Actionable content can seem repulsive

Consuming junk food produces several negative side effects on our brains:

• We get possessed by urges to consume more. We unconsciously decide that we cannot get enough of our favorite junk food. Our insatiable appetite overcomes any reasonable restraints.
• We experience a change in what tastes good to us. Junk food makes nutritious food taste terrible. Our sense of how to avoid pain tells us to take flight from healthy nutrition.
• We become creatures of immediate gratification. We react to hunger ASAP. We take a short-sighted approach to our appetites as if eating is an act of desperation amidst danger.
• We regard packages of junk food as spell binding. We give totemic power to these trinkets that seem to enchant us. We indulge in magical thinking.

The manufacturers and distributors of junk food thrive on these side effects. Excessive consumption feeds their profitability and expansion. Insatiable demand for their products keeps them at full production. The revenue stream funds the massive advertising and elaborate packaging to keep the enchantments in the consumers' minds.

I see the same pattern in the why there is so little delivery of actionable content. It's too nutritious. It doesn't taste good to those on the receiving end. It doesn't make content delivery systems profitable. It requires an appetite that is very different from consuming junk content. It would take some kind of intervention to break the pattern of consumption and acquire a taste for actionable content.

The scuba diver and the water skier

There's a big lake with a boat dock for recreational enthusiasts. Most have been coming here for years and have not been deterred by the soaring petrol prices. Each has a different idea of how to make fun be actionable. Some work on their suntans as they lay out on the lake shore. Others work at catching fish by casting their line into the water off the bank or from a boat near a fishing hole. Others go for the thrill of being pulled around on skis by a high powered motor boat. Others go exploring the depths of the lake by scuba diving in wet suits with tanks.

One could say that scuba divers favor the depth of an experience while water skiers explore the surface. Divers delve into one place on the lake while skiers run around the entire body of water. Both are taking action while operating on different premises about how to have a fun and rewarding experience.

Divers go deep to get to the bottom of the lake bed. It's a good thing to get a sinking feeling. Falling below the surface of the water "poses fulfillment issues". Skiers go deep accidentally when they fall of their skis. Going deep seems like drowning that "poses survival issues". It's a bad thing to get a sinking feeling.

Divers favor the quality of what they find by going beneath the surface. Skiers value the quantity of adrenaline rushes they experience by keeping things superficial. For them, quality is boring. Delving beneath the surface lacks variety. Living the questions is a sign of not being smart enough or sufficiently educated to deserve others' respect.

Divers have the idea that scuba diving is actionable. There is so much to do within a single exploration, vantage point or place in time. Skiers know that skiing is actionable by how active they obviously are to others. Divers going deep does not appear to others as getting anything done. Divers go within where their fruitful experiences are invisible.

Living the questions

It occurred to me this morning that all content is actionable if we know how to question it. Rather than fix the educators or the instructional designs to be more actionable, we can all simply become more effective learners. Rather than finally "get it right", we can remain in process, continually exploring and living the questions. We can all "go with the flow" of other people playing different roles. Here's how I envision living the questions when I pretend that we could somehow articulate our unconscious thought processes.

When we're faced with someone acting like a content provider, we can question what were being given to read, hear, watch or look at:

• How does this tie into things I already know to do, concepts I already understand and experiences I already have under my belt?
• What does this mean to me within my particular frames of reference, past history and varied stages of my personal development?
• How can I use this in my world where I'm solving problems, resolving conflicts and changing my mind?
• What better questions does this give me to explore, reframe my own inquiries and challenge my own preconceptions?

When we're participating with someone playing the part of an activity director, we can question what we're doing and what comes of it:

• What happens to my state of mind, body or feelings when I do this as required, differently from last time, or like someone else is acting?
• How does this set-up make progress, function or take on a life of its own -- when I do my part?
• What results do I get when I follow the instructions, make a deliberate effort or try to get a change to happen?
• How can I improve my approach, try something different or build on what I've done so far?

When we're conversing with someone who's acting like a tutor, we can question what we're realizing during the process of talking things out:

• How does what I'm hearing differ from what's important to me, how I see things and what difference this makes to me?
• What am I being shown that I don't already see, that I'm assuming otherwise or that I rule out as inconceivable?
• How am I feeling amidst this conversation about my own confidence, our common ground and my trust of the other person?
• What does our discussion give me to contribute, tag on to, appreciate and question?

When we're observing another learner playing the part of a perpetual beginner, we can question the example being demonstrated:

• What is this showing me about how to fuel my own curiosity, create a spirit of adventure and love the process of learning?
• How can I be like this other person, follow this example and catch onto this contagious competence?
• What premises am I being shown to come from the same place, live inside a similar story and look out from a common vantage point?
• How can my own learning process benefit from all these questions, ways to deepen my own inquiries and hypotheses in need of further investigations?

When we're living the questions like this, every thing we take in is actionable.

Playing different roles

We're going to have great difficulty creating actionable content when we suffer from "role fixity". When we're thinking "I'm just doing my job", we're missing out on the playing all the parts where actionable content comes naturally to our minds and conversations. Marshal McLuhan suggested that we get hung up on jobs because printing presses do printing jobs and don't change roles like human labor before mechanization. We're embracing a factory mentality that delivers content and leaves it up to the customer to use it somehow. The labor involved in writing, editing, illustrating and publishing seems like all the activity we can handle. We are not limiting ourselves to providing content. We're doing our best with the full plate we've got in front of us. We cannot follow up with each receiver of the content to see that they put it to good use. That's not in our job description.

When we're looking after others' learning, there are many roles we can play. The more fluid we become in changing roles, the better we'll be at providing actionable content. If we think of ourselves as avatars in a game, we're in great shape to face this challenge. Here are four roles that capture our range of contributions I have in mind when others are learning from us.

• When we're playing the part of a content provider, our role is to see that others are well informed. We make our message clear and easy to understand. We organize the material to make it easy to follow. We follow logical progressions to develop complex arguments in stages. What people do with the content we've provided is none of our business. We crank it out and hope they do something with it. If we're lucky, we'll encounter some reflective practitioners who chewed on what we provided and came up with ways to challenge themselves. More likely, we'll endure run-ins with couch potatoes who want to be told what to think, say and do by authority figures who wield power over them.
• When we're playing the part of an activity director, we're setting others up to learn by what they do. We work on making it fun to learn, challenging to explore and practical in its applications. The learners practice what they've been taught, work with the ideas to get some result or play around with different possibilities to realize the consequences of each. Activities run the gamut from discussion groups, projects, lab work, field trips, remedial exercises and simulations. We're active keeping everyone on track and productive rather than presenting lots more content. We facilitate, coach, nurture and guide from the side. We take a very literal approach to providing actionable content and simply give others things to act upon.
• When we play the part of a personal tutor, mentor or coach, we're engaging learners one-on-one. We rely on the dialogue between us to uncover misunderstandings, to talk through her/his confusion and to sort out the individual's line of reasoning. We ask a lot of questions, do a lot of listening and learn a lot about each person's ways of thinking. The ways we contribute makes it clear in others' minds what to do next, do differently or do for the first time that had not occurred to them on their own. The content provided seems actionable because it's individualized and focused on personal change.
• When we play the part of the perpetual beginner, everything we offer is actionable. We provide an example of someone who is still learning and on equal footing with other learner's. We're acting as if questions continually drive our learning rather than wanting to appear like an expert or authority. We provide our current understanding as a hypothesis that is subject to further explorations and revisions. We act as if the act of learning is ongoing, fulfilling and self-perpetuating. It becomes obvious to others how to act on what we say, how we conduct our learning and what questions we're using to further our own understanding.

No matter what role we're playing, someone can always take what we're offering in an actionable way. We can make it easier and more likely by changing ourselves among these four roles. We keep the learners guessing where we'll come from next. We make the challenge of taking further action seem engaging.

What are you going to do about this?

Actionable content is doable. We expect learners to take action after comprehending the content. What they get told gives them things to accomplish, move forward or improve.

When we fail to provide actionable content, we drop the ball. We implicitly offer an ultimatum: "take it or leave it" and abdicate further responsibility. We pass up the opportunity to partner with the learner in getting past the talking stage. We expect the action to happen without our influence or example. We don't consider how the content could be revised to be actionable.

When we drop this ball, it feels to the learners like we have asked: "What are you going to do about this?" Content becomes actionable when we imply different questions for the learners to consider. We appear to be asking "Now that you have a feel for this idea, see some uses for the concept, or get what difference this distinction can make:

• how can you be more selective the next time you're making a decision about this?
• how can this idea help you come up with more alternatives to choose among before you make up your mind?
• how does this concept help you see opportunities you can leverage in situations that appear unfavorable to you?
• how can you apply this idea to troubleshooting what is not working as expected?

Questions like these imply that the content is actionable. The actions are not necessarily instrumental and physically active. The actions are certainly cognitive and considerate. They call for more reasoning, reflection and realizations. The actions in the mind come up with better decisions, designs, strategies, and diagnoses.

Defining actionable content

So far I've made it clear that actionable content is NOT inert, hypocritical, excessive, abstract, expert, trivial, or pseudo actionable. I've defined it negatively to shake up your preconceptions about how content always has to be conceived of and delivered free of confusion. We need to visualize a chasm between familiar forms of content and actionable content. With a sense of "we cannot get here from here", we can make the leap to a different set of preconceptions.

Here's the place we cannot get to when we're thinking about content in conventional terms. We've learned some actionable content whenever we can:

1. get the job done and achieve the intended results. -- Like getting the new furniture completely assembled when you've only been provided with the printed instructions, web address, fasteners and tools.
2. know what to do in an actual situation that is not the same as what you were taught -- Like knowing to learn from the students when you've only been shown to cover the material.
3. do something on purpose and be clear about your intentions. -- Like giving other's the feeling of being accepted, validated and understood when you want to be trusted and respected.
4. do something that needs to be done without being told to do it. -- Like taking the initiative to discover what's missing or misconstrued when people are acting like something is wrong.
5. do something differently than you would have from following a bad example. -- Like solving problems creatively when you've been rewarded for thinking inside the box.
6. make a better decision, trade-off or value judgment than those who react out of fear -- Like choosing to experiment with a different approach when everyone says our hare-brained scheme will never work.
7. approach a situation with more insight and perspective than the superficial facts make evident . -- Like recognizing a growth process to trust as it goes through stages while others are upset with their discomfort.

Making the switch to actionable content is a second order change. It's not trying harder to get it right, it's trying smarter to make it right. It's not playing by the rules, it's playing with the rules.

Jack this knowledge

On the second day of a three-day seminar I attended on dream interpretation, I needed help interpreting one I had the night before. I dreamed I was a thief who had successfully stolen some goods and was "making out like a bandit". I learned that this symbolism meant I had taken what I had learned from the dream seminar and made off with it like I now owned it. That proved to be true years later. I had taken the Jungian framework and found it to be actionable. I was having lots of successes interpreting my own and other's dreams. I even realized O could read the symbolism in the character arcs and plot twists in films I watched. I had no further use for "dream dictionaries". I car jacked that seminar and drove off with it.

Actionable content is intended to be stolen. The learners "make off with it" like they own it and it will belong to them from now on. They realize they did the hard part of making it into something they can practice, put to use or do thoughtfully. Telling them about it was easy for the teacher. Listening was easy for the learner. The work began at the point the serial numbers on the knowledge were being rubbed out. The knowledge was getting a new paint job, license plates and upholstery. What was common knowledge became personal knowledge that ties into previous experiences, lingering issues and open ended questions. The knowledge found a new home.

Most students appear to turn in the keys to the new knowledge at the end of the course. They act like they had been driving a rental car that they are not allowed to own by hook or crook. It does not feel like something they would want to upkeep and use to get somewhere better. They think they are not qualified, smart enough or sufficiently conscientious to make good use of it. It appear too complicated, abstract, or useless. In short, the content was not actionable.

We make content actionable when we expect it to get jacked by the learners. We want the learners to rip it off and make it their own. We intend for it to be mutilated by their subjectivity, contexts of use and unique efforts to apply it in their worlds. We lose control of what it means to them while being thrilled they have taken it in to the depths of their experience and flights of their imagination.

Acquiring street cred

My preamble to most of the college courses I've taught addressed this issue of "actionable content". I treated the students as customers who needed to beware of "getting cloned by academia", as well as to appreciate "getting prepared for the real world". I framed the issue as the difference between receiving "book smarts" or "street smarts" from a college course. Here's four of the ways I've called attention to the shortage of actionable content in college.

A problem with inert content:

If you know what a computer printer is, what good are you? If you know what "Command P" does or how to "Print" from the pull down "File" menu, you're only helpful if the printer is already hooked up, turned on and in working order. If you know how to troubleshoot the printer set-up and respond to particular error messages, you're showing signs of having "street cred". If other people ask for your help when they are having printer problems, you know you've got 'street cred" that you taught yourself, learned by experience or picked up from somebody with the right stuff.

An example of hypocritical content

A new county extension agent was driving around to meet the farmers in his district. He noticed one, whom he had not met yet, on a tractor near the road. The extension agent parked his truck and waved to the farmer that he wanted to talk. The farmer put his tractor in neutral, climbed down and walked over to the fence. The county agent proceeded to tell the farmer about a new class being taught about crop rotation and reduction in soil erosion. The farmer responded "No thanks sonny. I don't farm half as well as I know how to already. Giving me more book learning won't help me act any smarter".

The limitations of trivial content

If you've been taught the parts of a frog, you can play Jeopardy when there's questions about frog parts for $400. You can pass tests that measure how well you recall frog parts to get a good grade. However you cannot help a frog in trouble, prevent doing harm to frogs or protect the habitat of frogs -- if all you know is the parts of a frog. Frogs have troubles with droughts and too many predators. They can run into short supply of what they like to eat and how they like to mate. They may get into difficulties with raising their tadpoles to full size. If you come along with your expertise in frog parts, you won't know what effect you're having on the frogs, what to do differently or what will alleviate the harm you're doing.

Abstract content makes for trouble

When you get a job after college, the people where you work won't care what the textbook said about their situation. They won't want to know how smart you were in some course you took or how good were the grades you got on this topic. Those people will want to know how much you see in what's happening, how much you can do something about it, and how well you judge the alternatives. If you only know how to get good grades, you probably know how to make a worse problem of the situation. You probably think that all it takes to solve problems is being knowledgeable like it did in school. People won't look to you for advice when you're not learning from them, their ways of seeing or their experiences with this kind of thing. You're too smart or your own good and suddenly finding out what that gets you. Not much.

Actionable content results in street cred. When we do something with new content, we discover what it's good for, how reliably it delivers results, what can go wrong with it and what remedies the situation if it creates problems. We don't imagine we can swallow the lesson whole. It's no good for us until we see what good it does. Once we can put the ideas into practice, we'll impress others and earn some street cred.

The need for actionable content

Teachers want to give their students actionable skills. Managers want their direct reports to formulate actionable objectives. Authors of self-help books want to give their readers actionable guidelines at the end of each chapter. Trainers want to give their attendees actionable takeaways at the close of the session. Making content actionable has become a very popular solution to a widespread problem. Typical content is something other than actionable.

Through the next several blog posts, I'll explore how this idea of "actionable content" serves a purpose, how that purpose is changing, why it's so difficult to formulate and different ways to create the desired effect. For starters, here are seven problems that beg for actionable content.

Inert content: Sometimes we deliver content that only applies to the content itself. We foster encyclopedic knowledge of a subject area that only pertains to further study of itself. We dish out what Alfred North Whitehead called "inert ideas".

In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generations exhibit mere pedantry and routine. The Aims of Education 1929

Hypocritical content: We tell people to do something that is the opposite of our conduct. We cannot walk our own talk or provide an example of our advice. We lose credibility because we are merely preachy. We are full of what to say and bereft of what to do differently, more effectively and toward particular results.

Excessive content: We can make a thing of becoming inundated with too much information. We end up twice as smart as we act and say to ourselves "I knew better than to do that". We get so preoccupied with knowing more, we disconnect what we know from how we act. We expect to change ingrained habits by being well informed and then fail to do anything differently.

Abstract content: We can give others content that is taken out of context. It seems unrelated to a context where it could be applied to problems, conflicts or opportunities. It's disconnected from contexts of meaning, relevance, significance. They say "we understand the words, but not what it has to do with anything".

Expert content: We can dwell on being authoritative and fail to hand off our expertise. We can make the right answer seem too demanding, complicated or out-of-reach for others to take ownership of it. We come across as self-righteous, ego maniacal or pompous. We inadvertently silence their voices and dismiss alternative perceptions. We impose modernism on subjective, post-modern sensibilities.

Trivial content: We can prepare others for quiz shows and board games like Trivial Pursuit. We celebrate knowing facts as accumulated possessions. We foster the materialistic acquisition of bigger inventories and abundant collections of information artifacts.

Pseudo-actionable content: We can give people things to do that do no good. We set up people for pointless exercises. We pretend it's valuable to go through the motions with no lasting effect. We take time to waste their time with mere busywork. We show people how to look productive while accomplishing nothing of significance.

What are you supposed to do with that information? Recognize where you're having any of these seven problems. Consider whether actionable content has the potential to solve any of these problems. Wonder why there's still a need for actionable content if it's already clear it would solve these problems.