Newforma Director of Customer Satisfaction Dan Conery tells how one dish can constantly surprise you, and reveals how assumptions sabotage software training.
You were in the United Kingdom not long ago. Are the jokes about British cuisine justified?
Well, I like all food, so if there’s any joking to be done, it’s usually about the range of my appetite.
Your trip reports made much of “bangers and mash.”
It’s just sausages and mashed potatoes with gravy, but each dish was different, depending on location. I guess it’s not surprising; mathematically, just a handful of seasonings will have lots and lots of combinations as you vary the ingredients and proportions.
So you ate pub grub the whole time?
Mostly. Even when I ate at the home of Tim Bates, Newforma’s director of Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, his wife, Beverly, made a shepherd’s pie. It was outstanding.
I take it you liked it.
It made me want to herd sheep. It was that good.
Aside from the food, what else was different in Britain?
Not much, really. People were concerned about the economy, same as in the U.S. The same project information management problems that bug people in the U.K. are the problems that bug people here.
Did you do a lot of training?
Yes, and I trained the trainers. I’m reading a book that’s influencing Newforma training. It’s called “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” [by Chip Heath and Dan Heath]. It tells about an experiment between tappers and listeners.
Excuse me?
Experimenters broke people into two groups, tappers and listeners. The tappers had to tap out the rhythms of familiar tunes and listeners had to identify the tunes. The experimenters asked the tappers to estimate what percentage of songs would be guessed correctly. The tappers estimated listeners would be able to identify 50 percent of the tunes, but only 2.5 percent were guessed correctly. That’s the curse of knowledge.
The curse is that if you know what you’re doing, you assume other people will figure it out, also.
Correct. Tappers heard the songs in their heads, but listeners lacked that advantage.
How does understanding the curse of knowledge affect the way you train people to use Newforma Project Center?
Tappers vs. Listeners says most people are trying to convey information at a level that’s too high or too abstract for the audience to understand. So I focus on the 10 percent of the information people will understand.
What’s that 10 percent?
Email, Search, View, Markup and Info Exchange. We make sure everyone who leaves the room knows how to use Email and Search functions. A few will get the Viewer and Markup. One will get Info Exchange. Do that, and you’ve sown seeds that’ll get others going.
And that takes how long?
We do it in 60 minutes, which is not long, but we still use a technique picked up from “Made to Stick” to keep people engaged: At the outset we present a mystery around project information management. “Made to Stick” calls it a knowledge gap. It makes people curious to know the answers.
Like a murder mystery, when you want to know who did it.
Right, but in this case, you want to know how to do it. The who is you, and you’re wondering, “How am I going to get all this work done without killing myself?”
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