Bob Mosher (BM): Erwin, can you give us your background, role, and responsibilities so we can level set and share the context of your journey?
Erwin De beuckelaer (ED): My background is that I have a master’s degree in communication, and I started my career in a small consultancy company focused on user experience. That was more than 20 years ago. At that time, no one knew what user experience was about. We talked about usability, human factors, user interfaces, and usability design. Those were labels for what we now call user experience. I liked being the bridge between technology, IT, and the end users in designing technology at large, and I did that in all sorts of companies—biotech, transport, retail. You name it.
I realized that when we were designing technology, we could make it as user friendly as possible. There was always a need for people to get started with it, which made us think, “Maybe we also need to design training materials around it, because when people use it, they will probably need to rely on information.” At the same time, I started doing things like—to use the terminology from back then—creating user manuals, designing online help, technical writing, etc. We don’t really use those terms today, but those things were fulfilling needs that people have today.
Now I work for J&J as Director of Innovation within their R&D Quality organization, which is a group that oversees all activities in J&J that relate to clinical trials and medical safety. It’s my remit to innovate in the Quality sphere. In that sense, I’m a bit atypical, both in my background and in my role, because most people here have an extensive scientific background whereas I do not. I used to talk to IT people and now I talk to pharmacists and people with medical degrees, so there is always a kind of translation that needs to happen. Unfortunately, Quality is not often known as an area of great innovation, which is exactly why innovation is necessary, and why it’s important that we bring people who have very different mindsets together.
In addition to my day job, for the last couple of years I have had a side hustle at the University of Applied Sciences in Ghent. Once a week, I teach Design Thinking for bachelor’s degree students. I’m very grateful for that opportunity because it allows me to share a bit of my experience with young people and feel connected with younger generations. It’s very inspiring to be able to do that.
BM: I appreciate how you stepped into this arena because in my early days of eLearning, the concept of user experience wasn’t even a brand or a discipline. There were a lot of missteps in some of that early work, so I appreciate you having that background. How did you get started on a workflow learning journey? How did that become part of your story in support of the work you’re asked to do at J&J?
ED: Let’s start with the importance of training within a regulated industry. We operate under a Quality Management System. For anything that is regulated and anything that has an impact on patient safety, data integrity, product quality, etc. we must document processes along with our ways of working in Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). We must also demonstrate that people are qualified to do their jobs, which is typically done by providing training.
We sometimes refer to this as compliance training, which is kind of a misnomer. Yes, it is compliance training, but people often think about compliance training as being about things like fraud, bribery, diversity, and unconscious bias (maybe just 3-5 trainings total). In contrast, a typical operational role in our organization may need to follow 100 procedures, so they need to be trained 100 times and we need evidence to prove they’ve completed all that training. Approaches that work for a single compliance training simply don’t work when employees are taking 100 courses as part of their onboarding. Very often, there is a great deal of time between when we train someone and the moment when they start to apply or practice that training, because it has to do with rare cases. For instance, in a clinical trial, we do not want to see a pregnancy, but from time to time, a pregnancy can occur. There can also be a serious adverse event impacting a patient’s life, in which case we need to react very quickly. At such a time, workers need quick access to information at their fingertips.
I got into the workflow learning discipline by realizing that yes, the moment of New (one of the 5 Moments of Need®) is important for us to have evidence of training for our health authority inspectors, but what really matters are the moments of Apply, Change, and Solve—for troubleshooting when you get stuck. Those are the moments that really matter.
BM: I love this dialogue because you’re breaking the mold and the myth that we hear all the time in this discipline. Here in the US, when we try to bring workflow learning to hospitals, legal areas, the government, banks, etc. they all say, “Oh no, no, no. Regulate, regulate, regulate. Eighty percent of our offerings are compliance training. Compliance swamps our ship, so workflow learning doesn’t work here.” They don’t even say, “We can’t do it.” They literally say, “It doesn’t work here,” meaning they don’t even see that it would help people. You clearly show that the essence of compliance is at the beginning of the journey, and I understand that you have to check the box to indicate that someone has received certain training, but to your point, if they can’t remember that training, the whole compliance discipline is shot, because workers can’t perform. I appreciate that perspective and you’re proving that workflow learning is worth the work.
ED: I think what we also figured out—even before I learned about the 5 Moments of Need (5 MoN) approach—is the importance of risk. Within 5 MoN there is a focus on the criticality of tasks, and that’s what we were referring to as risk. What is the probability of a certain activity going wrong and what is the impact when it does? We need to have a very profound understanding of those risks to ensure patient safety. That understanding guides our decisions about when we provide formal training vs. when it is safe for employees to learn in the flow of work using a Digital Coach.
BM: Brilliant. So many people need to hear this! In your work, you must have come up against some challenges and achieved successes along the way. Can you tell us about those?
ED: We launched our Digital Coach for all activities in Clinical R&D, and it’s been a tremendous success. It’s very clear that we were meeting a need. Prior to that, we put all our SOPs into a Business Process Modeling (BPM) tool, but BPM tools don’t provide sufficient end user support. So, we brought all the processes into this Digital Coach. Now, we’re working on bringing all the knowledge information and job tasks/steps over, which is what people really need. The procedure typically only tells them who needs to do what, where they need to do it, what they need to do, and why. What they’re really seeking is the “how”. In our case, that information was scattered across SharePoint, OneNote, and Teams sites, and I still discover new sites every week and wonder how they got created in the first place! Don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe that they are created with good intentions. People want to help one another, but it can’t be done in a disconnected way.
This Digital Coach work actually started long ago with an initiative that we framed as knowledge management (another widely used term these days). What we learned is that we couldn’t really start from the bottom up with knowledge documents. We had to do it the other way around. We had to build the overall process framework and then relate the SOPs to it. Underneath that we built the “how” information because the different moments of need appeal to different user situations. In some cases, users need very detailed how-to information. Similarly, just in our clinical trials part of the organization, we have hundreds of roles. We’re trying to simplify that, but with so many roles, what I do and how I’m doing it isn’t all that matters. I also need to know who I am dependent on and how my actions affect others. It’s important to have an understanding that you’re not operating in isolation. If you present information like a matrix, you need to be able to go up and down, but you also need to go left and right to see where you fit within a complex operational process.
BM: That last point is so missed in this discipline. Even when we talk about workflow analysis, we speak in too many generalities. Then the roles start coming into play and we sometimes struggle because complexity immediately becomes a barrier. As soon as that starts to build up, people hit the brakes. It just feels too complex, so they don’t go into the analysis and start unraveling some of that complexity. That dependency you mentioned is so important to understand and is often what breaks the process, right? How far into that has workflow learning penetrated? Is it an adopted discipline across several of those curricula or are you in a certain area? Furthermore, to do workflow learning well, does the enterprise have to see you as separate from Learning &Development (L&D), as in “you’re not the training department”? For people to be successful in this discipline, there seems to be a change in mindset and role (not necessarily by title). Have you found that to be the case? Has that been what’s made you successful?
ED: The kinds of problems my group is working on are typically those that L&D cannot solve with current tools and methodologies. As such, it’s not as issue for me as long as we acknowledge who’s going to own which kind of problem. Using the earlier example of anti-fraud compliance training, the suggestion could be to have an interactive video, but no one wants to watch 100 interactive videos. You need to find a way to help people execute. I think the reason we are successful and have advanced on this journey is that we are an exception, even within our company, because all our procedures were already documented in our BPM tool. That is important because when there is a need to update a way of working (e.g., there is an audit observation, a new product modality, or a new regulation) the first thing we do is update the business process. From there, we create the SOP and the documents for the inspector, which simultaneously update the Digital Coach that our people are accessing today. If you don’t have that foundation, you are maintaining those two things at the same time. That’s a road we don’t want to take and that’s the message I’ve been giving. If you want to make this journey, it’s going to be very rewarding, but if you don’t find a way to manage the foundation upon which you are building all your how-to information, you’re going to make it very difficult for yourself. In this regulated industry, no matter what, you still need to demonstrate that you have documented your way of working.
We continue to have discussions about the level of documentation we want to have. Some of what we want pertains to how people must operate because of regulation. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we want to include information about things that could be useful for workers to do. And somewhere in between those two points, we want to include information that recommends the most efficient ways to operate, even if they’re not mandated. We’re moving between those points and I think it’s sometimes challenging to decide what we consider to be part of our Quality Management System, which becomes inspectable, and what we are using to train people to help them perform their daily jobs. But in our industry, if you don’t start from the foundation, you’re going to duplicate a lot of work.
BM: I love that you started with a performance-first process mentality. Many people start with SOPs and hope those flow up into a workflow or into the job processes. In my experience, that approach is hard. People get mired in that and there are disconnects among reality, hope, and regulatory concerns. Your process change—focusing on how people do their work—should more readily feed the workflow and job processes. I think success depends on the direction you take and the mindset in which you start.
ED: And we also see the opposite direction, which is where we see how 5 MoN is slowly but steadily starting to impact the way we write our procedures. In addition to writing procedures and processes that are inspectable, we want them to be easily executed. We’ve had so many conversations with Conrad Gottfredson about this. This is where our initial thinking and 5 MoN started to influence each other.
BM: I love that.
ED: For me, it continues to go back to what I said earlier. What is the user experience that we are creating if we say, “Here are 100 standard operating procedures. Read them and sign off.”? Recently, we started to zoom out from training to qualification. We want to ensure that our people are at all times qualified for the tasks they are supposed to do. There may be different ways to qualify them. We can qualify them through training. We can maybe qualify them through experience, but here comes the workflow learning piece. Maybe it is sufficient that when I’m doing something, the system tells me, “Erwin, did you remember that we recently made a minor change to this process? Here is a reminder.” Or the system may tell me, “You’re now doing task XYZ and something critical has changed. Please acknowledge the change by watching this 3-minute microlearning video within this Digital Coach before you continue.”
Now, I’m trying to build on something that you and Con have previously done, Bob. You’ve been foundational in defining moments of need, and we are realizing that we need to correlate moments of need with points of use. We need to bring workflow learning to wherever people are doing their jobs—and not just in the Digital Coach. The technology available today is not helping us. On the one hand, we have standalone Digital Coaches. On the other hand, we have the so-called Digital Adoption Platforms. In my opinion, there is no single platform that does it all. Whatever we put in the Digital Coach, we need to bring to the point of use by our end users. If the point of use is a system, then that’s where the support needs to be available. If the point of use is a printed form, support should also be available there. I don’t know how (maybe through an annex or a QR code) but regardless of where people are, we need to meet them at the point of use (aka point of Apply) to actually get them the information they need. That may be a combination of pull and push, meaning workers can pull it when they need it, but we can also push it in the context of, “We now need to inform you about this.”
BM: I would challenge any R&D professional, who’s in this for the reasons I think you and I agree they should be in this, to listen to this dialogue and not think, “I must be doing this. I must take what Erwin’s saying seriously. It must become front and center in my efforts with my team.”
This is such an inspiring conversation for me. So much of L&D is focused solely on training instead of performance and supporting that performance. They have no clue. When many learning professionals hear about workflow learning, they think, “Oh my God, that sounds hard. Wait, is this challenging ADDIE? I have 500 eLearning libraries, and you’re telling me those are bad?” I have heard it all, and it frustrates me.
Don’t get me wrong. I think anyone who’s in this business is a rock star. There are so many people who are in it for the right reasons, and they have great intentions. I’m not challenging that. But stories like yours get me up in the morning because this is why we do what we do. It’s so empowering and positions L&D so differently.
Why do you think L&D struggles with this weird disconnect?
ED: It’s hard for me to say why. I can only tell you that whatever I do, I need to demonstrate hard business value: dollars, cost avoidance, even better efficiencies. We ask questions of ourselves like what is the cycle time of how we’re doing things, what’s the hands-on time, and how can we reduce either or even both? That is what drives us. Maybe an L&D function doesn’t feel that drive as strongly. Of course we want to value people’s development, but what are we developing people for? Are we developing them because we feel they will get a richer life as a result or are we developing them because our business has certain needs that we need to accommodate? Again, that is an area where I think we can make progress.
For instance, in our onboarding training, we need to find a way to stitch all of the components together, because they’re not yet connected. Components include the process component (how you do things) and the system component (the technology being used). In our case, we use various approaches for clinical trials because the products are different, so the protocols are different and the context in which you’re doing the job varies. We can have two people working on two different clinical trials doing the same job, but they may be doing very different things. The last component is focused on skills. We should not look at skills independently of the jobs people are doing. Skills need to be correlated with the hard activities that workers perform, which is why we need to get rid of the term “soft skills”. Let’s call it “all skills” because each skill should have a purpose.
To clarify, I’m not providing employees with a course on communication skills because I want them to communicate better with their friends, their spouses, etc. I’m providing them with that course because they need to communicate better with the doctors they’re working with in the hospital. It’s important that they learn how to work with those who hold medical degrees, because we want those doctors to do what we’re asking them to do as part of our clinical trials. That’s why we’re providing our employees with a course in communication skills.
BM: You so eloquently articulate something I’ve struggled with, which is that regardless of the type of skill (e.g., listening, conflict management, empathy, professional, hard, soft, etc.) it is meant to help application and performance. To your point, unless I know the context in which I would use that communication skill or the context in which I would push a certain button/perform a certain action, it’s moot, right?
ED: Yes, and as you know, there are some well-known libraries of skills training, where some kinds of experts in particular skills will tell you in generic terms how to practice those skills. I don’t mind if people watch videos for three hours where someone elaborates on a particular skill, but if those videos are not connected to context and practice, that time may be wasted. I’m absolutely in favor of competency and skills development, but it needs to be rooted in workers’ practice or as part of their development journey. When I say development journey, it could be that we are already preparing someone for their next job, which also requires specific education, exposure to certain things, and necessary experience.
BM: Let’s put a bow around this, because you’re a practitioner who clearly understands the need to focus on performance and how workflow learning plays into that. You’ve studied it, you’ve applied it, and you’re running at impact. Many learning professionals reading or listening to this might be thinking, “Oh no, I just bought one of those skills libraries because that’s what I’ve always done, and my ID group just finished building a series of six-week-long courses.” If those folks are listening to this and feeling like they’re a mountain away from what you’re doing, but they want to be like you someday in your role with the impact you’re having, can you put yourself in their shoes? What would you say is the crawl-walk-run approach they should use? How do they begin to take that first step?
ED: For me, it always starts by understanding the specific problem that needs to be resolved. For example, if you go to a cardiologist with a heart problem, they’ll provide you with a solution related to your physical heart. But if you have emotional heart pain, the cardiologist cannot resolve it. You must see someone else. So, the first thing you need to do is frame the problem in the right way. If you frame the problem as a training problem, you will come up with training solutions. If you frame the problem as a qualification problem, you will come up with qualification solutions. Start by developing a thorough understanding of the problem your business is experiencing and really explore how workflow learning and training can be part of the solution.
If tomorrow you moved me from big pharma to small biotech, I should not be taking all the big pharma practices and translating them into the biotech company. I should first look at the context and the stakeholders to try to understand where they are and the problems they are trying to solve. Then I should design the solutions. What are the typical needs of people who perform these jobs? What are they lacking as they execute their day-to-day responsibilities? Only then could I step-by-step start to think about possible approaches and potential technology that could help.
I don’t think anyone can get this right the first time. If you’re not going to do this in an iterative or agile way, you won’t be set up for success. It’s sometimes hard to convince senior leaders that you’re not going to do a full-blown project and that you’re starting with a proof of concept, pilot, minimum viable product, etc. But we use an iterative, step-by-step approach so that we learn what works, what doesn’t work, and what people need. Then we adapt. That’s the way we should be scaling this.
Bob, you and Con created a wonderful methodology, but applying it is not like following a cookbook recipe, right? As practitioners, we need to adapt it to each and every context and situation. You’ve provided a framework that gives us guidance and general steps to follow, but we still need to create the recipes ourselves. And maybe what works today won’t work tomorrow.
BM: My friend, I’ve long admired you for your career, but today you’ve gone up a notch. Your ability to articulate the way you’ve thought through this and the work you’ve done is really inspiring.
ED: And maybe we’ve been too quiet in our little corner of the world doing this. Now, we can give wider visibility to our work. I would love to connect with people who actually understand this and people who need this.
BM: And frankly, those are sometimes two different sets of people because of where they are in their journeys. The people who need it are still learning, educating, spreading awareness, and fighting those early battles around shifting to a performance-first mindset. Others like you, who are further along, can have a different conversation and find ways to support each other.
Thank you so much for this dialogue, friend. It’s a first step toward increasing that visibility. I’m sure there is more to come.