Why does it all look the same?
By: Kristopher Hall
Tags: Instructional Design, Learning And Development, Elearning, Training, Education

Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash

People love the way concept cars look. They get excited about them. They share pictures of them with friends, and set them as the background image on their phones. They dream of owning them, and allow that even traffic might be bearable if they were surrounded by such beautiful works of art. But the car companies never make them. Instead, the car companies make the same boring box, almost identical to the boring box from last year, and practically indistinguishable from the boring boxes of the other companies.

Over the weekend, I was at a LEGO convention (withhold judgment), and everyone was invited to sit down at a table and build. I watched as the very young to the very old built amazing structures and created scenes of fanciful colors and shapes; some joined their creations together and constructed futuristic and fantastical worlds. But, do you know what I noticed? None of it looked like the world outside. Not a single person had chosen to build a square box for a home, or place a large corporate rectangle skinned in glass to decorate the cityscape. I am pretty sure that LEGO doesn’t produce a beige block, but if they do, none were used.

What does it say that people want cars that look nothing like the ones in their driveways? What does it say that people at the convention created a world with little reference to reality outside of the basic limitations of physics? When given freedom, people imagine and build the world as they would like it to be, not as is it. But why can’t the world reflect what we want, even in controllable areas such as design? Why does it all have to be the same? Why does it all have to be so boring?

We have best practiced and non-offended ourselves out of any creativity or beauty. We have standardized away personality and expression. We have jargoned and buzz worded away any real meaning. We have beige boxed and cubicled workplace training.

Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you watched a YouTube video that started with a list of learning objectives and instructions for how to press play and pause? When was the last time you took an eLearning course at work that didn’t?

Let me give you a syllogism: People like learning from YouTube more than from workplace training materials. Your employees are people. Your employees like learning from YouTube more than your workplace training materials.

Beware the instructional designer who tells you there is a correct way to create a lesson, that rules and procedures must be followed for training to be successful, and that the mechanics of teaching and learning are dependent on the best practices highlighted at the last conference they attended or the newest multi-tiered and acronymed assessment strategy. Training is not accounting. People are not numbers. Learning is not the predictable outcome of a formula.

Obviously, this is not to say that employees can be pointed to YouTube for their job training (even though for some of it they certainly could), or that all training will be exciting (I’m looking at you compliance, although a few airline safety videos might make you question this one.), but it should illuminate the point that employees want a world that more closely mirrors YouTube than the poorly repurposed PowerPoints and predictable eLearning templates of their workplace reality.

This is also not to say that sketch art animations or slapstick corporate videos of the CEO being relatable get us off the hook either. They have become just as hackneyed and cringe inspiring when assigned during onboarding as everything else. It is to say that we should stop expecting, enforcing, and rewarding uninspired deliverables. We should start encouraging and expecting a little art, and a little empathy, and dare I say a little uniqueness.

Lack of creativity, vision, and empathy for the learner should not be rewarded in the field of instructional design and training. Let those who can’t be creative with learning go back to the cubicle in accounts receivable from whence they came.

There are plenty of people in a corporate structure that lack creativity and think like computers. Our role as designers must include challenging these perspectives for the good of the employees that will be forced to ingest the materials we create. We should be an advocate for the people who would rather see a DeLorean than a Corolla. We should be a collaborator for the people who would rather have a koi pond than corporate art. We should be a voice for the people that would rather be watching YouTube than a PowerPoint. After all, isn’t that most of us?