Experiences and resources over courses

Experiences that make people care. Resources that help them act.

This approach is shaped by Nick Shackleton-Jones’s people-centred approach to learning. His starting point is simple: people learn what matters to them, and forget most of what doesn’t. So rather than starting with content, I start with the concerns of the people I’m designing for.

That leads to splitting learning into two distinct jobs. Experiences make people care: simulations, challenges, stories and real problems. Resources help people do things at the moment they need them: checklists, short guides and job aids. Traditional courses try to do both at once and usually do neither well. I design for each job separately.

Experiences: making improvement matter

For National Improvement Week I designed a five-day digital escape room for NHS staff. Each day dropped teams into the same fictional ward, Ward 8, facing a rise in patient falls. Every puzzle asked them to use a real quality improvement tool to crack a code and move the story on.

The challenge ran inside SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, the tools staff already use every day. There was nothing new to install or log into, so the effort went into the problem, not the platform.

The five days

• Day 1 – The Aim Statement – score five aim statements against the SMART criteria and find the one that holds up.

• Day 2 – The Night Shift File – sort anonymous staff reports onto a fishbone diagram to uncover the causes behind the falls.

• Day 3 – The Falls Pareto Puzzle – run a Pareto analysis on falls-by-location data to find the vital few locations.

• Day 4 – Test of Change – put a scrambled intentional rounding trial back into the right stages of a PDSA cycle.

• Day 5 – Holding the Gains – spot genuine improvement in weekly falls data and choose the control plan that sustains it.

By the end of the week, teams had followed an improvement project from aim to sustained change, and had used each tool in context rather than reading about it.

Resources: help at the point of need

Most people don’t need a course on data analysis. They need to turn their numbers into a chart when a meeting is tomorrow. So I build small, free web tools that do one job well: paste in your data and get a usable output, with guidance alongside.

• Driver diagram builder – map an aim to its primary and secondary drivers and change ideas.

• Pareto chart builder – rank causes or categories to show where to focus first.

• Run chart builder – plot data over time and check it against the run chart rules.

• SPC chart builder – build statistical process control charts to separate real change from normal variation.

How the two fit together

The escape room gives people a reason to care about improvement tools. The resources are there when they come to use those tools for real. Neither tries to do the other’s job, and that is the point.