My instructional design philosophy I’ve developed over decades as an instructional designer is one I call “Design for Forgetting.” It’s an alternative to the typical approach to workplace training that I think solves a lot of persistent problems in workplace training.
The Typical Approach to Workplace Training Doesn’t Work
Whenever there is a new corporate initiative, somebody calls for a big training “rollout” or “kickoff” event – a big splashy mandatory training to signal the beginning of this new way of doing things. It usually involves hours of mandatory eLearning courses or live training events to debut at the kickoff date – even when the details of the project are still being sketchily cobbled together by the teams tasked with developing them to align with that date. Too often, we instructional designers are given a high‐level training topic and a due date – and that’s it.
“Make a training about The New Widget Production Method. It needs to happen in two one‐hour sessions and it’s due in four weeks. Go.”
Then what normally happens is someone takes a stab at writing two one‐hour PowerPoints on the finer details of The New Widget Production Method, they send it to the instructional design team to turn it into two one‐hour Storyline courses, and everybody is forced to spend two hours of their lives clicking through it. Once it’s clicked through, the course gets marked “complete” in the LMS and is never viewed again. The finer points of the plan were not remembered the first time, so they’re not recalled later, and have very little effect on the way anybody does anything going forward. The details of this new way of doing things are not written out in an greater detail than these introductory PowerPoints, so the next time we do this again there will be no detailed record of the way we were doing it before. Rinse and repeat for the next big kickoff next year.
Design for Forgetting
There’s a false assumption at the center of this ineffective approach – they assume that learners will remember everything they’re trained on in perfect fidelity and know instantly how to change their own work processes in light of this new information. Unfortunately human brains don’t work that way.
“Education is the Kindling of a Flame, Not the Filling of a Vessel” — Socrates
At best, you have a very short time during a conventional training session, and you can leave a maximum of 3–5 lasting mental takeaways in your learners’ minds. Everything else is forgotten. Those 3–5 bits of information need to be something they’ll remember long after the training is over that can help them answer questions when they arise.
What’s more – training experiences END. That great eLearning course we built for you gets wiped out of your learners’ LMS “to do list” the moment they have completed the SCORM package. At that point they can no longer refer back to that information, and have to rely on their incomplete memory of the hour they spent clicking through training. What they need is an ever‐present way to summon up correct answers at the moment they need them, even if that moment comes months or years after the big splashy kickoff event.
How can we do better?
My approach is to create an evergreen knowledge base full of complete, detailed answers to the most common questions our learners will encounter in their daily work. Then use the two hours of mandatory training to show them what’s there and how to use it when they need it. Optimize that knowledge base for searching and easy finding – tie it into your work AI chatbot if you like. Make it easy for learners to search it whenever they need a definitive answer on how the company expects them to do something.
Main Features of the Design for Forgetting Approach
Learner‐centered pedagogy
- A learner‐centered approach rather than “information‐centric” approach. You need to understand and acknowledge how do they do things now, how will they have to do things differently in the future, and what do they need to know NOW vs. LATER to be successful with the new procedures? Any training you give them must use their precious time with maximum efficiency to produce those desired changes in behavior.
The Vault: An evergreen knowledge base for ongoing reference
- The Vault: Build a “single source of truth” that contains all the answers they will need to do their job effectively. Something like a wiki knowledge base where all the details of the new way of working are spelled out and organized for ongoing reference.
The Walking Path: A structured tour of The Vault for new users
- Have a guided path through that rich knowledge source for beginners. Design a scaffolded tour of the resources available to the learner, focusing first on those they will need to familiarize themselves with right away.
Circling Back: An ongoing series of events and communications to remind and reinforce – Have ongoing activities that draw attention and engagement about specific parts of the whole. – These can be spaced repetition questions to reinforce existing learning. – These can be periodic communications to draw attention to valuable “hidden gems” of information within the Vault, especially at the times when they’re most useful. – These can be “barnraising” events – meetings where teams’ focus is to review and update existing materials or create new resources based on new learning. – If you have Q&A sessions, respond with direct links to the Vault. Often people forget that “yes, we already have a best practice around this, and here it is”. Get everyone accustomed to going to the Vault for answers first before reinventing the wheel. – If changes are needed to the way we do things, connect the new changes to the existing practices to make it easier for your workforce to change their practices.
How do I know this works?
In 2020 I used this basic design philosophy to create the Instructional Designer Onboarding program to train new instructional designers joining our team.
Rather than bombarding them with lectures and handouts in their first days, I created a Walking Path to structure their first two weeks on the job. It was a checklist of people to meet, platforms to log into, training modules to complete. It existed within the Vault knowledge base, but it showed them only what they needed to know and do in the first few weeks. At the end of that intro period, we introduce the wider Vault – a Confluence wiki site with detailed, reader‐friendly pages and articles explaining every tool we use, every procedure we follow, and our greatest work products from the last five years for inspiration. The entire wiki is searchable by keywords and tags, as well as having layout‐based navigation for those who’d like to click around and see what’s there. In other words, it’s an incredibly dense resource of valuable information that’s optimized for easy access, quick searching, and timely updates from all team members.
In 2021 I won a Brandon Hall Gold award – Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program – for this onboarding program.
Since that point, though, it has grown more valuable as a training and reference tool for our veteran instructional designers, not just new hires. It’s cited in our team’s yearly reviews as a consistently useful tool in our toolkit, and multiple of our new hires have called our onboarding experience the best they’ve ever had.
The team has a twice‐yearly wiki maintenance sprint where we divide up all the existing pages, analyze them for any needed updates, and make those updates. The light task of maintaining the wiki is a small price to pay for the value it brings to us in our daily work.
Conclusion
The core idea at the heart of this approach is that training is not a one‐and‐done event. Events end. Work goes on. Instead, we need to surround our learners with a rich toolset of evergreen resources they can refer back to at key moments in their daily work, knowing they will get detailed relevant answers at the moment when they matter.
Don’t make people click through a two‐hour training course they’ll never see again once they finish it. Rather, use the precious time you have with them to show them how you want them to work and give them all the tools they need to actually change their work habits in the ways required. It should be OK for your learners to forget… knowing that the answers will be ready at the moment they need them.