A food bank volunteer doesn’t know how to lift a heavy box safely.
A farmers market vendor can’t remember how to process a SNAP transaction.
A board member is uncomfortable asking someone to make a donation.
What do they have in common? All of these people are working away from a desk, and something is getting in the way of doing their jobs well.
When people need to know something, our typical response is to offer a training. But consider what’s happening. The volunteer needs to develop a physical skill. The vendor needs to recall a process while a customer is waiting. The board member may know plenty about fundraising but lack the confidence to initiate a conversation.
These are different performance problems, and training alone may not solve them. Throughout our Learning That Sticks series, we’ve been exploring how to close the gap between knowing and doing. Three important pivots have emerged, and they set the stage for our November 17 conversation with JD Dillon, author of The Frontline Enablement Playbook.
Pivot 1: The power of practice
Let’s take our board member who is uncomfortable asking for donations. Confidence grows when we have opportunities to practice, experience progress, and receive useful feedback. Imagine giving this board member three opportunities to practice a donor conversation, each with a different challenge. After each attempt, they receive specific feedback and try again. By the third conversation, they’re listening more carefully, responding more naturally, and gaining confidence.
This is the power of deliberate practice that Dr. Nidhi Sachdeva explored in our October Learning That Sticks session. Once we identify a performance gap, we can pinpoint the skills involved, create opportunities to practice them, and build feedback into the experience. We can practice the difficult moments people are most likely to encounter in their work.
Your turn: Think about someone who isn’t doing something you need them to do. What specific skills might they be missing or not confident in? How could you give them opportunities to practice those skills in a safe setting, with feedback that helps them improve? What might change if they had several chances to try before doing it for real?
Pivot 2: From roles to the reality of work
We often design training around roles. We create learning programs for volunteers, board members, managers, and staff. We identify what people in those roles need to know and be able to do. How often do we design around the conditions in which people actually do their work?
Think about our farmers market vendor. They attended training in May, but now it’s August, and they’re trying to process a SNAP transaction while customers wait in line, the market is noisy, and they’re managing several things at once. We know working memory is limited. Add the passage of time and few opportunities to practice, and it’s easy to understand why recalling the steps of a transaction can be difficult.
JD Dillon, author of The Frontline Enablement Playbook, encourages us to design for the worker’s day. That means understanding the physical environment, competing demands, available technology, and moments when people need help. For our vendor, a short video or illustrated job aid accessible on a cell phone through a QR code could provide immediate support.
Your turn: Think about someone you’re responsible for training. Picture them doing their work on a busy day. Where are they? What technology do they have? What’s competing for their attention? What happens when they get stuck? How could you make support available right where they need it?
Pivot 3: From training to a system that supports performance
The first two pivots bring us to a bigger shift: center performance, and design everything around helping people succeed. That means looking beyond training to the full range of support people need to do their work well: opportunities to practice, timely information, coaching, useful tools, and working conditions that make success possible.
JD Dillon’s Modern Learning Ecosystem Framework helps us widen our view of the support available to workers. It shows how structured training, coaching, reinforcement, performance support, and shared knowledge can work together to support people throughout their work.
Source: JD Dillon, The Modern Learning Ecosystem Framework™, LearnGeek (learngeek.co/mle).
Recent research reinforces the importance of looking at the whole system. In its Workforce Enablement Era report, 94% of surveyed managers said they were regularly expected to support employee development, yet only 43% received substantial guidance on how to coach or reinforce learning. Supporting workers means supporting the people who guide them, too.
Consider our food bank volunteer. They may know how to lift safely, but what happens when heavy boxes are stacked too high, the right equipment is missing, or everyone is rushing to finish? Their ability to work safely depends on much more than their individual knowledge and skills. It depends on how the work is organized, what equipment is available, what supervisors reinforce, and whether volunteers can raise concerns and get help.
A learning and support system brings these pieces together. It asks us to examine everything that influences performance, including the decisions and conditions that organizations control.
Your turn: Think about a performance challenge in your organization. Look beyond the knowledge and skills of the people involved. What else influences their ability to succeed? Consider the tools, relationships, processes, expectations, and working conditions surrounding them. What could you change in that system to make successful performance easier?
My contribution to JD’s book
I contributed a section to The Frontline Enablement Playbook about designing learning and support for nonprofit frontline workers. I share three examples from our work: food bank safety resources, farmers market vendor education, and tools that help frontline managers protect vulnerable people. The common thread is listening to the people doing the work and making support available when and where they need it.
Continuing the conversation with JD Dillon
The gap between knowing and doing is a design problem. Across our Learning That Sticks series, we’ve explored how to close that gap through deliberate practice, designing for the realities of work, and building systems that support performance. On November 17, JD Dillon will bring these ideas to life with a focus on deskless workers—the staff and volunteers whose work happens in food banks, community programs, farmers markets, and countless other settings away from a desk.
Join us November 17, 10:00–11:30 a.m. Pacific, for Learning That Sticks with JD Dillon.