Design For How People Learn with Julie Dirksen

Aidan McCullen: I thought one of the things we’d do was pull out pieces of the book. The very first thing I jumped ahead, a couple of chapters was. Something that you say most learning journeys begin with, which is communicating learning objectives. And I thought we’d do that for today’s episode,

Julie Dirksen: Yeah.

Aidan McCullen: so we’ll eat our own cooking, but here you say one of the rules of training is that you tell the learners what the objectives are.

And when you first started taking instructional design classes, this was handed down as instructional design gospel. I thought you’d share your thoughts on that because we all see that’s still on so many learning courses. We see it virtually now. We see it on social media courses where the first thing is you will learn.

Everybody knows that slide.

Julie Dirksen: Right, right. And the problem with learning objectives is they often show up in a lot of the course material is that as instructional designers. We have a fairly sort of stiff and formal way of writing learning objectives, and that’s useful to us in our internal jargon as designers because we wanna be really precise about what we’re doing. and the issue with that is then these. Stiff and kind of jargony learning objectives that are written for professionals who do this. And, depending on your opinions about learning objectives, , you’ve got lots of, you know, sort of rules for how they should be written and what’s a well-formed learning objective and should it follow Bloom’s taxonomy and all of that kind of stuff. But all of that’s essentially meaningless to learners. And so I would never suggest that it’s a bad idea to kind of give the learners a bit of a signpost about here’s what’s coming up and here’s what you’re gonna do, and here’s the standard of performance that we’re hoping will get people to like, here’s what you’re gonna be able to do at the end of this course. None of that is bad. That’s all. Perfectly reasonable stuff to, to communicate to the learners, but the fact that we just take our super jargony stiff learning objectives and whack ’em on the first screen of the course like that’s gonna somehow communicate well to our learners just is. I’m gonna, oh, let’s call it misguided. Cause if you were just going to explain to the learners, like you’re talking to a regular human, you wouldn’t use this format, you wouldn’t use this jargon. You would explain it in a way that is, you know, easy for them to understand. And so it’s not that I dislike learning objectives, it really is that I don’t. the fact that we’re using our formal method for defining learning objectives as the main way that we’re communicating to people. ’cause I think the first thing it tells them is like, this is gonna be formal and academic and probably boring.

Aidan McCullen: And one of the things on that, I was thinking about this, I was thinking about when do I do that? When I’m running a course, and it’s usually because I’m asked to. By the l and d leader or the HR lead who’s asked me to do a course, and it actually feels foreign to do it. It feels old school to do it.

So I wondered what a better way. So little bit of pushback on that from me to the l and d person is perhaps advisable or even just to go, look, here are the outcomes, but I’m not gonna overdo this when I’m running a course. Would that be the best way to do it?

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, the question is just to ask yourself, is this the best way to serve this particular learner? Is this the best way to. communicate that. And, you know, um, I read an article not that long ago, and it was by, um, one of the heath brothers, either Chip or Dan Heath, I can’t remember, but he was talking about the goal behind the goal. And so we’ve got this wisdom that we put the learning objectives at the beginning of the course. Well, what’s the goal behind the goal? Is it that you want. People to kind of have a signpost for what’s coming up. Is it that you want them to know kind of what they’re supposed to achieve with this course?

Is it that you want them to pay a particular attention to certain things? And then if you, if you’re doing a good job of defining, well, why do you wanna communicate these things at the beginning of the learning objective? And they can actually answer that question, which they can’t always answer it. but if other than like, well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.

 But if they have a purpose for it, then that can really guide the design decision of. how you do it best, and we have a lot of these. Traditions or conventions that follow us around. I was looking at, I, I advise a group, for an instructional design program at one of the universities, and I was looking at some of the syllabi for the courses and you know, there’s a constant complaint from faculty that the students don’t read.

The syllabi. syllabus. And I was looking at the syllabus and I’m like, I wouldn’t read this either. It’s like nine pages of boilerplate, officially used language. Before I finally get to the little bit that I might actually care about, which is what are the assignments gonna be, or what book do I need to buy, or what’s the course, you know, what’s the course topic? And so thinking about like what’s my goal in handing out a syllabus and what do I really want students to get to it? You would design a very different. Document or experience, depending on how you’d answer those questions. So it’s always good when we’re pushing back to be like, well, tell me, tell me why do you want this here?

What are you trying to accomplish? And then maybe we can think about from a design perspective, what’s the best way to do that.

Aidan McCullen: And I was thinking actually that that going through that practice is just as useful for you being the instructor. Yeah. Because you’re kind of going, okay, what, what do I want to impart to this audience? I’m gonna move on because there’s so much in the. Book and we’re barely gonna get even to touch it.

And it’s, I love, by the way, the, the drawings throughout the book as well. Very simple, but really do get the points across the metaphors, the analogies. You do eat your own cooking in the way you’ve written this book as well. But one of the things. We need to consider you say, in our learner’s journey is whether the new learning is going to require doing something familiar in a new way.

And I thought how relevant that was in today’s age of AI and technology and digitalization. And you say if people are required to change the way they do things, then they are going to stumble over old habits. If they automatically do certain things, they are going to have to make a conscious effort to not do those things.

A process called unlearning, and we’ve talked about unlearning before on the show, but it’s such an important part of this, and as you say very clearly, it can make people grumpy.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. Well it’s, it’s such an interesting one to me because you know, one of the things I hear a lot of times on, projects, we might be like, updated safety guidelines. And one of the things that people will tell me is like, you know, some of the most experienced people are the worst. They don’t wanna change what, you know, the way that they’ve done it for 20 years, it’s kind of like. of course they don’t, right? They’re very good at it. It’s very easy for them because one of the things that we know is, is people get more and more practiced with a behavior in action or something. It becomes more and more automatic and it actually gets stored differently in the brain when it becomes this automatic thing. You know, when you’re first, when you first start out driving, you have to think about every single thing you’re doing, which is exhausting. And then after you’ve been driving for a decade or something, you do it really automatically and you don’t have to think a lot about the active driving. It just kind of happens and you can think about other things. But then if you have to change, so for example, you go from a country where you drive on the left hand side of the road and now you’re driving on the right hand side of the road, or vice versa, that’s almost harder than it was to learn it in the first place because you’re having to battle all these automatic. Impulses that you have about, and it just, everything feels wrong. And when we do that to people that are experts, you know that they’ve been doing something this way for a really long time and they’re very good at it, take them back from this expert, you know, feeling like experts, feeling very confident, feeling very practiced in what they do.

And we throw them into a situation where they go back to feeling like. Novice or, you know, and it all feels awkward and it feels unpleasant, and they’re fighting it the whole time. And that’s a pretty big identity hit for people, right? If I’m used to feeling very confident and very expert, and I get thrown into a situation where I feel really awkward and uncomfortable, then you know. I of course wanna go back to the old way of doing things. Of course I do. And what I see happening is A, either we don’t acknowledge that in the learning experience, we don’t sort of say explicitly, yeah, this is gonna feel uncomfortable, and we recognize that. You know, that’s because you’re, you know, and you can even sort of say like, that’s because you’re really good at doing it this way.

And we know that change is hard and so we’re gonna make sure that we’re creating time and space and a safe place for you to practice and all of those kinds of things. And the other thing about it is, is that we tend to. Only maybe practice a new behavior once or twice. Well, like that’s not enough to kind of start to undo a lot of this automaticity and, build new habits. just leaves the learner. They’re like walking out of the learning experience at kind of the lowest point of this, where their view of the world is. That was a. It’s super uncomfortable. I don’t like it. You know, so then we’re like, but they’re so resistant to change. Well, of course they are. I mean, you didn’t, give them, I mean, you, the, so the challenge there is how do we give people enough practice so that they at least see it getting a little bit better? And how do we support that? Where if. I, I’m never gonna get back to that level of automaticity and a learning experience, but if I can at least practice it three or four or five times and it starts to become a little bit more familiar and a little bit easier, then I’m at least leaving the room. Or, you know, whether it’s a virtual or a live classroom with a little bit of an upward trajectory where I’m like, okay. I see that it’s getting better. If I keep going with this, I will get comfortable with this again, or it will get easier, it will make sense for me as opposed to kind of having having people go back to the real world that they’re sort of lowest ebb. , Of course there resistance to that. Of course, they wanna go back to the old way that they do things.

Aidan McCullen: I think that’s such an important point. That’s very understated, both by the teacher, so if you’re the facilitator, but also then by the organization. So if the leaders tell the people this, I’d love you to share some suggestions maybe for the leaders who are employing a facilitator to do some type of learning.

We’re particularly, we’re seeing in things like with things like I mentioned there, AI or skills that people are feel threatened by, that they feel maybe I’m being trained, maybe I’m digging my own grave here. But if they’re empowered and the organization realizes you’re gonna have to take a step backwards, you’re gonna look silly.

You’re gonna have to go right back to learning because your expertise is in a way now defunct. The world has moved on. And if an organization tolerates that period, that messy middle between one state and the next, I’d love you to share your thoughts on that.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. And that’s such an interesting question to me about the idea that people’s expertise is defunct and you know, because. One of the really crucial parts of using any of the large language model ai, and I’m not really not qualified to talk about any of the other forms of ai. I mean, there are other types, but, one of the really crucial pieces of that is being able to evaluate the output and say, yes, this is something that’s, this is right.

Or this is not know, this is not quite right, and things like that. And so. The idea that like the AI is just going to replace that expertise is a super interesting one to me. But you know, oh, I mean, the challenge with the example that you’re talking about with the AI skills is some people’s jobs will be eliminated because of AI skills. And so we can tell them all we want about, you know, like you need to embrace it and it’s coming, and you know, things like that. And they may still be skeptical, rightly so. But then there’s the other piece, which is how do we. do we leverage this as well as possible and for things? And so a lot of it is about finding the example that is that can kind of step people through things.

So for example if I want you to adopt a new behavior, whether it’s using AI for something or it’s maybe like, you know, if it’s salespeople, it might be a new sales model, or if it’s, it might be a new way of doing like performance feedback for your. People like there’s a lot of these con training programs around things like difficult conversations and stuff like that, in our ideal world, people would go back and immediately change all their behavior and use all of the new things and just do it. But. That’s scary and it’s intimidating and it, there’s a lot going on there. And so one of the things I think that we can do as learning designers or facilitators is try to either identify or help people identify for themselves what are some baby steps we can do where it’s not that scary. You could totally try it. You can totally kind of go out there. So maybe you don’t change, you know, you maybe don’t jump into the hardest conversation with your most challenging employee. learning a new feedback model, you figure out, here’s a couple ones that I think I could use this format for where eh, you know, it’s not a big deal.

It’s just little things, you know. And so then I can get comfortable with it on sort of a little bit more of the easy setting before I sort of ramp up to. So the hard setting for things

Aidan McCullen: And, and that in an organization, the leader, I feel. Probably isn’t going through the same learning, so, you know, do you know this one where my people aren’t innovative enough, or my people aren’t X enough, and the leader books this session and then doesn’t attend the session themselves.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and you know, the innovation one I, I always find fascinating because organizationally we love to hear about innovative organizations. There was a time in the, oh, the teens where somebody had written one of the books about like how Pixar the film studio worked and everybody wanted to like adopt some of the practices that Pixar used. And it’s like. hard part about that was that, you know, the culture had to then support the changes. We can’t just have people say, we want you to be more innovative. We also need to then support innovative behaviors and maybe culturally to support innovative behaviors. We need to have the manager go to the training so they know what people are learning.

Absolutely. But we also need to recognize that with innovation comes risk. And so not every innovative project works and pe you know r and d groups and, you know. People who are genuinely like in the business of innovation, know that and they know that there’s going to be, like, if they get one success for every three failures, that’s a pretty good ratio from their point of view. But then we have people who are like, we need to be more innovative in our organization. But the organization structurally isn’t set up to support it and reinforce. Reinforce it when it happens. And so , this employee who learned how to be innovative shows up and their manager gives them nine reasons why the innovative idea they wanna try isn’t gonna work.

Well then it doesn’t matter what you did in the training, if the organization doesn’t also have reinforcement mechanisms once people are out of the training and in the real world to do the thing.

Aidan McCullen: And it, it makes so much sense that actually training people and unlearning, so the unlearning, relearning. Process gets faster and faster as technology gets faster and faster. But I’m gonna, I’m gonna park that for the moment because there’s so much in the book and I, I really wanted to come back to, okay, so.

Learning outcomes is one thing, and that there’s a huge benefit for that, for the facilitator running a session. But then there’s also the important work of identifying and bridging gaps because I’ll tell you the way I learned this first, I remember doing a course during COVID, during the pandemic, and it was an online course and I was taking the course and it was in leadership training, executive coaching, and I loved the teaching styles of the lecturers.

I remember then going into my first breakout room and some of the other people who were taking the course were like, oh my God, these guys are awful, aren’t they? And I had such a moment, it was one of those moments to go, I can be looking at the exact same thing, having a totally different experience, and I assume others are having the same.

And I’m a lecturer myself, so I lecture in Trinity College here in Dublin, and it made me, it gave me such empathy for those students because they mark you, almost like an Uber driver.

Julie Dirksen: Right.

Aidan McCullen: But at the same time, some of those students, because they have such different learning styles, some are from different countries, they have different learning cultures in those different countries,

Julie Dirksen: Yep.

Aidan McCullen: and that has a dramatic effect on what they expect from you.

Some of them wanted to be really taught by bullet point. Others love the way I style. My style is more metaphorical and analogy and case-based and there was a huge disparity between learning styles, and this is where this piece you talk about identifying bridging gaps comes in.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. Yeah. So the question is often, what’s the gap between where people are and where people need to be? And in, in my newer book, the Talk to the Elephant Design Learning for Behavior Change, I bring over, there’s been a lot happening in behavioral science that hasn’t been making its way back to educational settings and learning and development. so the, the, that book is very much about what can we learn from behavioral science and, the core model that I use for a lot of the behavioral science analysis is combi, which is part of the behavior change wheel. And it’s Susan Mickey and her colleagues out of University College, London’s Center for Behavior Change, but they, we just kind of asked the basic question, are people capable of doing this thing? And if they aren’t, then training’s a really great answer for it. Right? If they need to learn some information or if they need to practice a skill, but then do they also have the opportunity?

So is the physical environment or like the systems set up to support it, is it something where it’s supported by, the social culture of where people are, and then are they motivated? Do they have, is this part of their goals? Is this part of their identity? You know, is this something that they genuinely wanna do? And so that’s one way to look at it. In the design for how people learn. Book i, I look at some gaps of, you know, is it a knowledge gap is the only thing that stands between. This person being not being successful now and being successful in the future, if they just know something, , will that fix it?

And the answer is usually not. Usually. Usually knowledge gaps aren’t that hard to deal with. Is it something where it’s a procedure or a skill where people really have to practice it to get good at it, and then we start to think about how do we design good practice environments? Is it a gap that’s based on their habits?

Right? Somebody can know that they should floss their teeth every day. They can know how to floss their teeth. They can even really wanna floss their teeth. They can have genuine motivation about it, but they still don’t manage it because it just doesn’t become a habit for them. And so if something needs to be habitual, then there are some strategies. I think we’re getting more as the research evolves, but there are some strategies for how do we support people in habit development, but you have to be really deliberate about that choice. is it a gap of communication? You know, we never gave you a clear standard of what we were trying to do, or we didn’t really communicate the goals, or we didn’t really communicate in a way that you could like.

Understand if you’re on track, those kinds of things. is it a gap in the environment? As I mentioned, there’s a lot of behaviors where it would be much easier to fix the computer system or to fix, something about the physical environment to support the behavior than it is to try to fix the human through some kind of training.

And we have a tendency when we’re designing learning experiences to really focus on the knowledge. Like this is this vast body of knowledge. I’m an expert, I built this up, I wanna communicate it to you. But that really only addresses one narrow kind of piece of the gaps. And that knowledge may be absolutely necessary for any of these other things to happen, but being able to sort of say, okay, there’s a knowledge component, but also there’s gonna be a skill.

So I need to build in practice and there’s gonna be a habit. And so I need to figure out some ways to support people in that habit development. And, know, maybe there’s a motivation issue. They know what to do, but they’re still not doing it. That, needs a lot of unpacking.

Usually that’s what the whole elephant book is about. It actually, when it comes down to it, is how do we unpack a lot of that and make sure we’re solving the right problem. So, if I tell you that this behavior is really important and it’s super useful, but the truth is people are scared to try it. The, it’s useful message doesn’t address. That, I’m fearful of, of attempting this. And so what you need then instead is messaging around how, Hey, there’s baby steps. You can try it out a little bit. It’s a safe thing to do. We’re gonna create an environment. And so really it’s a lot of this is about. Not solving the wrong problem and making sure that you understand where the, where the challenges are and how do you match to that. And not everybody’s in the same place. You know, if you’re creating a program to encourage people to exercise more, some people may need practical assistance. They just need some suggestions and some help.

And, you know, some people maybe need an accountability buddy. Some people maybe really are concerned about. Exercise being physically uncomfortable and they’ve got bad experiences in the past and they need somebody to, you know, kind of be a, encouraging person and to help them take the first few steps.

Some people may just need a new pair of shoes, you know, it. The answer to what people need in different environments can be radically different, and their expectations or their norms about what they’ve experienced in the past. If they’ve had a particular type of schooling where they’ve been successful, they’re probably gonna be disconcerted by a totally, different, more conversational style.

If they’re like, no, I knew what to do. If it was a lecture, now I don’t know what to do, I’m not sure I’ll be successful at this. So. Finding out where people are and meeting them where they’re at with the, with a solution that fits them. And this is an interesting and potentially promising area with the AI and with the idea that we might actually genuinely adaptive learning environments depending on, what people either sees their own needs or what we help them identify as needs.

Aidan McCullen: You mentioned motivation there and one of the key things about motivation is the actual learner.

And unfortunately, it’s very difficult to detect this, and as you say, when you have an intrinsically motivated learner. Thank the learning gods for those people,

Julie Dirksen: Yeah.

Aidan McCullen: And you’re so lucky when you have them. But then as somebody said to me recently, . You can’t waterboard a horse.

So he was talking about you can’t bring a horse to water. He said equally, can’t torture the horse and

Julie Dirksen: Mm-hmm.

Aidan McCullen: waterboard it. And he was talking about those people who just either think they know it, all or equally or , very successful in their swimlane. And don’t think they need to learn anything beyond that swim lane.

Or maybe they’re near retirement, maybe they’re just had bad learning experiences in their lives. So we don’t know how to deal with those people, but we do come across them every so often. And I wondered, had you any advice for our audience on that?

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. You know, the sort of the single piece of advice , you know, a lot of times when you’re working with a subject matter expert, it’s frustrating to them because they’re like, it’s so obvious. How can a new person not understand this? And we talk about the curse of expertise where people have this really expert viewpoint of. Of a topic, and it’s very difficult for them to remember what it was like to not know this stuff and to have to learn it. And so the, a couple of questions that I’ve definitely added to my process when I’m working with stakeholders or subject matter experts is, okay, great. And how long did it take you to get good at that? Right. So it might be somebody talking about, you being good at project management or something. And I’m like, all right, so how long does it take you to get good at project management and. And they’re like, oh, well probably it was like two years before I was really comfortable and I’m like, okay, great. So let’s look at your arc over those two years. Can you tell me what kinds of learning experiences you had that really helped it all come together for you? And so, you know. They are like, why can’t you just do a two day course on project management? And these people aren’t, you know, getting to where I want them to be.

Well, if you remind them that it took them two years to get good at something, then two days is suddenly like we’re having a little bit of a different conversation you know, as a learning designer, I can maybe take two years and bring it down a little bit. If we make really good deliberate d design choices, maybe we can get people to that level in a year, but I’m not gonna get them there in two days.

And so. If you can get them to kind of think through their own process of how did they learn this? How did they get good at this? Then that can really help them wrap their head around the idea that like, oh, we’re gonna have to figure out how do we support some similar experiences for these novice learners as we, as we get to this point.

Because, you know, one of the classic things with subject matter experts is they wanna just take all this knowledge outta their head and just hand it to somebody who’s, uh, new. And why, why wouldn’t that ever, you know, why would, what could be wrong with that? Why wouldn’t that ever work? And people logically know, but that you can’t just overwhelm a new learner with an enormous pile of content that they can’t do anything with. But getting them to relax and sort of ease into it by thinking about their own recollections has been a super useful tool for me.

Aidan McCullen: Let’s share one of your, as a finale, your analogy of the closet. ’cause it speaks very much to this idea of being the expert where how to help novices structure their closets.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. Yeah. The process of remembering something is we encode it into memory, then we store it, and then at some point later we retrieve that, that information. so if you’re an expert in something, when somebody gives you a new piece of information, you have, your brain is like one of these really beautiful California closets.

It’s probably an American company, but these beautiful closets with like tons of categories and it’s all sorted and everything’s in its place. And so when somebody hands you, a blue sweater, you know exactly where to put the blue sweater because you have sweaters over here and it’s off season items and it’s blue.

But it’s also this kind of. Texture and, this kind of weight. And so you know exactly where that goes. And so then when you have to come back later and find the blue sweater, where you would store it because you have this really beautiful, well organized closet for this topic. So, for example it could be anything. It could be your knowledge of like hip hop music, right? I do not know a lot about hip hop music. I’ve got basically like the early rap that was coming up when I was a teenager and then everything else. So I essentially have two shelves for this. And if you tell me about somebody.

Any hip hop person, I’m like, I guess it goes out on the second shelf. But basically all of the content that I would receive about that is a big pile of stuff. And if I had to come back and retrieve that information later, all I can do is like paw through the big pile of stuff. ’cause I don’t have a very sophisticated closet.

I don’t have a lot of categories. I don’t know where to put this information or what to do with it. But if somebody’s, a hip hop record producer, they’ve got this beautiful closet, but what we. What we have is the experts wanna just clear all the stuff off all the shelves and just hand it to you in a big pile. But you know, the new person can only kind of like throw it on the floor. And like I said, hopefully kind of like scramble through it to see if they can find it again when it comes time to retrieve it. And the things that help people build shelves are. Usually doing things with the information. Like you can give them some organizers, you can help them think about, how do I structure this problem?

Or how do I think about it? You can give them some processes and that’ll help them build some shelves in their closet. But really the way that people build shelves is that they, they interact with the material in some meaningful way. They use it to do a task. They have to solve problems with it. You know, any of those kinds of things.

And that’s what really helps them this more sophisticated understanding of all of the pieces in the world and all of that kind of thing. And so if we want people to be able to become better learners of something, we have to support that process too. So I can’t just hand you a bunch of information.

I have to create experiences where you are figuring out what to do with the information, because that helps you, build the shelves and start building out your own more sophisticated closet for the topic.

Aidan McCullen: Beautiful. And for people who wanna find out about your closet and where to find out how to tidy the closet, where’s the best place for people to reach out and tell us about some of the projects you’re working on today.

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, so I am at usable learning.com and actually the projects that I’m working on right now is creating some coursework both online and some virtual classroom classes around. Helping people with instructional design topics. I’m trying to figure out, is there still gonna be a need for this in the age of ai?

But I think there is. We know that with the ai, we need people who can judge the outputs of the ai. So even if the AI is doing the work for you, you still have to have a sense of what good looks like. So you can find me@usablelearning.com. I am going to be loading some online courses I’ve went up, but we’re gonna revise it@designbetterlearning.com. And I’m also doing some classes in things like, oh, memory and coding and, attention. For, the Learning Development Accelerator. And there’s links on my website to that. And I’m gonna be doing, an online class in the fall about, in the fall of 2025 about designing for behavior change and kind of as learning designers, how do we need to think about that? But then you can always find the books designed for how people learn and talk to the elephants. Design learning for behavior change on most of the retailers. Your Amazons and, any other place that you would go to buy books.

Aidan McCullen: Author of Today’s Focus Design for How people Learn. Julie Dirksen, thanks for joining us on Inside Learning.

Julie Dirksen: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a very fun conversation.