It’s the Penmanship!

A few years ago, during a two-week visit from my father, I decided to take up golf.

Golf is my father’s favorite pastime, so this would be a great way to spend some quality time with him.

I was also looking for a new way to keep active in an otherwise sedentary lifestyle, and he’d be a great teacher to get me started.

We rented clubs for the first few rounds, but I quickly realized I’d need my own set if I was going to be a serious golfer.

As we stood in the pro shop, I faced several options, some being expensive and others being very expensive.

I turned to my dad and asked, “What brand of clubs do you recommend?”

I probably asked a few times, and eventually he replied, “It’s not the pen; it’s the penmanship.”

Now, I’m a regular Raymond Chandler when it comes to metaphors, so I got the point immediately.

The brand of tools you use matters less than your ability to use them.

And, of course, taking the metaphor literally, it’s easy to understand that a person using the highest quality writing pen will not produce anything legible if they don’t know to form letters properly on paper.

More poignantly, and perhaps extending the metaphor a bit, even if someone’s handwriting were exemplary, they would still require even more skills to handwrite something meaningful, such as an essay, a poem, a short story, or a novel.

The same goes for sailboats and sailing, cookware and cooking, computers and coding, and a million other things, including e-learning software and instructional design.

I know because I was a novice “instructional designer” 20 years before I was a novice golfer, and I faced overwhelming choices regarding where to invest my time, learning, and money so I could get a real job.

I chose a software option that was free to me at the university—Macromedia Authorware, probably the biggest name in learning technology at the time.

After about a year, I got a job in a company needing someone to develop computer-based training for accountants in a client company (CBT), and the development software had to be Authorware.

I got to work converting online help documentation into CBT lessons and honed my skills in a few other areas to produce what I considered to be a decent product.

The lessons looked good, presented information well, had a structure that accurately mirrored the accounting software, and even had a few animations, which was not so easy to do in 1996.

I did well on my first project and, with that feather in my cap, moved on to my next assignment to develop training for a large bank.

This time, there was no CBT, only straightforward instructor-led training with a paper-based workbook, handouts, and role-playing exercises.

This low-tech gig was going to be a cinch.

I’d already had seven years of experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students at the university.

I was a natural in front of the class, and I’d produced my fair share of materials for lessons or as study aids.

I found myself on a project team of training professionals who used terminology I didn’t understand and methods and techniques I could not comprehend.

I was a hired contractor brought on board because of my supposed expertise, and I was expected to keep up.

I didn’t ask many questions in order not to be exposed as an impostor, and there wasn’t a lot of guidance by project teammates, most likely because I was an outsider.

I had no penmanship.

Rather, I suddenly felt like a kindergartner with crayons and construction paper trying to take notes in an astrophysics lecture.

There was constant talk about terminal objectives versus enabling objectives, levels of evaluation, needs analysis, performance gaps, and the “smeeze.”

Who was Mager? Who was Kirkpatrick? And who on Earth was Addie?

Needless to say, I was lost and didn’t do well on that project.

Worse, I was a costly burden to the team, the client, and my employer.

I had no penmanship, but I’d learned that it’s more important to master the fundamentals than to impress with technical skills.

If you consider yourself a “techie” like I did, at least develop both sets of skills in parallel, but don’t try to bypass or shortcut the process.

Twenty-six years after that first CBT project that launched my career in corporate learning and development, nobody’s heard of Authorware unless they’re over 50 and were working in this field at that time.

However, Kirkpatrick, ADDIE, terminal objectives, needs analysis, SMEs, Mager, and all the rest are referred to almost daily in training operations around the world.

And in all of that body of knowledge and associated skills lies your penmanship and subsequent success in corporate learning and development.