Monday, April 28, 2008

Taking my own advice

I recently wrote a program that calculates lead time, filtering out unreliable data statistically. My objective is to generate a reliable lead time, not a perfect predictor but sound enough on which to base forecasting and replenishment. Since it’s not perfect, people who use the results will need to understand how it works. But – and this is the catch – they don’t really want to know how (that is, they don’t want to have to think about standard deviations), while they do need to be able to interpret credible results (which are sometimes not intuitive), and distinguish them from non-credible results.

Just a few days ago, I wrote here that the challenge is to embed process change within the social context we inhabit. How do I create a narrative or even entertain (!!), while implementing this tool? Just thinking about it takes me down a completely different path that my old-school teaching mind imagines (drawing equations with Greek symbols on a whiteboard…what was I thinking?).

Now I’m thinking about it from the learner’s perspective: why would I need this information? Why would I want this information? How will my life be better if I know this? How could I explain this to someone else in my department? The task now is to discover the human story in the solution, and tell it memorably.

This is much harder than writing the code.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There are some good concepts here which raise even further questions. For instance, when building a narrative context in order to engage the learner, it's all too possible to accidentally trip over the line between facilitating a learning process and 'dumbing-down' - for lack of a better term. One of the benefits, one hopes, of introducing new tools is that they open up new possibilities, challenging the tool-user to explore new environments or new aspects of the environment in which she operates. In order to derive this benefit I think that the user does indeed, as you state, have to understand at some basic level how the tool works, how it does what it's supposed to do. You can give a person a shovel and teach them how to dig a hole, or you can give that same person that same shovel and teach them how it works - that it's basically a lever - which opens up a whole new universe of potential utilities and at the same time, hopefully, shifts the user's concept of the tool into a wider context, the place where learning happens on a creative level. Just a thought.