Do you want to engage your culture? Safety is the first step to creating the motivation needed for people to perform their best. Each day, we have the chance to lead our teams and learn more about our people through an understanding of our safety climate. Through looking at current issues in HSE, we chat about creating cultural value through safety. Your host is Dr. Mark French, CSP, SPHR aka The Safety Dude.
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What makes workplace training meaningful? It may have less to do with the presentation itself and more to do with what happens before the first slide appears.
In this episode of Leading and Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French continues the discussion on learning design by exploring the Analysis phase of the ADDIE instructional design model. Drawing from interviews conducted as part of his doctoral dissertation, Mark examines how experienced safety trainers—often without formally calling it ADDIE—use analysis to understand their learners, identify knowledge and performance gaps, and make required training more relevant.
The episode explores a simple but powerful question: Why are we conducting this training, and what needs to be different when it is over?
Examples from safety trainers demonstrate the importance of understanding employees’ previous experience, existing knowledge, job responsibilities, and actual working conditions. Whether conducting forklift training, fall protection training, or another regulatory requirement, meaningful learning begins with knowing what employees already understand and where genuine gaps exist.
Mark also connects Analysis to the concept of Gemba—going to where the work actually happens. By observing employees and talking with them in the field, trainers can compare “work as imagined” with “work as performed” and determine whether training is even the appropriate solution.
The takeaway is straightforward: Before designing the training, understand the work. Before teaching the learner, understand the learner.
Great training doesn’t begin with PowerPoint. It begins with curiosity.
Mark French:
This week on the podcast, we're talking about one of my absolute favorite things, and that's learning design. Oh, I know. We can make it interesting though. This week on the podcast.
Unknown:
Welcome to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now, here is Dr. Mark French.
Mark French:
Welcome to this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. So glad you can join me. So glad to be part of your podcast rotation. Last week we talked a little bit about training. Actually, we spent the entire time talking about training, and I didn't feel like I got enough. And this is what happens when I end up getting back into a topic that I have such a passion for, and I have really discovered that I love learning design. I think it's one of the greatest things that we can do in the workplace to help make a meaningful impact on people's lives, and so I want to continue the discussion a little bit more as I did some more digging, did some more background, did some more work in general to really enhance, hopefully enhance that conversation just a little bit more, and so last time we I talked about being in an eight-hour class with a very regulatory basis, and it reminded me of my dissertation of how do we take this regulatory required? It has a certain component of lecture because that's the way you transfer the knowledge. It has a pretty big component of lecture actually, and how do you make that interesting? How do you make it meaningful? And that was the word I used in doing the research: was how do we make it meaningful? And ultimately, the findings were a lot of multivariate. It had a lot of different information. It was all yeah. There was a lot. It came out as a lot because there is no one single method that is going to reach everybody in the ever-evolving, highly diverse workforce that we have now, and it's only going to get more diverse. It's only going to get more complex. It's only going to get more of that. And so, how do we start to get a handle on that now? So, I went as part of that discussion. We talked about the Addie model, and that's an instructional design model. A D D I E, and it's very much a lean principle for instructional design. So the plan, do, check, act of a lean mentality. It's the same thing for learning. You analyze. So the A, you understand what are you teaching, and who are you teaching it to, and what do they need? And then you have design and development and implementation. So the plan is the analyze, the do is the design, development, implementation. You build it, you design it, you develop it, and then you implement it. You put it in place. The check is the evaluation. So you go back into an evaluation. It's also the act is you find out, you go and see, you learn from either surveys or you observe the training, and then hopefully even you can see some result from the training in the field where the work should be. So whatever you're training someone on, maybe it's reporting, maybe it's some sort of leadership tool, maybe it's a new software, maybe it's any of the number of things that we have to instruct on at any given time. We want to see what kind of difference did that training make. Good or bad, up or down, or was it flat neutral? That tells us about that training, and it allows us then to change, to adapt, to try to figure out why did it go up, why did it go down, why did it stay the same. All of those are data points that tell us which way we should go to dig deeper to understand how do we make this training different so that people will hopefully get what we wanted out of it, and that's some sort of usually it's a behavior change. Usually we're seeking some kind of behavior change or something different. So, long story short, or at this point, long story long, I went back to my interviews from my dissertation. Now, this is these were back in 2019. It's been a while since I collected that information, but I went back and looked at those again, and I wanted to understand not this time, not answering the question of how do you make the training meaningful, but I thought you know you can't make the training meaningful without that analysis phase, the A in Addy, and that's what I felt had the greatest opportunity in the training that I attended was the A really wasn't there. There wasn't a good piece of analysis to see what were the gaps because it's one thing to say I'm going to do an OSHA class and even like an OSHA 10, OSHA 30. If you've been through those, woo, they can be painful. But you can also tailor them a little. You can try to understand who you're delivering it to. You can try to figure out if there's gaps there that you you should focus more or less time on. It is pretty regulated. It is pretty stock, but there's still ways you can do that if you really want to make a difference in creating that instructional and learning design. And so that's where I went back to. Is I went back to those those safety trainers, those leaders. Some of them weren't even safety people, but they were responsible for delivering the safety training. Which is interesting when you look at the those that I the demographic of those I was interviewing. I basically reached out and said, "Do you do safety training in a lecture format. If so, I want to interview you, and I received ultimately I did 14 like hour and a half, two hour interviews, going through a whole bunch of information about how ultimately leading to how do you feel like you create meaning for your team when you're conducting this training that in some cases can be pretty dull and boring, and I wanted after going through that and understanding and kind of seeing that you know this stock information can or cannot be interesting to a certain degree, but it really doesn't become applicable at all if you don't do the first step of instructional design, now if you've never been taught instructional design, if you've just been taught to do training, it's really hard to figure that out on your own. It takes a lot of years to figure out that you need to do that analysis part ahead of time, and it sometimes it takes quite a bit of time to do that. Others, it can be a pretty fast process of even doing an icebreaker or a few questions in the beginning to understand what is happening there and how the people. What what is it I'm trying to convey to you? What is it that you need to know? Why do you need to know it, and how can I convey it to you in a way that bridges that that gap of where there there needs to be some knowledge transfer. That is where we ultimately begin that transference of knowledge. We begin a real learning. We begin a true change of hopefully a change for the positive in their behavior by first understanding who am I talking to and why do they care that I am standing up here talking. Even now, I hope that you are listening because you are interested in some form of leadership and learning, and you understand that fundamentally, the imperative is is safety. If I don't care if you live or die, what kind of leadership is that? So let's start there. Let's build good leadership there, and let's let me hopefully, hopefully, I'm giving some knowledge that helps gets us to that point. Anyway, that's a long way of me trying to justify what I'm doing. But when we do training, when we stand, and it doesn't have to be formal training. Basically, when we stand in front of a group of people and we're trying. Trying to give them some knowledge, we're trying to impart our opinion. We're trying to impart anything. We have to understand who are we talking to, and why should they listen? Let me dive a little deeper in that with some real examples on the second half of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast.
Unknown:
Humanizing the workplace-it is the leading and learning through safety podcast. What drives next-level performance in your business? It's not just strategy; it's your people. And great performance starts with great leadership. At TSDA Consulting, we believe real leadership begins by creating a workplace where people feel safe, supported, and heard. TSD Consulting is led by Dr. Mark French, a recognized leader in the workplace culture who helps organizations bridge the gap between behavioral psychology and operational safety. Learn yourself, lead others, create safety. Visit TSDAConsulting.com today.
Mark French:
and welcome back to the second half of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. So I went back into my interviews from my dissertation years ago, and I wanted to look at how they, whether they knew it or not, they were using some aspects of the Addy model to create meaning in that safety training. I wanted to really understand the analyze part. How did they get to know their team? So let's look at some of that. So one person who I interviewed said there needs to be a gap. There needs to be a reason to conduct the training. Right there, the understanding. The first thing: Why am I standing in front of you today? Is it just because you need a certificate? I hope not. I hope there's knowledge that you want to gain. But what is that knowledge? What is that gap? And that's as easy as saying, is asking someone who organized the training. What do you hope to gain from this at the end of this training? What do you hope is different from your team? That's a five-minute conversation from a trainer to someone who organized the training to figure out what on earth needs to change. So there was another one where they noted that when they did fork truck training, which is one of the most regulatory based, and it has a lecture. It has a practical, of course, but it also has a pretty big chunk of lecture. They gave the example of when they're doing fork truck training, they want to know how much experience do you have and where was it, because not all experience is the same. There's some well known places, and if you go to the internet and you go to YouTube and you search fork truck, you're going to see some crazy videos of people who have done some crazy stuff on forklifts, and so you want to understand what is your experience, how much do you have, what is it? It's not going to change the fact that I'm still got to do this training, that I still have to impart this knowledge. But maybe you can tell me some stories of things you've seen like that. Maybe you can help me teach the class, or someone can help answer, or we can tailor it a little bit better so that we can understand where the gaps are and where I can help fill those in as doing a training. One of the other interesting quotes that I found: I have to know the people I'm training and their intelligence level and their understanding level. I want to know what they need to know and what they don't need to know. That's really an interesting quote because he wasn't insulting anyone by this person, I don't remember if it was a he or a she. I apologize. They weren't sure of their intelligence, and that's not an insult of saying that people are dumb. It's saying, do you have the ability? What what type of training do I need to do to make sure you understand it because it's important? What level are we on from a standpoint of where you're going to learn? And intelligence can be a very deep conversation, but want to understand how are you understanding this? How much experience have you had? How is the best way you can learn the way I'm going to teach? What is it that? How can I convey this knowledge, and I love the fact of what they need. What are your gaps? What is it that I can help you with, and what is it that you know like the back of your hand? And it's as simple as I sat through a training where it was really to a bunch of electricians and linemen, people who know electricity pretty well, and because it felt like a stock training, it went right on through and was like, okay, so if you happen to work around power or electricity, here's what you do. What? One question. One question would have helped that avoid that really awkward statement, because you lose you lose your audience when you do something like that. When you really don't even take the time to go, hey, what do you guys do? What's going on? Well, what what do you do here? You miss that, and if you miss that, it's really really hard to make up that ground again. So, what do you already know? What interests you about this topic? Do you have any interest in this topic? Doesn't mean we don't have to cover it sometimes. It just means that maybe we can tailor it a little bit. Or what do you not need to know? Am I giving you extra information that you don't want, don't need, and don't care. And if that's the case, let's move on. There's no need for me to give you the extra if it doesn't serve a greater purpose in that learning opportunity. Another one. So here's a great one about like tech analyst and looking at the task in context, they said being in the field and talking to the individuals and knowing what they're actually doing, and this was in reference to like fall protection, which is really important that they understand how to do that inspection, how to look at that gear, how to wear that gear appropriately, because the time that you want to figure out your fault protection isn't working is when you fall. You want to know that that's going to hold you if you need it. Hopefully, you don't need it, but if you do, you want to know what's going to work. And so, going out and looking and going, what are the gaps in the field? What am I seeing that I need to give more knowledge to because maybe they don't realize. So remember what they need to know versus what they don't need to know. Maybe they didn't realize that they needed to know that. Well, during the next training, I'm going to give an example. I was out walking around talking to you, and here's what I saw. Here's how we can fix it because your life is on the line. So let's see what they're actually. Let's go out and just take a moment, observe what's going on, and be able to use that observation to build a training. Let me just see it for a few minutes. Sometimes that helps immensely, especially if you're doing a training for another company or it's new. You've come to a new situation. You're learning it brand new. I've done a number of startups and turnarounds, and when I first come in, the best learning opportunity I have to build that training and that learning instructional model is to observe. I want to see the real work, and then understand how the training, how the education, how the mentorship, how any of that will then fit into what the actual work is doing. Because if I give a training that doesn't match anything of what's going on in the real world, then none of it really matters. And I'll end with just a really quick story about a really cool instructional guy I met one time. He was an ergonomics guy. That's what he did. He was ergonomics, and he was great at it. But he was walking around a facility, and he goes, "You know, ergonomics is important, but until you fix the guarding and the lockout issues here, don't worry about ergonomics. You've got some real issues to fix, and he was right. This was a complete turnaround. We had a lot of work ahead of us, but that was an astute way of looking at it because he could have went on and just started doing ergonomics lecturing and ergonomics everything. When the truth was, the team really knew there was some really, really immediately dangerous stuff. But he only knew that because he observed, and he was doing the analysis. Thanks for joining me as I talk about my passion in learning. And until next time, we chat. Stay safe.
Unknown:
Thank you for listening to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. More content is available online at www.tsdaconsulting.com. All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training, or legal advice. This has been the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast.
