Impactful Scenario-Based Training: A Conversation with Daniel Guimont

Conversations with a Learning Leader ft. Daniel Guimont

Shalini Merugu 1:18
Hi everyone, this is Shalini your host for today, and I'm very excited to welcome to our eLearning Champion podcast a special guest who's dedicated to transforming workplace training. Daniel Guimont is a senior training specialist at Peri, Canada, one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of formwork and scaffolding systems. He has designed and implemented 100 plus learning programs, boosting higher integration and streamlining training workflows with 15 plus years in instructional design, including work with the Canadian Armed Forces. Daniel specializes in scenario-based training that drives real behavioural change. His expertise spans instructional design frameworks, blended learning, and automation tools like SharePoint and Power Automate to optimize training delivery. A lifelong learner and a skilled speaker, Daniel believes in the power of education to unlock potential. We're thrilled to have you with us today, Daniel, to discuss ID best practices to create impactful training. Once again, a very warm welcome to you.

Guimont, Daniel 2:43
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Shalini Merugu 2:46
Right, let's dive into the very first question for today. When designing training, what are the key factors you consider to ensure that it is impactful rather than just informational?

Guimont, Daniel 3:00
Yeah, that is the question, isn't it? So, I look at it as what's the experience that we're trying to create for the learners, for the people? And more importantly, what's the behaviour that we want? So, it's important to think and I'm sure a lot of IDs think this way about the end product. I'll tell you a story. So, when I first started with the Canadian Armed Forces, I was in the fitness department. I was a fitness instructor.

I started this journey as a fitness person, so my education comes from physical education. Then I went to the military as a civilian and my first job was to prepare these military units for the different tasks that they would need to do. Now traditionally as a fitness instructor for the military, what we can imagine and what we see in movies usually is what happens, meaning that we would have these men and women come early in the mornings 5, 6 AM. And then we would do some jumping jacks, some pushups, some chin ups, some sit ups, all that traditional stuff. But what happened in my career is, we started asking the question, Why are we doing this? So yes, one, they're sweating, they're physically engaged.

But what is our end goal? Then it led to other questions of who are the people that we're having this morning? Are they medical technicians? Are they infanteers? Do they work on special operations? Are they pilots? And based off just that surface level analysis, we started changing our approach. So, here's something really cool that we did through my experience is traditionally we would have military members just run around the base, right? That could be 10 kilometres, 15 kilometres. When we're doing that, there's a lot of things that are happening. The first thing is we're training the aerobic system, the capacity of our lungs to engage our heart, to engage in endurance long-term running. OK. Are there risks involved? Well, yes, if we dig a little bit deeper, depending on the bio mechanics, the skills of the runners, there could be injury risks to their ankles, their knees, their lower backs, et cetera, et cetera. So, then we need to interject, OK, there has to be a way to do it. But even at a deeper level, when we started to chat with these infanteers, these military members, and asked them, On deployment in exercise in a realistic scenario, how much do you run? And the answers that we were getting were 50 metres, 100 metres, and we're doing it very, very quickly. So, we're talking about sprinting. Now we're not talking about the aerobic system, we're talking about the anaerobic system. So earlier on, we were training people with a certain risk on something they would almost never do. Now the answer to this analysis is not to eliminate running altogether. Of course, traditions are traditions, and there's certain things that we need to keep so we could do it, but we could do it in a safe level. But instead of investing, let's say 80% of our training time on that, why don't we invest 80% of our training time on what you're actually going to need to become a good sprinter? Because, if we're training you to become a slow, and we need you to be fast. Then we're doing you a disservice. So, all of that to circle back to say that was the lynchpin, a little bit of an epiphany, in my career as a training professional to understand that. All right; we need to change people's behaviours. We need to really understand, not exactly what is it that they want because that's a little bit of a trap although to listen to people, for sure. But what is it that they need? Because they don't always know what they need. The customer is not always right, as I have learned. And now that I work in a corporate setting, I take the same approach to how I analyze.

So now I'm no longer a subject matter expert. I'm out of the fitness realm, but I work with engineers. I work with salespeople. I work with people in operations and it's the same approach where you get to understand what it is that a good performer would look like. So maybe there exists a good performer within the team, or maybe it's just a hypothetical. You're talking to the director of a department, let's say engineering, and they're painting a beautiful picture, hypothetically of an engineer. What they should do at what level, communication, design levels, whatever that is. You take those notes. And then you dissect it and you start building from the ending and then where do you start? So, what is it that we start off when we do hire someone? What do they come with and what are they missing? So, a bit of that gap and we provide them whatever they need to get to the behaviours that we identified. So that's really the key that I'm excited about.

Shalini Merugu 8:56
Wonderful. Wonderful. Thanks, Daniel. That was a very interesting ‘aha’ moment, the kind of training you need for a sprint versus a marathon. It's an entirely different skill set. And it's very interesting how you brought that to your corporate training framework because really, it's addressing the need. It all drills down to addressing the actual need and not getting distracted by all the other things which will be good, like you said, what they want. But I really loved what you shared about zeroing in on the actual skill that is needed, the actual behavioural change that you're targeting.

So, Daniel, my next question is to do with engagement. Despite having heard about engagement, many organizations still struggle with building in that engagement. So, what are some strategies to ensure that training resonates with the learners? Of course, you shared about meeting the actual need. I'm sure that's the key thing because when they see the relevance, they are engaged, but what other strategies do you have?

Guimont, Daniel 10:13
You're absolutely right. I hear that often, how do you motivate people? How do you get them engaged? And it's funny because that's not a question that I ask myself. It's not something that I'm hunting for as I'm trying to prepare something necessarily. Of course, I want that to happen, engagement like we call it. But for me, that's almost a byproduct of a good design. You really hit the nail on the head. The foundation has to be there. If you're looking to build a training, you have to understand why you're doing it. Just to go back to our previous question, it has to be related to the need and the learners have to see that connection of where they're at right now and what this is going to give them. If you can sell that message, and I use the term very strongly here, that is going to take into consideration that motivation, that excitement, if you will. So, one thing that I've learned working in the corporate world and working with salespeople is there's so many parallels between training and sales, it's incredible. It's almost the same exact job when you think about it deeply.

You're meeting with customers. You're meeting with stakeholders or with learners and you're providing them a service. And the idea here in both cases, selling and training, we want to solve a problem. We're not just going to sell something and move on, I suppose that can happen, but eventually you're going to run out of luck. But we really want to solve a problem. That's what we're doing in training. Hence the need for a really, really good analysis, I can't stress that enough.

So, you meet with your stakeholders, or you meet with the people that you want to solve their problems, and you get deep into what it is. Psychologically, it's almost like a psychoanalysis of the people of their problems. Once you engage that, then there's going to be multiple different ways to get there. But the more time that you spend in your analysis phase, the less time that you need in your design, meaning that you know what to do, you know exactly what to give them, it's right in front of you. That should take care of engagement.

Now the other layer that I would say, because usually you shouldn't be just satisfied with that, you shouldn't sit on your laurels for just that. The next step would be try to think as a learning professional. Try to think of how people learn, all right? And this is another thing that I've learned through my years of military training. So in military training, my focus was on fitness. And it was easy for us to use three powerful senses to help people retain their long-term memory. So, the more senses that are involved in learning something, the more ingrained. It's almost as if you have one sense, then you have only one computer to save your progress. If you have 3 senses, then you have three computers, so you're not going to lose that memory.

And in fitness it's easy because you could provide let's say, visuals in a classroom setting of let's say, body mechanics, biomechanics, things like that. So, you have the visual. We have the back of our brain. We have a lot of real estate for our visual cuing. So definitely good advice to have visuals. Auditory as well, so instructors normally do that very well where we're speaking using our tone of voice, using different ways to do that. And another one is kinesthetic, the touch. So, if you have something to touch or to understand concepts then you have 3 senses that are targeting a person's brain. Ergo, it's going to be easier for the person to grab whatever it is that you're saying. And if you're trying to learn something as well, sure you can go through a book, but if you do exercises from that book where you have to actually move, maybe write certain things down, notes and all that, you're going to grasp that information a little bit more.

So, all of that to say is have a solid foundation of why you're doing this. And the other is, understand how a person registers and use as many of the techniques to engage them in that matter, make it relevant and make it stick.

Shalini Merugu 15:46
Right, thank you. I really love what you said about motivation being a byproduct of good design. I think that's really a very great takeaway because sometimes we think motivation is just a motivation hook inside of a learning course, how do we just hook them? But it begins even earlier if you set the right foundation, you have them motivated already and you don't have to persuade or sell your course too hard because learners will see the relevance and the need. So, thank you for that. And I totally agree with you about you saying that it's very akin to sales because what are we selling really? How are we persuading our learners? So yeah, thank you for those great examples and analogies.

Guimont, Daniel 16:36
My pleasure.

Shalini Merugu 16:38
You mentioned you're passionate about designing impactful training to drive behavioural change. When we think of behavioural change, we automatically associate with some kind of scenario-based learning, because those are as close to the real world as you can bring the learner to. So, what role do you think scenario-based learning plays in making training stick and how do you design effective scenarios?

Guimont, Daniel 17:07
That's a really good question. So, scenario-based learning is something that I did in part a little bit. But when I started working in the business world, I studied it and understood it a little bit more so I could say that I'm more grounded into it.

But what is scenario-based learning? Essentially, it's trying to throw a learner into a similar environment in which they will face, or they might face within their work scenario and they have to make decisions. And within those decisions, obviously there's going to be some decisions that are good, maybe great even, and there are going to be decisions that they may make that are going to be bad, detrimental, if you will, to their company or to whatever they're trying to aim. Let's take an example. Let's say we were training sales. So, you can train on product, that's super important. If you have any products to sell as an organization, your sales people should know more than your customers or to a certain degree if they're starting, maybe not so much, you might have some customers that are very knowledgeable in your field, but if you're onboarding sales, you don't want to just throw them to the wolves and say here are some product trainings, off you go, now do the best that you can. It would be in your best interest as a hiring manager to see the behaviour of your salesperson in a scenario. So, this could be a role play. Role plays are usually something I would use for sales in this scenario. So, you could role play with a few of your staff members, and can get them to do the best that they can in the scenario that you created. And what's interesting with this scenario is, although they're stressed, although it's uncomfortable, it's not fun to do role plays, especially if your boss is there. That stress is what's going to really hit your long-term memory. So, the stress that you have, that anxiety, if you will, is going to really make you retain. But here's what I've learned, which I find so amazing, almost like, how could you not do scenarios is if you have this salesperson that fails, they make the wrong decision. They're doing the best that they can, they make the wrong decision and the manager is there. The manager coaches them, explains why the decision is bad, what would have happened if they would have continued. So, it's not just throwing them in a scenario, it's providing the real consequences of their actions. That's the key thing. If you're provided or if you're told that the consequences are the company loses its reputation, which is a big deal, we lose this customer forever, or it's going to be hard to regain them or we lose the sale or all of that. We have an emotional connection to that. We feel bad, that anxiety, it's bad, but it's good in the sense that it will tell your long-term memory to retain that, and you will never repeat that behaviour. They say in a job, if you do something bad, you'll never repeat that same fault again because you feel so bad, so why not use that as an advantage? Instead of throwing them in a real scenario where that could actually happen and we could have those undesirable consequences, let's say we control the environment, we throw them in there, and we tell them what would have happened without it happening ever again. The person feels a little bit bad, uncomfortable and all that, but they will never repeat it.

And on the upside, if they do get the good answer, they'll also get feedback and say, hey, that would probably work in reality, you'd probably make the sell, et cetera. Then they retain that behaviour and you have dopamine, you have maybe potentially serotonin that just goes in there and solidifies that behaviour so that you repeat it in a future setting. Ergo, whatever you do in the scenario, whether good or bad, you're going to remember what the good thing should be, and you should be going there. However, it's not as easy as it sounds. You really need a good coach or a good set of consequences. I've mentioned the role play where you have a manager, so the manager has to really understand what's going on in terms of this learning environment and be able to provide those consequences in a manner where the person will get them. And it's also possible to do it in a setting like in eLearning, you could use Articulate Storyline for example, do branching scenarios and have the consequences pop up. So that's another way of doing it. Longer to create, but you could spread it out to more people, and I would say if you'd have to pick and choose always pick live people in a setting. But if you're trying to spread it out to, let's say you're heading a big region, a market region, let's say North America, where I'm at. Well, maybe I can't travel everywhere so I could create those instead of just giving them information about products or information about selling. It's better than nothing, but I can throw them into a virtual scenario with a virtual customer and get them to make choices and get them to understand what the consequences of those choices would be.

Shalini Merugu 23:09
Great. Thank you, Daniel. That's a wonderful way of explaining this. I mean, we all know that scenarios are powerful because you put learners in a risk-free environment. But I like what you said about adding a little bit of anxiety because that's a little bit just the right balance is a good thing. I think we have a tendency to mollycoddle our learners a bit too much. So, what you shared, achieving the right balance between giving them something that will bring out the best and the worst in them, whatever the case, and then reinforcing the right kind of behaviour, that's really bound to stick rather than as you said, just throwing a bunch of information at them. Coming to our next question, Daniel, how do you balance theoretical concepts like ADDIE or action mapping with the practical constraints of corporate training?

Guimont, Daniel 24:12
Oh, that's a really good question. So we talked about a lot about scenarios and now we're going to talk about action mapping. I'm a big fan of the book Map It, by Kathy Moore. Yes. Big fan of hers.

Shalini Merugu 24:24
Yeah, She's a legend. I'm a big fan.

Guimont, Daniel 24:30
I was doing scenarios before understanding what she was doing, but now that I went through her courses, I've read the book multiple times, I can't get enough of it. I understand it better and I have a different approach and I'm always trying to get better at it, and I think it's a lot of fun. How do you use the ADDIE model and the action map? The ADDIE model is an important guideline, and it should be looked as a guideline. Meaning that not everything is going to go exactly according to plan, but it's always good to have a plan, despite the fact that you're not going to follow it step by step because if you have nothing, then everything is just going to be a bit of a blur. As I've mentioned earlier, the Analysis phase is the most important phase in my opinion. You could argue that they're all important. One without another phase, the whole thing crumbles. But for me, the more time and quality that you spend in the analysis, chatting with people. Surveys are a good tool, but it can't just be surveys. You have to really get to talk to people, sit them down. Kathy Moore calls them kick-start meetings, I think, where you should have at least two hours. The first time I read that, Two hours with a stakeholder? What am I going to talk about? But after I've done it a few times, it's almost as if you’re psychoanalysing the stakeholder. It sounds bad in one sense. But the first few minutes of the conversation is all about what they want. I'm thinking about this training, I want this, I want my people to do this and that, and you listen. And it's a bit of a journey, so don't jump to the end right now, show that you're listening. That’s really, really important. Then once things kind of settle in, that's when you probe them a little bit more, just like a salesperson would probe a customer to better understand. OK, what are your needs? What are the problems that you face? If you would have this, would that solve the problem? What would a good engineer, salesperson, operator look like to you? And then they can think about it because a lot of times what I've learned is through our rational brain, where we have language it's really, really hard to get deep inside of what our fears are. Because over here, this is our emotional centre of the brain, and we will feel those deep emotions, those signals are good, but it's hard to put them into words, so we, as Learning and development people, we have to cater to and foster that kick-off meeting. Listen to people, challenge them in certain ways to really, really understand that. Once we have a lot of data from our conversations with the stakeholders, from surveys with a group of people, imagine the engineering department, you survey them, maybe you get 50% results. But in my book, that's a pretty good result. Then you can have some focus groups where you're talking to subject matter experts to get their perspective, cause the stakeholder, let's say director of a department sees of the problem, the operators, the technical people, they might see it completely different. So, you need to hear their side of the stories. And once you get all of that, everything becomes a little bit easier. So, when you're doing your design, when you're doing your development, you know what you want to hit in terms of those big points that are going to change that behaviour that you focused on. And going back to the action map, it's paramount when you start a project, especially if it's a big project, you need to know what your goal will be, what is the behaviour that you're looking to change. And how are you going to measure that? That's the other thing that for me changed a lot.

We talked a lot about metrics in terms of training and development, but that can't be brushed off so easily. You really have to be able to measure capture wherever the people you want to train, where they are at right now and where you want them to be, so that when you're designing and developing that you hit those markers. And if you don't hit it at the end of the training, then you can reevaluate, try to understand what went wrong, what you've missed. But if you did hit those markers you could think, OK, how can I hit them even better, how can I bring the bar a little bit higher for next time, and things like that? That was also something, the measurement, that I didn't take seriously at first, but after reading Kathy Moore's book Map It, that really solidified, and I can understand why are we going through this this activity? It goes back to the ‘why’. If I can't measure it and if I can't show you that you're different from when we first started this, whether it's a week, a month, six months, whatever it is, then that could take you out of engagement. But if I can measure it or say, hey, this is where we're going, there's a good chance that we're going to hit it, we're probably going to get engagement in there. People should be excited to see, hey, I'm going to be this much more productive in my personal and professional life. It's hard to say no to that.

Shalini Merugu 31:06
Right, right. Yeah. Thank you. A tangential note, Daniel. Stakeholders are super busy people. How do you persuade somebody to agree to a 2-hour meet?

Guimont, Daniel 31:15
Yes. That is a good question. I love that. I'll tell you a story. When I finished reading Kathy Moore's book, I thought to myself, OK, two-hour stakeholder meeting, how am I going to do that? And it's not as if these training experiences happen all the time. Most of the time, I'm just at my desk doing my things, working on a project. And stakeholders are just being stakeholders and doing their jobs. But one time, someone approached me, and they said hey, we're going to do this big project and I want you to find a solution to this. I want my people to be able to do this. And that's the opening door. If I were as shy as I was back in the day or if I was more junior, I'm thinking about, let's say, 10 years ago, I would have just said OK, no problem and then got to work, maybe open up a Rise file. Nothing with Rise, you fill it with information, maybe a video or two, and off we go. But what I did instead is, first of all, you thank him, right? You really show appreciation and gratitude to people that come to see you because they don't have to use your service. Absolutely not. So, the fact that they're coming to see you is a really good sign. And then you kind of praise it. So, you say this is a really interesting project. I'd love to know more. I really want to dive deeper into it. Why are you so passionate about that? Would it be a problem for you to sit down with me in a week or two? For I know it might be long, but maybe two hours because I really really wanted to dive deep. I believe that when you show curiosity to people, even though they're busy, people are going to provide time, and when I try to empathise with people that are busy, we're talking about directors or departments, VPs or even CEOs. I've done this with COOs as well. When you show curiosity, yes, they are busy, so it might be it won't be today, won't be tomorrow. It won't be next week. But if you're curious about what they want to do, they will provide time. Especially if you say I'd like to take at least two hours to really go deep into that. It's hard for them to say no. They won't give you the time right now. But the fact that you're showing curiosity, not a lot of people probably show them curiosity to this thing, and here you are. You're offering something that they don't really get. So, they will love to talk. They will love to say everything that they can about this because they are passionate about it. The reason why they're passionate about it, they came to see you or else they would have done it their own way or this and that. So, they have to be passionate about it. That's how I look at it. At first, I was a bit scared of how am I going to do it? But when you propose it, I haven't seen anybody refuse it thus far.

Shalini Merugu 34:44
Right, thank you. I'm sure that's a very valuable tip for our listeners because that is something we hesitate with, how can I make so many demands on their time? But as you said, express genuine interest in what they're trying to accomplish, and then they've become co-partners in this training. So, Daniel, you talked about the importance of measuring the impact of training or the importance of measuring how successful the training has been in learner retention. So, can you share an example of a training programme that you've designed that had very tangible, measurable success in terms of both learner retention and performance?

Guimont, Daniel 35:34
Yeah, I love this question because it forces us to become creative. I'll give you another story where I worked with a department that deals with customers. We were talking about KPIs. As I was going through the key performance indicators, one of the things that popped up in my mind would be the performance of the worker on the phone with the customer. So, the quality of the call, are they resolving the problem, things like that. And I never saw that as a KPI, so I was scratching my head. I was thinking well, how is this not measured, they do this all day long. It has to be 90% of their day, maybe 80 at the least. And we're not measuring that. So how do we know where they're at and where they're going? To be fair, supervisors are joining on calls and giving feedback, which is fantastic like that. That's already a step in the right direction. But how do you know if you're better this year than you were next year? And let's say that you want to be the best. You don't just want to meet the minimal standard, you actually want to really, really thrive, because there's incentives to thrive. Maybe the company makes more money, maybe you get bonuses or whatever. It's great that your boss thinks that you're decent, but where do you scale? Are you at the bottom of decent or are you at the top of decent? How are you compared to your teammates? How are you compared to other people in the field? While I saw that this was not a KPI, I challenged the manager and I asked, why is this not measured? And one of the answers that I received was, we don't know how to measure it, so we're not going to put it as a KPI. And I pushed back and said, OK, it's not because we're not capable of measuring it for now that it shouldn't be a KPI. Let’s look at what's important. And then we'll figure out how to measure it, just like the analysis.

Let's look at what you really, really need. Let's not worry about How are we going to do this? Because sometimes we could go into deep ends where how am I going to create? Don't worry about it. We're not there yet. But what is it that we want? Then we could become creative. And maybe if we have to make cuts because of resources and time and whatever, we make cuts. But we try to aim for that target as much as possible. So, let's get that target right. When we were able to put that back into the KPIs, what we were able to do then is to create a simple monitoring guide where a supervisor would have a sheet of paper where he could quantify subjectively and objectively. So that's the thing. A lot of people sometimes will have resistance for subjective metrics. In a conversation, a lot of it is subjective. But the thing is, if you have consistent subjective data, you have consistent data. So you can see progress or regression or stagnation, and then you could provide feedback. But if you're not taking that data in, the person is just assuming that my current behaviour is OK, let's continue with the same operation. If you use a monitoring guide where your supervisors will take notes on subjective data such as, let's say, tone of voice. Although you could argue whether that’s subjective or objective, but OK tone of voice, how was the tone of voice? How long were you talking? Was it more so you on the phone or more so the client, or a bit of half and half because if it's 80% them and 20% you, that probably means that you're showing that you're listening. So, if you're not talking as much in certain scenarios, that could be a very good metric, and that is completely objective. How long is the call? That's another objective metric. So, if you resolve the problem, which is fantastic, but you resolve it in 10 minutes and now you’re resolving the same types of problems in 2-3 minutes, that is an objective factor taking into consideration. So, it goes back to understanding what the behaviour is that you're looking for and deep dive into that. What are the sub-behaviours that follow through with that main behaviour, and then find, don't worry about whether it's too subjective or whether it's not enough objective, you'll find objective things. Just find whatever you can measure, and maybe with technology or with more creativity, you'll be able to capture data in a more effective way. But even if today you have just a pen and paper and you're listening, you have your ears, that is better than having absolutely nothing. So, in the future, let's say you get some fancy software, you get some recording tools and all that, you can measure it and get it better, you can compare that with the paper stuff. So, you still have a trail. So don't look at lack of resources as an issue. To become resourceful in the way that you're going to measure, even if it's a little subjective, it's better than nothing.

Shalini Merugu 41:48
Right, right. Thank you, Daniel, those are practical points that I'm sure we would all be better off by implementing. I was just wondering, Daniel, you said something about, not everybody has these KPIs laid out. Sometimes you have to persuade them to start defining these KPIs. So, if you were to measure the impact of this training initiative later, how would you go about it? Because if they haven't really captured the initial, there's no diagnostic, so to speak. Then how would you demonstrate the progress at the end if there's no pre and post training kind of an assessment? I was just wondering.

Guimont, Daniel 42:34
Yeah, that is a really, really challenging situation to be put in. So, here’s the thing. I've been tossed into a similar scenario. I think this is going to be interesting. When I first started in the business world, I came to my position and there were onboarding programmes going on, so I was the first training person in my company. Ergo the training that was created was by managers, directors, people in those departments that see a need for it, there's a new hire we need to get them up to speed, we need to get them to be able to do something. So, what are we going to put in? And those people have done a great job. And what really matters is their intention, which is fantastic. They saw a problem, they figured out a solution, and they did the best that they could with what they have. And sometimes just that could be enough. Now I come in and I look at the programmes that are already going on. One of the questions that I've asked them and that they didn't really ask themselves, is What does a good professional in your field in your department look like? So, when I have that information with them, I was able to look at what the programme was. And I ended up actually making a lot of cuts, so I'll give you an example. One of the things that I did with all the onboarding programmes is I would chat with the learners once they were finished, usually it would take maybe five to seven weeks to go. So, you're starting a new job, you go through a few weeks and the more complicated your job, the longer you're going to go through. And when I was doing my review of a programme that I did not create, I just come in and ask a few questions to the learner, which they themselves are new as well. And I said, OK, how does this prepare you for your job? And oftentimes they don't have a good comparison because they're just starting the job. But they can give me a fair amount of information. So, I could extrapolate, and I could see there are certain things that we're giving them that were hitting the mark and there are certain things that they don't really need right now. Then I go back to the stakeholders, and I ask that poignant question of what does a good professional, a good engineer look like? What does a good logistics technician look like? Then I look at what the content is with them cause at this stage I don't know what the content means, I'm very novel in experience and I kind of challenge them and say all right, this meeting, how does this help them be prepared? This eLearning, how does it help them?

And when they really can't answer the question, they themselves say something like, well, I guess we could cut it. And this goes back to engagement, which is funny enough. So, if you cut certain things and you make it more relevant, the person's going to be more engaged. If there's something in my onboarding that I'm going through, an e-learning, let's say. Here's an example. So, in our company you travel, and we have software to use the travel, and there's an e-learning that tells you how to navigate that and how to put your information and it's wonderful. But as a new employee, are you going to need that? And my epiphany of that moment happened where I did the training myself. And when I first started travelling was six months in.

Shalini, I didn't remember what I learned six months ago because I had no incentive to remember it because there was no expectation of me doing that. So, we cut that, and we cut other things, not to say that there's anything wrong with the training. We cut it only to use it at those appropriate moments. So, if you're going to be travelling in six months, we're going to give you that just before you travel, because now you're going to retain it and it's going to be helpful, but why should we give you something that lasts 20 minutes when we could give you something that's more pertinent, especially if those 20 minutes you're not going to use it until six months? Eight months? Whenever it is that you're going to travel? That was one of the ways that I evaluated, talking with the stakeholders. Again, there's no way around it. You just need to talk with those people. You need to talk with the people that are doing the job as well. You need to look at the current situation. And you just kind of play Legos. You take off blocks that are not needed, that don't give you the goal. So really get an important goal and put things that maybe are not there yet that will help to expedite the process to that goal.

The other thing that I'd love to add especially with onboarding because when you come in with a mentality of, let's cut things to make it streamlined, sometimes you cut things that answer the question, does this make you ready for your job? There's certain things that don't necessarily get you ready for your job, but they're really, really good culturally. So, for example, in the company that I work for, we would have meetings with certain departments, even meetings with the CEO that we would prepare for the new hire. And when you dissect that question, does this get the person ready for their job, it doesn't really answer that. But it is culturally something really relevant and it helps the person understand that they're cared for, that they're part of a company that even the CEO will take 30 minutes of his or her busy day to sit down and welcome you, answer a few questions, and get to know you. So, there are these exceptions. The only thing is you don't want to get too overwhelmed with these exceptions. This is the part that I would say the art of designing where you have to really understand what's a good level of technical capabilities and nice, warm and fuzzy we're showing you that we care here. It's not just about getting you ready, but we want you to know that you're appreciated. We picked you, not the other people that did the interview and we want to invest in you.

Shalini Merugu 50:03
Right, right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The emotional connect piece that's often overlooked in our rush to create all the other technical parts of it and get it right. So, on a similar note, how do you incorporate storytelling and emotion or real-world context into your designs?

Guimont, Daniel 50:27
Storytelling is a challenge for me, so this is something that I'm working on, but I'll give you a few examples. Going back to the customer service example that I was talking about, one of the things that we did for a scenario-based training, instead we created the monitoring guide. So now we have a piece of paper or data to grab that information. The other thing is we have to measure that so we can use real live calls. Or if we want to practice and become better, we're going to do scenarios, right? That is the answer. So how are we going to do scenarios? Well, in this case, much like sales. I thought that one of the best approaches would be role plays. Now how do I, the little old training person that doesn't do that job, create these stories to put people in? Stories are such a powerful tool. So how do I do that well? The way I did that was I would chat with my subject matter experts from that department and ask them, Can you provide me a story at work where you were with a customer, and it was impactful? Let's say it was either very, very positive, it went well, or maybe it went very, very negative. Either way it's not your regular call, it's something that happens once in a while. You could call it a disgruntled customer or whatever it is that you want, but something significant that you remember and tell me in detail. They provided me those stories and when I was reading those stories, I was able to create a scenario. I modified certain things because I didn't want it to be too obvious, but I was able to use those emotional cues to say, OK, What's the situation that the learner is thrown into, in this case, the service providers? What are the choices that they need to do and what are the consequences of those choices? I had all of that through the stories that they gave me. I just had to make a form to build a role play. And when it came to the day of the role play, I would make a team of three people. So, you would have one person that's acting as themselves, they're actually the ones learning and getting feedback. One person would have a piece of paper that would have the role play, so they would read, I'm this disgruntled customer. If this happens, I do this. If that happens, I do this et cetera, et cetera. And off they go. They do the best that they can and sometimes they go a little bit off of script, but that's more than OK. And then the third person would have the other sheet where they're taking notes. They're taking the data, there you go. And we do that for a few minutes, then we have the team members give feedback, and we have the manager give feedback, and me as well, give feedback and then we rotate, we change roles. So that was one way of doing it.

When I'm doing scenario-based e-learning, it's the exact same approach. I'm going to go to an SME. I'm going to ask them what's the story? How does it go? I'm going to build it. And instead of building a role play or a script or something to guide you, I would build it in terms of this little virtual scenario. So, I'll put visual characters, maybe one or two characters depending on the scenario, what they say or what they do. Now the learner has to make a choice. Let's say they have three choices. They have to choose. If they choose a bad choice, they get the consequence and they get the understanding of what that consequence is, short term and long term, so that they get that hit in the brain. If they get the consequence well, it's the same thing. It's not just well done. You pick the right answer. It's more, because you did this, your teammates were able to thrive, the customer was so happy that they contacted your manager, et cetera. You lay down what would really happen in a realistic scenario.

Shalini Merugu 54:57
Right, right. Yeah. Thank you for that really comprehensive response to that question that I'm sure interests most of our listeners. Maybe we have time for one or two last questions, Daniel. What are some trends in instructor design that excite you right now?

Guimont, Daniel 55:20
OK. Last year I engaged in The Devlin Peck instructional Designer boot camp. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but every time you Google instructional design, you find his name. And I went through his boot camp, which was phenomenal. I'm really, really proud of the work I've done and what I've learned. He does an amazing job. These days he's talking a lot about AI. And one of the things that excites me, so a few weeks ago I started doing these LinkedIn learning JavaScript. I know nothing about JavaScript at all. So I went through the course and I'm still very, very lost. But I understand what it looks like. So, what excites me about these trends is I love what e-learning can do. Because e-learning can really target the masses. So I'm excited about that face to face is really the one where you're going to get that connection, but you could still get a decent connection through e-learning if it's designed right. And we talked about scenario design. So, you could bring scenarios and storytelling in e-learning as we've chatted. But what I'm excited about is instead of having in your e-learning three or four choices with the consequences, you actually integrate somehow a chat bot where if you have a character, they don't just write the prompt that you wrote, but they actually write as if they are the characters so they stay within that character. They're not writing what you would have written, but it's what the character would say. And instead of the learner choosing these choices, they actually type or dare I fantasise and say, that they chat. I'm dreaming a little bit, but let's start with the typing on their keyboard. We’re talking about sales. So, imagine your new salesperson, instead of having those choices, actually types what you would say to the customer. And then this chat bot would understand what you're saying and then behave a certain way, so if you're not hitting the particular marks that you would put into your chat bot for your learner to hit that, you would have a negative consequence and then you could have the character change their state, they're grumpy or whatever, but you get that direct feedback. I'm really excited about that because it's almost as if we're getting as close as possible to the real-life thing or the role play. So, we're getting so close there, but we're targeting a mass of people. If you have a big company and you have salespeople across a continent and you're just a small training team of let's say three people, you can do something really, really powerful. Yes, it's not as good as being there in a role play, but you can do that. So, I'm excited about integrating chatbot within Articulate Storyline or other types of medium to get those reactions in that behavioural change.

Shalini Merugu 59:14
Alright. Thank you, Daniel. Actually, this really resonates with me because I found myself wishing the other day that I wish my post would talk to me. It would let me talk to it and respond as a real person would do in real time. That would be so fabulous and almost an AI coach inbuilt into the course. So yeah, for all you know, even while we're speaking, somebody out there has already developed it and is using it because there's so many things happening, there's something new every day.

Guimont, Daniel 59:41
Probably.

Shalini Merugu 59:45
Thank you so much, Daniel. We are at time, but I would just hate to leave this conversation without one final question. If an organization wants to level up its training programmes but doesn't know where to start, what would be your top three recommendations? Conditions

Guimont, Daniel 1:00:07.
The first thing is if you have nothing, just start with something. For example, if you don't have a training cell or a training specialist or someone that can help you do those deep dive analysis, just try to have anything. So, for example, if you're dealing with complicated products and you want to hire new salespeople, they're not going to have that background. Well, mentorship, pair someone up with someone that's good, and that usually is the default situation that people would gravitate. But I would say it's probably one of the best ones that you could do. The down part is you'll have your high performer that can't perform as much because they have to mentor the other person, but that should be the price that you pay. And it's hard to get away from not using your best people within training because if you want your new hires to be like your best people, well, eventually they're going have to sit down together and do something. And a good onboarding will make sure that we're using those resources adequately. But if you have nothing, pair someone with a good performer that you trust, that is also a good communicator because sometimes you might have some really good performers. But they just don't know how to connect with someone. So, if you're an attentive manager you can dissect that. I would say that would be the first place to start. Like I mentioned, anything is better than nothing. So even if you have nothing right now and you're saying, hey, let's give them this. And you're not too sure if it's too much or not enough, it's better than nothing. It only shows to the person, to the new hire that you care, so that's a step in the right direction and I would say the last thing would be to listen to your team. So, let's say that you're listening to this podcast and you're a hiring manager and you're too small of a company to have a training person and you want to do the best that you can, and you work with a team of professionals. Let's say you have a small team of five people. Well, sit down with those five people and ask them, Really what it is that they do about their job, what it is that's important about their job? Try to mark down what those things are really, try to separate the wheat from the chaff, meaning there's a lot of things that you could give to your new hires when training, but what is the most important thing? So, listen to your staff, take a lot of notes and from there you should have a good idea of what to do and what to avoid. And then you could build something that would be a great start to inviting someone in your company, your department, and making them feel like they're appreciated and giving them tools and capabilities that they didn't have a few weeks ago.

Shalini Merugu 1:03:46
Thank you so much, Daniel. We've gained a lot of insight into what all goes into making training really impactful and we really enjoyed the stories that you shared and the real-life examples. So, thank you once again and thank you, listeners. Do stay tuned in for our next podcast. Thank you once again, Daniel, it was a pleasure having you.

Guimont, Daniel 1:04:07
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.