Map It: The hands-on guide to strategic training design

Principles of the "stream of activities" approach 1. Activities help people practice making the decisions that they make on the job, in a realistic context. 2. Activities target common mistakes and support behaviors that will achieve the business goal. 3. Activities target specific job roles and levels of expertise. They aren't expected t

A multiple-choice question can actually inspire more discussion than an open-ended question if it includes appealing distractors.

After a few scenarios, we offer a debrief, preferably in live discussion, that helps people digest what they've learned, debate how the scenarios worked, and consider how they could apply the model to their projects.

At first, it looks like "just" a multiple-choice question, but it's designed to simulate the kind of decision-making that people have to do on the job. It sets a scene, asks the learner to make a realistic decision, and provides options that have been carefully designed to tempt the learner to make a common mistake.

I'd steal an idea that worked well in our military projects: I'd have each participant adopt a choice and always have to defend that choice, whether they agreed with it or not. So, for example, Steve would always have to defend option B as well as he could, no matter what option B was.

A good multiple-choice question can be turned into anything from an informal discussion to an immersive world where avatars face challenges. Because it stores so much information about the decision and possible consequences, it's going to be our default activity for now. Later, you can turn it into anything you want.

We also arrange the activities so the earlier ones build the knowledge and experience required by later activities. Our recipe will mix scaffolding (help plus a slow escalation of difficulty) with productive failure (encouraging people jump in and try it if they want).

If you plan to develop an online activity, make sure your software lets you provide different feedback for each option.

For example, one approach is to attempt to complete the task yourself with the participants' coaching. I used to do this when I was a technical trainer in the early 1980s. I'd use a projector to display the screen of the one IBM PC we were allowed to have in our group of 30 people. Then I'd describe a task, like, "We have to write a memo that