Some thoughts on turning corporate training into something more interesting and fun

How to turn your old training methods into an interesting story




Step 1


Identify your main character in the story of your company, hint it is not your customer. You'll never know your customers as good as your employees now matter how good your marketing is. Even if you think you really know your customers, the way you collect information about your customers will creep most of them.

Step 2

Identify your main supporting characters. Your customer is the main supporting character in your story. If you customer isn't there to support you, you have no business.

Step 3

Identify the different types of your main character, your protagonist. Find out his/challenges and create several variations of this character. Make the characters so that real life people can identify with them.

Step 4

Identify the knowledge your main character will need to be successful for your customer and your business.

Step 5

Identify levels as commonly found in video games. Make each level harder than the next. The first level is a happy customer who needs a question to be answered. The next level gets progressively harder requiring more levels of knowledge. Each learning object for each level is represented by a key in the story, The character/player collects all keys before moving on to the next level. Non-human characters can be involved in supporting this activity.

Step 6

Allow each character/player to customize them selves in any way they want.

Step 7

Award points to those characters that meet the learning objectives the quickest. List the names of the people getting the highest scores.

Step 8

Create a framework where you can swap in and out learning objectives allowing you to modify the game making the learning more challenging and fun.



These are just some thoughts to make your training program into something that is interesting, scalable (because you create the world and modify levels, keeping the characters/players in the story), and user focused.



-Mike

Why the newspaper is about lifestyle and not "paper"

The demise or near demise of the newspaper has been a recent topic in the past few years. I don't buy it because its not about the physical paper contributing to the recent decrease in people reading the newspaper. Reading the newspaper for many is about taking time to relax and enjoy reading. The rise of the information from other places namely the web browser via the Internet has allowed people to reserve part of their day to use the Internet to get what they used to get from the newspaper. But many like sitting back on the couch and reading their newspaper, its their lifestyle. Most people would agree that many people that are older who grew up reading the newspaper still do because its a habit. Generally I would agree even though I am sure there are many people in their 30's and 40's that read the Sunday newspaper. The use of digital content will eventually kill the newspaper as a dominant form of getting information for most people. Since the technology can not immediately affect people's lifestyle, newspaper's death will be a slow one.

Newspapers will still be read by many until e-books become more advanced and get cheaper. Amazon's reader is a great improvement in an e-book reader in terms of how the material (novels, etc) are marketed and distributed.

Thoughts for the day...

So I learned a great deal about collaboration software in terms of what is happening and

what could happen. And here are some random thoughts.

I looked at facebook and some of the discussions around Facebook. Where I think this will change is how facebook can take itself on the road into deeper places. A mobile version perhaps with presence information that can share location. Businesses using Facebook (with person's permission) to view their tastes in coffee. I think either Starbucks or a similar company will start offering advertising on facebook with coupons for coffee, and in turn people will use Facebook in coffee shops.

The next logical step is for facebook to start selling digital downloads on behalf of other companies. This includes Music. A rumor about this already has started. So first music then e-books, makes sense, download an e-book to read while surfacing facebook, maybe even use your Sony Reader book to download the book. Next is movies, but of course Apple has cleverly designed a way to now download TV shows and movies on their iphone so you could literally (with hooking up to iTunes) download a movie to your

iphone or perhaps even watch a movie. It makes complete sense why Fox bought MySpace however in the context of MySpace, they are now limited to a market from entertainment from Fox and perhaps that is how it will go, that established Media Channels like TV will look to take advantage of new platforms to reach people. But imagine from a consumer's perspective and here is where Google is smart. People with a

Myspace account will want to communicate about media other than Fox. The question is, will Fox embrace this and learn from it? Google is smart because they are trying to stay away from a specific media platform other than the internet. It is better to let the people choose what they like in terms of entertainment. After all, of all the shows you watched, were all of them on 1 network, and what about cable?. So Google is better at understanding the future than those other companies, even though those companies will still learn how to make a significant amount of money from their own platform of entertainment.

It reminds me of show and tell. Most companies get up to the class and show what they have brought, telling you about their product and why you should use it. Google on the other hand differentiates itself by clearly first illustrating the show and tell of the people in the classroom. They understand that while some objects will be the center of attention, time changes everything and most people all don't like the same thing. And just as important they enjoy discussing why each of them like or enjoy certain objects. Now imagine thousands of classrooms but now within all of these students groups start to evolve and experiences are shared. This is the essence of life, communication, collaboration, and enjoyment where ideas are born and people understand more about the world and eventually themselves. This is something Google understand will never change no matter what type of favorite TV drama is playing on Wednesday night at 9pm.

Keeping with that thought...Google understands that the people in the class aren't really looking at person in front of the class because they want to, they are doing it because its an activity decided by the teacher. The students in the classroom will pay attention to what they are interested in and the best way to do that is to let them explore just like many of us do when we search on Google to find documents, groups of people, video, etc. The basic idea is that the future

I imagine what I just described in the last paragraph is an element of basic economic, behavioral and social theory. If not I am calling it Mike's theory :-)