Ray must be profoundly irritated in whatever dimension he’s in: He was already starting a new breakthrough innovation that would change – again- our training industry. This summer, while most of us in Learning & Development were busy figuring out how we could use AI to get the content and activities we need to design and deliver “our” courses, Ray was writing a book and launching a course for all of us in L&D to explore together ways to empower employees to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT -and variations – to manage their own ability to achieve needed on-the-job performance results and build successful careers.
I know the bodies we "drive" wear out and we have to move on. But this is too fast! I want to know how Ray would have turned his ideas about Augmented Intelligence into a profound break through for those of us helping employees build successful careers... or maybe in the future, how we can help workers manage their own performance development process.
Ray's ideas about AI this summer are just his most recent innovations that have caused the field of training to evolve and become more effective:
• Ray was also expanding line managers’ and L&D professionals’ awareness of the value of employees share their solutions to work problems in SituationExpert.com. Coming from his own respect for each person and joy in sharing talents, not competing, Ray developed a system for acknowledging employees’ to share with each other effective solutions to typical work problems. He was showing organizations ways to embed employees’ success stories along with other micro learning courses into the flow of work. After basic orientation and training for new hires, Ray was working with clients to connect training with work so that employees learn how to handle typical challenges and problematic situations when they need to learn best practices at relevant points in the flow of work, including ways to include and share their own insights and success strategies.
• Another of Ray’s innovative strategies is working so well and spreading to other organizations that people may not realize how he worked with TrainingMagNetwork.com to shift our field of competing experts into a collegial community of professionals learning from each other. When I first started working as an instructional designer, I only met experienced learning professionals at conferences or association meetings where they were giving lecture/demonstrations or standing in booths.. They presented, we listened. Or when I paid for a course with an expert. TrainingMagNetwork’s free one-hour webinars bring us together to find out what’s new, what’s working well and how to deal with common challenges
o Free.
o Recorded to fit any busy schedule.
o Open to anyone of us propose and deliver a webinar on a presentation on what we offer that others in L&D might find useful by just covering webinar expenses.
o No focus on closing sales with hooks like, “sign today to get a discount
o Collegial, highly visual conversations among equals
o And giving each of us the ability to inform a large market of L&D professionals and executives of potential clients about work that may have value for others.
• And starting in the early 2000s, Ray’s early innovation - micro learning with vignettes. New trainers may assume short 5-30 minute micro learning units are just part of digital technology, not a break through. Newcomers to training did not experience the early attempts to shift:
o From ponderous 3-5 day onsite courses, mostly lecture with a few practice exercises, packaged in thick 3-ring notebooks…
o To eLearning online or on CD Roms that initially was just the same content from onsite courses stuffed into long online live or recorded sessions or CD ROMs.
I don't know how Ray changed engineering before he joined us in Learning & Development, but I think Ray’s early break-through in our field was to envision short 5-30 minute micro learning focused on specific concepts, strategies and skills needed to meet real world work challenges successfully. We might be offering online courses with a live or recorded facilitator or independent study digital lessons. Whether we offer a stand-alone course or a series of micro learning modules related to a complex concept, strategy or skills.... And we maybe be focused on interpersonal communication skills or technical procedures...Whatever aspects of learning we worked in, Ray developed our ability as instructional designers, course developers/producers and facilitators/instructors to:
• Start with one or more vignettes that dramatize a real-world work challenge and stimulates employees understand the value and importance of investing their time in the micro learning;
• Then, using socratic questions and decision points with visuals, involve employees actively in the learning process with demonstrations of best practices (key concepts, strategies, skills, etc.) and practice activities that can help employees achieve work objectives, meet challenges and avoid failure with needed on-the-job performance.
As I realized the value of Ray’s vision for micro learning and found his book “3-Minute E-Learning,”I felt I was breathing fresh air after sitting through too many expert lectures, reading too many online pages of questions, answers and correct responses. So I went to the Contact window on VignettesLearning.com to type in a fan-thank you and give a suggestion (to use micro learning as a way to capture and archive how retiring experts have handled key challenges.) A few days later, I almost dropped my phone in surprise when Dr. Jimenez, the founder and CEO of Vignettes Learning called to thank me and discuss ] what we thought worked well in training – or not.
That conversation continued every few months from the early 2000s until now. My hunch is that Ray kept up with developments and fed his creative mind by regularly making these check-in calls to hundreds of us working in various areas of job training in corporations, not-for-profits, government agencies, and in all forms of learning media. Ray’s calls were a gift to me – and probably for others. A gift of respect and acknowledgement from a creative thinker in our field wanting to connect, listen and sometimes create strategies together but with those of us developing or providing training in the trenches. In my conversations with Ray, we also shared what storytelling structures we found could create powerful vignettes. Did you know that, to strengthen his facilitation and vignette design skills, Ray had the courage to take improvisation acting classes? The courage to be vulnerable.
Over the years I have been able to incorporate Ray’s micro learning structure into the various needs of my organization and then when I started a consulting practice, of my clients. Ray gives us space to adapt Ray’s vision in our own ways – the main elements of Ray’s vision that I incorporate include, in a cybershell:
• Dramatize why the training is important: Vignettes that show a work challenge or work failure that employees really want to handle well or avoid…
• Show best practices for meeting the challenge or preventing the problem: An inductive/discovery learning process that asks socratic questions about causes or possible solutions, builds on critical thinking and analytic skills, and gives ownership over the learning process to participants…
• Demonstrate how to apply best practices to situations: with brief step by step guidelines in a visual skill model, checklist or chart with questions and actions for achieving needed results…
• Practice with feedback: use the best practice guidelines to help people assess their own work and give constructive suggestions to others, inviting people to adapt the guidelines to their own style and experience as well as their cultural/organization’s styles and to create their own reminders and skill models, adapting elements to their own personal style,
• Reinforce and plan next steps. Each person decides what was most valuable for their work, adapted to their actual challenges, and plans when to turn the ideas into action on the job, with any needed coaching from each other or from resources.
Until this summer, I had met Ray in person only once, in 2013 when I took an onsite course that he led. But he became a major influence in my work over more than 10 years of friendship. In that and many online courses as well as his own free webinars, I witnessed first-hand his gifted teaching – shaped by his personal authenticity, appreciation of different ways of thinking, and ability to turn critical and creative thinking into industry changing performance development strategies. I treasured his conversationsever month or two – someone with a brilliant strategic mind really wanting to listen to our thoughts and insights. And always protecting a few minutes of conversation to share something his beloved wife Marisu or one of his sons or daughter had done that delighted him and for me to give some family highlights. Virtual friends.
I am so grateful that this summer, when I visited one of my sons in Los Angeles, Ray and his wife Marisu made time to meet me for dinner. As I mentioned, only the second time meeting him out of cyberspace… and the opportunity to meet the woman he had so often spoken about with so much love and appreciation: Marisu Jimenez, who is a phenomenon in her own right. She designs, manages and often hosts events and programs in a university center for alumni -- planning fund-raisers, dinners and award ceremonies for university graduates, development of relationships with seniors, entertainment events, residencies and conferences. Marisu shares Ray’s ability to connect with people both personally and organizationally. She and Ray had new plans for their future. I hope her sorrow will someday lighten with the good memories.
Oops, Ray isn’t here to tell me to cut this down, make this more concise and stop embarrassing him! But I just wanted to let the thoughts flow.