http://www.articulate.com/community/blogdemo/fuzzy_thumb/player.html
If you hire or work with e-learning developers, this blog post may creep you out. It’s about manipulating e-learning stakeholders in order to move e-learning projects along. But it’s diabolical brilliance is what has me calling for Tom Kuhlmann, the author of the The Rapid E-Learning Blog, to run for President of the United States. Here’s the premise:
- Stakeholders often nitpick unimportant things in e-learning projects, such as changing the walks in scenario images from white to light green.
- They often don’t understand that the large ripples caused by these supposedly minor changes.
- These ripples can get the project off track, which can waste time and resources.
- The team is normally ineffective at pushing back about these types of changes.
Stakeholders are often frustrated at the fact that projects take longer and cost more than they want and don’t see the relationship between their nitpicking and these results. So Tom recommends intentionally putting in some errors for stakeholders to nitpick, rather than trying to make the project as perfect as possible. For example, he shows an example of this egregious “main character” that is inserted precisely for stakeholders to complain about (screenshot above).
The Fuzzy Thumb Technique is technique number 7 in Tom’s 7 Proven Techniques for Keeping Your E-Learning Customers Happy blog post. Manipulative? Sure. Useful sometimes? Uh, yeah.
Some stakeholders don’t need this and it’s important to know which ones don’t. But for the ones that do, the technique may reduce time and wasted resources. As for Tom, there’s no doubt in my mind that this type of brilliance could be used to overcome some intractable world problems and the world needs his skills on a much wider scale. I think an exploratory committee is in order.