In this conversational interview, Christopher Parsons argues that Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) firms should integrate learners from the very start of the learning‑design process. He outlines a step‑1 informal conversation with potential learners to surface real‑world opportunities and to counteract the information asymmetry that senior designers often have when deciding what knowledge employees need. Parsons challenges the prevailing belief that modern attention spans demand only ultra‑short (90‑second) content, noting that audiences will still engage with longer formats if the material is valuable and on‑demand. He describes how pilot and early‑adopter phases—similar to intranet roll‑outs—provide critical feedback that often requires revisiting and refining the course before full launch. A concrete example is shared from Boulder Associates, where learners interview a subject‑matter expert, become teachers themselves, and help offload the expert’s instructional burden. The discussion concludes that involving learners throughout, gathering iterative feedback, and using learners as teachers creates a virtuous cycle that improves each subsequent learning path.
Chapters
I'm curious about your thoughts on when it's like the right time to bring in learners is to make sure that we're incorporating actual learner feedback into the design without overwhelming them with this question.
Yeah. So I have, I do have them in step 1. There's an informal conversations with learners piece in there. So that's really around building the list of what are the opportunities we should be thinking about. And that is meant to counterbalance, and I say this with, with, I mean this in the best possible way. All of us were emerging professionals at one point in our career, and based on how we remember, I think we think of what would be useful, what they might want to learn, right? Or from our position now as more senior people, we're like, I need them to know this. They may not know they need to know it, but I need them to know it, right? And those things are both true, but it's also true that things have changed since you were an emerging professional., and so they have ideas. Maybe there's new technology or they come from another firm and the other firm was using some new practice or new process that would be a really good thing to use at your firm. And so I think definitely engaging them as part of your identification process is really, really good. I think you're right about the— so, so there is information asymmetry, but it can also cut both ways to some degree. You don't always know what your audience needs, and so it's good. The more time you spend talking to your audience, the better. I think there's another area. Where it's really important, and especially now I've been hearing things like everyone's attention spans are super short. Everything we make needs to be 90 seconds or 2 minutes because people are used to TikTok. And I think there's some obvious evidence that those tools are popular in the culture. But there's also— there's counter-evidence that people watch the Acquired podcast and Joe Rogan Pod— those are 4-hour-long episodes. Right? People used to watch movies. Now they're streaming entire television shows. So if something is interesting enough to them, they will keep going, whether it's educational entertainment or whatever it is. And so I, I'm not, I'm very skeptical of this argument that people don't have the attention span. I do think it's true that people have lost some of their endurance. I read a piece last week that it was in Cal Newport's newsletter saying that at the NYU film school, right? Super prestigious film school, they're saying that the film students are having a hard time making it through full-length films because they just get antsy, right? And they're like, I need to check in. I'm out of the conversation. I don't know what's happening. And I don't, I don't doubt that's true. I've definitely paused a show and been like, eh, what else is it? How the Warriors doing? You know, whatever it is. I, I get, I kind of like, I don't dispute that premise, but I think if your thing is valuable enough, people will finish it, which is again, another benefit of on-demand. And letting people pause and go at their own pace. It's another argument for instead of an hour-long thing that you're presenting somebody, if it's a 9-minute thing, maybe that's more aligned. I can do a 9-minute thing, take a break, do another 9-minute thing. Maybe that's more aligned there. But I think talking to end users and seeing if that's true is useful. Really, how are you consuming content? If we were to design this and you, you're saying we're thinking of 3 different ways, you don't have to do what they're saying, but you can certainly get their feedback. It seems like a useful thing to do. So yeah, I, I think you should involve them all to the extent possible. I think involving them all the way along. In fact, in the issue I just published today, I kind of linked to a clip of Todd Henderson from Boulder Associates. One of the things they did is they actually had the learners become the teachers. So they had a healthcare expert named Kate who had built all these medical planning tools. And the strategy Boulder used was we're going to have these emerging professionals interview Kate, become the expert on the tool to the extent that they're going to present to the office, they're going to document and present to the office how the tool works. So there's also an opportunity to offload some of that burden from the expert, both from teaching the thing, but then also of being the go-to person always for these questions. And so I think there are a wildly interesting number of ways to involve learners. That's just the that's just starting, getting started on that.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So in the pipeline there's a pilot step, right? Which is the place where like, yes, you are going to involve learners, but if you, if that is the first time that you are involving learners, then you're probably going to have to rebuild a bunch of stuff because, right, right.
You will likely, you spent a lot of time and energy and money to build the thing and you cross your fingers, you hope they like it, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. When we are launching intranets, there's a phase that that we generally do 3 weeks before launch called early adopters, where you bring in some people who've just never touched the intranet. They're, they're not content editors. They aren't probably not on the leadership team 'cause they kind of know what's happening. You're just trying to find people that don't know what's going on. Give them the intranet and have them give you feedback. And information always comes out of those that is very helpful to the team. Small things the team can adjust.
Yep.
And then go live 2 to 3 weeks later. For the learning experience, I think it's a very different model. You still need these first readers, people who are actual learners, representative of the broader learning body, not someone else on the Internet Core team or the learning team, but actual learners. And what I think is going to happen in pilots, or what we're starting to see happen, is that you're going to get information back that you're going to need more than a couple of weeks, maybe. To go back to the course and adjust to get it ready for prime time. The other interesting thing that I'm noticing with the pilot phase is most of our clients are launching like one or two courses or maybe one learning path at a time. So you do have the opportunity to pilot something, make it a little better, launch it, give it to all employees, learn from that, and then you're back in prioritization and right-sizing for some other program, some other learning path, and you're able to take all that learning from the first one you rolled out and roll it back in to make the next one better.
