1. Home
  2. Blog
  3. How learning Bursts Support Attention and Memory
Arrow

Keep it Simple

  1. Pen AllenComm
  2. Calendar September 25, 2008

blank-award-300x497I’m at the Fall CLO Symposium in Coronado today, where Allen just received a Learning in Practice Award for Excellence in eLearning for a recent OJD initiative we helped Toyota with. Truly, it’s been an honor to receive the recognition and be counted amongst the best in the business. More so, we at Allen feel honored to work with so many great clients and top notch companies, like Toyota.

Tomorrow morning, Paul Zackrison, our COO/CFO, and I will be at the symposium’s “Winners Circle” to talk about the Toyota project. Truth be told, neither Paul nor I were directly involved with the project. But we’ve been well briefed by our CLO, Michael Noble, and the Project Manager, Anna Sargsyan. During those briefings, I particularly took note of the story where the Toyota team showed some real commitment to quality design. Of course, at Allen, that’s what we’ve built our reputation on. We love working with clients that are just as committed, as Toyota was and is.

In that vein, I thought you all might enjoy a little clip that pokes fun of when “design” goes overboard. I think I like it because I’m on the marketing side of things, and well, when it comes down to it, this video is poking fun of me and my cohorts (hopefully, I’m not as bad!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqPYeTSYng

Fortunately, we don’t deal with this often. But maybe you do? Maybe you have all sorts of stakeholders that want to blow past the simple and obvious designs that work. If so, what do you do?

Comments 1

  1. Since I’ve recently been working on some sales training and we discussed the usefulness of keeping the training simple for the audience, who consisted of new sales representatives, I thought I’d share on a twist I found for the traditional KISS acronym (Keep It Simple Stupid). Frank Troha translates KISS in a new way for his KISS Instructional Design Model: Keep it Simple and Safe. (http://www.saleslobby.com/Mag/0402/FEFT.asp)

    The model consists of eight questions that he suggests might be a way to strike the “happy medium” balance you’ve been looking for. The questions are a great baseline; however, each company often has unique strategies or processes that may or may not be addresses with the eight questions. Recognizing those unique needs and elements are often what makes the training stand out and be a value-add for the company. What are your thoughts on the KISS Instructional Design Model?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *