As many of you know, I recently launched a learning and development company named Endurance Learning. My co-founder, Tim Waxenfelter, shared the following story with me a few weeks ago and I thought it would make an excellent guest blog post.
When it comes to instructional design, having someone to bounce ideas around with generally leads to many, many better outcomes than if I’m just sitting by myself thinking through the design of a session. Following are Tim’s observations and thoughts on the idea that two heads are better than one:
I’m very lucky to be able to have my whole family together every night for dinner. It is one of my favorite parts of the day. We have a tradition where we ask “what lit up your day?”
It may be that someone did something kind or made you laugh. It may be that you were able to take a walk on a beautiful day. During one recent dinner my son asked me and I blanked. I couldn’t think of one thing that lit up my day. It had been a hard day but not by any means terrible. I was just working. Let that sink in. I was just working.
There were other days where I was chained to my desk “just working” and I could share three or four great things that happened.
On this particular day, I was doing work that I loved and was checking things off my to do list. What was different?
The answer came to me the very next morning. My partner, Brian, who fancies himself something of an instructional design wizard, had spent an hour and three minutes staring at his screen to come up with a theme for a course. I got involved for thirteen minutes. In that thirteen minute span of chatting on Slack we were able to take what he had done and flesh out something that felt much closer to the right approach. Those thirteen minutes was how I started my day and the opportunity to put our heads together and get creative and throw crazy ideas out to one another and settle on something to which our client would buy-in is easily what lit my day.
How does collaboration light up your day?
