26. You built the training. They completed it. Nothing changed. Julie Dirksen on why.

Stop Talking to the Rider
Julie Dirksen on behavior change, the elephant in the room, and why knowing is never enough

From Jeanne
If you have ever stood in front of a group, delivered a session you were genuinely proud of, and then watched nothing change two weeks later — this episode is for you. That is exactly what happened to me early in my career. I ran a two-hour training that had people practically running out the door to sell a new product. Two weeks later: zero. Turns out nobody got a bonus for selling it. I had never even thought to ask that question.

Julie Dirksen has spent more than many years asking exactly that question. She is the author of Design for How People Learn, an industry classic, and Talk to the Elephant, which picks up precisely where the first book left off: what do you do when people know what to do, and they are still not doing it? I have distributed that book widely. It is that good.

We recorded this conversation in English, and I am so glad we did. Julie is sharp, warm, and she has a way of making behavioral science feel immediately useful. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

About Julie Dirksen 
Julie Dirksen holds a master’s degree in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University. She has spent decades helping organizations design learning that actually changes behavior, and has been recognized as a Guild Master by the e-Learning Guild. Her books are considered essential reading in the field of learning and development.

What this episode covers 

•  The question Julie could not stop thinking about after her first book: what happens when people know what to do, but they are still not doing it?
• The Elephant and Rider metaphor, originally from Jonathan Haidt, and why most learning experiences only talk to the Rider while the Elephant gets bored and checks Instagram. 
• The two factors Julie has never seen absent in a challenging behavior change problem: competing priorities and delayed or absent feedback. 
• The change ladder: a practical framework for diagnosing where people actually are before jumping to solutions. From not knowing, to knowing but not convinced, to convinced but stuck, to needing practical support, to building and maintaining a habit. 
• Why adding more information louder and more emphatically is almost never the answer. 
• How to redirect the conversation when colleagues or clients start blaming learners for not learning. 
• Action planning versus positive visualization: why picturing yourself being successful is far less effective than thinking through everything that might stop you.
• AI and defaults: why people are much better at generating content than at critically checking it, and what that means for how we use these tools. 
• A preview of Julie’s new book, Designed for How People Build Skills, out in the fall.

Julie’s two things to do tomorrow 
Ask what everything in the system is currently doing to either promote or prevent the behavior you want. How many of those things can training actually address?

Look at the feedback mechanisms. What feedback are people getting on the behavior right now? How can you improve it?

Books mentioned
Talk to the Elephant — Julie Dirksen
Design for How People Learn — Julie Dirksen
The Happiness Hypothesis — Jonathan Haidt
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman 

Find Julie Dirksen at julieDirksen.com and on LinkedIn. Listen to the full episode via No More Boring Learning.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to a new boot for your mission, No More Boring Learning. This is the Brain Bakery Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Everybody, thank you for tuning in to No More Boring Learning. We will be doing this one in English without JP because I have a very special guest, and this very special guest today is Julie Dirksen. And if you've ever tried to close the gap between somebody knowing something and actually doing it, you've probably come across her work. And if you haven't, stay tuned. Julie holds a master's degree in instructional systems technology from Indiana University, and she spent more than many years helping organizations design learning that actually changes behavior. She's been recognized for this a lot, but also by the e-learning guild as a guild master, and she's the author of multiple books that I consider essential reading for anyone in our field. Her first book, Designed for How People Learn, has become an industry classic. The kind of book people recommend to one another whenever they enter our world of learning and development or instructional design. And her latest book, Talk to the Elephant, takes it even further. It's about what happens when people know what to do, but they're still not doing it. Honestly, this is the book I wish I had written. I'm distributing it everywhere because it's very, very well written and so insightful. So what I admire most about Julie's work is her ability to translate behavioral change into something practical, warm, and very genuinely useful without dumbing it down or losing the new ones. Julie, welcome to No More Boring Learning.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Back in the early 2000s, I worked for Michael Allen, who was the inventor of authorwear and is kind of one of our foundational people. And we had t-shirts that had boring e-learning with a big red like slash mark through it. So I actually might still have one somewhere where it's a no-boring e-learning t-shirt. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

I should wear those as well with boring crossed out or something. Oh, that's awesome. Good. So that means that I'm not very original. Thank you. That's okay.

SPEAKER_03 2:13

It means a part of a worthy tradition. That's what it means. Very well put.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Thank you so much. And apparently, still something we're battling because if it was there then and it's still there now, we still need to work on that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's such a delight to have you. And I've asked some of our listeners to send us in questions because some of them are familiar with your work and I want to spread it further around the Netherlands and Flanders, wherever our listeners are. So some of the questions will be by our uh listeners. Shall I start off the first one? Great. Yeah, let's go. Yes. In your first book, Design for How People Learn, and that became an industry classic, when you started then to write Talk to the Elephant, what was the question you couldn't stop thinking about? The one that your first book didn't fully answer.

SPEAKER_03 3:02

Yeah, well, there were there were two chapters in Design for How People Learn, where I mean there's always more to say about everything, but there were two chapters in particular where I felt like we were just starting to scratch the surface. Um, and one of them was chapter eight, which was the motivation chapter. Um and so that's the the the take that and expand it all the way out, uh became um Talk to the Elephant, Design Learning for Behavior Change. And it was really very much specifically the question that you stated what do you do when people know what to do, but they still aren't doing it? And what is our role in that as training or learning and development professionals, uh, given that we're not in control of all the variables that govern whether or not somebody does something, but we certainly have influence and we certainly, you know, are part of the conversation because whenever something goes horribly wrong in an organization, they almost always promise they'll do training. And I think it's good to be realistic about what we can accomplish in training, which I I think is a lot, um, but what we can't also, because those conversations need to be had about um what in the system or what in the environment or what in the organizational structure is either promoting the behavior or causing it not to happen.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Oh yeah, I remember very early in in my career I did this great training of only two hours. It was a fantastic session. I had people almost running out of the classroom into the shops to start selling the new product, and two weeks later, nobody sold anything. Well, 0.1 per shop per week. And I was completely in shock because I thought I'd done it well. Turns out everybody got a bonus for everything but the new product. I hadn't even thought about asking the question. Yes, yeah, that sort of thing. Yeah, absolutely. Uh so your work emphasizes identifying the real gap before jumping into solutions, before going, oh, that should be an e-learning, that should be this. So, how do you help designers diagnose the right problem, especially when stakeholders arrive with we need a training, it should be three hours, it should be this. They already almost mapped out the whole training when they get to you. How do you help designers deal with that?

SPEAKER_03 5:18

Yeah, well, there's a couple of questions that I'll usually ask, you know, and one of them just is why do you think they're not doing it right now? Is it just that they don't have a particular piece of knowledge? And you know, once in a while you can find a behavior where the gap is just knowledge, like if they just knew something, they would do something differently. Um, but that's pretty, pretty rare. Like that's usually not all that's going on, you know. So then if you can start to kind of have that conversation of like, well, what what do you think are the reasons that people are not doing it right now? And then you can kind of then bring in the okay, so some of those things that you've identified, I think we can actually address absolutely address with training. Here's the ones. What do we want to do about some of these other things that you have, you know, if you're the one telling them what the issue is, that never works as well as if you're asking the questions and they're telling you what the issue is. Because people usually know or have at least, you know, suspicions about it. You know, I always rail against the lazy idea that, you know, the learners are just lazy and that's why they're not finishing the training or that's why they're not doing the thing or whatever. And it's like, you know, I don't actually know very many lazy people. You know, everybody I know is so busy they can't see straight. You know, the two biggest factors that I think are almost always present when we have a challenging behavior change problem. One is just competing priorities, which is our world, right? And so it's not enough that you convince people this is important. You have to convince them that it's more important than a whole list of other things that they're also spending their time on. Um, but the other one is delayed or absent feedback. And that one I have never literally never seen a behavior change challenge that didn't have an element of delayed or absent feedback. You know, something doesn't happen that, you know, there's no feedback in the system that's telling people this isn't right. There is definitely absent feedback in your product example, in the sense that there was no reinforcement of, you know, like if you sold it, nothing good happened. Um nothing good happened. And so, you know, uh misaligned incentives, you know, are gonna are our frequent cause. And so one of the things about that is even though we've got good instincts about some of these kinds of things, it can be genuinely helpful to like have a more systematic way to figure out what the issues are. And I tried to do that in the book is give lists and ways of thinking about it and practical lists, like um, you know, a checklist to go through. Is this an issue? Is this an issue? Is this an issue? Because then that really can then help guide what learning experiences are we going to do, but also can we identify places where, yeah, we can do the learning, but if they aren't being incentivized for the behavior, you know, let's be realistic, not much is going to change.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Yes, I remember when I was reading your book for the first time, I was working with the contact center, and they had just implemented something great that one question that would resolve a whole lot of shizzle. And they were waiting, they were in the back room looking at the numbers as one does in a contact center because they measure almost everything. And then we replaced the reward to giving people high fives when they just tried the sentence. Yeah, and there was a sudden spike. Yeah, so it was uh it I it's so true what you say. Those two elements are so crucial, and they're now much more in my line of vision. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

Well, and that's an interesting example because one of the things that the book is really based on a model that comes out of um University College, London Center for Behavior Change, Susan Mickey and the behavior change wheel and the COMBI model. And so I'm leaning pretty heavily on all of their work, and they've done a tremendous amount of work again, also trying to like be comprehensive and really categorize and really think through things. And one of the things that you do as part of the process is that differentiation between outcomes and behaviors, right? So the belief is if the people in this contact center will say this thing, it's gonna ultimately lead to better outcomes. But that's often a delayed form of feedback, like that's often kind of down the road. And so the the high five, if you just do the behavior, and that's what people have control over. They don't always have control over outcomes, but they have control over behaviors. So if I'm trying to reduce my blood pressure, I can eat less salt, which may or may not reduce my blood pressure. It depends on more than like just that. But we know that that behavior is probably beneficial and useful, and so acknowledging the behavior of eating less salt is probably a more important form of feedback than the outcome of what actually changes my brain.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Measuring it again in three months' time where you've just been stressed because of something else, so there's no not even a difference. Right. Oh, great example. Let's go to the title of your book because I really love that. So the elephant and rider metaphor is central to the talk to the elephant. Please explain it a little bit. And what's the most common mistake you see when people try to talk to the elephant? And what does it look like when it's done well? Right.

SPEAKER_03 10:30

So the um the elephant rider metaphor comes from somebody named Jonathan Hayde. I I sometimes people will talk about it as my metaphor, and I'm like, no, no, no. I almost do that. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Um uh but it's Jonathan Hayt, and he wrote a book in oh gosh, the early 2000s sometime, um, called The Happiness Hypothesis, and he was talking about these two sort of systems that are at play when we're making decisions. And it's an oversimplification, it's one of those all models are wrong, but some of them are useful. And I and I like this one. And it, you know, it gets talked about in um things like Daniel Kahneman's thinking fast and slow. It's a little bit of a different version. I happen to like the elephant rider, and I think it resonates with people. Um, but it's this idea that we have, if you think about, you know, kind of how your brain is structured, you've got stuff down by your spinal cord that's like a lot of um automatic responses. So you know, like breathing and heart rate and reflexes, and then we have a lot of your brain that's you know about physical movement, so gross motor control, kind of fine motor control. You've got um things about perception, seeing and hearing, and you know, sensing and perceiving the world. And then you've got things like right in the middle, you've got the limbic system, which does a lot of emotional regulation and fight or flight and things like that. And so a big portion of our brain real estate is taken up with our sense of the physical, visceral, immediate world, right? Like moving around, sensing and perceiving it, moving around and interacting with it, things like that. And so that's a lot of what our brain is doing kind of all the time. Um and then we have areas of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, which tends to engage when we're using executive function and impulse control, and you know, it might engage when we're planning for the future. And to try to get this into brain regions is a little bit simplistic, it's distributed, but but still, you know, we've got parts of our brains that are thinking about like abstract ideas or you know, planning for the future, which is to a certain extent kind of an abstract idea, you know, so it's our logical, rational, you know, thinking brain that does things like considers future consequences. And then we have a big part of our brain that's like right now very visceral, very emotional, that you know, our feeling brain, our emotional brain, and things like that. And when we create a lot of learning experiences, we're almost entirely talking just to the logical, rational planning for the future part and not, you know, using any communication. So if I'm doing compliance stuff about financial whatever, I'm often talking in abstractions and I'm often, you know, talking about things that are way down the road or may never show up, or you know, things that you can't immediately apply and all of this kind of stuff. And so we're relying entirely on this kind of rider part of the brain, the our you know, intellectual, you know, executive function brain to kind of be the, you know, that's the only part of the brain that we're really engaging with at that point, versus something where we're like, no, the whole rest of this brain is just kind of hanging out here getting bored while we're just talking to this part. And so if you really want something to resonate with people, if you really want something to engage, you need to kind of have, you know, a conversation with not just the rider, but you also need to talk to the elephant. So, and so one of the things with that is uh immediacy is a big issue, right? The the rider plans for the future, but the elephant is like, what's happening right now? What's happening right now is that these PowerPoint slides are super boring, and I really want to take out my phone and check my Instagram feed because I posted a cool thing and I want to see if anybody did anything with it.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Yes, you know, as my TikTok doing, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

Um, or I'm hungry or I'm bored or I'm sleepy or whatever. And so as long as we're like kind of asking the rider to drag the elephant behind them, we're just making this whole process harder. You know, it's just it's just really difficult for people. Um, I sometimes do this thing where I'll be like, okay, how interested are you right now in a five-minute video on printer repair? And everybody's like, zero, zero percent interested, you know. Well, you know, but then if I'm like, but now your printer's broken, you need to print something really badly, and you know, now it's your level of interest, and they're like, oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. And I'm like, all right, so what if I put a broken printer in front of you and said, Hey, humor me, we're gonna do this task, we're gonna fix this printer. Now where are you? And they're like, uh, 60, 70% somewhere in there. And I'm like, okay, so none of the video didn't change in any of those scenarios. Right? It's still just a video about printer repair. Hopefully, it's a decent one and it's clear and it's easy to understand. But it like doesn't have to have, you know, fancy whatever dancing cats and unicorns and I don't know, whatever else to be interesting. It just need you just need to have something that you need to do with it, right? Which is this immediate, like, I have a thing I can get my hands on and I can engage with, and I have a need. And so a lot of talking to the elephant is just creating that sense of immediacy and something concrete that people can do with information and not just talking about in the abstract, in the future, maybe sometime, you know, let's speak about this, because then we're we're really relying on executive function and executive control to like do all the work, as opposed to when you're talking to both, you know, if you're engaging the elephant, like it's just so much easier for people to pay attention and to engage.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yes, I I found it such a striking image that you conjured in my brain that the next time after I'd really gotten it, I was in in front of a group and I was just seeing tiny brains riding on elephants, thinking, whoa, let's not go there. Whoa, how do I engage the total of it? And it it made me actually invent, even though there were many practical things also in the book, invent new ways of engaging both. And I found it so so so strong. Do you have any like practical example except from the printer where somebody you know wanted to engage people, the writers, and did that through engaging also the the elephant?

SPEAKER_03 16:54

Yeah, well, I mean, like compliance training is one of our kind of constant struggles, right? Like if you're dealing with financial compliance or something like that, you know, you're trying to um engage with something that's just not that interesting. You know, it's just not. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

I've I've walked in a in the back room of a hotel uh when I was training a hotel, and they were there was somebody just clicking on a board, and and I was saying, you know, you've been doing this now for two hours. What are you doing? I'm doing everybody's compliance training.

SPEAKER_03 17:25

Oh my god, because HR makes us no, I collect those stories. That one just got added to the pile of doing everybody's doing everybody's compliance training. That's fantastic because yeah, uh, somebody told me a story, it was for accountants, and it was they had this required, they had to get 40 hours of training every year to maintain their their licensure and their certification. And so somebody described a story to me of a guy going to the back of the classroom. So he was in a physical classroom, it was an eight-hour day. So he was gonna get eight credit hours from that, and he opened up two laptops in the back of the classroom and was going through two e-learning at the same time that he was in the classroom. So by the end of the day, he was gonna have 24 hours. And I'm like, well, if you make the point just finishing, and that's the only reason that somebody sees to do it, he was totally winning, you know. He was he was finishing really efficiently, yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

So he should be applauded. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:24

Yeah, but I I love the like, what are you doing? Oh, just doing everybody's compliance training. Yes, that's absolutely gonna be added to it.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

We need to do it by Thursday, otherwise we don't get the reward or we don't get, you know, the green dot or something. Right.

SPEAKER_03 18:37

Well, and and if we wanted to sort of just take that, and and actually I'm gonna do a session on this scene um where we we take kind of compliance or technical training and try to figure out how do we flip it and make it more engaging. But um, if we wanted to do that, you know, the question is well, these rules exist for a reason. Like they're not, you know, they're not completely purposeless, they are associated with bad things that happened at some point, yeah, right. Um so can I put somebody in the situation of dealing with one of these bad things and you know identifying the ways that they could have prevented it? Or can I put somebody in the situation of being the compliance auditor who's looking for all the places where the compliance stuff wasn't followed? And now you've got a now you've got a challenge, you've got a task, it's immediate. I'm trying to find things, I'm trying to do it, but I actually have something I need to use this information for. Yes. And, you know, like this is not an insignificant amount of work, this, you know, to to build these things, although I'm a little bit of an AI skeptic, but I my hope is that it will allow us to build more, you know, interesting scenarios for people to solve and learning things, you know, faster and more easily than we've been able to do so in the past. If I have to like find the 12 different places where the compliance rules weren't followed, that's at least something that I can get my hands on. You know, it's at least something the elephant could be like, oh, we have something we're doing right now.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, at least it could be sort of a game, like how many did you find? At least that will help. Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I remember working with a mining company in Australia, and uh safety is a big issue there. And they had tried like everything to talk to these like guys with muscles and mustaches, and you know, how to get them to talk about safety because it was almost like safety, if you talk about it, you're like not male enough or something. It was like almost devaluated, and um, so what we found out at the end is we had everybody bring three pictures of the most important people for them to come back out of the mine for and put those up, and they actually took them down in the mine and hung them up and said, Hey, I need to be back there for my wife, my spouse, my children. Uh and that actually helped. And and I think that was an example of talking also to the elephant and making it more absolutely, absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:03

I I've done some work with like construction site safety things and stuff like that. And you know, if you think about it, like, okay, this beam is 12 feet off the ground, right? So not that high, but high, but not that high. Yeah, I should go and get a harness and put it on to walk across this beam and go, you know, work on that thing on the other side of it. Or I could just walk across it. And your elephant's like, ah, it's probably fine. You know, like the elephant, you know, likes probabilities, right? Like it's like, oh, most of the time and it works out, it's all right, you know, that kind of thing. And, you know, if you think about it and you said, okay, is saving 10 minutes worth not seeing your child graduate from high school? Well, nobody would say, Yeah, saving 10 minutes is worth not seeing my child graduate from high school. Nobody would say that. Right, but that's not the math that's happening. The math is happening is do I Think a bad you know, do I think I will fall off this beam and injure myself? You know, or having to go to my kids' graduation in a wheelchair, or not being able to continue doing this job, or you know, any of these kinds of things. And like the risk isn't worth it. And you know, I when I've worked with safety professionals, they're absolutely clear, they're like, it doesn't save time because when it does happen, it takes so much, you know, time and resources that like it's doing it the right way saves time in the long run. But like all this little mental accounting is really hard for us as humans to do, but but keeping that, you know, so like building the habit of asking the question of is it worth it not going home safe to my family? Yes, okay, I'll go get the harness, you know, that kind of yeah, let's do it.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Yeah, let's not think about maybe 10 minutes extra break because I didn't do you know, think about the the important stuff. Yeah, wonderful. So you've developed what I call the derksome change ladder with good reason by not being performing a behavior when they know they should, they know how, and they're still not doing it. So when you diagnose a problem, where do most organizations get stuck on that ladder? What's the most common ones that you see?

SPEAKER_03 23:18

Yeah, and that ladder to do the credits or the you know the sourcing on it. Um Robert West and Claire Stevens and some other people were using something similar when they were uh doing the research that they were doing was looking at if we meet people where they are, can we send more effective messaging around things like texting while driving or alcohol cessation or smoking cessation or things like that? And so the latter, and I this is kind of a generalized form of it that I use. So it sort of asks, is the you know, do people not know about the behavior at all? Right? So maybe it's a new vaccine that I I didn't know. I just found out recently that based on my age, I am now ill eligible to get the pneumonia vaccine in the US. Oh, right. Well, that didn't used to be the case, it was older, you know, and I think it was, you know, it was about how much vaccine do they have and you know, things like that. And so that was news to me. Like I will absolutely like, oh, I can get it, you know, as in at my age, sure. Well then let's go. Yeah. And so that was a case where just knowing some information about the behavior changed the behavior, and I'm like, yes, I will get vaccinated. Where let's go. So that was purely a knowledge thing, and I didn't know that I could, and once I knew that, I did. So great, fantastic. Um, but then we get into I know about the behavior, but it's not a, you know, I'm not totally convinced, right? So some people don't get vaccinated because they have hesitation about vaccines, and there's a bunch of complicated reasons why that's the case. Um or I know about the behavior and I genuinely think I should get vaccinated, but like making an appointment and and getting it done is is a lot of hassle right now. And I I'll get I'll I'll deal with it. I'll I'm sure I'll be at the doctor's office sometime. I'll deal with it then, right? So um, so in you know, one is I just didn't know. Two is I know, but I'm not totally persuaded that I should. Three is I'm persuaded that I should, but I it's just not a priority for me at this point. And then um then we start to move into, oh, I would, but I can't find figure out where to get vaccinated. You know, I don't know who can do it for me, or I don't know if I can get it covered by my insurance because I live in the US, um, where health insurance is a whole thing. Um, you know, uh, you know, or I I um I'm ready to do it, but you know, like I'm out of state. Like so it starts to become I'm I'm totally in on the behavior, I'm totally ready to do it, but now I just need some practical assistance. I need some help. I need somebody to like take my hand and be like, here's how we're gonna go and do this, or here's where you can do it, or here's how it can be done. Um it might be that I feel anxious about it, right? Like it could be that I I don't feel, you know, like, oh, I'm nervous about needles, or you know, to continue. I I'm not sure if the vaccine one is gonna carry all the way through. I might have to switch my example. But you know, like it might be that, you know, if it was say getting started with exercise, right? Um, that's another one because that's a behavior we want people to do kind of regularly.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 26:17

Um, you know, it may be that I believe that exercise is good. I I know I want to do it, I've even made it a priority, but now I'm feeling intimidated, right, by going to the gym.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Um because I see all these super muscular people and I'm not one of those. So oh my God, let me turn around and walk back. Right, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:38

So if it's exercise motivation and it's, you know, you're feeling insecure about it, and you need someone to basically take you by the hand and kind of help you and feel confident and do enough that you're feeling like you're doing something and accomplishing something, but not so much that it's horrible and unpleasant and makes you not want to do it anymore. You know, we don't do a very good job of kind of creating that sort of soft landing for people who are trying to start exercising. Yeah. You know, we say you need this much time and you need this much intensity and all of those kinds of things. And that may be right, but that shouldn't be like people's very first experience with it.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

No, I remember I have a very bad knee, and it took me years to, you know, trust myself to find the right exercise that wouldn't make my knee worse. Right. And that was my excuse for a very long time to not move my body at all. Yeah, yeah, very recognized.

SPEAKER_03 27:30

My knees are, I also have I don't have I don't have that same exact problem, but like kneeling on anything is quite painful. And so when I finally just admitted that I I'm not gonna do yoga if you make me kneel on things, I was like, oh, there's a whole world of standing yoga that I can totally do. That's great. Um and then we get into things like maintenance, right? I've tried it a little bit, but I'm not kind of building a consistent habit, or I've been doing it kind of consistently, but it's starting to fall off and be a little bit rocky. And those tend to be the areas where we sort of have a little less research and a little less solutions because it it's a harder thing to research on like longitudinal studies and things like that. But we know that as people move through this continuum, what they really need changes completely as they as they kind of move through. So, like the first step, they do need information. I needed to know that I was eligible to get a particular vaccine at my age. Great, perfect, beautiful, supply information. But then as soon as we start to move down a little, it's not about information so much as it is about persuasion or messaging or experiences that help people, you know, kind of feel comfortable or seeing consequences. And then it kind of moves into actual practical support and assistance. Okay, you're on board, so now we need to help you kind of get over the threshold and get moving with things. And then it moves into things like how do we maintain, especially when it's a behavior we we want people to do regularly over time, how do we maintain? So it might be about um accountability partners, or it might be about tracking mechanisms, or it might be about kind of increased and improved goal setting. It might be about the body double is like an excellent thing.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Yeah, absolutely. I never knew this, and it's work so much. Sometimes I'm hesitating about an email or about reaching out to someone and just tell one of my colleagues, sit next to me until I do it. Or your phone, but sit next to me. And the body double just does it for me. It's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I love that. Yeah, yeah. So, where do most companies or organizations or maybe even designers like us get it wrong? Where in the ladder do we often, or do we forget almost every step? How yeah, I mean a trend.

SPEAKER_03 29:41

You know, the the tendency is when people aren't doing something is to add in, you know, sort of add more information in louder and more emphatically.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 29:51

Um, and if that isn't the issue, then that's not what they need. So convincing people that it's super, super, super important isn't gonna fix if what they really need is a little bit of practical assistance.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Yes. And you know, if sending more PowerPoint, sending more movies, explaining it one more time, putting it on the internet, there's information there. Oh, got it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:12

Yeah, there's um there's a researcher, Gabrielle Ottagen, who talks about she's her method is kind of whoop, and she looked specifically at the question of whether like picturing yourself being successful was a good motivator. It turns out it's not great because that was a big thing for a bit, you know, for a minute where it was like you're supposed to picture yourself being amazing and successful. Uh, it turns out that it's not super helpful. What works much better is kind of going, let me think through all the things that might stop me from doing this and create plans for those. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

So that kind of action planning piece, right? Yes, the action planning is very powerful. I heard they did that with the elections in Georgia, where they action plan, what if it's raining on the on the day off? What if what if your car breaks down? Uh to work around all of those. Those are much more powerful. Wonderful. Yeah, and even just what time are you gonna go vote?

SPEAKER_03 31:00

And you know, do you know where you're gonna go vote? Let's get that, let's keep let's make sure you know where you're gonna go vote and decide what time, okay, you're gonna go over lunch. Great. You know, what if it's busy because everybody else is going over lunch, then yeah, you get into the action side piece and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Good. But also, I've heard, and you write about that in the book too. We need to stop blaming learners. And I think when I first read it, I was like, I'm never blaming learners, they're intelligent, they want to learn. But the more I thought about it, sometimes, you know, we just were on the phone at the end of a training session with another trainer who finished another trainer session, and they weren't really into it, or they weren't prepared, or management didn't do this, or they're not that dedicated to the company, or we're blaming learners for not learning. How do you redirect that conversation without immediately making enemies? Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 31:54

Well, there's a quote that I'm kind of obsessed with, which is it's probably Edward Deming, but attribution's a little murky. But it's the quote is every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Yes. And so if you've got a room full of people who are not engaged and on board, then what about the system is designed to create them not being engaged and not being on board? Yes. And can you have that conversation with them? You know, and like sometimes it's just that it hasn't connected for them. You know, you can't connect it to things that they care about, right? And there are some things that are just never gonna be that inspiring. Like one of the examples I use is people filling out their timesheets. Well, you're never gonna have people passionate about filling out their timesheets. Woohoo! And it's just not gonna be, you know, it's just not gonna be something people are like, yay, I get to fill out my timesheet. But, you know, like it feels like dumb paperwork that's a distraction from other things. And so, you know, can you connect it to real things? Like, here's how this, this is how it makes the accounting person's life difficult when you don't fill out your timesheet. Like this is how this is all the hassle she has to go through every single week because you're not filling out your timesheet. Well, most people aren't jerks and most people don't want to make their coworkers' lives difficult, but that's usually invisible to them that that's the outcome of it. Um and you know, and obviously a timesheet's connected to the role of the organization and you know, the viability and ultimately you having a job and all sorts of really important things, but a lot of those connections are really not visible and not clear. And and honestly, when something's always gonna be a tedious, unpleasant task like filling out timesheets, it's never gonna be fun. Um but it's always worth, you know, when you're looking at it from the systems approach, how do I make this as easy as possible for this person to do? Right. Yeah. And maybe we all body double, like we all jump in on Monday at 8 15 for a 10-minute Zoom call where we all just do our time sheets together and then we all go, woo, yay, you know, or high five or whatever it is, right? Um, you know, so like can I figure out ways to make this behavior, you know, like, and when we look at it, um, there's a mut many different motivation models. I like self-determination theory, I think it has lots of useful things to say, but I would never claim that it's the you know the only or the even necessarily the most important model. But one of the things they talk about is connectedness. So if we're all doing our timesheets together at the same time and then we, you know, we do a high five at the end of it, like that's a value, that's a motivator of that kind of feeling of connectedness. We're all doing a thing, and it's you know, and our elephants are all like, hey, we're hanging out with the people and we're doing a thing, you know? Yeah. And so the leaning on you'll get punished if you don't do your timesheet, or you'll get yelled at, or you know, whatever. Well, you know, if those things were super effective motivators, they probably would have worked by now. So let's maybe try something different. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

I I always try to ask myself the question if they're not doing it, what has to be like the issue for me to also not want to do it? Yeah, and how can we resolve for that? Yeah, one of the one, yeah, yeah. Let's go AI. You already said a little bit about that. Uh so in a world flooded with AI tools, and I had recently had a conversation with Dr. uh Clark Quinn, and he even said it's we are in an AI bubble. So he was even you know warning for it to pop. Uh, but in a world of AI tools and instant content generation, how should designers avoid adding more noise and instead use these technologies to support real learners' outcomes?

SPEAKER_03 35:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

Well, you have any yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:43

The AI thing is so interesting to me from a behavioral point of view because one of the really crucial things that anybody, specifically talking to large language model AI, because there's different kinds. Um, but if we specifically talk to large language model AI, one of the things that everybody agrees on is super crucial is for people to diligently check the output of the AI and make sure that it's right. Yes. And so then we start to look at something like COMB, which is is are they capable? Do they have the opportunity? Are they motivated? And when we look at capability, that's an interesting thing because most people using AI right now are people who already know how to do their jobs. And so they're using their A the AI to do it faster or easier. And they are capable of judging the outputs. But that's gonna, you know, that's gonna change. Like new people come into jobs, and if AI is built into the workflow, they may or may not have the opportunity to kind of learn some of the things they need in order to be able to do that. So that's something that we need to look at. But you know, opportunity is kind of about does the physical environment afford things and stuff like that. Um you know, and and we would look at the question of if we want people to judge the outputs, you know, does the environment make it easy for them to judge the outputs or make them easy to revise or you know, things like that? Um and it's AI is interesting in that respect because I, you know, when I'm using a ChatGPT or something like that to try to do something, if I want to change it, you know, because it's not quite right and I change it, then I get something that has changed more than I wanted it to necessarily. So there's things about the environment that make that subset of challenges. But then the motivation piece, we know defaults are a very powerful strategy in behavioral design because people tend to accept defaults. Yes. And this has been used quite a bit. There's a lot of fairly famous research around organ donation, and people are much more likely to list themselves as organ donors on um, you know, in the US it's driver's licenses. I'm not sure what it is, other places, but they're much more likely to list themselves organ donors if it's already checked when they get there. They're like, okay, well, I guess I'll leave it.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

And so we know that the f-in our country, you are a donor unless you object to it and take remove yourself. Exactly. Very good.

SPEAKER_03 38:03

And so that is, and and I mean, it's all a more complicated system than that, but nonetheless, like people were more likely to do it if the default is is that it's selected, if you're you're designated unless you opt out. And all of you know, people are being presented with a lot of defaults, sort of good looking, kind of sort of right answers by the AI. And the idea that they're gonna diligently check it and make sure it's completely 100% right before passing it on is not historically verifiable in human behavior. That's not how we usually read it.

SPEAKER_01 38:42

I recently got flooded with emails of questions about doing a keynote. I'd done a very famous keynote and there were lots of questions coming in. And somebody had asked, Can you do this date? And I couldn't do the date. So, with everybody that I could do the date, I wrote a personal email and I had six or seven that I had to say no to because the date didn't match. I put those in Chat GPT. And one of them, the last one, when I was completely tired, I was like, Oh my god, just plugged it into the email, which in which I offered to think with them on the topics they could do and even help them find another person. And I send it out. Oh my goodness. I was so ashamed, and I I actually, you know, confessed. But it was terrible. It was terrible because I yeah, that's the default. That's just all right, it's done. Whoops, let's send it out.

SPEAKER_03 39:33

And it had been like five that were fine, and then like the sixth one, you were like, Oh, it's gonna also be fine because that's how and I sent them a link to to plan an appointment with me.

SPEAKER_01 39:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I ended up doing the appointment and really helping them because I promised, but that was Chat GPT's fault or my default brain fault.

SPEAKER_03 39:52

Yeah, well, you know, like that is just not something that we're really spectacular at as humans, is double checking defaults. There's a reason why copy editors are a very specialized profession, and you need a very particular kind of set of skills and you know, almost a set of you know, capabilities to be good at copy editing materials. You know, I'm I'm writing a new book right now, and I very much know I'm gonna like leave the verb out of certain sentences and that you know it's gonna require on and go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Like, and then I I can't copy edit my own writing because I know what it's supposed to say, and so I I just read it like I expect to, in the same way that you, you know, like accepted the email and the what you know is what you expected it to say, and then didn't realize until afterwards that it was like, oh, that one, that one was different.

SPEAKER_01 40:48

Yes, yes. Tell me a little bit more about your new book. I can't wait. When is it coming? What is it about?

SPEAKER_03 40:54

Yeah. So the other chapter in the in Design for How People Learn that I was like, oh, we're just getting started, was the chapter on skills development. And um, and that's an interesting thing right now with the AI because right there's the whole issue of are we just gonna use AI? Do people really need still need to develop skills? I think yes. So I'm gonna I agree. Um, but one of the things we see all too often is kind of insufficient practice, and so being more realistic about like what level of practice something's gonna take. We seem to understand it when it's like um hands-on skill. So we know that nobody's gonna be able to play volleyball without practicing, and you don't want a doctor, you know, performing surgery who hasn't practiced, and you don't want a pilot who hasn't practiced, but then we go over to something like managerial or leadership training, and we're like, well, we'll just tell them stuff and they'll do one role play and then they go off and they do it. And it's like, well, actually, this stuff's really hard and it needs a lot of practice.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

Um, and then we still some people still call that a soft skill. Uh when it's a very hard skill, yeah, yeah, true.

SPEAKER_03 42:00

Yeah, and so it's really about like what are the different things that you when you're being presented with a skill that you're gonna create a learning experience for, really sort of being able to break it down and kind of go, what should practice, how would I teach this skill and what should practice look like for something like this? Oh, that's wonderful. How long do we still have to wait? Well, if I can stick to my schedule, it should be out in the fall sometime.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

So looking forward to the case.

SPEAKER_03 42:28

My publisher's pretty quick. That's actually a pretty fast turnaround time in the industry. Good. Oh, good, can't wait. Do you have a title yet? Uh Design for How People Build Skills is the current title. We'll see if it sticks. Sometimes we tweak, but uh but that's the current, that's the current version of it.

SPEAKER_01 42:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:49

Yeah, this may be the first time I've told anybody publicly the title.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

So yeah. So let me go to the last question to wrap it all up. If somebody listening right now could only do one thing tomorrow, they're you know struggling with the design or training something, and they could shift their practice towards actual behavior change. And what would that one thing be? What would you if you had a magic wand and you could touch all the designers all around the world, what would you give them or impart knowledge in them in their brain, or talk to their writer, or the elephant, or both to for them to do differently?

SPEAKER_03 43:24

Yeah, so the so I'm gonna say two because I'm gonna cheat. One is to really ask that question of what's everything that's in the system right now that's causing the behavior to either happen or not happen? And how many of these things can I impact with trading? So that's that's one question. And then the other question is what are the feedback mechanisms and how can we improve it for how can we improve the feedback that people are getting on the behavior?

SPEAKER_01 43:47

So yes. All right, let me just thank you. And I might actually read the book in the fall and ask you back to talk about your next book. Yeah, but I'll pop online for that. Can I thank you so Much everybody, please give it up for Julie Dirksen. That's awesome. Thank you for being here. Yeah, thank you. This has been such a fun conversation.

SPEAKER_03 44:06

So thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 44:08

No more boring learning. This was the Brain Bakery Podcast. Want to know more? Follow us on our socials.