Laura: Here’s a wild thought: that mandatory two-day training your company just spent a fortune on? It probably had a 90% failure rate. Sophia: Come on, 90%? That sounds incredibly high. Are you saying the trainers were bad or the content was useless? Laura: Neither, necessarily. The failure is that it was likely designed to solve a problem that didn't even exist. It's like giving someone a beautifully detailed map when what they really need is a key to start the car. Sophia: A map for a car that won't start. I know that feeling. That’s a perfect metaphor for so many meetings and workshops I’ve sat through. Laura: It’s the core argument in a book I'm completely obsessed with, Design For How People Learn by Julie Dirksen. Sophia: Julie Dirksen... I've heard about her. She’s not some stuffy academic, right? She's an actual practitioner who got frustrated with boring, ineffective training and decided to write the book she wished existed. Laura: Exactly! And you can feel it on every page. She filled it with comics, doodles, and compelling stories instead of dry theory, which is why it's so widely acclaimed in the learning design world. It’s all about moving past just dumping information on people and getting to what really works. Sophia: Okay, I'm intrigued. If it's not about giving people more information, where do we even begin? Laura: It all starts with a simple, powerful question: what's the real gap we're trying to bridge?

Sophia: The 'gap'? What do you mean by that? A gap in what? Laura: A gap between where the learner is now and where they need to be. And Dirksen argues that we almost always misdiagnose it. We assume it's a knowledge gap—that people just don't know enough. So we throw PowerPoints and textbooks at them. Sophia: Right, the classic corporate solution. "People aren't using the new software? Let's schedule a four-hour webinar!" Laura: Precisely. But Dirksen breaks it down into different kinds of gaps. There's the knowledge gap, sure. But there's also a skill gap, a motivation gap, an environment gap, and even a communication gap. And if you design a solution for the wrong gap, you're just wasting everyone's time and money. Sophia: That makes so much sense. It’s the classic "I know, but..." problem. I know I should go to the gym, but I don't. The problem isn't a lack of knowledge about exercise. Laura: Exactly! You're not dealing with a knowledge gap, but a motivation or environment one. Dirksen tells this fantastic story about drug and alcohol prevention programs for middle schoolers. The early versions were a total failure. They focused on giving kids information—the knowledge gap. They’d say, "Here are all the terrible things drugs will do to your brain." Sophia: And I'm guessing that didn't work. No teenager thinks a bad thing will happen to them. Laura: Not at all. The kids would nod along, ace the test on the dangers of drugs, and then go out and do them anyway. The designers finally realized they were solving the wrong problem. The real gap wasn't knowledge; it was a skill gap. Sophia: A skill gap? The skill of... what? Not doing drugs? Laura: The skill of navigating a tricky social situation. The real challenge wasn't knowing drugs were bad; it was being at a party, having someone offer you something, and not knowing what to say or do in that moment without feeling like a total outcast. Sophia: Oh, wow. That’s a completely different problem. So how did they fix it? Laura: They redesigned the entire curriculum. They threw out the boring lectures and instead had the kids do role-playing. They practiced, out loud, how to handle those awkward moments. They brainstormed excuses, they acted out skits, they built the actual social muscle needed to say "no, thanks" and not feel weird about it. They bridged the skill gap, and the programs became vastly more effective. Sophia: That's brilliant. It reframes the entire purpose of learning. It’s not about knowing more, it's about doing more. So how do you tell the difference? How do you know if you're facing a knowledge gap or a skill gap? Laura: Dirksen offers a great rule of thumb. Ask yourself this question: "Is it reasonable to think that someone can be proficient without practice?" If the answer is no, you're dealing with a skill. You can't learn to ride a bike by reading a book about it. You can't learn to give good feedback by watching a video. You have to actually do it. Sophia: Okay, but what about those other gaps? Motivation seems like the hardest one to tackle. You can't just 'teach' someone to be more motivated, can you? Laura: You can't, but you can design for it. And that's where Dirksen brings in one of the most powerful metaphors for understanding our own minds. It’s all about a Rider and an Elephant.

Sophia: A Rider and an Elephant? Okay, you have my attention. Is this some kind of ancient fable? Laura: It's a modern psychology metaphor, popularized by Jonathan Haidt, and Dirksen uses it beautifully. The Rider is your rational, analytical mind. It’s the part of you that makes plans, sets goals, and understands that eating a whole pizza is a bad idea. Sophia: I know that guy. He tries his best. Laura: He does. But he's sitting on top of the Elephant—which is your emotional, instinctual, habitual self. The Elephant is massive and powerful. It seeks pleasure, avoids pain, and operates on gut feelings. And here’s the kicker: when there's a conflict between the Rider and the Elephant, who do you think wins? Sophia: The Elephant. Every single time. The Rider can have the best map in the world, but if the Elephant wants to go sit in the river and eat donuts, that's where you're going. Laura: Exactly! And most learning is designed exclusively for the Rider. It's all logic, facts, and bullet points. Meanwhile, the Elephant is bored, distracted, and looking for an escape route. To create real change, you have to appeal to the Elephant. Sophia: So how do you do that? How do you get the Elephant's attention? Laura: You have to understand what it pays attention to. It doesn't care about abstract data, but it loves stories. It gets tired by sustained effort, but it's captivated by surprise and curiosity. Dirksen points to a fascinating phenomenon called "banner blindness." Eye-tracking studies show that when we're on a website, our eyes have literally learned to not even see the banner ads. Sophia: We've habituated to them. Our Elephant has learned that those flashy boxes are irrelevant and just filters them out. Laura: Precisely. It’s a process called habituation. If your learning material is presented in the same monotonous way—slide after slide of text—the learner's Elephant will tune it out just like a banner ad. But it goes even deeper. There's this incredible study about the impact of font readability. Sophia: Font readability? You mean like Times New Roman versus Comic Sans? Laura: Basically. Researchers gave two groups of people the same set of instructions for a task. For one group, the instructions were in a clean, easy-to-read font. For the other, it was in a slightly blurry, difficult-to-read font. Then they asked them to estimate how long the task would take. Sophia: Let me guess. The group with the hard-to-read font thought the task itself would be harder and take longer. Laura: Significantly longer! The task was identical, but a tiny bit of friction—just the font—was enough for the Elephant to say, "Ugh, this looks like hard work," and lose motivation. It shows that these subtle design choices have a huge impact on engagement before the Rider even gets a chance to process the information. Sophia: That's incredible. It's like the learning experience begins before the learning even starts. It also explains why we remember stories so well. A story isn't just data; it has emotion, characters, a sequence of events... it's pure Elephant food. Laura: It is. And it taps into different memory systems. Dirksen tells the story of a doctor treating a patient with severe amnesia who couldn't form new memories. Every day, the doctor would have to reintroduce himself. One day, the doctor hid a thumbtack in his palm before shaking her hand. Sophia: Ouch! That’s a bit mean. Laura: It was for science! The next day, the patient still didn't recognize him, she had no conscious memory of the pinprick. But when he went to shake her hand, she instinctively pulled away. Her Rider had no memory, but her Elephant remembered. It had formed a deep, implicit, emotional memory: "This guy is a source of pain." That's the power we need to tap into. Sophia: Wow. So effective learning has to create a positive emotional memory for the Elephant. But what if the problem isn't in the person at all? What if both the Rider and the Elephant are ready to go, but the path is blocked? Laura: Ah, now you've hit on the most radical, and maybe the most important, idea in the entire book. Sometimes, the solution isn't to design for the person at all. It's to design the environment.

Sophia: Okay, "design the environment." That sounds big and abstract. What does that actually mean in practice? Laura: It means shifting your focus from "knowledge in the head" to "knowledge in the world." Instead of trying to cram information into someone's brain, you embed it into their surroundings. The design guru Donald Norman has a classic example: the stovetop. Sophia: The stovetop? How is that a learning problem? Laura: Think about a stove with four burners in a square, and four knobs in a straight line below them. Which knob controls which burner? Sophia: Oh, I hate that! It's a total guessing game. You either have to memorize it, or you turn on the wrong one and almost set the mail on fire. Laura: Exactly. That's a failure of design. It forces you to rely on "knowledge in the head." A well-designed stovetop would have the knobs arranged in the same pattern as the burners. The knowledge would be "in the world." You wouldn't need to learn anything; you'd just know. The design itself teaches you. Sophia: That's a game-changer. You're not fixing the user; you're fixing the world the user lives in. Laura: And it's often a far more powerful and permanent solution. Dirksen gives the beautiful example of the Freedom Trail in Boston. Boston has all these amazing historical sites, but they're scattered around a confusing old city. They could have given tourists a complex map and a 300-page guidebook—a "knowledge in the head" solution. Sophia: Which no one would read. They'd just get lost and end up in a Starbucks. Laura: Instead, they did something genius. They painted a red line on the sidewalk that winds through the city and connects all the major sites. They put the knowledge in the world. You don't need a map. You don't need to know anything. You just follow the red line. It's simple, elegant, and perfectly effective. Sophia: Whoa. So let's bring this back to that corporate training example. Remember that call center with the four different, clunky computer systems? The company kept trying to train the employees to be faster. Laura: Yes, and they had a six-month learning curve and high turnover. They were trying to solve what they thought was a knowledge and skill gap in their employees. Sophia: But the real problem was an environment gap. The system itself was the problem. So the real solution wasn't more training for the employees... it was to build a better interface for the system. Laura: You've got it. Fix the environment, and the performance problem disappears. You make the right behavior the easy behavior. It's a profound shift in thinking. It asks us to stop asking, "How can we teach this?" and start asking, "How can we make this unnecessary to learn?"

Sophia: This is so clarifying. It feels like a three-step mental model for anyone trying to help someone learn something. First, stop assuming it's a knowledge problem and find the real gap—is it skill, motivation, or the environment? Laura: Step one. Diagnose the right problem. Sophia: Second, if you do need to teach, design for the emotional Elephant, not just the rational Rider. Use stories, create surprise, and make it feel effortless and engaging. Don't be the boring banner ad. Laura: Step two. Win over the Elephant. Sophia: And third, the most powerful move of all: step back and ask if you can change the world instead of the person. Can you paint a red line on the sidewalk so they don't need a map? Laura: That’s the trifecta. And it completely redefines the role of a teacher or a designer. Your job isn't to be the sage on the stage, dispensing wisdom. Your job is to be a guide, an architect of experiences. Sophia: It feels so much more respectful to the learner, too. It assumes they're intelligent and capable, but might be struggling with a poorly designed system or a lack of practice. Laura: Exactly. And Dirksen's ultimate message is incredibly empowering. She says our job as designers is to make the learner the hero of their own story. To create environments where they can, in the words of another great designer, Kathy Sierra, "kick ass." It’s more fun to know more, and it’s more fun to be able to do more. Sophia: I love that. It’s about building confidence and capability, not just checking a box for compliance. We'd love to hear from our listeners. What's the best or worst learning experience you've ever had? Share it with us on our social channels. Looking back, do you think it targeted the right gap? Laura: This is Aibrary, signing off.