Process can be a headlong rush for the airline gate when you’re pretty sure you won’t make it, or process can be a reflective stroll with warm sand between your toes and a late afternoon sun skating across the waves.

If you prefer the latter, you’ll like our Defined Workflow.

If putting together this new cabinet from Ikea requires brute strength, there’s a better way.

If I’m trying to carry a queen-sized mattress down three floors, I should ask for help.

If completing this project is making me crazy, I’m likely ignoring the reason for my stress.

The goal is flow, not flail.

In other words, sometimes our perspective is off. We naturally base the learning we create on the learning we’ve experienced.

Because learning fell far behind the times, our mental models make us replicate the mediocre. Especially the ones we don’t know we have.

The sage on a stage model should be avoided. Guide on the side works better. And our Defined Workflow helps creators and reviewers keep the learners front of mind.

We’ll want to spend more time talking about this.

The Pareto Principle (you get 80% of your return from 20% of your output) is a key component of the defined path.

Our process guides us to focus on what the learners will use most often, and help them learn how to avoid being stuck when they encounter something unexpected or problematic.

Opportunity cost is an economic term about scarcity: if I do one thing, I won’t be able to do something else.  For any given person, on any given day, opportunity cost limits how much a person can learn. Not to mention sleep, straighten up, and watch old  Paul Newman movies.

In other words, we can keep pouring after the glass is full, but the liquid’s going to spill.

Historically, too many training departments were about spraying with a firehose rather than topping off a glass.

The biggest concepts matter the most. They deserve time, practice, and repetition.

If I’m having trouble defining the objectives for a learning experience, it’s likely that I haven’t gathered essential data and insights in the discovery phase.

If I get stuck writing the lo-res version of a deliverable for testing, it’s likely the reason is in the design.

Or maybe I just have to take a walk.

While it doesn’t necessarily feel good at the time, “stuck” is good. Some of our best solutions emerge from stuckness.

There have been many times that I started over because there was no other choice.

But I’ve started over out of choice, too.

Our path provides (yes, optional) opportunities to let go of our first results and try something different.

My best example comes from when I used the successive approximation method (SAM) to create replacement point-of-sale training for a retail organization.

I went through deliberate revisions until the training boiled down to what was essential.

Two years later, while traveling, I asked a store team member about using the software. He replied with the big idea of the learning experience. Word for word. I almost cried.

The same is true for agile, design thinking, SAM, the 6Ds, and the like. They’re tools. 

When they’re the right tool for the situation, they’re effective. When you use a hammer to drive a screw, you do more damage than good.