Immerse Yourself - Increasing Learning through Simulation... Gaming Style

Immerse Yourself - Increasing Learning through Simulation... Gaming Style
A conversation with Clark Aldrich, Co-Founder of SimuLearn which is www.simulearn.net, and lead designer of their "Virtual Leader" product, and a step-back to Simulation 101 to bring people listeners/readers up to a common-level of discussion, and then some diving into how to sell and use simulation or other e-learning within an organization, pros and cons of techniques, and a lot of discussion on what e-learning or simulation both can and cannot do. This is you chance to disguise time spent in Second Life as "research" into e-learning!


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If you prefer to read this conversation, view the full blog entry.

Immerse Yourself – Increasing Learning Through Simulation... Gaming Style

Dan Keldsen: This is Dan Keldsen from the Perot Systems Innovation Labs, and also Delphi Group, A Perot Systems Company. Today I am speaking with Clark Aldrich, who is co-founder of SimuLearn, which can be found at www.SimuLearn.net, and lead designer of their Virtual Leader product. which, as it turns out, won Best Product of the Year in the Training & Development Magazine (t+d magazine) in 2004, a fairly big deal there, as well as an analyst and author of several books in the simulation, e-learning and gaming spaces. I haven't read these yet, but they are definitely on my Amazon list. His books are Simulations in the Future of Learning, and Learning by Doing. There is another one that is brewing while we speak, and that Clark was kind enough to send me a draft of, which I found both fascinating and overwhelming.

We will see if we end up talking about that at all. Today's topic is Immerse Yourself: Increasing Learning Through Simulation... Gaming Style, and that is the bare bones. People who have listened to my podcasts now have a sense of how I run these things. We are going to dive into it now with a framework for Immersion, Simulation and Gaming, and Clark has a lot of interesting stuff in this space. So with that, Clark, thank you very much for your time today, and thank God for Amazon, Google, and LinkedIn to actually get us connected into doing this podcast today.

To start us off, I gave you a brief introduction, but if you would give a little more background on who you are and where you came from, and what you are seeing and doing today, in this sort of world, that would be great to start us off.

Clark Aldrich: Great; thanks so much. I went to Brown University and majored in cognitive science, which was an early take on artificial intelligence. So I guess I have always been thinking about this stuff.

But I think I became legit in this whole training and learning space when I was at Gartner Group, and I was the analyst that founded their e-learning coverage. I spent a few years building up that practice, and that was fun to be in on the early implementations of e-learning, on both the promises, and in some cases the failed promises and challenges that that represented.

I then left Gartner to do two things. One was to actually build a simulation myself, because I was very intrigued by the technology. I grew up playing computer games. A lot of the people who were consuming e-learning grew up playing computer games. It is an interesting background for someone to think about content.

So I spend about half my time with the company called SimuLearn, building Virtual Leader, and then I also spend the other half being an outside analyst, and doing a lot keeping up that Gartner work. Not officially through Gartner, but being an analyst and covering the industry, writing a lot of articles, writing a lot of chapters and eventually books about simulation.

Dan: I definitely have got to get hold of some more books to find out about this, but our topic is Immerse Yourself: Increasing Learning Through Simulation Gaming Style.

As we were bantering before we turned on the mic here, we sort of both grew up at the birth of interactive gaming worlds, beyond handheld blips and bloops and checkers, and things like that, into the world of Atari 2600s and everything that has come beyond that.

But not everybody did that, so if we could start at the beginning, from the simulation angle, and we are talking largely about simulation for business purposes and training purposes.

Why don't we start at Simulation 101, to get people into that mindset. We are not talking about having people literally play games all day, like firing up "World of Warcraft" or something like that, but gaming in a context of business.

Clark: Sure. If I asked most people what simulations are, and I have asked that quite a bit, and I would ask everyone who is listening to this podcast, generically, what is a simulation, most people would say, "Oh, it is a safe place to practice skills." Most people have that definition.

And most people have that definition and most people have that roll off your tongue fairly easily. And so you could literally talk to a group of a thousand people or five thousand people, and most people would say that is what a simulation is.

But then when you ask a second level question, and say, "Okay, what is your experience with a simulation," that is where you go from this great common vision to the fragmented, dirty reality.

If we are talking to kids and, well, I guess I am almost 40 now, but I will still put myself, at least in some way, in that category. They think of simulations as computer games, whether it is the more simple games we played way back when, or the more elaborate games like "Half-Life 2" or something like that. They think in terms of these very complex computer games.

If you ask a pilot, he or she might say, "Well, we trained in flight simulators every nine months or whenever we switched aircrafts, so that is what we think of." If you ask someone from the military, they think war games.

You know the two or three or four day, exhaustive, full-body simulation with weeks and weeks of after-action reviews afterwards to figure out what happened.

Versus if you talk to a sales trainer, he or she might say "Well, we will do half hour role plays where we get sales people together and one person pretends to be the customer, one person plays the role of a sales person, one person observes it, and then we will run through some practice sales cases that way.

Then if you ask other people, like business school people, they might say "Oh, well, back when I was in B school we had this Business Acumen course, and we ran a mock company," and lawyers do mock trials. So already you can see that what people mean by simulations is incredibly different from what other people mean about simulations.

There is a real problem with that, which is now, when someone mentions simulations, everyone is excited about it, they say "Oh, great; simulations! Let's do it!" Then when the reality rolls around, it's typically not what people had in mind, and often in cases, it is the wrong simulation for the wrong job.

So it was kind of that starting off problem, which is that what we mean when we say simulations is very different from each other.

What I did in putting on the analyst hat is I spent a long time looking at both corporations and academics in both here and in the states, and a few other countries as well, with the basic question of, "What are the common types of simulations and are there established genres out there?"

Again, a genre is a collection of expectations and interface and sort of flow, the same way that computer games have genres, like "First Person Shooters" or "Real Time Strategy," or sports games, or something like that.

Dan: Sure. Right.

Clark: I found four different types of simulations that probably represented eighty percent of simulation activity. What is interesting about them is that they are all fairly straightforward. I think most organizations could actually deploy any or all of these types of simulations, but they are not interchangeable.

If you wanted one type of result, you wouldn't want to use the wrong type of simulation. So the first type of simulation is a branching story based on a model.

I don't know if you ever read when you were a kid the "choose your own adventure" books, where typically you are in a cave--there are always caves--and you find a gold coin and you walk out and some menacing figure is approaching you, do you A) go up to the person and talk to them, B) run into the culvert, or do you C) run back into the cave or something.

Those options have a page number associated with them, and then you flip to that part of the book. So now we have sort of online versions of these that might use video to set up a situation that might use pictures or sound, and you make a series of multiple choice decisions, and it might take typically anywhere from twenty five minutes to an hour to through the whole thing.

So it is a branching story, and it is really good for new employees, really good for people who don't want to be there, really good for reluctant learners. It can be completely deployed by itself because you have built in coaching where you know exactly where someone is on the big know tree that underlies the whole structure.

So you can give them very specific pieces of help. "So far, you have been a real jerk, maybe you want to be a lot nicer" or something like that. It is sort of the branching structure tree. At the other end of the extreme is the interactive spread sheet base model.

In these kinds of models, and the Lemonade Stand is a classic model, but you have a certain amount of resources and you have $10 or whatever. You have maybe five or six competing categories. One is buying inventory, one is buying signs, one is your little sister to work the stand, and by the way, it happens to be raining out today.

How many options do you want to have for your customer in terms of sizes of drinks, how much sugar you are going to add, and how much you want to charge per drink.

It is this kind of allocation business school sorts of problems, and then based on how well you did the first day, you may have more or less money the second day, or maybe a loyal customer base or whatever.

So you have the interactive spread sheet based model, and again, this is really good for high potential employees, really good for wonky types of people like myself, really good for administrator types.

The output of these things, unlike the big story you have in the first model, the output of these things tends to be "Oh, boy! My profit increased by four percent! Isn't that exciting?"

Dan: Yeah! [laughter]

Clark: And for some people that really is exciting, and I want those people to run my mutual fund, where other people, who cares, what could be more dry in the world. So these types of models, unlike the branching stories, tend to be coaching.

A lot of times you see these things in a multiplayer environment where you might have four or five teams of four or five people each and they are kind of competing against each other, and you get things like price wars and all that kind of stuff. So you also have the engineers in a room who are trying to reverse engineer all the equations.

Dan: Right. Gaming the system.

Clark: Right. Ping the system and see what results. "Oh, I figured out the equation behind the market share numbers." Obviously not a perfect model either. The third kind of category is game based models, and this is a pretty pure thing. Let's take a game like "Solitaire," or "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" or "Word Jumble," whatever. Let's shove in a lot of HIPAA compliance. Nobody cares about HIPAA compliance per se, but people have to go through it if you are in the health care market. So you can put a game around it, and maybe we can create some competition, or maybe have a fun interface or something like that.

It creates a lot more engaging way of dealing with content. Huge amounts of downfalls in this model, as well. If you get the wrong audience, then the game might fall flat. Some people really like gambling and have fun in a gambling model associated with content, but other people really hate gambling.

Or "Treasure Hunt," some people it drives crazy and others like it. So you take some risks there as well, but it does tend to make the content go by more quickly, and build some affinity between the users and the content.

Dan: Okay.

Clark: The last sort of typical model out there is the virtual model and virtual lab based simulations. In those simulations it is "How closely can we represent the object on screen?" Whether it is a Cisco server or a new application, or maybe a new car or an iPod, or a new camera or cell phone, how much of the functionality of the real thing can we build into an onscreen version of that thing.

I have seen some nuclear reactors as well as aircraft controls. Then how do we set up a series of objectives like you are a GM dealer and a car comes in that is smoking, you have to meet the needs of the customer.

In this case, do you know what button to press to open up the trunk, to find the right tools, to attach the network cable to the right part of the car, upload the diagnostic computer, replace the right pieces or whatever? So what is interesting about that fourth model, the virtual lab model, is that now the interface to the simulation becomes part of the content.

So where you do, how hard you do, how long you press on the ‘turn the wrench' button matters a lot; it is not just a matter of clicking A, B or C. There is, in a sense, kinesthetic learning going on as well. So those are the four models that are fairly well established that are a lot of knowledge deployed around each of those.

In a lot of cases the vendors like to use a more high falutin' term for referring to them. Branching stories becomes interpersonal simulations; the interactive spread sheets become dynamic models or simulations.

And dynamic systems simulations, or maybe business acumen simulations or stuff like that. So we see a lot of high falutin' vocabulary around this, but at the core it is well worth knowing what is the model below them, and how is it serving the learning objectives.

Dan: Right. What can it do for you. And creating branching stories always broadsided me, because when I realized there were big portions of the book I wasn't getting to, I always wondered, "What is in there?" Then you can't read it all without a lot of effort.

Clark: Yeah, and there is that problem when the branching becomes too divergent, as well. Another thing too, is if you have creative people, they always say, "Well, I don't want to do A or B or C. I want to do halfway between B and C, or I want to do E or F or G" or something like that."

You know, you have a lot of people who are feeling very imprisoned by the constraints of it, while you have other people who love it, who say this is a simple, effective exercise.

The other really funny thing about those is if you are presenting them, say, at a sales situation, or you are presenting them at a conference, it is incredibly easy to watch someone else do it and it feels very trivial watching someone go through this.

It is much different when you are in the hot seat, and as with all simulations, when you are actually there engaging it, everything changes. It goes from watching someone else say A, B or C to you there.

There is a simulation from Will Interactive on racial profiling, and you know, you pull someone over for speeding and it turns out to be a minority, and that minority is yelling at you for what he perceives to be racial profiling, and what do you do, and A is keep pushing forward, and B is apologize, or whatever.

It sounds so easy to say it's just A, B or C. But when you are actually there, having to make the decision, it's really hard! You really start challenging your own assumptions, and really try to make the right choice, and it really can get very emotional and very difficult.

Dan: Right. I might have read another article of yours on that very topic on potential buyers of these solutions or evaluators of these solutions, like that manager very frequently will say something like "Well, that was way too simple and trivial. Why would that ever be of any use?" and potentially the conversation goes no farther than that. So how often do you think that happens, and is the best solution in that case to say, "Well, it may look trivial, but how about you try it, or five of your people take a driver's seat position here?"

Clark: That is a good point you bring up. I am going to take it up one more level, which is in a lot of cases; training groups are really bad at the core competencies of piloting content. So if they are given content, and lots of people say, "Oh, I can't even evaluate it, so I don't even want to look at it."

There are plenty of organizations; I am going to say twenty five percent where the training group evaluates content by breezing through it themselves. "Let me breeze through the content myself, going through it as quickly as I can, and get a feel for it."

A hundred times out of a hundred, that doesn't work in simulation. Then there is the way of piloting content, which is "Let me beg, borrow and steal some of my friend's time. Hey, Joe, Sarah can you spend a half hour ripping through this content yourself and telling me if it is any good or not?"

Again, it tends to not work very well. Let's put it in another category. Let's do a pilot with a lot of people and see how they like it. This is the final category, let's put a group of people through it and let's actually measure the results, and let's track it, and even measure results a month later or six months later, and see how well these skills have really changed behavior.

The sort of second to last category, the smile sheet category, isn't bad, but one of the realizations about any good simulation is that it does really involve frustration, especially not the game based models, but the other models. If you look at learning in real life, there is this sort of oscillating pattern of frustration and then resolution.

If you think of yourself when you learned a foreign language, or the first couple of times you might have podcasted, either doing a podcast or listening to a podcast, or whatever.

Or learning a new operating system, there are just these waves of frustration, where you swear and get mad and say "This stinks; I hate this. This is the worst thing ever. These podcasts will never take off. They are too hard to load; they are too hard to listen to. I keep going back to the beginning."

Then there is that sort of "Aha!" moment where everything starts clicking together, and you think, "Wow, this is great! Podcasting! I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, in the car or exercising."

Then there is that wonderful relief. Then there is the next level of frustration, "Oh, I can't find the content I want to listen to," or whatever, and that is how life works.

Dan: Sure. Right.

Clark: The good and bad about simulations is that they follow carefully that same pattern of highs and lows. People get very frustrated in a good simulation. "I don't know what to do. I hate this, this is a stupid simulation, and this is no good. I have no idea what to do."

Then maybe they will go to sleep or go have lunch or whatever, and suddenly they will say, "Wait a minute; why don't I do this?" They will go and do it. So one of the worst things in a pilot simulation is to let people quit the first time they get frustrated.

They go "Oh, I am frustrated. This whole simulation thing is stupid. That is not how the real world works," or something like that. And so it is very important in the process of actually evaluating a simulation to tell people to go through the whole thing.

I mean, if it is the kind of simulation that requires a coach, great; if it is not, great. But don't say "This is a pilot; this is something we want to test with you." Have people go through the entire program and say this is an important program and we are going to keep track of it. We are going to measure you on it because we think you would really benefit from this program. Then you see the really good, sustained, long term results that you would hope from any kind of training program.

Dan: Right. It is a pilot, but it is not a throw-away.

Clark: Yeah! It is a pilot but not a throwaway, and it is serious, because again, if it does work, it has a serious impact on the organization, so it is worth taking very seriously. But mostly it is worth giving a pattern of frustrations and resolutions that roll through it, not letting people give up at the first or second frustration.

Help them through it because that is the real power, those are the new real mental muscles that are being formed. And maybe a good analogy is if you went to the gym and you came back an hour later, and you came back not having broken a sweat, then you probably know instinctively that you wasted your time, that you probably did not do a very good job.

So you come back and you are sweaty and a little sore, but also a lot more limber, then you sort of know intuitively you did something good, probably. I'm thinking it is the same thing, this sense of frustration and resolution that sense of forming new associations, the whole wonderfulness of simulations.

Dan: Okay. You know, that is interesting because I was doing a podcast with Stephen Shapiro who wrote a called 24/7 Innovation. We were talking about, in the context of innovations; people assume that in wanting to be innovative as a person, as a company, as an organization, as a country, or whatever, you want to be successful.

But success isn't a straight route. Things that Stephen has seen specifically in his work and innovation is that some of the most successful innovating companies very specifically mentor for and look for a certain percentage of failure.

I don't hear that all that often, because like most people (and we write up case studies for people, and we talk about best practices), failure is not discussed much. I actually fairly frequently bring up the idea of worst practices, because I think it is worth at least hearing about them if not over focusing on them, like some of the initial Web design books that, I forget what they are called, but essentially "Sites That Suck," or something.

That might be overdoing it, but giving a sense of balance in whatever balance it would be, a view of "So life isn't a cake walk," so a culture of simulation or a culture of innovation or any of this should include both. Some easy success, some hard ones, and some failures, some of which are just tiny failures, and some of which are annoying failures. But as long as you are learning from all of this and you continue to go upwards in the trending chart.

Clark: Yeah. There are two sort of risks on that comment. One of them is people often ask about simulations, how accurate are they, and by accurate, how predictive does it have to be in order for it to be instructional?

There are a couple of parts of that question too, quickly. And one of them is, well, if it is totally predictive - If you can build a simulation that is totally predictive of a situation - then why not just automate the whole process and get the person out of it?

Dan: There you go!

Clark: So almost by definition it is not going to be a hundred percent predictive, because again, then you just automate the process. But the other side of it is it does tell you a lot of things you don't do, and almost more than simulations telling you what you should do, it is reducing the amount of things it is really bad to do.

And so if someone goes through simulation, they often know the answer for a tough situation, and they often have a good mental understanding of what are a lot of really bad things to do, even though they might seem obvious.

Also, what are some high level metrics to track, and what are some things to look out for to test their own solutions? So it is knowing that device is not the perfect balance; it is not going to give you the right answer, as much as to make you a much more productive person in a difficult situation.

Dan: Right. And not just to give you theory, but to work it through some sort of simulation, where you get to apply it.

Clark: Yeah, it is almost a fifth or sixth category of simulations and one that I have been intrigued with recently, and one that Virtual Leader represents, is this notion of "practiceware," and it is almost a high level of practice where it has come from, the Air Force and flight simulators is that, to some degree, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln. "If I had six hours to learn anything, I would rather spend four of them practicing."

It is incredibly easy to be given theory, and even be given a lot of theory and those of us who grew up in traditional classrooms, and reading traditional books, have gotten a huge amount of theory. But it is really in the practice of it, in the application of the theory, that things get very hard and dicey and very grey, and very nuanced.

In most of life, it is not a matter of do I praise an employee or not; it is a matter of when do I praise the employee, and how hard do I praise the employee. When do I definitely not praise the employee. It becomes the differentiator between success and failure.

So it is this notion of nuance, of how hard or how soft, do I praise a little bit everyday, or do I take the person out for a big dinner, a huge once a year praise?

It depends on the person and the situation, but it is this notion of nuanced application being the hardest part of the equation, the part where most of the training fails, as opposed to good theory, which in a lot of cases, most people agree than disagree on any of the really interesting areas.

Dan: Okay, so that is interesting. So I need to reconcile the four hours out of six being practiced, with Stephen Shapiro's n Einstein quote, which said if I had sixty minutes to save the earth, I would spend the first fifty-nine defining what the problem was and the last minute identifying the solution.

Clark: Yeah, and I am never going to argue with Albert Einstein!

Dan: Well, why not? He was crazy! [laughter]

Clark: How many people did argue with him in the later part of his life?

Dan: Okay, so the frame of reference we could hang this off of was immersive learning through simulation and gaming style. Normally I would ask what sort of thing is cutting edge, but for this... I think, so many people are not even on the trailing edge.

Clark: Yeah, and I think it is a very safe assumption, but I still want to answer the question. But I agree we have a lot of work to do to get to a point with regards to games and simulations. I think there doesn't have to be much innovation, there doesn't have to be much new thinking, and all it takes in a lot of cases is a lot more of us to catch up.

So we have a lot of opportunity there. Having said that, in terms of things that are out there that are next, and everything from podcasts to Web 2.0, to mobile learning saves you a lot of things that are next.

In terms of the gaming simulation area, for me, the next step is saying, "For me, what is the manifest destiny of games and simulations in learning. Is it simply to make stuff more fun, is it to make stuff stickier, to make content last longer in terms of performance improvement?

I really think we can go beyond that. I think we are getting, we are starting to realize that most knowledge that has been captured, we have captured using writing. The more you grow up using computer games, the more you grow up in these, and every generation from now on is now realizing what a bad repository writing is.

Writing stinks as a way of capturing what someone knows. If someone wrote a book about their life and you think what percentage of their knowledge have they captured, even if they wrote a hundred books. It is probably less than one percent; probably less than that.

So books are fabulous for things like inner monologues, "What was I thinking when I made that decision?" Books are fabulous for that. Books are fabulous for processes: Do A, then B, then C; books are wonderful for that. Books are wonderful for dictionaries and random access lookups. They are wonderful for great color pictures.

A great color picture book is wonderful and inspiring. Good quotes are inspiring. Nothing is as much fun as reading that great quote and it just sort of gives you that wind in your sails, so to speak. Those are all things that books are fabulous at.

But there are so many things that books are dreadful at that it turns out that simulations might be a much, much better way of thinking about it. I will give you a few examples. One of them is the concept of situational awareness. And basically that is that when different experts walk into a situation, they see different things.

So let's say we are at a Palm Springs resort and we just finished playing golf or something. If different people saw us, they would see different things. The manager of the hotel walks by and she might notice where is the sun versus where is the umbrella. Is there a bit of chlorine in the pool?

Does it need a little more chlorine? Do we have the right food? Maybe she would come over and pitch certain services to us. "Hey, have you heard about our new business plus plan," or whatever.

As opposed to a lawyer who might walk in and look at what we are doing and wondering if we are discussing any confidential information and have the proper papers been signed, and maybe looking and seeing what papers we do have in front of us. What is the structure of the business that we are talking about.

So she might see something totally different from that, versus a nutritionist who might walk in and say, " Oh my God, they have just been out in the sun for eighteen holes and they should really be drinking X and in fact they are drinking Y, and that is a really bad idea." So what we see impacts directly what our awareness of a situation is.

It turns out that simulations do a really, really good job of that, because they are so visual and dynamic in that way. They do this great job in helping people learn from this concept of situational awareness, when in fact books do a really, really bad job.

Dan: Well, the richness of an interface conveys a lot more information.

Clark: Yeah. Here is another example, which is sort of your awareness of action. Given any real situation, let's say you are in charge of a new project, or let's say you are put in charge of an organization, or let's say you are worried about the security of your house, whatever. What are your options?

And simply understanding; you know, most of us in those situations have between five and twenty discreet options, any of those we can do sort of in a soft or hard way. It is not a matter of pressing the button and we have the one answer.

It is a constant sense of looking at the environment and making a decision, implementing it and then maybe doing it two or three times or maybe pulling back. But it is this notion of awareness of actions and what the impact of actions is. We don't make one big action typically.

We do a whole series of little actions, almost like writing or playing the violin--you are making discreet actions that all flow together to form a coherent whole. It turns out that simulations, especially higher level simulations, do a better job of making you think about "What are my various possibilities in this situation?"

It could be everything from the GM example, the car example we mentioned earlier, or even a leadership example where people are having to deal with complicated leadership situations, and they are constantly doing a lot of little things to keep these situations from exploding.

Dan: Sure.

Clark: You know, the notion of awareness of actions, to give you a third one, not that you asked, but I thought I would! Because you mentioned it with the notion of innovations and got me thinking about it. In most cases, when you look at a lot of leaders, what they are doing in any situation is they are almost creating a conceptual map.

They are saying "What are all the possibilities that are available, let's say of different business models or different markets, or different organizational structures? What are all the possibilities? Where are we today on that big conceptual map? Where do we want to be?"

Where do you want to be is like putting the finger down on the map and saying "We are here; we want to be there." By the way, it is the same thing with medical researchers saying "We want to cure Parkinson's or make it more controllable. What are all the different possibilities of combinations that could potentially lead to a cure?"

I am going to stick my finger someplace and say, "You know what, here's this big dark spot on the map here of dopamine inhibitors or whatever; I think the answer is here." Then once they have sort of made that commitment, then they have to make a series of very short term decisions of dead reckoning and say how do we get to that position?

And maybe it is very ambitious and very far away from where we are, or maybe it is very conservative and close to where we are. But now we have to make a series of very short term decisions to get us along this windy path, almost like lightening forking against the earth, to get to it.

It is not directed, it is not straight, and it is very intertwined and complicated. Again, books are really bad at sharing that kind of knowledge, where good simulations and good computer games actually do a very, very good job at balancing that long term planning and that dead reckoning to get there.

So all these things are just new types of content, new types of awareness; domain expertise, as they say in that academic world. And being able to capture them a lot more simply and a lot more effectively than many of us thought possible ten or fifteen years ago.

Dan: We could keep talking about this forever, so let's head toward one potential ending here, and maybe we will pick it up again in another podcast.

I am curious... We had been following e-learning many years ago, the late ‘90s or so, and then as you have no doubt experienced, although you have been more in this space directly so maybe it is not quite as dramatic for you, maybe it is; that the e-learning world sort of died. People were not spending money on training.

Like knowledge management, B2B, and portals... a lot of things were way oversold. And so it sort of got tainted, and from my experience people ran away from it and forgot about it.

But it seems to me that there has been a renewed buzz that has popped up in the last three to six to nine months, maybe, around e-learning and specifically on the stuff we have been learning about, the simulations and the relatively sophisticated offerings.

Is that what you have seen? Are the people who are getting into it now have tried it previously and then forgot about it because they were too busy putting out fires and staying alive? What is the sort of world that is now embracing e-learning?

Clark: I think people are definitely renewed. I won't say they are ten out of ten, but they are probably eight out of ten. I think they are more focused on it. I think there are more case studies. I think a lot of early adopters of kind of e-learning 2.0, if I may, as of two years ago, have now seen a lot of results from it.

So I think there is a strong, but not very strong, re-enthusiasm in the potentials of e-learning, and the successes of e-learning. We are seeing some cases where there are well documented, very robust cases of significant business performance improvement. Clearly a lot of training people are still gun shy; they are still nervous.

But they also know that if they don't do things they are not going to have a job much longer. Maybe they have ridden that ‘not do the wrong thing' pony as long as they can. And so in a lot of cases you have situations where they are saying they do have to deliver some organizational performance.

I am going to say one thing which will sound really cruel, and it probably is, but I am going to say it anyway. If I am in front of a thousand people, presenting at a training conference or whatever, my instinct is to say, "If you have been in the training world for more than three years, you might as well leave this presentation now."

Historically, from my own last five years or work, you guys are not going to do anything in this area. It is only the new people who are going to do stuff and be rewarded for it, and get good results for what you do. So it is not a matter of ha-ha, roll the next batch of suckers in.

But it is the new people who are coming into the industry who bring excitement and optimism, and sophisticated optimism. A desire to do it right; to do the right pilots, to do the right measurements, to create the business case methodically, and be able to present this very, very strong ROI to increasingly higher levels of the organization.

But in a lot of cases, people who have been in training for more than three years still have the scars and are still burned out, and are still so scared to commit to anything. Again, they are in a doom loop in a lot of cases; they are really burying themselves.

I do have a lot of situations where I go back to people two or three years later who considered something but didn't move ahead because they were worried that it was too unconventional or high risk or something. They ended up not being in the organization anymore.

So I think now more than ever we are at a time where new people are championing the right activities, and are getting great results from it, and are getting internal promotions from it.

I think that people who have been around a lot longer really do have to take stock of their own career ambitions and think "What is my role to the organization? How can I best do it? If my role is simply to keep bad things from happening, maybe it is time to look for a new job."

It is to be regressed, to be highly aligned with the business, to pilot, and to pilot a lot. And getting toward your point, if you pilot four to five things, and four fail and one succeeds, that is your job. That is not bad.

It is far worse to do nothing and hope magically to get some mysterious magic result than it is to pilot five things and have four fail and one succeed, and then roll off that success across the organization. So failure isn't bad in that context. It is much more problematic not to fail than it is to be super-conservative and not do anything.

Dan: You know, if I could extend that just a little bit? I keep coming back to these podcasts and interviews and things I have been writing lately. I keep coming back to the idea of borrowing from the developing and programming world, agile development, and rapid innovation.

So the cycle you were talking about, the frustration and resolution and whatnot, is just kind of a standard for plays and movie scripts and TV shows and good fiction books and things like that. And learning, as it turns out.

So one of the key benefits then, of simulation is obviously the time compression, so you don't have to be in a role for ten years to accumulate ten years of experience. You can potentially crush that down and get some of the key learnings, and get people to a fifty percent level, or a seventy percent level, in a much reduced time frame.

Clark: May I make one quick comment there? One of the most fun things about watching people go through simulations is putting up a video camera and having them talk about their experiences.

Or more importantly, when they are hitting a real life situation, have them talk about it, because what is so exciting is hearing these people who might be twenty-five or twenty-six years old, or even younger, and they are talking, drawing from what sounds like decades of experience when faced with a new situation.

Having someone literally go into real situations, step out of it and say "Well, I can see that four people are really nervous and they are scared. But one person has a great idea and they are not going to say it, you know, unless I lower the tension. This person over here just wants to get out of here no matter what," and they just bring with them this tremendous depth of experience that is hard to measure that on any scale. But it is very exciting to see those years of experience that they have in a very methodical, consistent way.

So that is where the spark in the eye or on the videotape becomes a better metric than some of the more scientific ones. You do see, you do hear the passion in their voice when they actually go apply this content and this new way of seeing, and suddenly these things that have been problems they have had for years suddenly goes away.

And even something as simple as building a rapport by asking someone about their kids, their pictures on their desks. And someone had a situation where they just butted heads with this person for years, with this one procurement person, and then just tried a different tactic, and suddenly they are best friends now.

It is incredible to see the kinds of mental log jams that often get freed up. The challenge though, is that if you have five or ten people, even in the same course, they all have different log jams. In some cases you can solve two thirds of them, maybe, but there are all different solutions because there are all different people with different log jams.

So even the consistency of results, you can say that everyone is more productive, but they are all more productive for different reasons, because the same situation has resolved different issues within them.

Dan: Sure. Everybody has their own strengths or weaknesses. Interesting. It is pretty neat. I have drunk some of the Kool-Aid here (around e-learning and simultation), but not all of it. [laughter]

I have seen all sorts of crazy stuff through the dotcom years and even beyond some of that, and I have been with this company for over twelve years. I was a little bit concerned about social networking and Web 2.0 and AJAX and all that. But hopefully I have been around enough so that my senses are a bit more sharpened to identify what the total buzz crowd factor, and what is real.

Clark: The scariest thing about Web 2.0 today, not like professional organizations and even magazines, is that they are building even stronger alignments from people not from the same organizations than people from the same organizations. Trade shows and professions have always done that.

The lawyers all hang out together and the marketing people always hang out together in an organization. But even more so with the Web 2.0 stuff, where you have people feeling highly aligned with people not of their geography, not of their company, but in some cases of their interest who live very, very far away.

So it is yet another realigning of people's allegiances that will have interesting impacts on and is one more challenge to the coherency of an organization.

Dan: Right, and I kind of feel like a shmuck. I hadn't read The Cluetrain Manifesto until five, six, seven years after it had come out, which is sort of the early precursor to Web 2.0 and interacting with the community.

Clark: You know, it is best to read a business book two years after it comes out. All the hype is down and you can see what the ten percent of good insights are, versus the ninety percent of pabulum. So that might be a fairly good strategy unless you are in a very high driven part of the industry.

Dan: So we won't mention that to your book publisher for your next book.

Clark: Exactly. Don't tell anyone!

Dan: Okay! Well, I think we covered quite a bit of ground here, and loosely hung on the framework of the topic we had identified, Immerse Yourself: Increasing Learning through Simulation Gaming Style. Well, we mostly stayed to that!

But again, this is Dan Keldsen from the Perot Systems Innovation Lab and also Delphi Group, a Perot Systems Company. I was talking today with Clark Aldrich, who is co-founder of SimuLearn, which you can find at www.SimuLearn.net.

He was the lead designer of their Virtual Leader product, which won a best product of the year in the Training and Development Magazine in 2004, writing many books, such as Simulations and the Future of Learning was one book a couple of iterations ago, and Learning by Doing the most recent, as of the airing of this podcast. There is also another which, have you decided on the final title?

Clark: Not yet.

Dan: Okay. So we will leave people hanging with that one. But thanks so much for your time today, Clark, and I am so glad we managed to make this happen.

Clark: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Dan: All right. We will see what happens. Maybe this will be a "to be continued" and we will branch off in another direction at some other point, but I think this was some really great content here. Thanks!

Clark: Thanks so much!

Comments

[Sam]

Wow this is a great interview, although is was very long...so took me a while to read through it!

I have recently started learing arabic through a podcast and we use technology a lot at my school for learning but i think that there is a lot more that can be done, but this is the start and it looks good so far!

[Dan Keldsen]

Hi Sam - Thanks for stopping by. Podcasting is certainly taking off, but the creation, distribution, and consuming tools all have quite a ways to go to be made usable for the masses.

Glad you enjoyed the post - you can subscribe to the audio via the iTunes Music store as well, just search under podcast for "Dan Keldsen" - and you're good to go (but no transcription - have to come back here for that!).

[Brian Remer]

Dan,
Enjoyed the interview! I saw Clark present at the ISPI conference in Dallas last year. It was helpful to hear a reminder of his thinking especially in a different context.

I heard about this podcast via your post on the NASAGA list. Thanks!

BTW, I live in southern Vermont only two hours from Boston. Would love to meet you and talk training games sometime.

Brian