A warm welcome to 2012 to all our customers, (and potential customers!). As this is the season for resolutions, I can share with you that ours is to widen our circle of contacts by asking our customers to recommend their colleagues and associates to register on our website. In return we will reward our new contacts with some free resources and regular information which we hope they will find useful, and our existing clients with several incentives on purchasing our products. If you are visiting this site or blog for the first time, we hope you’ll consider registering by clicking HERE. We are fortunate to have a large number of customers who have been very positive about our products and our support for their work; and we are grateful that they are responding so well to help us achieve our 2012 goals.

We also plan a number of new product launches in 2012 both in the ‘physical world’ with RSVP Design and in the ‘App world’ via our sister organisation Mobile Learning Design. If there is a tool, activity or mobile device application you’d like to see developed for a training need, then please email your suggestions to graham@rsvpdesign.co.uk and we’ll consider it as part of our product development planning process.

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RSVP Design was delighted to establish a new distribution relationship in 2011 with Experience Corner, based in Warsaw, Poland. Experience Corner is the first on-line store in Poland offering interactive training tools from globally known brands, and following an invitation from colleagues at Experience Corner, last month I made my first visits to and Krakow and Warsaw to introduce some of our products to their customers. It is always exciting to travel to a new city and although I had just returned from a visit to the USA, I was looking forward to seeing Krakow and watching the reactions of the Polish audience to our products. Alicja and Joanna from Experience Corner met me on the first evening I arrived, but by then I had already had the chance to wander around the main square in Krakow and begin to sample what was clearly a popular and vibrant city!

Experience Corner have translated all the facilitator manuals as well as the delegate briefs for several of our learning tools, so I although I would have an interpreter with me during the events, her main role would simply be to help me understand what was being said in Polish as the groups worked with their own language version materials. The Krakow event was held on a large converted Dutch barge on the river, and I was pleased to see that Experience Corner, like RSVP Design, believes that the learning environment is important in making events memorable for participants! It was a wonderful old vessel, and I could have happily sailed along the river on what was a beautiful sunny day! The delegates were a mixture of internal training specialists and other training consultants, and were extremely enthusiastic in their participation. I used our Images of Organisations™ metaphor cards to open the session and to get pairs and triads discussing what their training challenges were, and I was delighted to see that Polish people have no problems in working with metaphor in this way. We then had a group play Colourblind® with a number of observers and again, not only were they enthusiastic, but very disciplined in their problem solving approaches, which helped them reach a successful conclusion fairly quickly. To show how RSVP Design would sequence activities we then introduced Simbols™ (using the Team Version) to show how we might build on similar behaviours using a different activity, and finished with Challenging Assumptions™ – again it was comforting to see Polish people make exactly the same assumptions in this exercise as other Nationalities we have tried it with around the world!

The following day (well, very early in the morning!) we took the train to Warsaw where I presented to a larger group (some 45 people) in probably my most unusual training venue ever – the deep end of an old swimming pool (thankfully undergoing a conversion to an arts venue!). I was interested to see if our dinner discussion the night before about Polish stereotypical group behaviour suggested by my hosts as being  ‘a lot of heated discussion, but when agreement is reached there will be a uniform acceptance of the new direction – perhaps to the detriment of thinking about alternative strategies’. During this larger session I decided to use Webmaster® to see if these behavioural stereotypes would play out. Whether by coincidence or as a reflection of these stereotypes I did indeed witness a lot of heated discussion after the initial problem-solving portion of Webmaster® (creating the first construction). I observed lots of discussion with many overlapping conversations, and several people taking a lead as to how they though they could best achieve the team performance increase required (i.e. complete the whole construction in under 2 minutes, from an original build time of 25 minutes). None of the available exercise time was used for further practice or rehearsal purposes – it was all used for ‘discussion’. Eventually as the time limit began to expire (somehow!) the group agreed on a strategy and every one of the 30 strong group delivered on that strategy and managed to achieve the objective! There was a lot of discussion following this activity (most of which I was unable to understand!), and I get the sense that Webmaster® could become a popular activity in Poland!

Although this was a very short trip I saw enough to know that I want to go back and experience more Polish cooking, Polish beer, Polish socialising and Polish customers, and I look forward to a successful partnership between Experience Corner and RSVP Design.

Graham Cook

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Corporate Universities are, almost exclusively, found as appendages of big corporations. In the USA the HR-driven corporate university has represented to a very high degree the choice of large organisations that need to process a large number of employees through diverse learning experiences. Over the past 20 years I’ve worked with many of these institutions, developing new learning content, introducing experiential methods and working alongside faculty to better target specific learning outcomes. I’m currently mid-way through an extended project with the CU of a major food and beverage multinational, creating experiential practice-fields for the leadership models they are introducing.

A brief down-time in this project recently led me to consider what characterises the way that CU’s approach the business of learning, the “What’s good and what’s not?” of Corporate Universities.

Top of the “what’s good?” list is the way that CU’s live and breathe their corporate culture. Learning happens in an environment which always feels like the concentrated essence of their corporate culture, an immersive learning environment that lives and breathes company ways of working. As an outsider it’s always a little daunting to first step into these unique environments, a state that I can describe in this way:

I’ve been invited here because of what I know i.e. I’m an expert, but this whole experience places an emphasis on what I don’t know i.e. I’m an alien in this place.

At this point I know I’m going to have to bring my ‘A-game’ to this job.

The result of this situation is that the learning that happens in a CU needs little translation or adaptation to be applicable in the operational part of the business. It was conceived, developed, delivered and evaluated in an environment that is totally geared towards the business of the parent company. People leave knowing what they have to do to deliver what their company wants them to deliver.

What this means for my work is that I will be given very clear design direction – I’ll be told very clearly what learning outcomes are needed, and given very strong feedback around whether my designs are a good fit with ‘how we do business’. As a designer I enjoy the challenge of very quickly assimilating the corporate culture and language, and producing seamlessly compatible designs – “going chameleon” I call it.

The flip side of this is that the walls (physical and metaphorical) around many Corporate Universities are pretty high and not easily breached by new thinking and new ideas. Let me say up-front that this is a generalisation, I work with some institutions that are extremely innovative and open to best-practice thinking. Indeed I can cite instances where particular CU’s actually lead the field in innovative learning practice: but for many their approach to corporate education demonstrates all the negative effects of “limited gene-pool learning”.

At RSVP Design we specialise in learning innovation, and that is, in most cases, why clients buy our services. We bring new ideas, new approaches, new thinking. And that makes it pretty disappointing when we can see where our approaches would breathe fresh life into some dated and tired situation, only to be told “that won’t work here” or “that’s not how we do things”. These situations, (and work with CU’s often produce them), are typified by a strange paradox:

“We’ve asked you to use your unique expertise to design something that we can’t, but we can’t accept your design because it’s different to what we do.”

I’m happy to say that my current work hasn’t encountered this paradox, it’s going well and the pilot programmes suggest we’re ready to deliver something special. The culture in the CU is strong, but open to well-informed, well-presented influence, just about the ideal situation.

Now if all Corporate Universities could hit that happy medium………

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Very often, when I describe and demonstrate RSVP Design’s range of experiential learning activities to L+D professionals, consultants and HR advisors, they respond in a predictable fashion. Something along the lines of…

“Yes, I do use games and learning activities like these with some groups but I couldn’t possibly offer these to some of my clients – they are much too senior.”

There seems to be a belief that the more senior a leader or manager in an organisation, the less likely they are to respond positively to learning through the ‘metaphor’ that a well-designed learning activity or simulation offers. It is perceived that these activities add value, for example, to a team-building event or to a management skills workshop for young employees but that they are, in some way, inappropriate for more senior leaders. There is a fear and anxiety about offering a form of learning that is seen as too trivial for senior executive education.

“I couldn’t offer that at Board level – they simply wouldn’t engage with it…..”

Our experience is exactly the opposite. The more senior and successful leaders are in a business environment, the more likely they are to engage with the learning activities we offer and to play, experiment and challenge their own learning and performance. They ‘get it’. They have the ability to see beyond the presenting activity and understand the processes it mirrors. They are also confident enough in themselves that they have nothing to prove – they are ‘comfortable in their own skins’ and able to demonstrate a willingness to step outside of their comfort zone -even if it means short-term failure – in order to develop their own, and their organisations’, performance.

Ben Bryant, a skilled and experienced psychologist, is  Professor of Leadership and Organization at IMD. He commissioned RSVP Design recently to work with him on perhaps the most senior programme we have ever delivered. The participants built geometric shapes out of plastic construction components, raced wheeled vehicles along the floor and connected complex webs of coloured ropes in order to solve a puzzle. They were completely engaged and immediately able to make the connections between what they were doing and the leadership capability they were at IMD to develop.

Ben explained this to us from a psychologist’s perspective. He confirmed that it is all about ego. These leaders are so senior they’ve left their egos behind. They don’t have to prove themselves – their track records stand for themselves. They can make the connections, see the big picture, be confident in their own abilities – confident enough to allow themselves to play, get things wrong, make a fool of themselves, knowing that that is crucial in learning and innovating. They can see the parallels in the ’simulated world’ and the ‘concrete world’.’

In contrast, we experience much more resistance from more junior team leaders and managers – the very people for whom these activities are often chosen. Many of them are likely to be working from a position of uncertainty and anxiety and they need to keep proving themselves to their teams and colleagues. They are reluctant to step into the unknown – concerned about losing the respect and confidence of those they manage. Asking them to leave ‘ego’ behind is a much bigger challenge. So, offering an experiential exercise becomes high risk for the facilitator and participating is high risk for the manager. It may be rejected as ‘demeaning’, when in fact it is just too scary!

Knowing this can help the learning designer to choose and frame appropriate activities and consider the appropriate level of ‘confrontation’ that the activity, and the facilitation, offers. The more successful and senior your team, the more likely they are to respond positively to the challenging experiential learning opportunities you offer. For all sorts of reasons, primarily to do with organisational politics, senior leaders are starved of in-depth, unfiltered, authentic feedback. Well researched, well-designed and well-facilitated experiential learning provides a rare opportunity for senior leaders to tap into the support and challenge that they are hungry to receive.

For more information about RSVP Design’s work with Senior Leadership teams, please contact us via the website

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk

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I am delighted to announce that Interel Inc. from San Francisco and RSVP Design Ltd. are forming a new partnership that will see their respective product portfolios merge and both organisations work together to continue to support customers around the world with the most effective activity-based learning tools and learning design support. Although RSVP Design and Interel have worked together informally for several years this is a new development in formally providing all shipping and logistical support for both sets of products. Interel in the US will support all US customers and RSVP Design in the UK will support all non-US customers – both sets of products will be available for purchase from either location.

Key product designers Boyd Watkins, Geoff Cox and Ann Alder have worked together before but this announcement signals an intention to provide a truly global and probably unparalleled level of experience in designing effective learning environments.

You can download the official press release here: RSVP Design & Interel Press Release

Please visit the RSVP Design online store to see the additional Interel experiential learning devices now added. Larger scale devices like Pyramid, Network and Mosaic provide some fantastic new tools for large group meetings and for use in outdoor environments.

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This was the question I was asked this morning by an interviewer who telephoned me and wanted to include my response in an article for a training journal.It was 1130 and she wanted to go to press by lunchtime, so I was asked to think on my feet!

She modified her question and said, “What are the five most important things Learning and Development specialists can do to ensure that the training they offer is really learner-centred?”

In the 10 minutes I was allowed, I came up with the following five. I wonder what yours would have been?

1. Understand how learners really learn. The work the University of Bristol has been doing on ELLI seems to have defined the key dimensions of learning: everything effective learners do. Tim Small of ViTaL Partnerships said of the lead researcher Ruth Deakin-Crick, “If there was anything else that effective learners do, Ruth would have found it. We believe this really is the ‘DNA’ of Learning”.

2. Make learning problem-based and purposeful. Adult learning needs to be relevant and useful to the learner, helping them to solve problems, generate innovations and make their lives more rewarding. Tap into the desire to solve relevant problems and use these as the basis for your learning design.

3. Identify and use past and current experience. Link new learning to what is already in place. Identify if and when it conflicts with what is already ‘known’: explore how to integrate new pieces into old patterns.

4. Use simulation. Simulations allow us to explore and rehearse in a safe environment, encouraging experiment and risk-taking. What we learn in the ’synthetic’ world we can transfer to the ‘concrete’ world. In relation to this, there are some interesting figures related to computer based simulation in the report below. Dr. Geoff Cox’s doctoral thesis suggests this is also true of behavioural and ‘physical’ simulation, although the figures given here only apply to computer simulations.

Overall, declarative knowledge was 11% higher for trainees taught with simulation games than a comparison group; procedural knowledge was 14% higher; retention was 9% higher; and self-efficacy was 20% higher.

For anyone wanting to review the whole paper you can find it here: A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Effectiveness of Computer-Based Simulation Games

5. Attach emotion to learning. Emotion drives behaviour. If we attempt to learn in an emotionally ’sterile’ environment we are unlikely to become engaged and motivated enough to press for real behavioural change. This is why experiential learning – with its associated frustrations, anxieties, challenges, satisfactions and passion – remains such a powerful technology.

I’d be interested in your additions to my top five!

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We have been struggling for several years to adequately describe what we do in terms of our ‘30 second elevator pitch’. It’s that horrible bit when an acquaintance or even a close friend/relative says ‘Graham, what do RSVP Design actually do?’ We use terms like experiential learning or activity-based learning – but these typically only work for people who are immersed in learning & development and understand this jargon. I was glad therefore to read a couple of articles recently which describes some of what we do in more plain English terms. The first was the wonderful Thiagi (see http://www.thiagi.com/index.html ). Thiagi was talking about ‘Jolts’ – short pieces of activity/games/training that can be used to ‘wake-up’ delegates and remind them that things were not what they thought, or to ensure that they are ready to accept a change in pace, direction, content or some other move in terms of the training programme. What I love about Thiagi’s philosophy is that he still maintains that you spend every second you have with your learners focused on delivering the required learning outcomes (even although he sometimes uses some very simplistic ideas that I think might not work with a typically cynical UK senior management group). This is in contrast to many US-based trainers who still use rubber chickens and a host of other childish ice-breakers that they genuinely believe will somehow make people more responsive to their forthcoming, and finally relevant, learning content!

I think a ‘jolt’ is a good example of what we provide through some of our learning tools and helps people understand what we mean by creating ‘learning tools that are effective and engaging’. I’d consider tools such as Challenging Assumptions, Images of Customer Experience and Seeing the Point as successful ‘Jolts’ . Although Thiagi maintains Jolts should be short in time duration, I’ve also seen many wonderful insights created through a  Jolt delivered by a longer experiential activity like Colourblind that can take 30 minutes to complete. I do think people often need a good amount of time to really reflect on the ‘Jolt’.

The second article discussed the ‘triune brain theory’ (also important in Whole Brain Learning Theory) and the fact that although humans have many specialist parts of our brain, a lot of training seems only to be aimed at particular parts. The triune brain theory model considers our brain as evolving from three distinct parts – the reptilian brain, which manages typical ‘fight or flight’ responses; the mammalian brain or limbic system which manages emotions and memory; and the neo-cortex or ‘upper’ brain which deals with logic, analysis, synthesis etc. A lot of training aimed at the so-called higher-order thinking processes can forget to include key areas such as emotion and memory – much of which makes learning ’stick’  and therefore be more likely to be applied, and is key in behavioural change. This article can be found in the October 2010 edition of Training Journal: ‘The Three Brain of Training’. There are a lot of tips and techniques for trainers that we would certainly agree with – and would also suggest that well designed experiential activities can provide the necessary engagement with all three brains:

1. They can provide that ’safe’ environment necessary for rehearsing new skills and behaviours, satisfying the reptilian brain

2.They can provide the emotional engagement for the mammalian brain through providing engaging and elegant game play that can provide a memorable ‘anchor’ for later recall and application

3. They can provide the necessary challenge required in adult learning that is also clearly linked to workplace issues,  to satisfy the upper level thinking processes for the neo-cortex that allows for generative learning where participants can integrate their new learning with old models.

I’m happy tell people that ‘we design games that engage each one of your three brains!’

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Everyone here at RSVP Design and our clients, partners and suppliers would like to congratulate our colleague Geoff Cox on his recent Doctoral award and his new title of Dr. Cox! Outlined below is some further information on Geoff’s Thesis, and you can contact him for more information on geoff@rsvpdesign.co.uk

Back in 2003,  RSVP Design was created with a real sense of mission around utilising, and developing best practice in the design of learning environments. It was recognised at a very early stage that if this mission was to be achieved there was an urgent need to define exactly what “best practice” looked like. It was at that time that Geoff began his research, aimed at making available to designers, practitioners and buyers of learning events a set of guidelines that would help them to discern the best from the rest!

The early stages of the research were plagued with problems. Different terminology on different sides of the Atlantic, a shocking lack of published material relating to the design dimension of learning, and in particular the extent to which RSVP Design needed to demonstrate the unique value of experiential learning: each an impediment to progress. By 2004 a comprehensive examination of published material brought the conclusions:
a) There were no existing guidelines for the design of experiential learning environments
and
b) We were going to have to write our own
and
c) Any thoughts of this being a quick exercise were now out of the window!

That began six years of action research that started with some initial, tentative guidelines that Geoff put forward and asked our facilitation team to report back on. The guidelines were revised, based on their feedback, and he moved to the next piece of design using the new guidelines. This cycle was repeated on multiple occasions, with groups from business school executives to factory supervisors, each time adding to our knowledge of how the emerging guidelines needed to be revised and applied. The research journey was punctuated by some interesting insights, for instance when it was determined that the guidelines were equally applicable to learning environments that were designed to address the needs of young people, and when the guidelines were used successfully for the first time with electronic simulations as the experiential activity.

So finally, (in 2010!) Geoff has defended his Thesis and is now Dr. Cox. We will shortly be publishing an Executive Monograph of his research on the RSVP Design website and we believe that this will be a key contribution to what we believe to be current best practice in the field of learning design.

·It is an open and transparent statement of how RSVP Design creates experiential learning environments.
·It offers clients who are commissioning experiential learning events a language to define their requirements.
·It offers clients who are buying experiential learning events a way of discerning / interrogating the quality of the designs that they are being offered.

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We regularly run in-house and open sessions where trainers can come along to see how our learning tools work and consider how they might use or integrate these kinds of tools in to their development programmes.

Here are some confirmed dates for these programmes:

• London (Wallacespace) June 3rd 2010
• London (Wallacespace) July 8th 2010
• London (Wallacespace) August 19th 2010

To obtain a booking form please email kim@rsvpdesign.co.uk or call +44 141 561 0387

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I had an interesting discussion with my colleague Boyd Watkins recently – owner of Interel (an Action-learning devices company – see www.interel.com ). We were discussing terminology as we increasingly come together with our respective businesses – Boyd sees himself as a ‘challenge’ designer: the creation of challenges where individuals and groups can improve performance in teamwork, leadership and a range of other skills by interacting with engaging and intellectually stimulating ‘challenges’. He sees a distinction between this and the (US) ‘games’ industry which maintains a whole set of specific rules about what constitutes a ‘game’ and often includes a range of  ‘trivial’ props from rubber chickens to bean bags. I must admit I agree that the presentation of such props to a group of senior executives can pose a credibility problem for even the most confident and capable facilitator/trainer! Perhaps a more important distinction is that in ‘game’ play the tendency (much like early experiential learning in the UK) is to watch the participants play the game then debrief at the end – however in challenge or simulation ‘play’ we would advocate that the faciliator can intervene as coach if and when required to aid the learning process, and make best use of the most valuable commodity that a trainer has these days – quality attentive time from learners! The other conclusion that we came to is that RSVP Design is probably best described as a ’simulation’ designer in that all of our learning tools started life as very specific response to a client need, and we design our programmes and activities for clients with their very specific needs in mind, even if the ’simulation environment’ might look very different to real life.

However does all of this matter or is it just semantics? Games, challenges or simulations – what do trainers and faciliators look for when deciding to use learning tools?

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