they know the shortcuts and barriers. Most of the time, people have already thought of ways to improve a process or work across functional teams. What they may need is a forum to share across silos.

Working together to design a better way to work builds empathy across silos, so it’s infinitely easier to break them down.

A mid-level manager from a large technology company told us that executives wanted teams to collaborate more, so the organization could move more quickly. She said what those team members saw were processes and roles that kept them siloed and bottlenecks in the decision-making process that paralyzed progress.

She said the team members knew exactly what they’d do to solve those challenges, and they had some solid, actionable ideas. But, no one had asked them. Executives brought in a consultant who presented a lengthy document full of buzzwords, and only some of the steps made sense for their organization. It’s no surprise that only a few of the recommendations have been put into practice.

There are times when subject matter experts might share best practices, benchmarks, or recommend systems or tools. The key is to give your teams that learning and then co-create the solution.

“This will take too long.”

Co-creation is the best way to align and jumpstart any change. Once a cross-functional group of people has a say in designing a new process or clearer roles and responsibilities, they go back to their teams and advocate for it.

We see teams begin to buy in and own a new customer experience or corporate strategy as they tweak it and work cooperatively to fit the pieces together in the discovery session. That alignment is critical. Teams don’t end up confused or misunderstanding each other and then head off in different directions.

Crucially, those team members return to their functional groups ready to explain, teach, and promote the new plan. This is the secret sauce of co-creation because those participants jump-start activation. We even encourage organizations to include a couple of naysayers in the session to get them on board as supporters.

So even though it seems like you’d save time if we gave you the answer, ultimately, you save time and have a better solution if we help you and your team co-create it.

Written by Cynthia Owens, XPLANE senior consultant, for www.xplane.com.

Stop Asking Consultants to Give You the Answer was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

OSET partnered with XPLANE to build a groundswell of public awareness around the voting machine crisis and their solution to bring our election process into the 21st century in a national campaign called The TrustTheVote Project.

Voting vulnerabilities, ranging from voter fraud, lost ballots, and miscounted votes, to more recent cyber security threats, have continued to increase and cast doubt on the integrity of our elections. To many voters, the whole election cycle process can feel overwhelming and hopeless. Our nation must restore the trust in the election process.

OSET has a solution: ElectOS, a technology platform that supports all aspects of elections administration and voting, including creating, marking, casting, and counting ballots, as well as managing all back-office functions. ElectOS is more accurate, transparent, verifiable and secure than anything ever used for a public election, at a fraction of the cost when compared to the current systems in use that must be replaced following this November’s election. And it will be publically owned by the people of the United States, not by private corporations.

Enter XPLANE. We help create clarity. We drive alignment. We work to create meaningful impact. We believe in visual thinking. We thrive by rolling up our sleeves to support the greater good.

OSET’s team joined us in our Portland studio for a few days of discovery, voter interviews, designing, and planning. Our teams worked together to co-create the key messaging to help drive support for the TrustTheVote Project and develop a clear path forward through a suite of visual design components, including a bilingual animation, presentation slides and citizen landing page redesign on the TrustTheVote website. And we couldn’t have done it without the help of our amazing Portland partners B. Frayn Masters, Marmoset, TalkBack Sound and RoboToro. It takes a village!

Watch the video here:

We’re proud of our friends at OSET and the TrustTheVote movement, and are honored to be involved in this impactful work to restore voter trust in our election process. The TrustTheVote message has spread across the nation. The OSET team has met with the White House and Department of Homeland Security, and serves as contributing experts in an ongoing investigative report on voting systems featured on NBC News, The Today Show, MSNBC, and NBCUniversal.com.

The future of voting is bright. The TrustTheVote Project is on its way to changing the way America votes, rebuilding the integrity of our critical democracy infrastructure, and ensuring that every vote counts for generations to come. Join the Movement.

Written by Annie Pomeranz and Deanna Rizzo from XPLANE.
Originally published at www.xplane.com.

Inspiring a Movement: Our Work with The TrustTheVote Project was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Liminal Thinking is the art of creating change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs.”

We’re proud to be kicking off the release of XPLANE founder Dave Gray’s book, Liminal Thinking, this month. Dave’s insights and ideas have left our team feeling motivated to create positive change in our lives, our business, and the world.

To share the excitement of his book release, we’ve gathered three insights from Liminal Thinking to inspire your thinking this week.

You don’t need to be the CEO to create change in your company.

If you want to create change within your organization, you need to change your mindset first. When you start changing the way you think, you allow new possibilities and ideas to form. Start on the path to creating meaningful change with these three Liminal Thinking gems from Actionable Books’ Alyssa Burkus.

You can’t change the past and the future does not exist yet, so the only place that change is possible is in the moment right now.

Why is that important? In a YouTube video, Dave Gray dives into shutting off your autopilot and getting out of your repetitive routine to come back into the moment, do something different, and create change.

You can envision new possibilities and start creating positive change with stories.

People make sense with stories. When you present a new idea based on facts, people often interpret it within their own personal belief system. By promoting your own ideas and beliefs with a story, it allows people to better understand, relate to, and make sense of it. Read more about this practice with a free download of a chapter from Liminal Thinking.

Interested in having Dave Gray come to your city or organization to talk about Liminal Thinking?

Let us know.

We have a special deal for our friends and fans!

Purchase your own copy of Liminal Thinking here and use the code xplane for 20% off your purchase.

Try it. Change your way of thinking. And then let us know what happens.

@XPLANE #liminalthinking

This content was originally published in XPLANE’s monthly newsletter, XPRESS. Click here to join the mailing list.

Creating Positive Change by Changing the Way You Think was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Teams are stuck in silos and can’t or won’t collaborate
• Functional leaders aren’t aligned and are focused on different priorities
• Structures and culture slow people down
• Metrics and rewards are focused on the wrong things, so they derail objectives
• Employees don’t know how what they do fits into the bigger picture

To solve those complicated challenges, it’s vital to design processes in the context of all the dimensions of the organization (mapped out in our Eight Dimensions below).

The minute you change one dimension, say process, it causes ripple effects across the entire organization. Fixing the steps in a process without adjusting the culture, structure, skills, and behaviors means the new process is doomed to disappoint.
Looking at the entire picture makes it easier to see how to make genuine change that lasts.

• Process improvement often overlaps with a need to improve culture, values, behaviors, and structure.
• Vision, mission, and strategy are often an unclear clutter of messages filled with buzzwords that confuse rather than guide people.
• Talent, knowledge, and skills typically lag behind the innovation driving successful companies today.
• Tools are frequently out of date or make people’s jobs more difficult.

Designing a better process helps employees know what they are responsible for and how to do it. They know how their work contributes and how they should hand off projects to the next team. They understand how to collaborate across functions.
But process improvement is rarely just about moving boxes and arrows. Today, it’s more commonly about getting people to change the way they’ve done something hundreds or thousands of times. That requires looking at all the dimensions of an organization.

Written by Cynthia Owens, Senior Consultant at XPLANE

Originally published at xblog.xplane.com.

Process Problems Aren’t Just About Process was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most companies fail at strategy activation. Why? Well, despite a whole lot of talking, most leaders never clearly articulate what people are trying to accomplish or what motivates employees to come to work. There is little to no connection to the people who need to enact the strategy. The resonance is lost.

It’s not for lack of trying. Most corporations have tools like vision and mission statements, values, a North Star, purpose, principles, and ways of working.

But all of that has become such a confusing clutter of navigational tools that employees, and even department heads, aren’t sure where the company is headed. Functional teams are in silos headed in different directions, focused on different priorities, so they can’t execute on strategy.

For employees, every couple of months there seems to be a new message designed to lead and inspire them. After a while, it becomes white noise, and employees quit paying attention.

Vision, purpose, mission, North Star, or principles–whatever an organization calls these navigational tools–are vital to uniting employees, so they can articulate what you are trying to accomplish and align to move in the same direction.

These tools aren’t marketing messages. To be valuable, each navigation tool has to answer a specific question, so people know where the organization is headed.

Ask the right questions

Navigation requires answers to just five questions:

1. What do we or should we do that is unique?
2. Where are we going?
3. Why do we do what we do?
4. Who are we?
5. When do we want to arrive?

Be clear

Companies can have one piece of navigation, or three to four, as long as the answers to the five questions are clear and aligned.

Everyone in the organization needs to see clearly what the company does that is unique, where the company is headed, why the work is important, what principles guide decisions and behaviors, and what is the timeframe. Then strategy and priorities will begin to make sense.

Be consistent

Priorities may change, but vision, purpose, and values don’t change from year to year. Shifting direction every few months is like the pilot announcing midflight that you are headed to New Delhi instead of New York.

Consistency helps people feel confident about where they are going and helps them make the right decisions to get there. Consistency helps teams align so that employees are headed in the same direction and focused on the same things.

Be authentic

Some companies spend a lot of money and resources word-smithing a vision or mission statement into a work or art. But if employees know it’s little more than an internal marketing message, it will fail. If they don’t believe the message or don’t see executives supporting it, they will become cynical.

Make it authentic and real, and employees will invest more in making sure the company gets there. People support what they help create; make co-creation a part of the process to bring true authenticity to the tools.

Lose the labels

It doesn’t matter what you call each piece or navigation; what matters is creating an easy way for people to understand, so they can activate your strategy.

In some companies, purpose has replaced vision; other companies incorporate their purpose into the vision; and some have only a mission. Those labels become confusing; it’s the answers to the five questions that are important.

Sharpen your scissors

Simply adding another message will only make things worse. Look at existing navigational tools and test them against the five questions. Figure out what question each piece answers, and then eliminate any pieces that don’t provide the answers and contribute to clarity. Use only enough tools to be clear and no more.

Understand that strategy is the “how”

It’s appealing to try to squeeze strategy into a mission statement or confuse the navigational tools with strategy questions. Any “how” question is part of your strategy.

• How do we get there?
• How to we work together?
• How do we know what to do?
• How do we reach out goals?
• How do we know if we succeed?

These are important questions, but only after there are clear answers to the five navigational questions.

Cynthia Owens is a Senior Consultant at XPLANE.
Drew Mattison is a Senior Vice President of Account Services at XPLANE.

Originally published at www.xplane.com.

Why You Failed to Execute Your Strategy (And What To Do About It) was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I became fascinated with this topic about a year ago and began reading all I could on it. I started interviewing our consultants; they work with teams across organizations each day and know a high performing team when they see one. I received good insights but had trouble finding strong enough patterns to draw any conclusions. Some teams had clear, strong leadership, while others thrived in flat, collaborative environments.

Just as I was about to conclude there was no secret recipe to high performing teams, Google released their extensive research results announcing just that: There is no magic recipe. There is no magic mix of skill set types, hierarchy, or demographics. Even more surprising, there is no one size fits all set of behaviors to make a team work. Some teams get to incredible outputs through critique and debate while others find groundbreaking creativity through positive encouragement and support. There only appears to be two pervasive qualities among all successful teams that no one seems to debate: trust and respect. Trust and respect, the core requirements to any healthy relationship, are foundational, but when it comes to teams, they can also be elusive.

“We just need to trust each other” — Easier said than done!

Let’s look at the positive side of this conclusion. If there is no secret recipe, you can create a high performing team out of (almost) anything.

So whether you are creating a new team from scratch, inheriting one that doesn’t yet click, or trying to rehab a team that is completely dysfunctional, think of think of the following three foundational elements as ones you can put in place to create a high powered team fueled by trust and respect:

Shared Goals:

If your team doesn’t have a common mission or goal, they are not a team; they are employees working side by side. If individually they have conflicting goals, they are actually working against each other. If they are working against each other (or even suspect they are), how can you expect them to trust one another? Mission and goal can be used interchangeably, and although I love that a goal is typically more measureable, a good mission creates passion. You should strive for both.

Here’s an exercise you can use to facilitate this with your team:

Team Understanding:

How well does your team know one another? Even if they have worked together for years, you would likely be surprised by the answer. Do they know one another’s backgrounds and areas of expertise? Do they know about their interests, goals, and skill gaps? By creating a common understanding of strengths and weaknesses, the team will begin to identify as an interconnected unit vs. a group of individuals. Revealing yourself more fully also makes you more approachable, human, and easier to connect with. All of this helps foster authentic trust and respect.

Here’s a storytelling exercise to help people share their story:

Established Ways of Working:

What are the common expectations and norms that this team will follow to get work done? How and when will we share and communicate our work? How will decisions get made? What behaviors are encouraged? How do we deal with conflict? It’s essential to co-create these norms together as a team. Differing work and communication styles can create power struggles, alliances, and kill progress. This might be hard work and highlight areas where your team members have different worldviews and philosophies; however, it’s better to do the work now than later.

Here’s a canvas you can use to guide your team through these discussions:

If you’ve invested the time and energy into the previous exercises you’ve probably had some breakthroughs as a team. Now comes the hardest and most important step: the follow through. Everything you’ve done previously won’t get you the results unless you keep it fresh by referring back to it and working through the tensions that arise as you work. The ways of working you’ve defined will require behavior change for some people. That is hard work and requires continuous reflection, feedback, and conversation. If you don’t provide consistent follow through, the trust and respect you’ve developed will begin to diminish.

Here are some tips for embedding new ways of working on your team:

1. Take over a physical or virtual wall with your mission statement, stories, and canvas to keep it present and fresh

2. Provide regular metrics reporting and visibility on your shared goals

3. Schedule a monthly meeting to talk about team tensions and highlight successes and challenges related to your ways of working

These exercises are designed to create the conversations and decision making, so you can avoid the common pitfalls that impact team productivity down the road. They can be used for teams of any size or shape. If you are dealing with strong personalities, hierarchical conflicts, or heavy discord, a third party might be needed. XPLANE has a great deal of experience with that; let us know if we can help.

Written by Kathryn Jarrell, XPLANE’s Chief of Service Delivery
For more articles by Kathryn, click here.

Three Exercises For Creating High Performing Teams was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Strategy activation is basic physics. A simple lever is a good metaphor for how organizations experience a change in strategy. On the left side of the lever sits the organization in its current state. When we have a new strategy, we’re committing to moving the organization, lifting it up to a future state in which the strategy is adopted and integrated into daily work. How heavy is that lift? How far are we trying to lift? These are both questions of magnitude that can be underestimated. On the right hand side of the lever is the effort we must put in to achieve that lift. That’s strategy activation: the effort of lifting. When you think about your activation plan, do the physics work? If not, you have three options: reduce the load, reduce the distance, or increase the effort. Reducing the load can mean piloting the strategy in just one part of the organization. Reducing the distance might mean reframing the expectation of how much can change at once. If you can’t compromise on either of those, seriously consider increasing the amount of effort you’re putting into strategy activation.

Strategy is often devoted to figuring out what to do. If you are working with management consultants, you may have a 95-page PowerPoint full of what to do. You may have spent six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars figuring out the what. You’ve finally narrowed it down to a simple strategy statement of your objective, scope, and advantage. You are so excited to tell people about the what — but wait! Activation often stumbles early when stakeholders are closed to hearing the what because they aren’t convinced of the why and the why now. Go back to the beginning and start with the why.

In art school you learn to look for the negative space. That means finding the shape of the thing that is not there, so you can better define what is there. Often, strategy only speaks of what to do. It’s not usually clear about what not to do. If you’ve ever been part of a great strategy development effort, you were able to say “no” to many possible alternate paths. The act of saying “no” made it more clear about what you were saying “yes” to. But that same clarity sometimes doesn’t make it into the organization. Strategy gets watered down when everyone can point to the same statement and use it to justify continuing down the same path. We have to talk about the negative space: What will we not do, what is not a priority, what is changing, and what is not changing?

The activation curve is a powerful tool in understanding strategy activation. Every stakeholder travels along this curve from initial awareness of a strategy to being fully on board with the strategy. This can happen quickly, or it may take months or years. Many organizations will have a strong launch, with lots of communications and focus, only to see momentum fizzle out as another priority becomes the hot topic. There’s a reason why it’s an activation curve and not activation stairs. Until you reach the top, the progress you make is not guaranteed. Without continuous momentum, it’s easy to slide right back down to the start. A good rule of thumb is to plan activation efforts for every notch up the curve, reasonably spaced to build momentum and maintain focus. This is preferable to a “big bang” approach of trying to leap from the bottom to the top in a big burst of activity. It is virtually impossible for any single intervention to move people up more than two notches at a time.

Consider the organization as a system in balance. When changing one part of the system, we sometimes fail to anticipate how other parts will need to shift to reinforce the change. Sometimes even when the awareness and understanding phase of activation has been very successful, adoption can fail because people don’t translate the theory of the strategy to what they do practically every day. Once strategy is understood, people need the opportunity to redesign their own work to support it. This can be disruptive to processes, systems, incentives, and priorities. Embrace and encourage those ripple effects as a sign that the organization is rebalancing to a new normal.

Most organizations are optimized to share information through the classic management cascade, from the CEO down through the functional leaders, to team leaders. The truth is the names on the organizational chart aren’t always the best guide for who will influence behavioral change. Research has shown that it’s easier than we think to identify the informal influencers, and the simple question “Who do you trust?” is the best predictor of true influence. Look at the stakeholders who are critical to strategy execution and who they trust. A simpler stakeholder network will emerge with a direct path to activation with more effective results.

What are the barriers to adopting your new strategy? We have asked dozens of strategy development teams this question using a deck of 35 cards, each with a different potential barrier. The teams put on their empathy hats and identify what they think the top five barriers for their stakeholders will be. Then we ask the stakeholders who will be executing the strategy the same question. When we show the strategy development team the results, they are stunned. Every time we have done this exercise, we have learned the development team’s assumptions were wrong. Strategy activation is really the art of barrier dismantling. And when you’re working on the wrong barriers, you’re wasting time and resources.

Sometimes strategy fails to activate because it is lost in the chaos of many other strategies. We’ve heard clients call it everything from “change fatigue” to “strategy overload” to “organizational ADHD.” We call it navigational clutter, and it’s endemic in the global business world. A recent Harvard study showed that “when asked about obstacles to understanding the strategy, middle managers are four times more likely to cite a large number of corporate priorities and strategic initiatives than to mention a lack of clarity in communication.” The antidote to navigational clutter is radical pruning of the strategy tree. If your strategy activation is at risk of failing because it’s getting lost in the noise, it may be time for a spring-cleaning for your organizational house.

A recent Harvard Business Review study looked at the possible causes of failure to execute strategy. The study showed that strategy execution breaks down not because of lack of alignment between strategies and team/individual performance measures, and not because of lack of coordination within teams, but because of trust across teams. “Only 9% of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time, and just half say they can rely on them most of the time.” Thirty percent cite failure to coordinate across units as the single greatest challenge to executing their company’s strategy. Activation is effective when it shows the big picture of how strategies connect across the organization. Many organizations don’t have a systems view of how their strategies connect and mutually support each other. We call this a strategy ecosystem, and building it is the single best tool for strategic alignment across silos.

Originally published at www.xplane.com.

Nine Pitfalls of Strategy Activation was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few years ago we made the decision to stop emphasizing the learning and training part of XPLANE’s offering. We looked around and found our competitors in this slice of our business had become e-learning production houses churning out rinse-and-repeat instructional designs on a dime. Even worse, we felt like the learning projects we were part of weren’t making enough of a difference for our clients — our client sponsors may have been delighted, but we felt the actual learning was superficial and wasn’t driving deep results. So we just stopped telling clients we did learning design.

Would you believe what happened? The quality and effectiveness of our learning work skyrocketed. Over the past few years we have enjoyed a wave of projects with fantastic learning outcomes: high information retention, immediate on-the-job impact, increased empathy, behavior change.

Why?

Two reasons:

We reframed learning design as experience design

When framed as “learning projects” we found our clients had specific outcomes in mind: usually one-way push learning or nominally interactive e-learning experiences. Traditional learning formats and traditional instructional design processes were an anchor on creativity and a true focus on outcomes.

When framed as “experience design”, projects suddenly had room to breathe. Our clients joined us in a single-minded creative focus on outcomes, wherever that path may take us. This led to diverse solutions from company-wide board games to dynamic workshops to museum-like immersive spaces. We’ve honed our experience design methodology to a precise craft, capable of producing highly effective experiences that surprise and delight learners while paying off big for our client sponsors.

We joined our client’s 70:20:10 world

The majority of our clients have adopted the 70:20:10 ratio as their dominant learning model. Though our clients interpret the ratio differently, most define optimal learning as:
70% from on-the-job experience and stretch tasks
20% from other people, like peers or bosses
10% from formal learning, like courses and reading

When clients came to us for “learning design”, they wanted us to help them with the 10%. With broader focus on “experience design” we are helping clients across the entire 70:20:10 spectrum, integrating strategies across and applying design methodology at a learning-system level.

So if you don’t hear XPLANE talking much about learning design anymore, it’s because we believe Experience Design is better at addressing learning needs than traditional Learning Design ever was able to. Our experience design methodology is robust and outcome-driven to meet the needs of the 70:20:10 organization holistically. We are still here to help you reach organizational learning goals, but be prepared to work with a design partner, not a production studio. Get ready to meet your learners where they are at and design an experience that rekindles their love for learning at work.

Originally published on http://xblog.xplane.com/

How Abandoning Learning and Training Improved Learning Outcomes was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cross-published on XPLANE’s xblog.

So, you have to give a presentation… was originally published in The XPLANE Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.