I find that organizational misalignment is a diagnostic mystery I cannot resist. Fortunately, I also have a hard time walking away from problems I know I could solve through learner experience design. 

I want to hear why people are frustrated, what operations are working against their own intent, and most importantly, what assumptions led to those operations being created in the first place?

… what assumptions led to those operations being created in the first place?

That’s when I find the answer to THE question: what does the organization really need?

OCM Systems as LXDs

That’s the question because my designs don’t work like misalignment pain relievers that never reach the root. They immunize organizations against misalignment by transforming them into learning communities.

And once your organization becomes a learning community, growth becomes every single quarter’s inevitability.

The steps before Silent Steps

Long before I drafted the Articulate 360 Rise experience to address it, I diagnosed a problem I’ve recognized in virtually every sector: supervisors, instructional designers, managers, teachers, and team leads focus on giving the step-by-step directions for completing the task they are focused on, but often skip over the steps their people will need to take before they can even be ready for that task at all. 

What’s usually feeding the root problem

Then I drafted that diagnosis, the silent steps framework, to describe what I find feeding almost every root problem when I dig down to it: an unexamined assumption. In this case, the assumption is that everyone will always have unimpaired access to the executive functions needed to spontaneously think of those unnamed steps before following the named ones. 

Finally, I designed this training: This is your learner on ADHD, as a way to operationalize the framework — surfacing the assumption and blocking its ability to creep back in unnoticed.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I keep seeing the same mistake — requiring the same fix

Check out the table below for other examples of my methodology for unearthing the unexamined assumptions driving root problems to not just treat organizations in — but inoculate them against — misalignment.

System	Procedural Steps Communication	Healthcare Documentation	Performance Evaluation
Goal	Directing others	Documenting patient behavior	Data-driven growth
Production	Losing people at the start	Documenting interpretations of patient behavior	Under-, un-, or even misguided performance
Operational Misalignment	Incomplete directions	Bias pattern-matching under pressure getting encoded as clinical observation	Defining metrics by where (in K-12, classwork vs. homework) or how (in K-12, quiz vs. essay) metrics were produced
Unexamined Assumption	‘They’ll just know to do ABC before XYZ [because everybody can always think through everything all the time].’	‘I must [perform unlicensed psychoanalysis to] disprove performance failure by proving patient failure.’	‘Once we measure their compliance [and get measured, ourselves, by how they perform on the important metrics they never see], they’ll improve.’
Common Misdiagnosis	“They need punishment for not caring enough to think ahead.”	“They need bias training.”	“If they just overcome lack of motivation to do everything, they’ll learn/perform everything.”
My Prescription	Naming the steps that must be complete to attempt the task	Reorienting staff regarding the life-saving power of their pattern-matching applied to patient presentations, but also its unreliability in interpreting human behaviors	Performance measurement communication that centralizes objectives as the units of measurement, translating metrics into growth targets
My Inoculating LXDs	silent steps framework	Describe the behavior, not the person	Grading for Equity (sector agnostic version coming soon)