How Fuse Supports the 5 Moments of Need in Learning

In the previous post in this series, It’s Time to Consider a New Way of Looking at the Learning Journey, we looked at why companies should move away from a majority course-led approach and how workflow learning can enable better performance results and greater competence of every employee. 

We introduced you to the expertise of Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson who regularly use the term ‘workflow learning,’ and we explained how to get learners closer to the place where performance occurs - in the flow of work, doing work, and completing tasks. 

Today, we want to continue on this journey, moving on to talk about Mosher and Gottfredson’s ‘5 Moments of Need’ in learning, and how Fuse is a great enabler of learning the way people actually want to learn at work, in the flow of work.

Why? Because we believe learning and development should be about more than mapping skills gaps to courses. Our goal is to help accelerate learning and enable performance by promoting learning in the flow of work. We believe in collaboration, and getting the most out of a company’s collective knowledge, as well as delivering the world’s best expertise outside your company by providing instant access to knowledge in the moment of need.

So, sit back as we explain the 5 Moments of Need in Learning, and how Fuse can help support these needs easily - and in a way that will boost company performance faster and more effectively than any other learning and knowledge platform available today. 

Stop Teaching Everything! 

Courses are being overused in the enterprise. More often than not, they are not the right place to start when it comes to learning, and more often than not, course-based learning results aren’t impacting the bottom line in a positive way. It’s time to train less, and learn more in the flow of work. 

Experts agree. Speak to Bob Mosher and he’ll tell you that in his research, between 70 and 80% of what companies train doesn’t need to be delivered via formal training, because most of it can be learned in the workflow of day-to-day work as long as learners are supported appropriately. 

Train Less, Learn More

Bob supports the workflow learning theory through a learning design framework called the 5 Moments of Need, where he highlights the different stages of learning. These are:

1. When Learning for the First Time
2. When Wanting to Learn More
3. When Trying to Apply and/or Remember
4. When Something Goes Wrong
5. When Something Changes

We’re all learners. So ask yourself, as a learner: what do I need in each moment? In moments one and two, when learning something for the first time, or when wanting to continue on and learn more, training may well be the answer. 

The problem is, most companies try to train everything, attempting to cater to the needs of moments three through five with more training. When you’re trying to apply or remember something, do you need more training? When you attempt something you learned in a course and it doesn’t go perfectly, is heading back to the classroom really the answer? And when anything changes surrounding that initial skill you learned, do you need to be re-trained all over again?

Of course, the answer to all of these questions is no. As Bob likes to say, you can’t train your way out of moments three through five. In workflow learning, you actually design for these three moments first, before you even look at designing the training. It’s about ensuring that learning is sustained and transferred properly, and that it is practised and retained in the flow of work. 

By reversing the design and moving from the workflow backwards (we call it ‘designing from the right’), you’ve got an opportunity to introduce training as and when necessary afterwards. More often than not, it halves time-to-competency and you end up with completed tasks and finished products instead of meaningless certifications and long-forgotten knowledge. 

What’s Fuse Got To Do With It? 

If you’re a Fuse customer, or just a follower of our blog or social channels, you’ll see how often we talk about learning in the flow of work, and applying knowledge at the point of need. We love the 5 Moments of Need framework because the fundamental raison d’etre of the Fuse Knowledge Intelligence Engine is to enable people to learn in the flow of work. 

Like Bob, we’re not anti-course or classroom. However, for 15 years now we’ve been challenging the fundamental classroom and course-only approach to learning on the basis that often, 90% of what we see on offer in the classroom isn’t applicable to what people need to know to do their jobs and increase their job performance. 

Why? Because more often than not, people need knowledge to do their jobs and perform better - not courses. There’s a reason we call our platform the Fuse Knowledge Intelligence Engine: it’s not a simple search engine - it’s an AI-driven powerhouse that serves up personalised knowledge at the point of need, building expertise quickly in the flow of work. 

Fuse actually caters perfectly to all 5 Moments of Need. It is changing the way people search for and access knowledge that they need at that very crucial moment in a project. It’s also changing the way we look at, manage and disperse knowledge amongst employees and communities. 

Using AI, Fuse is giving users a more personalised experience by narrowing down recommendations to match the experience that a user may be having in their workflow at a particular moment in time. It creates a ‘corporate brain’ of contextually relevant content it can recommend based on relevance to individual users. It understands the site and pages that users visit, and can build dynamic search queries that can predict the performance support users need at an exact moment.

With Fuse, learners are positively encouraged to consume learning in the flow of work so that they can practice, adapt and try things differently if needed - just like stages three through five in the 5 Moments of Need. 

We could go on - and trust me, we will, as there is an upcoming ebook on this very subject. But rather than getting into every single way Fuse backs up the 5 Moments of Need, we’re going to pause before we come back with a few case study examples of how our customers are using workflow learning to support performance in really impressive, demonstrable ways. 

So watch this space for the next two blogs in our series (hint, Avon and Vodafone examples await!) In the meantime, if you’d like to have a discussion to discuss how we can help your move to workflow design to boost your learning based outcomes and performance, get in touch today.