Should we teach the History of Paper?

A while back in my career, I was charged with modernizing the learning function in a corporate learning and development organization. The first thing I noticed was that the new hire curriculum took four to eight weeks to onboard entry-level employees for customer service-type roles. This training came at a huge cost to the company via the resources to train these employees, lost productivity, and even more loss in repetitive training due to the high turnover inherent to the role.

When I looked at the curriculum, I found that new hires were taught the entire history of the company from the beginning to the present day. In addition, the curriculum included every contingent they might ever experience in their role. My first thought was how would anyone remember all that information and apply it to their job? Can anyone remember something learned in the classroom three weeks ago that wasn’t immediately applied? I realized why it took six months for an employee to be considered proficient in their role and why some never even made it that far.

That’s when the History of Paper concept was born. I needed to transform this curriculum to contain only the information an employee needed to be able to perform the basics of their job. All the rest of the information was just fluff and noise.

To make this point, with the help of a few senior Instructional Designers on my team, we designed a lesson on how to build an origami paper boat and rolled it out to the learning organization. The lesson began with me telling the history of paper, describing the paper-making processes and how that resulted in different textures, etc. This talk was met with, admittedly planted, hecklers in the crowd asking how this was going to help them build a paper boat?!

Once we finally built our origami boats, I related this lesson to the new hire curriculum. Why were we teaching the history of the company and other superfluous information to our learners that didn’t help them do their jobs? The history of paper may be interesting to some, but it didn’t help us build our paper boats, just like the history of the company is important but doesn’t help new hires answer customer questions. The lesson also took double the time it needed to achieve the objective of building a paper boat.

This concept was met with a lot of resistance and protest!

“It’s important that new hires know the company’s rich history!”

“You can’t provide proper service to customers if you don’t understand the evolution of the company and what it stands for!”

“Employees need to understand that previous versions of the software were much less intuitive, and this version is so much better!”

…and on and on.

My response was to apply some change management techniques and challenge these beliefs. When a customer wants to understand why they are being charged for X, how does knowing the company history help the employee answer that question?

The result was a modernized curriculum with just-in-time learning and performance support tools that employees could access in the workflow of the job. This addressed the “forgetting curve” and assisted with the less common questions that might come up. ??

By cutting the “fluff” from our courses, we significantly shortened the time new hires spent in class and saved millions of dollars in lost productivity.

So next time you are wondering if content should make it into a curriculum, bump it up against the History of Paper test – is the information needed for the person to perform a task/job or is it noise, and therefore, should be left out of training?

Happy designing!

Credits: Chris Durbetaki, Jennifer Brown , others on my Curriculum Development team, and business partners were pioneers in helping me develop this strategy.