hypergogue

The critical role of recognition in decision making came into sharper focus when Beth Crandall, 51, vice president of research operations at Klein Associates, got a contract from the National Institutes of Health to study how intensive-care nurses make decisions. In 1989, she interviewed 19 nurses who worked in the neonatal ward of Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio. The nurses cared for newborns in distress -- some postmature, some premature. When premature babies develop a septic condition or an infection, it can rapidly spread throughout their bodies and kill them. Detecting sepsis quickly is critical. Crandall heard dozens of stories from nurses who would glance at an infant, instantly recognize that the baby was succumbing to an infection, and take emergency action to save the baby's life. How did they know whether to act? Almost always, Crandall got the same answer: "You just know."

But once again, the more accurate answer was this: "recognition." By asking each nurse to recall specific details of when she suspected sepsis, Crandall compiled a list of visual cues showing that the baby was in the early stages of an infection: Its complexion would fade from a healthy pink to a grayish green; it would cry frequently, but then one day it would become listless and lethargic; it would feed abnormally, causing its abdomen to distend slightly. Each of these cues is extremely subtle, but taken together, they are a danger signal to an experienced nurse.

"When we reviewed the list of cues with specialists in neonatology, we found that half of the cues had never appeared in medical literature at that time," recalls Klein. "The head of the unit asked if we would train new nurses. We told her that everything on that list came from her own nurses. She said, 'It doesn't matter, we can't articulate what we see anymore -- or how we see it.' So Beth developed and tested a series of training materials to help the nurses."

Three thoughts:

1. Are Learning Professionals charged with articulating as much as transfer? It seems that the articulating is the hard part - and that course books and off-the-shelf materials reduce teachers to little more than performing monkeys.

2. Much of what Learning Professionals in the workplace do is dysfunctional. It's obviously silly to teach pilots, nurses or firefighters to remember an acronym like STAR (Stop, Think, Analyze, Respond) because it's obvious they'll never have time to use it eg by developing a semi-mystical ability to deploy the semantic pause and have it benefit their decisions. Firefighters can't use STAR.

The rest of us won't.

Learning professionals are rubbish at dealing with 'won't', and are much more in their comfort zone with 'can't'.

3. All this said, there is a place for Teachable Equivalents.