How to Know if Your Company Needs Larabee
There are two obvious reasons why you would never expect your child to learn how to tie her shoes from a book. First: if she’s of the age of learning to tie her shoes, chances are she can’t read complex instructions yet. Second: learning to tie shoes is a complicated endeavor for children and requires slow, repetitive instructions that need visual demonstration and incremental steps. Eventually, each and every one of those micro-movements become seared into muscle memory, chunked as one complete procedure by the brain into a nearly thoughtless routine. Books, or linear videos for that matter, simply don’t offer the kind of rich, visual, at-your-pace guidance required for that kind of muscle memory to happen.
When it comes to determining whether your company needs a learning tool specifically designed for procedural knowledge, here are some ways to know for certain.
Your organization requires complex procedures.
Anything that involves sequences and actions that need to be done in a correct way in order for the outcome to be successful, AND is difficult or time-consuming to put into words, is a complex procedure. Some examples include: operating machinery, manufacturing a product, cooking a recipe, installing a car seat, playing a musical instrument, sign language, crafting at home, setting up smart equipment, conducting a medical procedure, and demonstrating product use.
Examples of non-complex procedures: filling out forms, conveying company policies, and setting up automated alerts. (Can Larabee help? Yes, we can, and easily. But the point is: you have other options.)
You want your customers to fall in love with you.
If you’re a consumer-facing brand and your product involves physical objects, chances are: you need a powerful customer engagement tool. In the days of yore, housewares like vacuum cleaners and silver polishes were often sold by door-to-door salesmen who guided their customers through the assembly and use of a product, all the while providing information and stories for why their brands were superior to their competitors. It was what we could refer to today as a “last mile solution” – that much needed touchpoint that left an indelible and human impression on customers, with the hope of not only boosting sales but producing lifelong brand enthusiasts. The companies that still invest in that last mile, like Peloton through their product delivery and set-up, are the ones who best understand that human-to-human connection is impossible to underestimate.
There are immediate benefits to investing in this deeper form of engagement. First, your customers are more likely to use your products more successfully. Second, by hearing your stories and getting to know the people behind the brand while they’re using your product, they’ll forge deeper emotional connections that are hard to undo. Stories are the most powerful conduits for information. Stories combined with physical activity and guidance? That is a mighty combination forging indelible relationships that live way beneath the surface. Third, you’re communicating to your audience that you are invested in their growth, and you will forever have an immediate and positive association to the knowhow they gain from the experience you created for them.
You care about employee growth.
Let’s look at one of the top companies in America with the most impressive rates of retention: Patagonia. What does their employee ethos boil down to? Treat your employees as whole human beings with rich lives to live, not sedentary, passive, expendable bodies with expiration dates. (That might have been needlessly grim.) With a low turnover rate of 4% at the corporate level, Patagonia actively invests in the growth and wellbeing of their people. They enable their employees to be activated physically as well as socially. They maximize their time efficiently so that they’re not stuck doing time-consuming drudgery if there are more efficient ways of doing. Employees feel both supported and part of an organization that acts on its mission and values.
One effective way to invest in your employees is by tapping into a fundamental and genuine human need: inherent reward. As Jane McGonigal puts it in her book Reality is Broken, human beings crave the satisfaction of accomplishment and growth. “We are much happier,” she quotes Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar, “enlivening time than killing time.” Consider how a learning tool that connects with learners physically and intellectually, that engages as it guides and dials into a deeper appetite for curiosity and knowledge, could benefit them in both the immediate and long term? What would happen if your employees completed learning experiences with a sigh of satisfaction and an eagerness to share what they learned with their partners?
Standardizations matter.
Legend has it that a Chinese-American founder of one of the largest fortune cookie companies in the country once said, “If I die, fortune cookie crisis!” The joke was that all of the knowledge he inherited during his decades of running and operating his factory would be lost with him. Whether you’re a restaurant group with a signature dish that patrons across the country love, or a life-saving medical training organization with thousands of employees, the need for clear and reproducible steps and actions might be crucial to your business.
The tricky thing with complex procedures is that they’re highly subject to human interpretation and modification. If instructions come from textbooks or videos, the onus is on novices to make sense of what they’re seeing, which can be highly subjective. If guidance happens in person, training can turn into a game of telephone. If the expert at the top of your organization establishes a protocol for a procedure or product use, and the success of your company is predicated on those procedures being taught the same way, it’s important that this knowledge not be misinterpreted, diluted, and morphed over time.
Standardizations might not matter. But foundational knowledge does.
In 2021, New York Times food editor Sam Sifton published a piece titled “A No-Recipe Manifesto” in which he encouraged readers to “wing it” with recipes. Learning to cook without a recipe, he states, is a kind of proficiency that only develops through trial and improvisation. Sifton is not wrong, but it’s important to note that successful improvisation - and problem solving for that matter - comes from a foundation of knowledge that is developed and honed with hands-on experience.
The problem with most asynchronous learning tools, whether they are text- or video-based, is that they tend to overlook the critical nature of context in a multitude of ways. First is the context in which information is delivered. If the procedure that is being taught is an action or activity, then under no circumstances should the learner be sitting passively in front of a screen or book, nor should that screen or book be the primary object the learner is interacting with. Second is the context of the learners themselves. Understanding what questions might arise and when, providing opportunities for them to dive deeper without getting lost, identifying potential problem areas, and integrating storytelling whenever possible are all creative exercises that create context for the learner and augment their preparation in immeasurable ways. Finally, there is the context of the expert – the lessons learned, mistakes made, personal histories, and lived experiences. Creating a place where the lifetime knowledge of an expert can be documented, preserved, and shared means that invaluable knowhow lives on and remains accessible to others in perpetuity.
Learning without context is the equivalent of following GPS instructions. You might get to where you need to go, but unless you’re taking in the landmarks and street signs and topography, chances are you’ll be reliant on GPS to get to that same destination in the future. Context gives meaning, shape, and color to everything we do, because it is in our nature as human beings to be acutely sensitive to context. When you attend to context, you not only create multiple retrieval cues for memory and retention, you enable learners to start building their foundations for deeper embodied knowledge.
