Failure in Branching Scenarios

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Introduction

Nobody likes to fail. It makes you feel vulnerable and uncertain of your skills. It makes you feel stupid or inadequate. But, unfortunately, we all fail. Well, actually, it's fortunate that we fail.

Failing is a great way to move forward, to learn new things, to navigate a path forward. So failing is actually good. We learn from failure and grow from failure. Except, it still doesn't feel good and, if we fail in the wrong situation, the results can be catastrophic. But failing in a branching scenario is a great way to fail safely.

Enter Branching Simulations

As designers of instruction, when we create branching scenarios to facilitate learning, we should really focus on creating options and choices for the learners that accurately reflect possible points of failure or confusion. You want learners to fail in an environment where they can receive corrective feedback and learn from their failures rather than make the failure on-the-job in the actual situation such as in front of a customer or violating a safety protocol on a piece of equipment.

Types of Failure

There are several types of failure that can be included in a branching simulation that can see like the right choice but actually lead to undesirable consequences. You want to create choices that are often made by employees in the same situation but are wrong. Here are two general types of errors you may want to include in your design (there are many more).

• Skipping a Step in a Process--With this type of error, the learner is following a process but forgets a step or thinks that omitting a step will increase efficiency or speed. This is where the learner will need remediation about the importance of following each step and the consequence of missing a step. It might be the step of checking credit when taking an order or the step of washing your hands before serving a patron. You want to ask current employees what steps are often skipped by others and why they think those steps are skipped. Then you can devise branching choices based on those skipped steps. In academic terms this is an error of omission.
• Deviation--Here the learner does something that is incorrect. They enter the wrong figure in a spreadsheet or miscalculate a benefit for life insurance or run electrical wires through the middle of a vent. This can be due to inattentiveness to detail, lack of understanding of the task they are performing, or a change in processes or procedure. An example might be an employee accidently placing a deposit into the wrong customer account or mis-labeling a piece of equipment or mis-coding a medical procedure. Since inattentiveness is often the cause, drawing attention to the tendency to of employees to fail to pay attention to details in the specific instance can be helpful. This is often called an error of omission.

Conclusion

There are many more types of errors you can include in your branching-scenario design and often you'll want to make those errors subtle in a good, better, best design.

To learn more about designing effective branching scenarios, you may want to check out the LinkedIn Learning Course Designing Scenario-based Learning (click for preview).

The course covers everything from crafting the right environment for the scenario to creating decisions with consequence to how to craft a branch so you don't get overwhelmed.

Add or refresh to your knowledge of designing effective branching scenarios. They are a great way to engage learners and help them to learn from failure and to make mistakes in a safe environment where they received targeted feedback based on their responses.

Branching scenarios are a great way to allow people to fail in a safe and comfortable environment and to allow them to accept that failure is actually a learning opportunity.