Build The Foundation For Your Best Learning Experiences

“We don't own their time or attention. So how can we genuinely get people engaged?"

This is Greg Arthur (FLPI) ’s mindset around learning experiences, and he’s created a process that solves the issue.

In this episode, the Two Circles Design Studio Founder talked through the first part - building a foundation by understanding problems, stakeholders, context and more.

As always, check out the full episode below and keep scrolling for the key takeaways:

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• Watch on YouTube .

1. Think of problems you’re solving like a family tree of sub problems

"Start with your earliest ancestor at the top, the main problem. And then you start to break it down. So each new family member beneath then breaks out into them, into them, into them.

"And you're just breaking that problem down into a couple of small components and then into those small components. So you don't try and attack the ultimate problem on its own.”

This framing allows you to think about where you have the skill and ability to deliver quick wins.

And allows you to prioritise the biggest contributors to the overall problem.

But most importantly, it ensures you have the full context, so you don’t miss anything as you build out learning experiences.

2. “Forget everything you’ve done before and treat every problem as unique.”

“Some problems will share the same characteristics… you and I, we're two different people, so we could deal with the same problem very, very differently.

“You always go back to your problem. Where will you win? Where will you not win?

"How do you scope something out to a point where you can say, I'm fairly confident, or above fairly confident.

“Let's get an MVP out. Let's make it work. And then everything else will fall into place after that, but there's a whole process in between.”

3. Map stakeholders based on interest/influence and role/relation

“We also talk about stakeholders in terms of who are they? And then we start to map them out around where they would sit on a very basic grid.

"Are they interested, but not available, and then all sorts of different versions of that."

This quick exercise is designed to help you understand stakeholders beyond ‘they have a vested interest’, to what level of interest they have, how available they are, and what level of involvement they can commit to.

The goal is to figure out:

• Who would you work with and how would you work with each of them?
• What are they actually going to do for you?
• What are you going to do for them??
• And then collectively, what will you do for your users?

4. The simplest way to diagnose problems with stakeholders is this…

• “What's happening now? And how do you know that's a problem??
• “How do you know it's not a problem?”?
• "What are you measuring that on? Is it a feeling? Is it a data point? Is it a bit of both?”

5. Build a process where you know what you’re doing before you do it

“If I had a slingshot and I just pulled it back a couple of centimetres, and then let go. It's just going to fall down.

“I could do that over and over again… I'm never getting anywhere near my target, but I'm doing it really, really quickly.

“Whereas if I spend a little bit longer pulling it back, taking a little bit of my time, aiming properly, and then letting go, I've only spent, in theory, a few more seconds doing that, but I've got a much better chance of hitting my target.”

So while you don’t want to spend months planning and researching, you don’t want to start executing before you’ve built an understanding of the problem and confidence in the solution you’ll test.