Now don’t get me wrong. I love measurement. Heck, I measure everything, Everything! I am the epitome of measurement. Okay, perhaps that’s stretching it too far but you get the picture. I believe measurement is a critical step to bring about any change and improvement. Yet, I have been shying away from measurement lately. Well, I am still measuring but am generally becoming resistant to pushing the envelope too far on measurement. Which got me thinking.
When does measurement become a pain in the wrong part of our anatomy? When do we start resisting measurement? I think this happens when:
- we stop playing the game and become score keepers. When measurement becomes an end in itself.
- measurement starts to be more difficult and time consuming than the actual work that you are trying to measure.
- we look for absolute precision in measurement when accuracy is all that is required.
- it is just hard to measure softer parameters and kills the fun of actual work, like trying to measure creativity, innovation, culture, learning etc.
- we are afraid that measurement will be used against us in performance appraisals, or for comparing us with peers.
- one measure will lead to the requirement of measuring another, will lead to… …
When have you resisted measurement?
Pic by HeyThereSpaceman.
As part of judging entries for the Brandon Hall Awards this year, I encountered an elearning module that attempted to teach the company’s sales people its new service orientation and its service oriented products. The elearning module was very well made, full of videos (actually it was practically a ‘video-based-training’ disguised as elearning) with very well written script and extremely professional production quality. The script and production quality was so good that I would have been proud of the product if it had been made by my team.
I went through the modules as a learner, something I hadn’t done in a while. I was probably the right audience, not in terms of being part of that company, but perhaps with about the same experience as the intended audience. So after being impressed with the first few video clippings I got down to actually attempting learning from it. And man was I unhappy going through the training. The training included lots of case studies and ‘role plays’ (the wrong and right way to sell videos). As an intended audience, I felt bad and felt the training was demeaning my intelligence and showed what I might be doing right now (remember I was trying to be in the actual learner’s shoes) in very bad light. Something like this might work in a controlled classroom environment where a trained instructor would be able to provoke me and respond to my reactions to the content being taught, and I might also have a healthy debate with others in the class. However using the elearning module, I felt the module was preaching to the choir and insulting the learner’s intelligence. Since it had no facilitation of a trainer and there were no other peers to learn from or debate with, I felt very bad about the content.
Which makes me wonder – can self-paced asynchronous elearning be a good tool for attempting to change behaviour? Is elearning better suited for certain types of audiences when attempting to do this? Are there some content areas that should just be dealt with in a classroom? Or perhaps is there a better way to teach behaviour change using elearning?
