Technology & ResouRces

Taking notes
Ed Bernacki
I have attended many events for trainers, consultants and speakers in various countries. Its clear that some of the material provided has yet to make the acquaintance of a designer. While I have seen some good workbooks, many look like something produced by a high-school student, not a paid professional. I have faith in well-designed notebooks and journals, and have been thinking about this issue for a long time. There are clues to suggest that people still want something to touch and feel. I challenge you to look around and notice the tools people use for notes and ideas. stage. Instead, he said, they were speedtyping the content of the speeches into their tweets or blog entries. He thought he was witnessing a glorious mass communication revolution until he saw what they were typing. Posts included, Speaker says green is here to stay and Green is good for business. Marc called this a pretty anaemic version of what was actually being said. Then it dawned on me, he added, These audience members were so intent on flexing

In praise of workbooks, notebooks and journals

Do you really need to print those workbooks? What an interesting question! It was one Kevin Lohan asked it in his regular column, Outside the Box (Aug 2012). It got me thinking about workbooks, notebooks and journals, and our growing focus on technology.
dependent on how people are engaged for the program, 50 per cent is the impact of the training and the last 25 per cent is created by what people do back at work (or do not do). This prompted me to consider the materials I use, and how I could design them to prompt participants and their managers to act afterwards. About this time I came across a quote from Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian academic and philosopher. Many people know his proclamation that the medium is the message. He also said, We shape our tools and they in turn shape us. I wondered about the tools we use and what behaviour(s) they shape. At conferences and many training sessions, the standard tool is a blank pad of paper (often with hotel logos on it). I dont know what behaviour we should expect from blank pads of paper. And our workbooks? What behaviours are they designed to shape? Coming from a training background, I also wondered about the skills people have for making notes. If they make notes that they never look at again, what does this say about their skill for listening, note taking, creating ideas, etc? This gave me an idea for a journal that could be used for recording notes at conferences. I developed (and published) a notebook with well-designed editorial pages to give people new skills for being an effective conference participant. In terms of making notes I observed that the current behaviour of most people is to summarise what a speaker says. I now open

When I started a PhD, I noticed many students (who are 30 years younger than me) using technologybut not necessarily for taking notes. I often work at the Victoria State Library and I noticed that most students have a computer open to social media while using school notebooks for their notes and learning. I teach a Masters program in Creativity and Innovation at the University of Adelaide. Only three of 24 students used a computer during one of my lectures, so I asked why. I was told it is easier and faster to use a notebook. I asked about technology and online resources. Did they want more? They said no. What they want is engagement: face-to-face sharing and collaboration. They want to experience something.

these audience members were so intent on flexing their social media muscles that they missed 95 per cent of the message.
their social media muscles that they missed 95 per cent of the message. Technology turned them into stenographersand not particularly good ones. There was no synthesis, no analysis, no thinking. Im certain the writers felt they were making a difference. But they were, in fact, adding little more than chatter. And that, I believe, is a problem. I once joked, How many people attend conferences, make notes and never look at them again? When 70 per cent of the hands went up, I remembered a line from the movie, Apollo 13: Houston, we have a problem. I also remember research from a Canadian Society of Training and Development conference I spoke at 10 years ago on the effectiveness of training. Researchers said about 25 per cent of the impact is

How technology can be bad

Marc Stoiber, a conference speaker from Canada, talked of a recent event in which 90 per cent of people never looked at the

| 030 | OCT 12 | TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT

Technology & ResouRces

conferences by helping people to make more effective notes. It may sound a bit daft yet more than one participant has said, I had not thought about how I take notes since primary school. I prompt people to focus on different types of knowledge. These are: 1. Insights: capture the aha moments. What intrigues you? 2. Ideas: when you hear something and an idea forms in your head, write it down. 3. Questions: capture insightful questions that you can think about after the event. 4. Quotes: did the speaker say something worth repeating? 5. Actions: what can you do as a result of this presentation? I keep waiting for the guillotine to fall on paper-based notebooks but, thankfully, it has yet to happen. People will respond when something looks good, feels good and serves a purpose. In his book Emotional Design, Donald Norman proposed a way to analyse products in a holistic way to include their attractiveness, their behaviour, and the image they present to the user. He suggests we can design more effective materials by prompting our thinking to consider these types of aesthetic issues: 1. Visceral design: The initial impact. Whats the first impression you want

people to have when they see your product? How can you make first impressions stronger? 2. Behavioural design: the total experience of using a productits look, feel and use. How do you want people to engage with your product? How can you add more engagement? 3. Reflection is about ones thoughts afterwards, how it makes one feel, the image it portrays. How and where do you want them to store it? What will make them come back to the product? This type of design thinking is about seeing the materials through the eyes of the user and what will inspire them.

problem for a bright white piece of paper. And power management is rarely a problem (although your pen may run out of ink). Notebooks dont require any connectivity. Given all of the analogue goodness of notebooks, it is no surprise that there has been a resurgence of paper. When it comes to keeping track of priority information, it would appear that notebooks are becoming the tools of choice for technologys elite.

So, what is possible with workbooks and idea journals?

There is room for a new generation of notebooks that link people to the technology that they are using. It is for the training industry to innovate new solutions for this new generation of employees who know how to use a computer but may not know how to make notes. For the record, this article started with a sketch of ideas in my idea journal in a caf over coffee while reading Training & Development. I spilt coffee on my journal and the magazine. Both survived without shorting out (unlike the time I spilt coffee my computer and lost everything). Ed Bernacki created The Idea Factory to help organisations build their capacity to innovate. Email: wowgreatidea@hotmail.com

Are paper journals and books still relevant?

Technology expert David Hornik wrote an article about a meeting he had with four technology entrepreneurs. They were meeting to create an idea for a new business. At the first meeting he noticed everyone used a paper notebook. He then explored the issue this way: Notebooks have certain enviable characteristics. They are instantly oneven faster than a laptop with a solid-state drive. They have virtually unlimited storagejust boot a new notebook when the pages are filled. And they perform better than tape for archival storage. Direct sunlight is no

TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT | OCT 12 | 031 |