Deck the Halls and the Secret to Engaging Learners

Every December, advertisers declare open season. Targeted ads, twinkling retail displays, a coordinated campaign for your attention that tells you what you want until it's genuinely difficult to identify what you need.

I wrote this because L&D does the same thing to learners, and mostly doesn't realize it.

Faced with enormous quantities of content and a limited amount of attention, we reach for format. Augmented reality, now that every phone supports it. Whiteboarding, the reliable classic. Gamification. Each is a legitimate tool, and each gets deployed for the same reason as a holiday window display, to capture attention in a crowded field.

The problem is that attention captured isn't the same as need met. An advertiser is satisfied when you look. We should only be satisfied when someone can do something afterward that they couldn't do before. Those are very different goals, and format innovation serves the first far more reliably than the second.

So the secret in the title isn't a technique. It's a reorientation, moving from what will get their attention to what do they actually need, which is a harder question and much less fun to answer with a new tool.

A lighter piece, seasonally framed, but the argument underneath is one of my more persistent ones. If your learning team is having a debate about a new modality, this is worth ten minutes first.