“BOLLER AND FLETCHER, IN DESIGN THINKING FOR TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT, BUILD A POWERFUL TOOL-SET FOR LEARNING PROFESSIONALS. BY AUGMENTING DESIGN THINKING WITH RESEARCH-BASED WISDOM AND PRACTICAL INSIGHTS ABOUT LEARNING, THE BOOK PROVIDES A NEW LEARNING-DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY—A WORTHY REPLACEMENT FOR LEARNING-NEUTRAL PROCESSES LIKE ADDIE.”

—WILL THALHEIMER

Design Thinking for Training and Development

Creating Learning Journeys that Get Results

by Sharon Boller, Managing Director at TiER1 and
Laura Fletcher, Senior Program Manager at Salesforce

Better Learning Solutions Through Better Learning Experiences

When training and development initiatives treat learning as something that occurs as a one-time event, the learner and the business suffer. Using design thinking can help talent development professionals ensure learning sticks to drive improved performance.

Design Thinking for Training and Development offers a primer on design thinking, a human-centered process and problem-solving methodology that focuses on involving users of a solution in its design. For effective design thinking, talent development professionals need to go beyond the UX, the user experience, and incorporate the LX, the learner experience.

In this how-to guide for applying design thinking tools and techniques, Sharon Boller and Laura Fletcher share how they adapted the traditional design thinking process for training and development projects. Their process involves steps to:

  • Get perspective.
  • Refine the problem.
  • Ideate and prototype.
  • Iterate (develop, test, pilot, and refine).
  • Implement.

Design thinking is about balancing the three forces on training and development programs: learner wants and needs, business needs, and constraints. Learn how to get buy-in from skeptical stakeholders. Discover why taking requests for training, gathering the perspective of stakeholders and learners, and crafting problem statements will uncover the true issue at hand.

Two in-depth case studies show how the authors made design thinking work. Job aids and tools featured in this book include:

  • a strategy blueprint to uncover what a stakeholder is trying to solve
  • an empathy map to capture the learner’s thoughts, actions, motivators, and challenges
  • an experience map to better understand how the learner performs.

With its hands-on, use-it-today approach, this book will get you started on your own journey to applying design thinking.

The “Why” Behind the Book

Co-author and TiER1er, Sharon Boller shares what prompted her and Laura to write this book.

“Three reasons:

1) Too often, learners’ perspectives were absent from our design process. Our customers would tell us that learners were too busy. Or that the “subject matter expert” could represent the learner. Or some other reason.

2) Learning was viewed as an event, not a process. Business leaders too often wanted to produce courses rather than designing an entire experience that might include a course. They over-estimated the ease with which “training” can be produced and under-estimated what it takes to truly get someone to change their behavior.

3) The problem to be solved was poorly defined; we were asked to create solutions for which we did not have a clearly articulated and validated problem or any verification that the training design we created would actually resolve the problem if it WAS defined well.

As I became aware of – and then dove deeper into – the problem-solving approach known as “design thinking,” resonated deeply.

So I enlisted my colleague and design thinking ally, Laura Fletcher, to write a book with me on the experiments we were trying with design thinking tools and techniques. We’ve written Design Thinking for Training and Development to help others embrace the concepts of design thinking and incorporate them into their own work creating learning experiences.”

How to find the book:

Apply to Your Learning Experiences

We’d be happy to discuss the people approaches that will help you apply design thinking to your learning experiences—and the brain-based science you can rely on to achieve it. Let’s talk!

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