Designing Learning for Behaviour Change – Episode 62

In this episode, host Beth Cougler Blom talks with Julie Dirksen about designing learning experiences that support real behaviour change. Julie shares insights from her latest book, Talk to the Elephant, and offers practical ways to go beyond knowledge transfer to create meaningful impact.

Beth and Julie also talk about:

  • The difference between knowledge gaps and behaviour gaps
  • The rider and elephant metaphor and why it matters for learning design
  • How to identify what really needs fixing—people or systems
  • The importance of pre- and post-learning supports
  • Why designing for managers is just as important as designing for learners

Engage with Julie Dirksen

Links From the Episode

Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast

Connect with Beth Cougler Blom

Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions

Show Transcript

[Upbeat music playing]
[Episode intro]
Beth 00:01
Hello, welcome. I’m Beth Cougler Blom, and this is Facilitating on Purpose. In this episode, I’m really pleased to present a conversation that I have with Julie Dirksen. Some of you might know Julie’s name because she is the author of now not just one, but two books in the field of learning design. Her first book was called Design for How People Learn, and her second one, which is the focus of this conversation, is called Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change.

Beth 00:30
We don’t often have episodes that are solely devoted to learning design on Facilitating on Purpose because we so often default to talking about facilitation, what we’re doing in the in-person or the virtual rooms with our learners, but I’m a learning designer and a facilitator, and you might be as well. If you are facilitating, you are often the one who is also designing, and this episode will give you a chance to geek out on that foundational design side of our work.

Beth 01:01
Even if you don’t call yourself a learning designer or an instructional designer or user experience designer, experience designer, all the other terms that we have in the design area, you’re going to benefit from this because Julie makes our focus on designing for behaviour change in this conversation really easy by telling lots of stories to back up the concepts that she’s talking about.

Beth 01:27
So while yes, she and I really nerd out on having a design related conversation here, I think and hope it’ll still be very accessible for all of you who don’t necessarily spend as much time as we might thinking about the design side of things, but hey, the more you are intentional in your design stage, the easier it is if you are facilitating an experience when you get into the room with participants. So this is about intention around design and it’s about behaviour change. I hope you enjoy the show.

Beth 02:00
[Episode intro] Julie, welcome. It’s great to see you. Thanks for joining me.

Julie 02:05
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Beth 02:06
I am curious about one thing, first of all, and it has to do with your role, but it’s more how you explain what you do. [Smiles] So when you go to some sort of party or gathering and you are surrounded by people who don’t do learning design work, they have no idea what instructional design or learning design even is, how do you explain your role and what you do?

Julie 02:30
I mean, I usually will say that I’m an instructional designer, but with zero expectation that anybody will know what that means. I mean, I think maybe two or three times over the years, somebody’s been like, oh, OK. [Beth laughs] And I’m like, wow, OK, all right, you actually understand that. But then I’ll usually explain that I work with training and that it’s usually about creating workplace training for different kinds of things and that my background’s in things like educational psychology and that sort of thing or educational technologies. So I’m trying to always to find the words that will resonate with people and that they can recognize and stuff like that because, yes, explaining what we do is often really difficult for people. Nobody understands it out of the gate if they haven’t heard of it before.

Beth 03:14
Yeah, I can relate. I think I’ve boiled it down to, “I create courses with organizations” or something like that, [Julie: Yeah.] like the bare bones. [laughs]

Yeah, yeah, I know that’s great. So you’ve been doing this your whole career or almost your whole career working in the learning field?

Julie 03:30
Yeah, pretty much. When I was an undergrad, I was an English major, which of course, immediately led to so many different job prospects, except it didn’t. And the first kind of thing that I actually did was a certificate in teaching English as a foreign language, and I did that for a little bit. But I was also working for a financial company at the time, doing just data entry stuff while I was in college as a part-time job. I always sort of describe people’s path, like lots of people’s origin story as something along the lines of, hey, you’re a good customer service rep, we’re going to let you train the other customer service reps. And that was pretty much my version.

Julie 04:07
Hey, you’re good at this data entry thing, do you want to be a trainer for the other data entry people? And I was like, sure. [Said with up tone to voice, questioning.] And that was a mixed thing between like classroom facilitation and creating the materials. And we didn’t really know what we were doing.

Beth 04:23
Nobody does! [laughs]

Julie 04:24
I look back at it now and I’m like, right, exactly, exactly. I look back at it now and I’m like, oh, yeah, I think that we more or less created OK stuff, but boy, it was sure rough and ready. And I mean, I think our whole toolkit at the time was a Microsoft Office subscription. So this is now 33 years ago, I think. So e-learning wasn’t even a thing yet. We were still talking about computer-based training, and the web was still kind of a glimmer in people’s eyes and stuff, because that’s, I’m that old. [chuckles]

Julie 04:55
But yeah, which gave me this interest in instructional design. I also got really interested in, I was working with their call centre group, and the biggest challenge we had was teaching people how to use this sort of very creaky, antiquated computer system. And so I also wound up managing a project to look at putting a front-end system over the existing computer system so that would work better for the customer service people. And so that gave me a perspective really early on of approaching it from two different ways. There’s the learning pathway, which is we teach people to use the tools better. But then there’s also sometimes it makes more sense to fix the tools than it does to try to fix the people. And that led me towards an interest in things like user experience design and that kind of thing.

Beth 05:43
Yeah. And I don’t know all of your background or, you know, even probably half of it, but I do know that you worked with Michael Allen, who probably was pivotal in your past because he’s a big guru in the field of e-learning design.

Julie 05:56
Yeah, absolutely. I started working with them right after I finished my master’s. I did my master’s in instructional systems technology at Indiana University, which was one of the biggest ID programs at the time in the US. I picked it partially because it also had a lot of coursework in what we now call user experience. At the time we were still calling it human-computer interaction and things like that. Then after graduate school, I went to go work for Michael Allen’s company, and I was there for eight years. And yeah, it was absolutely foundational.

Julie 06:29
And just some of the different things that he he was really influential in terms of thinking about learning design and what, you know, really good kind of instructional interactivity look like. And also the methods that they had around doing rapid prototyping for e-learning in that company. I remember one of the…I’d done some e-learning development and stuff. And you play around with authorware at the time. It wasn’t, you know, then then Flash and now Storyline is, you know, the current software, I think, that that mostly is used for this stuff.

Julie 07:02
But I remember being in it was the first, I don’t know, two weeks I was at the company, something like that. And I’m in a meeting and we’re there there. You know, I was just I was just there to listen in and kind of learn. But the designer and the developer were kind of like talking about, oh, we could prototype it like this. And they were working with the client. They’re like, OK, we’ll call you back at three. And this is like, I don’t know, 11 o’clock in the morning. And I was like, wait, what now? And they’re like, yeah, we’ll have the prototype then. And I was just like, oh, oh, oh, you know, because I was so used to like it taking days or weeks to kind of formulate, you know, a beta version of something.

Julie 07:41
And they would do this thing where they would prototype something in like two hours and then get client reactions to it really quickly. And I just remember being flabbergasted by it. And it’s actually a pretty amazing thing to like try stuff out and get start getting reactions to it really quickly, especially with interactive material or something like that, where how it works is such an important component of it, not just how it looks or what it says. And so, yeah, so I learned to do that to learn to do rapid prototyping and and love it.

Beth 08:13
And it’s so people focused too, right? Like that must’ve been a great, just delve into an introduction to it’s the people at the heart of the process and what do they think? And let’s not go too far designing the thing before we get feedback on it. That would have been a great introduction.

Julie 08:28
And a really strong focus on what is it that they actually need to be able to do. Like, okay, they’re going to process these applications and they’re going to evaluate them against a set of criteria. How do we create a practice activity that’s as close to that as we possibly can manage, as opposed to let’s tell you about, you know, the applications for 37 slides, and then finally give you some multiple choice questions.

Julie 08:49
So, yeah, it was amazing. And of course Michael went on, this was before he had done, had really like, kind of formulated the SAM. I mean, we were doing it, he just hadn’t named it SAM yet, but like things like Leaving Addie for SAM and, you know, the rapid prototyping methodology. So he wrote some books after that and things like that. And I think it’s been, I think it’s been influential for people. I love to do prototyping demos as part of like a workshop or something to sort of prove to people like, hey, in 10 or 15 minutes, we can actually have something that’s a little bit functional enough to maybe test with somebody or at least get some feedback on. So.

Beth 09:26
Nice. Oh, I love that. Your newest book is about behaviour change. Was it always part of your practice? I mean, do you or do you remember the point where you kind of thought, oh, it’s about behaviour. [chuckles] It’s not about knowledge only.

Julie 09:40
I think there was always the focus on behavioural application of things. But the place where the origin story for that book really came in the mid 2000s. And I was attached to a project that we were working on at Allen about AIDS and HIV prevention strategies. And they were specifically looking at taking what had been quite a successful—it was through the, we were partnering with a few different groups, but it was mainly driven through the University of Minnesota School of Epidemiology.

Julie 10:07
And they had a live classroom intervention that had worked really well for them and involved a lot of interpersonal interaction and small group kinds of stuff and these things. But they wanted to look at an online version because this one was obviously limited by people being able to physically get to the place and have a weekend to take it and things like that. And they wanted to look at online resources for this same audience. And I was realizing by about, I can’t remember exactly what year this was about around, like say 2005. And by about 2005, most people had gotten the message around things like condom usage to prevent the spread of AIDS and HIV.

Julie 10:50
Just telling people, hey, this is really important didn’t seem to be the, people knew, but sometimes the behaviour still wasn’t happening as consistently as we would like. And there were still new cases and things like that. And so I was kind of like, all right, when I looked through my toolboxes as an instructional designer, I had things for helping people understand stuff, helping people remember things, building skills at stuff. And none of those seemed to be the right answer in a circumstance where people knew what to do. Theoretically, they knew how to do it, although there were some subtleties there.

Julie 11:27
So, for example, one of the things that they really talked about is how do you, how do you have that conversation where you negotiate safe sex practices with a partner? And do people need to build that as a skill and build their comfort with that and that kind of thing? But I was really kind of looking at my toolkit and going, there’s something missing here. Like, when people genuinely know what to do and they’re still not doing it, what’s the, and it turns out it’s not a thing, it’s many things.

Julie 11:55
But that really was kind of the origin story on the new book around, the Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change, is telling people louder and more emphatically to do certain behaviors seems to not be the like special sauce in terms of getting those behaviours to actually happen. And so what else do we have? And it gets complicated really quickly because one of the issues is making sure that we’re solving the right problem. Is the problem a lack of knowledge? Well, sometimes, but lots of times no. Is the problem like fear anxiety or discomfort with the behaviour, right? So like negotiating sex practices with a partner can be really uncomfortable. So, okay, what do we need to do around that? Or is it that the incentives are misaligned?

Julie 12:45
We tell people we really want them to be customer focused when they’re talking to customers as part of a call centre or something like that. But then the incentives are mostly about like reducing your talk time. Well, you know, those things don’t always match up. [Laughs]

Beth 13:00
Yeah, I worked in a call centre once, and I think the incentive was around how much I upsold laundry detergent at the end of the service call, right? [Julie: Right.] Like it was a service centre. [chuckles] Yeah, there was nothing about customer service that was incentivizing there.

Julie 13:15
Yeah, no, my favourite example of that one, and I think I talk about it in the book, is I was doing some stuff for an insurance company that did multinational policies, which gets really complicated because you have to deal with the legal guidelines around insurance in a bunch of different countries and things. At one point, we’re sort of picking all this stuff apart and trying to understand what the flow of the training materials will be, and at one point they said, well, you know, here’s the thing though, is when the data entry people are entering these applications, they just don’t, they’re just not as careful about the accuracy thing as they should be.

Julie 13:47
Like, can we put something in the training that says, you know, that tells them that accuracy is super important, and I’m like, sure, yeah, remind me how they get paid again? And they’re like, oh, the number of applications they do per hour. [Beth laughs: Yeah. Hmm.] And I’m just like, huh, do you see the issue there? [laughs]

Beth 14:05
Interesting. Yeah. Like this truth teller that kind of just sheds light on a situation? [Julie: Yeah.] And do they go, “Oh, we’ve never looked at it that way before.”

Julie 14:12
Yeah, they totally did. They’re like, huh, no, I, yeah, I don’t know. You know, cause I was like, do they give feedback on how accurate they are? And they’re like, huh, no, I don’t think they do.

Julie 14:22
I’m like, all right, so here we are, you know, we can put whatever you want in the training. I’m happy to do it. But, you know, if we look at the actual root cause of this problem, you’ve got a disconnect there, right? You’re saying accuracy is important, but you’re, you’re paying them to go as fast as possible. And those two things, you know, how do we, how do we get better alignment around that? So.

Beth 14:44
Yeah, for sure. I think we should, let’s definitely come back to training is not always the answer [Julie laughs: Yeah!] because you’re kind of going into that direction. But maybe I’ll back you up a little bit and say you wrote your first book, Designn for How People Learn, a few years ago, and it’s been super successful. And you introduced the metaphor of the rider and the elephant in that book—I know, because I have it. So I want you to explain the metaphor, if you will, that people are kind of situated with that. But also what was it about the second book that you, you know, you had to write it, how and why did you need to go further? And was it based on feedback from the first book or, you know, kind of what led to the second one?

Julie 15:21
Yeah, so the first book I was looking at trying to match up, because one of the things that happened to me in grad school is that they say, okay, you do this analysis and you understand new learners, and then you design an intervention. But there was kind of like no connective tissue between the analysis box and the design box. It was just like, and you will magically design this thing. [Beth chuckles.]

Julie 15:40
And I was trying to pick apart like, where can I have some foundation to stand on when I’m choosing an instructional strategy, right? Like, it could be anything from like, is this better in person? Is this an e-learning? Is this a thing? But then also, what’s a useful activity? What’s a useful experience? What’s useful support materials? So I was trying to figure that out.

So in the first book, Design for How People Learn, which is very much intended for that, hey, you’re a good customer service rep, you’re going to train the other customer service rep, like that audience. We didn’t seem to have a good like first book to hand people to help them with…Telling Ain’t Training is a good one.

Julie 16:18
But, you know, we didn’t have a good kind of purely instructional design book around how do you help people teach, you know. You know your topic, how do you teach it? And they broke it down into a few different kind of types of gaps, the gap between where the learner is now and where you want them to be. And one of it is, is it knowledge? Like if I just give them the knowledge, will they be able to do the thing? In my own practice, I don’t think I talk about it as much in the book, but in my own practice, I talk about procedures where we have really well-defined performance and I’m just trying to get you to do it with speed or accuracy. Skills or anything where, again, it may take practice, but it also usually requires some judgment or some decision making. Motivation gaps are very much the hey, they know what to do, but they still aren’t doing it. I also have things like habit gaps, because you can know you should floss your teeth, you can know how to floss your teeth, you can even have the motivation to floss your teeth, but if you don’t have the habit, it’s probably not happening on a regular basis.

Julie 17:16
And then I talk about like environmental gaps, which is essentially what I was describing before, where it’s maybe easier to fix the environment or the system than it is to fix the person. And of those, there were two chapters, and I had a chapter on each one and stuff, but of those, there were two chapters that just felt like I was kind of scratching the surface. And one of them was the motivation chapter. I’ll talk about the rider and the elephant at the moment. And the other one is the skills chapter, which that is probably going to be book number three. I’m putting together the proposal for it this summer, and will hopefully be writing it maybe over the winter period or something like that. But the motivation piece, like I said, it’s this they know what to do. And yet, there was just so much more to talk about. But the rider-elephant metaphor comes from a psychologist named Jonathan Haidt, and he wrote a book called The Happiness Hypothesis.

Julie 18:10
And he was talking about this tension between what we know and what we kind of feel is one way to think about it. And most of these decision-making models, so like Daniel Kahneman, when he talks about thinking fast and slow, has the fast thinking system and the slow thinking system. System one and two is usually what he calls it. And that’s similar, if not quite identical, but close enough to the rider and the elephant. I like the rider and the elephant because I think people get it.

Julie 18:33
I mean, if you think about like brain regions, you have a lot of your brain that’s concerned with things like moving your body around in the physical space and perceiving, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching things and perceiving the world and translating it. And you also have like hearing and seeing and fine motor control and gross motor control and emotional reactions. And all of that is kind of what Haidt refers to as the elephant.

Julie 18:33
And then the rider is sort of logic, reason, executive function, the ability to project that into the future and consider consequences. There’s areas of your brain that sort of activate like your prefrontal cortex when you’re exerting executive control or things like that. And so we’ve got this divide in our decision-making between what we intellectually know is a good idea and what feels like a good idea in the moment. And so the example I always use is your alarm goes off in the morning. And it happened yesterday because I had a 6am meeting because of time zones, right? Because we had a bunch of people in Europe and somebody in Australia and whatever, whatever. And so I was the 6am person on this call. And so I set my alarm for 5am and it goes off. And I’m like, I should get up, I should get up, I should totally get up. An hour will be enough time for me to be like fully awake when I have to get on this meeting and I’ll be able to get coffee, you know, be able to like do my little morning routine and still be present for this meeting. And I should totally get up and I should totally get up and absolutely hit the snooze button for another 15 minutes, right?

Julie 18:33
And that’s my rider knows intellectually that getting up is a great idea and is probably the most functional behaviour in the circumstance. But my elephant is like, nice, warm, comfortable. So darn, it’s early, right? Yeah, I know. So that’s both entities play into decision making.

Julie 18:33
And a lot of those visceral feelings, I was working on a curriculum. And I use this example quite a lot in the book around handwashing for healthcare. And I remember talking to a doctor when I was working on one of these curriculums. And she’s like, I know this stuff, I know this stuff so well. And even I at the end of like a long shift when I’m like three hours over time and, you know, just getting tired, I can get a little bit more careless about this stuff than I should. How is that a thing? And I’m like, well, your elephant gets tired.

Beth 21:10
And it’s sort of lazy or yeah, just repeating demands or whatever. [Julie: Yeah.] But what’s the problem? And I’ll say the problem is that people want to talk to the rider and think the rider is the only one that’s listening and our clients come to us and ask us to design learning only for the rider. And what’s the problem with doing that?

Julie 21:32
Well, you know, we have this belief that our rider can override our elephant if it needs to. And the truth is, it probably can. It just takes a lot of effort to do it. And if you need this behaviour to be consistent, you know, for hours and hours, you know, or days and days or weeks and weeks or whatever it is, if your rider is battling your elephant, you’re probably going to have, you know, some issues with that, right?

Julie 21:56
I absolutely know that I should wear sunscreen every day, you know. So, we’ve got a family history of not super serious stuff, but, you know, like the basal cell skin cancers and things like that, which are, you know, not the scary kind, but they’re still not great. And so I 100% know what the right behaviour is, which is to be totally on top of my sunscreen basically all of the time. And that intellectual knowledge only goes so far. At a certain point, I have to still find ways to make it an easier behaviour to do, you know, to just always have a lot around or have the kind of sunscreen I can put on my face that doesn’t make my eyes sting or, you know, figure out a whole kind of range of strategies and even then behaviour is still a little, still a little wobbly sometimes.

Julie 22:42
So when we double down on intellectual, I mean, almost everything that’s a behaviour change problem has a issue where what we intellectually know doesn’t match up with what we’re physically experiencing. So I know that like I should, you know, record my expense receipt, tax stuff, you know, get it updated in the system, kind of, you know, and stay on top of that all the time. And then my life will be much easier down the road. But the truth is, you know, nothing bad is going to happen for, let’s see, we’re in July now. So like for five more months, [Beth chuckles] if I, you know, if I don’t stay on top of my expense receipts.

Julie 23:22
And so that’s out in the future. And our rider understands, hey, there’s future consequences, but our elephant’s like, you know what? I think if you like watch a YouTube video instead of dealing with your receipts that nothing bad will happen. And it’s right. It’s right about that. [They laugh]

Beth 23:38
For now.

Julie 23:40
Like, go get coffee or a snack and leave those receipts there for a while longer. It’s true. Nothing bad is going to happen for a really long time. And then it’s going to be, you know, massive pain, but it’ll still be, it’ll, it’ll be fixable. It’ll be recoverable. So that knowledge of what’s going to happen in the future does not weigh very heavily with the elephant. And so we’re always dealing with that. We’re always kind of dealing with, I think the single most common element in all behaviour change issues is kind of delayed or absent feedback. So what’s the bad thing that’s going to happen if I don’t wash my hands as a healthcare professional? Well, somebody could get sick, but the likelihood that I will know that me not washing my hands at like three o’clock on Thursday caused a particular infection is almost impossible.

Julie 24:24
So whenever we have that disconnect, we have behavioural challenges and there’s a whole slew of strategies that we can bring to play, but we need to be using them in deliberately and we need to be trying to address, you know, the actual problem and not just berating people.

Beth 24:41
I know and it’s kind of “struggle-y” for me in a way to chat with you because there’s so much in your book too that…People just have to get it and read it and work through it and have it in front of them. I think when, you know, the next learning design project comes our way and pull it out, right? Because it is really, really meaty.

Beth 24:59
I’m actually listening to it as an audio book and I also own the physical book and I think I need both, right? [They laugh.] Because talk about cognitive overload in some ways. It’s not that you’ve written it that way because you’ve got tons of examples and stories and you know, you’ve done all of the right things. Like I can see what you’re doing to help us learn the things in the book. But I also have to pull it out I think the next time I have that problem in front of me that I’m going to try to do a little bit better on in terms of behaviour change. Not that I don’t think about it now, but I’m going to, we have to keep doing better, right? [Julie: Yeah.] And having those conversations with our clients because I work for myself and a lot of us do, but I don’t know, whoever it is that’s coming to us saying, here’s the problem.

Beth 25:43
You know, how do you, like, what are the first things that you say to people to, to start off and say, um, is this a knowledge problem? Is this a behaviour problem? Like it’s often not a behaviour problem that is coming our way.
So how do you start? Like what do you recommend for people to, to dig…it’s like a little exploration that we have to do to try to find the real issues, right? To solve as learning designers?

Julie 26:07
Yeah, there’s a tweet that I screen-capped and put in one of my presentations where it’s, I don’t think he was a learning designer, I think he was a designer-designer, but maybe like UX or something, but he was saying, my job isn’t to implement your solution, my job is to understand what problem you’re trying to, you know, like to uncover what problem it is you’re trying to implement, you know, to answer with a solution and understand kind of how I can help you with that. And so, and that happens a lot.

Julie 26:36
Like I actually have some slides in some of my workshops where I’m like, is this problem or is this a solution? You know, and if somebody’s coming to you with solution, that’s fine. They, they may have done all of the thinking necessary to establish that this solution that they’re trying to hand you, we need a training course, you know, we need a safety e-learning on how to like prevent safety issues or something like that. They’re showing up and they’re wanting an e-learning program on this and you have to kind of have this conversation with them about, okay, well, what problem are you trying to solve with this? And why do we think that an e-learning course is going to be a solution that makes sense?

Julie 27:15
And it may be, and I mean, most of the time when people show up and they’re like, we want an e-learning course on this, most of the time we’ll, we will get to that, like we will do that, but we want to have a conversation around what’s, again, what’s the gap between where people are now and where they would need to be in order to, to be safer, you know, on the job. And is it that they don’t really know how to put on the personal protective equipment? Is it that they know how to put on the personal protective equipment, but it’s a hassle? And so they’re, they’re short cutting. Is it that they put on the personal protective equipment and it’s supposed to keep them safe, but the glasses fog up and then they can’t see, and then that’s actually dangerous for them. And so their decision to not wear these consistently actually has a logical issue with it that we’re not, we’re definitely not going to fix with training, you know?

Julie 28:07
So where’s the disconnect? Where’s the issue? And I have a whole list of things that I usually go through that are common things that show up in training requests. Because every time, you know, like I’m always interested in the fact that every time a corporation or an organization or an entity has a really massive screw up, you know, they, like something goes horribly wrong. Maybe they do something just kind of like, oh, look, an appalling example of bias or things that didn’t work the way that they were supposed to, you know, procedures that, that led to, you know, really unfortunate outcomes, whatever. There’s always, always, always, you know, part of the apology is “We’re going to do training.” And it’s sort of like, how, what’s your level of confidence that the training that you’re going to do is actually going to fix this problem?

Beth 28:55
Again, it’s like, could be a match. It could be a mismatch, as you said before. Yeah, misaligned. For sure.

Julie 29:00
Yeah. And I mean, training is frequently part of it, but it’s usually not all of it, especially in these complex problems. And it’s interesting to hear your reaction to the book because I tried so hard to make this not overwhelming. [She laughs.]

Beth 29:13
It’s no, it’s exciting though, cause it’s, it is meaty. It’s not just, I mean, you did, you need, you needed to write a whole other book, basically about the issue and all of the things that are within it, right? I get that for sure. [Julie: Yeah.] And it is big and it’s, it’s like the most important work I think we learning designers have to do in a way with, with the people that come to us, asking us to do, you know, to create an e-learning course or whatever kind of learning experience it is.

Beth 29:40
Because they usually, in my experience, they don’t often come with the crux of the problem that’s actually happening. Actually I use, um, Cathy Moore’s Will Training Help? flow chart diagram, a fair bit, right. And, and clients seem to like that. And it’s an easy one pager. She’s got a one pager to say like, what’s, what’s going on, right? Why do we think the training needs to, yeah. So I don’t want to promote her. I’m talking to you, Julie! [Smiles]

Julie 30:07
Oh no, I love Kathy’s stuff.

Beth 30:07
But there’s also some resources, right? We can draw on like that. [Julie: Yeah.] Like is it a training related problem? And maybe there’s something in there, as you said, but there’s other things often as well.

Julie 30:19
Yeah, no, no, no. I’m a fan of Cathy’s stuff too, absolutely. So I’m happy for that to be promoted. [Laughs]

Beth 30:24
Yeah, but you talk about like, yeah, so not everything is necessarily a problem that we learning designers can solve in the role that we have. I liked that you talked about what was it, the individual level, organization level, like a system level. I’m probably kind of messing up the words about it, but often people come and say, oh, it’s an individual problem, but it’s actually not an individual issue or challenge, right? It’s something bigger, systemic or whatever.

Julie 30:50
Yeah, yeah, like one of the examples I use is based on some stuff that happened at Salesforce.com, they were trying to address salary disparities based on things like gender or ethnicity or things like that. One of the things that became really clear is that these problems were hard to see because there’s always a reason, right? It wasn’t that managers were like, “I want to pay women less” or “I want to pay people less based on race or ethnicity.” I don’t think anybody was being individually evil in this scenario. [chuckles]

Julie 31:21
But what they found was even though you have reasons for things, as long as there’s judgment involved, like one of the organizations that’s historically had actually the lowest levels of gender pay disparity is the US Postal Service in the US. And the US Postal Service has just these very clear guidelines. You’ve worked here long, you’ve done this and this, you get paid this. It’s a formula, at least I think it used to be. I can’t actually speak to it right now, but I believe that that’s all still mostly in place. And because there was just no, not no opportunity for subjectivity, but it was still a pretty objective process for determining what people get paid based on very, again, pretty objective criteria.

Julie 32:07
And as soon as we move it into this objective [sic: subjective] criteria of like, well, I’m going to evaluate their education and their training and their experience and all these kinds of things and formulate a salary offer through that, all of a sudden these opportunities for these things to creep in start to show up because an individual manager might hire five or six people in a year if they’re really on a pretty, even that’s even a pretty aggressive hiring cycle. And so they don’t have the ability to hold these things up to dozens or hundreds or thousands of comparable examples and go, is this something that makes sense?

Julie 32:48
And so we can train that manager all we want about de-biasing their hiring practices and equitable job…all of these kinds of things, but the issue isn’t visible at their level. There’s always reasons for what they’re doing. The issue becomes visible when we start to say, alright, I’m looking at this level two programmer with these job responsibilities and I’m comparing it to every other level two programmer with these job responsibilities in the company. And that can be hard to see. Like you typically know the salaries of the people on your team, but you don’t know necessarily the salaries. Different organizations have different structures around these things. And what they really found is that they had to have…

Julie 33:28
At Salesforce, what they had to have was a very specific and somewhat detailed rubric to make sure that they were comparing apples to apples when they were looking at these kinds of things. And I think they spent something like three or six million the first year that they did this when they actually found it, they spent three or six million, three to six million, somewhere in there, dollars to address the fact that, yeah, there were some disparities that were just simply not explainable by anything other than bias creeps in.

Julie 34:03
And it would have been literally impossible for most managers to have been able to figure this out. You just didn’t have the information then had the data. And so again, we don’t see this until we start to get up to the group level or we get up to, and really they couldn’t tell that it was going on. And so they were looking at at the system level and like hand washing, same thing, right? I can’t know that my individual behaviour has caused this particular problem over here. We might know that we’ve had infections on the ward and that’s bad. So we can recognize that there’s an issue at the group level, but honestly, we don’t really know there’s a problem until we’re at the system level and our hospital has much higher infection rates than similar size hospitals or comparable organizations.

Julie 34:48
And when there’s that disconnect between the behaviour is happening at an individual level, but they just can’t see it. Salespeople, for example, they know what their sales numbers are. They can see their direct results and it’s pretty easy for their managers to kind of do the comps across the whole team or the organization. And so that’s a much easier set of behaviours to see at an individual level and get effective feedback at an individual level. But some of these things, we just can’t get a good picture of the problem until we’re looking at a whole system.

And when you have that disconnect between the individual behaviour and the system level feedback, like that’s super hard stuff. You have to have system level solutions to address things that are only visible at a system level. Like the post office has a set of systemic guidelines for how they pay people. And that’s a systemic solution to a systemic problem, basically.

Beth 35:43
Yeah. And you mentioned a rubric. So, I mean, a rubric could be developed for the manager who’s hiring to consult it and to, you know, see who this person is in front of them that they want to hire and how many years, blah, blah, blah, like, like consult the rubric. But so the behaviour is that they actually have to use the rubric, but the rubric has to be created, doesn’t it? [Julie: Yeah.] I guess it’s both. You have to talk to enough individual hiring managers to realize that they don’t know how to do the picking of the salaries, right? They don’t, as you say, they don’t mean to be racist or misogynistic or whatever it is. They literally don’t have the information that they need. So the learners give us clues to what might be happening at the other levels?

Julie 36:27
Yeah. And I mean, I’m sure there are some bad actors in the system, but, you know, I’m sure there’s some people who maybe aren’t, aren’t pure of motive. But when we focus on that, we’re ignoring the fact that the whole system, you know, kind of propagates an issue. And that’s a real challenge for those of us who are, you know, designing learning because there’s a limit to how much leverage we can have over some of these things.

So when there’s, there’s kind of a system level reason that some of this stuff is going on, you know, again, we’re asked to do an anti-bias training for managers. And it’s kind of like, well, that might help, you know, it might make them aware of some issues that they see. And that might be something where they can, you know, correct some of their individual behaviours. And it might be part of the solution, but boy, it’s probably not going to fix the whole problem. So, yeah.

Beth 37:15
Or it changes the nature of the intervention. Like I had a client recently where I love it if I can kind of convince people to hire us for a short term contract to figure out what the problem is [Julie: Yeah.] and do that kind of, you know, focus groups or interviews or, you know, read things or whatever, all those pieces are. And one of the things we determined was the ultimate learner group that they were hoping for, they didn’t actually have time to attend any workshop, right? [Julie laughs.]

Beth 37:15
Like they did like to go to go to a workshop at a certain time and place and to spend X number of hours, like there, it was sort of the time, but it was also no one’s job to go get the learning, you know, like on the, you know, the learner. And we’re like, well, if it’s no one’s job and no one has time, like I’m not sure we should make a bounded time course for this, right? Because who, who’s going to come? Like there’s no real learner group there. I mean, we did end up creating something, but it was more of a website than a workshop, right? It’s like, okay, so the information has to be somewhere because at some point the learner is going to need it because they’re going to realize it could become someone’s job because the problem is happening and someone has to jump in and it kind of becomes their responsibility. So we created the website instead of a course. So there was still an intervention, but the nature of the intervention had to change because of what we learned.

Beth 37:15
We’re like, who’s coming to this six week, they wanted it to be six or eight weeks long, right? [Julie: Oh my goodness.] I was like, ah, no, I don’t think that’s not going to happen. Yeah. But you talk about one thing that I was interested in your book that you talk about was the stages of change that learners might be in. And maybe you can explain that a little bit more because in my healthcare work, like that’s in the content of a lot of healthcare related courses for their learners, right? Who are, we’re trying to get their learners to, you know, make some sort of change in their life. But actually I’ve never thought about the stages of change to just learners in general for our work in learning design, not, not the sort of healthcare content. Tell us a little bit more about the stages of change.

Julie 39:09
Yeah, and there’s a few different versions of this. I have one that I’ve kind of modified off of some research that was done around what they were talking about was kind of a change ladder, like where are people on, you know, which rung of the ladder are they on and things like that. And it’s not always a perfect thing. Like people don’t necessarily go through every single stage or things like that.

Julie 39:27
And there’s other models like Prochaska and Di Clemente’s, you know, transformational, their change model and, you know, things like that. But this one, it kind of had, I think it was 10 steps where it was like, first of all, is the issue that they just don’t know about the behaviour? Like, oh, I should do, you know, this thing to protect my data security, right? Like, let’s say we’re doing cybersecurity and we’re trying to get people to use kind of complex passwords, right? So is it that I just don’t even know that I shouldn’t use the name of my pet with 123, like for every single password I do, right?

Julie 40:01
Is it that they know about the behaviour, but they aren’t convinced, right? Like they’ve never gotten any of those data breach notices and, you know, it seems like it’s working fine for them so far. And they’re just not, you know, they don’t understand why it’s an issue. Is it that they know why it’s an issue, but they aren’t convinced by the explanation? Because we have that, right? You know, we’ve been dealing with that, obviously around some things like vaccines and so forth, you know, where people understand exactly what the argument is for it, but they’re not convinced that it’s a good idea for a whole bunch of reasons, right?

Julie 40:33
Is it that they are, you know, convinced, but it’s just not a priority for them right now? Like I’m convinced about sunscreen and it is not always a priority when it should be, you know, even with full knowledge of the potential consequences. Is it that they are convinced, but it seems too intimidating or too difficult? So like, let’s say we’re encouraging people to exercise more and they’re ready, like they believe you, they want to exercise, they’re on board, but their experiences in the past are that exercise wasn’t for them and that they’re not athletic and that exercise is painful and unpleasant and all of these kinds of things.

Julie 41:12
So, you know, it seems too difficult to get started or it seems intimidating or scary or, you know, any of these kinds of factors around it. Is it that they’re even past that and all they really need is just somebody to give them that little nudge to get started and a little bit of, you know, help and hand-holding? Is it that they have started but are struggling with consistent behaviour? Is it that they have been consistent and now they’re kind of falling off the behaviour? So at each of these stages, what they need is different.

So like, you know, if they’re, if they don’t know about the behaviour, education and training is a great solution. Beautiful. Perfect. Let’s do that. If it’s that they know about the behaviour but they’re not convinced or they’re not persuaded or they’re not prioritizing it, that’s a different start of problems, right?

Julie 41:56
Like it might be about making the case and something that’s more focused on persuasion. It might be about helping, you know, but then it might be about like practical assistance. How do you sneak this into, how do you fit this into your day? What’s an easy way to get started? How do you just try this out a little bit? You know, those kinds of things.

Julie 42:14
If they’re trying to do it but like consistency and issue, can you have, you know, an accountability buddy? Can you have some kind of coaching? Can you have some kind of tracking mechanism? You know, if it’s about, hey, I’ve been doing it but now I’m kind of falling off, is there anything about the environment that we can, you know, help you with to reinforce the behaviour? Or is there some kind of refresh or re-motivation thing that we can be doing? And so as you move through this, and again, not everybody hits every one of these and sometimes people have a few of them going on at the same time, the kind of support that you need changes pretty significantly depending on where people are along this continuum.

So you give two choices. One is you can try to adapt the intervention so that it meets people where they are. Or the other thing is you can try to have that sort of continuum of resources and help the learners figure out what’s going to help them most at a particular point, like some guidance or direction on how do they find the thing that’s going to be useful to them.

Beth 43:11
Yeah. I’m wondering how many times you design and develop blended learning experiences because you know, especially I know you design a lot of e-learning. I mean, there’s so many times when behaviour change needs some other mode, right?

Like the coach, the accountability partner, the buddy, the whatever, the job aid, the, you know, all those additional things to support the learning in these different, to meet these different stages of change. Like how much do you push back on clients where they’re like, nope, I only want e-learning. That’s the only thing we’re going to do. That’s all we’ve got budget for. You’re like, I know this other thing can, you know, support the solution you’re looking for. Like how much do you stick to your guns I guess on it?

Julie 43:54
Well, I mean, we always have the conversation. I have a really simple table that I use that sort of says, is there stuff that would happen before the learning experience? What’s the learning experience itself? How are they going to practice and get feedback? What kind of coaching or mentoring support do they need? How are we going to provide just-in-time materials or performance support materials for it? How do we periodically refresh? And how do they develop further if they want to take this and go to the next level with it and things like that?

Julie 44:25
I was doing an audit for a manufacturing company around their Six Sigma training. And they really wanted to focus on, what’s the learning experience? How do we fix the classroom? What else do we need? Let’s audit our classroom materials. And I’m like, actually, your classroom stuff’s pretty good. There’s always stuff we can tinker with, sure. But I think it’s pretty solid. What I think are your big issues is you have people coming in who don’t have enough statistical knowledge. And so there’s some pre-learning stuff, some prerequisite requirements that you could really look at there.

Julie 44:55
And also, the learning experience was several weeks. And it was so intense that coming back and refreshing it, so a typical Six Sigma project would last six months. So come back in at that six-month mark and maybe add to the curriculum there, which they will now have had the experience of working through a whole project. So they’ll have a much better understanding of the process, much more of mental models.

Julie 45:18
And so now when you come back and you start to talk a little bit about your more intermediate issues or topics, they will have some way to take that in, which they probably didn’t in the first training because it’s just too much. And so looking at that piece, and I think that that’s the same approach when I’m talking about blended stuff is what series of resources that all of these stages are going to help support this behaviour as much as possible. When we’re done with the learning event, instead of just pushing them out the nest [they laugh] and hoping they fly, what’s the soft on-ramp? Or off-ramp, I guess. What’s the gently working it back in?

Julie 45:59
A lot of times, we might have a training course on difficult conversations, and we might get really great stuff. But if the idea is that they’re going to go back out into the world and really tackle some of those hard, difficult conversations, well, that’s super intimidating, right? Even if you’ve learned the method and you think, oh, this is really great, it’s tough. And so it might be about helping some learners in the class to identify some easy practice opportunities for this. Here’s one to three places where I think I could go use this method that are not that scary. I’m happy to go have that conversation. Let’s go and we’ll practice this method. And then once I’ve done it two or three times in a scenario that’s not kind of scary and intimidating, maybe I can kind of work it into some of these harder situations.

Julie 46:46
And so it’s really trying to figure out what’s the path back to this becoming a consistent behaviour? And where do we need to reinforce it? And what does that, what does reinforcement need to look like? A lot of times, one of the things I talk about is the fact that we should always be treating…if people’s managers are the audience, are going to be pivotal in reinforcing this behaviour, then what are we creating for them?

Julie 47:12
Are we creating a separate training for them on how to reinforce this behaviour? Are we creating some support materials? Are we giving them a list of tips about how they can reinforce the behaviour? It could be any number of solutions and the answer is it depends. But always kind of viewing that as a secondary audience because we know that they’re pivotal. We know that managers reinforcing the things that people learn in training is probably one of the biggest determinants of whether that those behaviours actually happen. And so not just creating learning materials for the end learners, but also creating some support materials for their managers is probably a much better strategy for actually promoting the behaviour than just focusing on the learning experience.

Beth 47:57
Yeah. Cause what are we, people could make the mistake that we’re reinforcing knowledge only, and we’re trying to reinforce behaviour change, aren’t we? And people are on the job and they have managers or they have colleagues that they can check in with or yeah. So it’s, you know, what’s going to support?

I love that idea. I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked or have pushed that to happen. Right. Although I know it’s a thing and probably have talked about it, but I don’t know if it’s ever been part of a project.

Julie 48:20
Yeah. Feel free. [They laugh.]

Beth 48:23
Uh, yeah. What we do have more things, right? Always, we’re always learning how to do this role better for sure. All of us, uh, even though we’ve been doing it for a while. I’m so curious to ask you, it’s slightly different, but it’s related. In the age of AI, I want to just ask you in your perspective as a learning designer, when you see stuff like “create a course in 15 minutes”, [Julie laughs and then Beth laughs] this is a real bee in my bonnet right now, I can’t stand seeing this on social media. And, uh, and it’s not just people who design learning, essentially they’re saying this, right? It’s companies that have products where we use them to design learning. And they’re saying we can create courses in 15 minutes, but courses cannot be created in 15 minutes. Right? [Julie sighs: Yeah.] Like, what are you saying about this kind of stuff because of, you know, especially AI coming along?

Julie 49:10
Yeah, no, it’s been a challenge for me too. And the biggest fundamental issue that I have with a lot of this stuff is there’s a few different models of how we can potentially use the AI. And I have this whole like transport analogy. There’s the acceleration model, right? Which is, can I accelerate your performance? So I’ve got somebody who is already an experienced learning designer, and can they, you know, use AI to create a bunch of stuff? And then they can pick through and say, oh, you know, 60 or 70% of this is pretty useful. We’ll use that and we’ll kind of modify the other, you know, 20 to 30%, or whatever the number may be.

Julie 49:46
And, you know, initially, like some of these, “Here, you can just create a learning experience with AI” stuff was pretty bad. Oof. It’s gotten better. It has unquestionably gotten better. And I’m finally, I honestly was a bit, you know, laggardly, I was a bit of a laggard about the AI adoption, because I was not super impressed for a long time with the the outputs, you know, they were full of hallucinations, or just very surface or, you know, whatever it is.

Julie 50:07
And I think that that’s improving. But the majority of use of specifically the large language model AIs, because there’s different kinds of AI, and I’m not qualified to talk about, I’m not qualified to talk about any of them probably, but, but I’m certainly not talented to talk about the ones that are not the large language model, which is, you know, the most common stuff, right, your ChatGPTs, and your Claudes, and your Geminis and things like that.

Julie 50:07
The primary model where they’re, where we’re seeing utility in them now is somebody who knows how to do the job is accelerating their output, but they’re, they’re capable of evaluating the output and making judgments about it. Are they? That’s a different problem. That’s more of that psychological stamina piece of actually checking this before you copy and paste it. And we know people aren’t always checking it. [chuckles]

Julie 50:07
There have been lawyers who’ve been, I don’t know if they’ve actually been sanctioned, but boy, they got yelled at a lot for, you know, legal cases that didn’t exist because they didn’t check the outputs. There was that thing with the, I think it was the Chicago Tribune published, it was a franchise piece. So it wasn’t actually a Chicago Tribune writer who, who did an article of Summer Reads and none of the books existed. Yeah. There’s an element to that when we look at it from a behaviour change point of view, like, oh, okay, it’s giving you all this great stuff. However, you have to have this psychological stamina to proofread the outputs and verify it, either verify that they’re accurate or evaluate them using your own judgment to say, yes, they’re, they’re worthwhile. This is a good learning experience or this is the right content or just any of those kinds of things. And we know that relying over much on people’s ability to proofread things has not historically been a great strategy.

Julie 51:52
You know, there’s a reason why copy editors are, you know, that’s a professional role because most people are not great at this sort of careful proofreading. I mean, some people are absolutely being responsible in doing that a hundred percent, but, you know, has there been a little bit of careless copying and pasting?

Oh, I suspect just a bit. And so that fundamentally only works if A, the person has the ability to judge the outputs and B, that they are actually exerting the effort to do so.

Beth 52:21
Yeah, and asking the right questions right like we’re the ones that have to put in the right prompts to get it to you know help us do the things that you’re advocating us do around designing for behaviour change like we can’t just say, “Design a course for behaviour change to ChatGPT, can we, like there’s just hundreds and hundreds of things we have to do.

Julie 52:39
You can and it will give you a thing, but will it be any good? Will it be any good?

Beth 52:42
Will it solve the right problem, right, the true problem?

Julie 52:44
And I mean, one of the uses that we’re undoubtedly looking at is different than the acceleration model where somebody knows how to do the job and they’re just doing it faster and in increasing their productivity using these tools. We’re also looking at the elevation model, right? Which is here, you’re a novice, but I’m gonna give you a ChatGPT agent app that you can ask questions of and it’s gonna accelerate or elevate your performance. So you would be a novice, but I can get you to be an intermediate customer service agent by giving you an AI tool that will answer questions for you.

Julie 53:19
And that’s a much more complicated and problematic use of it because the person is not capable of evaluating the outputs. ChatGPT doesn’t just give you errors, it gives you errors very confidently and it makes it sound really good. It also tells you what you wanna hear, like the amount of flattery that’s been going on in these AI agents is fascinating to me. I’m just super curious about that. And so now we have a situation where I’m asking you to operate at this level, even though your knowledge is down here and you are not capable of identifying where there’s issues there. And that one means that we have to have a lot more security in these systems than I think we currently do.

Julie 54:00
And I’ve asked people who know more about this than I do, like what is gonna be that checks and balances on the computer system side? And there’s technology that they’re working on and ways that they’re trying to do validation for it. But depends on if you think the propensity to hallucinate is a feature or a bug, and I think it’s a feature. And if it is, then I don’t know if it’s ever going away completely. And then organizationally, we have the issue down the road, which is if I’m not growing new people with expert knowledge of these things, where is that gonna come from?

Julie 54:34
If I’m not having people come along this curve where they can, again, become experts and evaluate the outputs and be the judge of this. Right now, people learn to do that because they start out as beginners and they work their way up and then they know a lot. And where is that coming from? Especially as things change. Like the translation algorithms need to constantly ingest the work of human translators in order to keep up with the changes in language. So there’s all this terminology that gets used in 2025 that nobody was saying in 2015 when some of these language algorithms were actually trained. This is gonna be true of all of these things. And so you need to have some way to continue to take stuff in in order to update it. And where is that coming from if we’re not? And I mean, it’s a huge issue obviously in things like education and higher ed. Are people learning the thing or are they just learning how to press the button?

Beth 55:38
I don’t know. Yeah, it’s a, it’s gonna take us in a direction we don’t have time to keep talking about, do we? Fascinating and, and just watch this space. But be critical of everything, right? Like pay attention. [Julie: Hmm. Hmm.] Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot to pay attention to when using that too. Julie, thank you so much. I’ll give you the last word. Is there anything that you you haven’t said that you really want to make sure is said about about your book, [about] designing for behaviour change?

Julie 56:05
If people do read it, please go and review it because there are algorithms that it needs a few more reviews before it’s going to start to get kind of recommended by the systems a little bit more. So if you do read it and you enjoyed it, please go review it.

I am teaching a workshop in October through the Learning Development Accelerator on basically the contents of the “Elephant” book. So if people want to do an actual workshop on the learning how to design for behaviour change, that’s great. I think one thing I didn’t really mention about that is that a lot of that behaviour change material is coming from this domain of behavioural science. And there’s been just a huge amount of kind of advancement coming up in behavioural science. And I think so much of it’s useful to us as learning and development people. So, you know, the elephant book is the attempt to take a lot of this insight from behavioural science and bring it over to learning and development in a way that makes sense and is in context for the challenges that we all have. Otherwise, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Beth 57:04
Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. We could have talked all day for sure.

It’s been a pleasure to read both of your books and I’ll make sure I get everything in the show notes so people can follow up with you as well afterwards and keep reading, keep learning and keep connecting with you wherever you are. So thanks for taking the time to write books for the field, right? [Julie laughs.] Not everybody does. It’s a big, it’s a labour of love. It’s a lot of work. So appreciate that you’ve not just written one, but now two for the rest of us. So thanks for that.

Julie 57:33
Yeah. Well, and every time anybody tells me that it’s really useful, that’s what it’s for. So it, you know, it makes me really, really happy when that happens.

So I’m so grateful that so many people have found, have found them useful.

Beth 57:46
[Episode outro] I had been really looking forward to this conversation with Julie and she did not disappoint. I did love the fact that she told so many stories and gave so many examples in the conversation as I mentioned earlier. And I learned a couple things too or at least had them enhanced for myself that I need to pay a little bit more attention to them in my own work. I thought, as I mentioned, the stages of change piece is interesting to really think about not only demographic information or other types of knowledge-based information about our learners but maybe where they are in terms of their motivation levels to participate in the learning experience around something like the stages of change or other similar models.

Beth 58:29
So that was interesting to help me think a little bit more deeply about the learner experience. Because, if we’re designing for behaviour change, motivation is a huge part of it and I loved that she gave that list of the gaps that learners can have. It can be a knowledge gap, it can be a skill gap, it can be motivation, it can be around habit changing or environmental. And the identification of that gap is really important for us to then design an appropriate solution for.

Beth 59:02
I also liked the pre and post learning experience pieces that we got talking about toward the end and how if we’re designing for behaviour change on the part of the employees or whoever it is in the work experience, say, then we need to get their managers involved and perhaps design something for the manager so that they can reinforce the behaviour change that the person is hopefully doing on the job or wherever they’re demonstrating those behaviours.

Beth 59:31
So lots of conversation there that took us in so many good directions. I could have just kept talking with her for hours, as I feel like with so many of my guests. I hope that it was an accessible conversation for you even if you do not do learning design as your main part of your role, and if you are more on the facilitation side I hope it expanded your knowledge around these foundational pieces that you can continue to learn about. So get Julie’s book, listen to it, read it, do both like I’m doing [smiles] and I hope that it helps expand your design knowledge for the betterment of yourself and your learners in the future. Thanks again to Julie Dirksen for being on the show.

Beth 01:00:14
The next episode of the podcast is a solo one with me. I’m going to be delving into the topic of silence in our facilitation. So using silence, not using silence, transgressions around silence, considerations. I won’t say any more than that but catch me next time on the show to think about silence in our design and in our facilitation of our learning. I’ll see you then.

Beth 01:00:40
[Show outro] Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you’re looking for the transcript or the show notes for the episode you can find those on my website on facilitatingonpurpose.ca. I would love to have your feedback about any episode including how it can make it more accessible for you or if you’d like to share a tip with me. Please reach out to me via the website or on any social media channel and I would love to hear from you.

Beth 01:01:06
If you’d like to support the show the best thing you can do is to rate the show, subscribe to it, and share it with a friend who you think might be able to use it. I would appreciate that very much. Thanks and see you next time.

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