Post by Melissa Milloway

Binary thinking is a results killer. It's what happens when you hit a constraint and assume there are only two options, when usually there's a whole spectrum in between. When my team decided to install a learning record store, we knew right away that capturing personally identifiable data was going to be a challenge. Security and data privacy were major concerns. A team thinking in binaries would have stopped there. Most people hear "track users across experiences" and immediately assume PII is required. And if PII isn't approved, the answer is just no. But we stayed focused on the outcome we needed, which was were people using what we built? Were they coming back? We didn't need to know who they were to answer that. How might we track what the same person is doing across multiple experiences, without ever knowing who that person actually is? What we focused on was anonymized launchers. Here's how it worked, rather than tying activity to a person's identity, we cached a randomized username, basically an anonymous ID, that would follow someone across experiences. This meant no name, email, or any PII. Our solution was not perfect but it allowed us to get to the information we needed. Articulate recently sat down with me for a community discussion, and one of the questions they asked was about underrated skills in our field. This wasn't the answer I gave them, and you'll have to wait for the episode to hear that one. But I keep coming back to this particular skill, the ability to not think in binaries is one of the most underrated skills there is. Because when you default to seeing only two options, you stop being innovative and getting the results you could have. And in our case you lose the data that would have led you to the business impact. Without that data, you can't tell the story at all. And with it, you're not done either. You still have to go dig into what that data is telling you. But now you have something concrete to investigate to prove impact. So I'm curious, what do you think is one of the most underrated skills in business, and why? #eLearning #InstructionalDesign #LearningandDevelopment #AIinLearning