The first thing to do is fire the old training guard

I have now been involved in many situations that have played out almost identically.

There is an innovative, typically "older gen-x" sponsor who either develops a custom simulation or brings in some off-the-shelf simulation. When the simulation is finished, the sponsor sends it out to some training power brokers for their input.

To be clear, at this point, the simulation either represents months of work, or is an award winning program with documented case studies of success.

In more cases than I care to count, the response from these old guards is "no, it will never work. Scrap the project." This is, of course, disheartening. So I often dig deeper. 10 times out of 10, when probed, I find out the same two things from the old guard.

First, they engaged in less than 10% of the whole program. So for a two hour program, they may have looked at 10 minutes.

Second, their "reasons" for dismissal were staggeringly capricious. "The font size is too small" or "the program both reads the text and shows the text at the same time which is counter to instructional methodology" or "I had to click the 'next' button too often."

To me, such counter-innovation smugness should be grounds for immediate dismissal. No graceful exit. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

It is one thing to say, "Sorry I don't have the time to review your program," or "I am so deep into my own experiment that my view is skewed" or "What happened in the focus groups" or even "I wish I could comment, but I am so far removed from the target audience as to not be valuable." It is another altogether to craftily do the least amount of work possible to "validate" a hastily-conceived intellectual position.

These people are clearly not serving the organization that pays them each month. What I don't understand is why they take the position that they do.

Here are some theories:

• Are they more scared that the new program will be a public failure or a public success? Failure might mean that all formal learning budgets are cut, while success might switch the balance away from their budget to someone else's.
• Do they truly believe in the validity of their own pettiness? Have they become so superstitions and intellectually brittle that they believe in a set of little rules as the key to success in formal learning programs? Is their circle of colleagues so narrow that they have feedbacked-looped their own theories into fact?
• Have they just learned to treat everyone as badly as they feel they have been treated? Are they mean because they can be mean?
• Are they, just by being in the profession of lecturing, far too comfortable giving out poorly thought out and researched positions as absolute fact?
• Do their minds get overwhelmed when they see media on a computer screen that is interactive and "game-like," causing them to thrash about in panic looking for something familiar and safe to intellectually judge and hit?
• Do they just have a rote process that they have developed for reviewing material that they are blindly applying?
• Do they resent being put in the place of a lowly student? Do they hate to learn?
• Are they simply insane?

Now, I admit that these comments haven't derailed any programs that I have tracked. But they sure take the wind out of a lot of great sails. (What is then amusing is seeing the smiling portraits of these old guard members in conference brochures next to blurbs about how innovative they are. I have heard some brag in public about programs they have tried to suck the support from in private. And honestly, either they are fabulous liars or they are truly unaware of their own hypocrisy.)

I get periodic bulk emails, letting me know that people who have been nothing but obstacles to the entire formal learning industry have retired, and each one fills me with rejoice. (Sometimes I even get personal emails from these old guard members asking for recommendations when they get appropriately sacked, which fills me with something else.)

That is why I often say at the beginning of conference presentations that everyone who has been in the industry for more than three years should leave, because they won't act upon anything I say. I pretend to joke but I am serious.

Sadly, if World War II created "the greatest generation," the baby boomers now in power in the formal learning industries have got to be the worst generation. Many have hoarded power by pandering to critics and cynics to ultimately lower the vision of the entire industry to using e-learning slide shows to teach people how to do simple processes and other test prep.

Thankfully, the wheels of time are relentlessly pushing the old guard out of the way. I just hope there is a profession left when they are done with it.

Four Intellectual Traps for Understanding Learning

In trying to rebuild our capability to capture and develop knowledge and wisdom, we have to back away from some of our sacred constructs. Here are four of my own observations:

1. School is not a useful model for learning. But learning to ride a bike or a foreign language is. Schools are only good for teaching people how to be students, and maybe teachers.

2. Books, magazines, and movies are not a sufficiently useful model for capturing wisdom. Would you learn leadership or innovation that way?

3. Professional (or other highly structured) sports are not a useful ideal for play. But pick-up games are. Professional sports are a better model for work.

4. Computer games are not a useful ideal for play, any more than white bread and candy are good models for food.

I will be delving into these in more detail in the weeks to come.

Using an interface to motivate players to wait

One of the trickiest interface challenges in sims is to motivate a player to wait. How can a simulation convince the player to hold off on doing something they want to do immediately? This is critical, as so many Big Skills (such as security and relationship management) require, to apply them successfully in real life, plenty of appropriate holding back.

Recharging Shield. In Halo: Combat Evolved, the player may best want to take cover and wait for the shield to recharge before jumping into full battle.

Here are some ideas, including both that can be learned through experience and visualized in the interface:

• Saving up: This is the most straightforward. Players have to earn a certain threshold of some resource before they can move ahead. For example, they may need to earn $35 before they could buy a bus ticket. There can also be variations, where the longer one waits and earns, the better solution can be bought. For example, one can earn $35 for a bus ticket but if one waits and earns $200 and one can buy a plane ticket.
• Charging up: In a charging up situation, the longer one waits (over the course of a limited time), the geometrically more powerful the effect of an action will be. So with a certain type of weapon, charging it for two seconds and will result in a blast of power 10, but charging it for four seconds will result in a blast of power 100. Likewise, at a staff meeting, not talking for a while may earn the group's attention when you do have something important to say.
• Limited inventory: In some cases, the player only has a non-renewable amount of some resource, and spending it badly leads to missed opportunities.
• When things are going well: Here, everything is going well, and the player has to realize that getting involved may hurt, not help.
• Earn interest: Here, any unused resource grows. The higher the interest rate, the more motivation for a player to wait. In other words, doing the same thing one turn later results in having more.
• Window of opportunity: Here, there is simply a time when an action is effective, and a time when the action is either ineffective or counterproductive. A level-ending boss may only be injure-able after firing his or her own weapon. This can be absolute or more subtle. For example, Company A may best buy Company B when Company A's stock price is at its highest and Company B's stock price is at its lowest.
• Probing/ identifying: In some cases, there may be a question as to even do an action or not. A person coming out of the fog may be an enemy or a colleague. Waiting can result in more information to make that decision.
• Dry powder: In some cases, there may be better options later, or an environment where surprises come up that need resources to either make things much better or keep them from being much worse.

We are all so used to twitch games. But some of the most interesting sims have us as tense holding back as striking out.

Learn more about HIVEs in the June/July special issue of Innovate Magazine on Online Simulations, Role Playing, and Virtual Worlds

I have been presenting my model of Highly Interactive Virtual Environments around the world in the last few months. I have been grateful with the amount of excitement it has garnered (and frankly relieved, as successfully implementing HIVEs is the centerpiece of Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds, the more traditional of my two upcoming books).

Given that, if you are interested in this subject, I am happy to announce that the June/July special issue of Innovate, on Online Simulations, Role Playing, and Virtual Worlds is out today. Moreover, I have been able to write a "keynote" piece for the issue, called Virtual Worlds, Simulations, and Games for Education: A Unifying View (keynote not in the sense of the most important piece, but as a level setter). My piece introduces the HIVE model, and importantly to many, in a language and tone that is more formal and familiar to many academics than my usual, ah, overly-jaunty prose.

I hope you like the whole issue, and find my piece a worthy addition.