ADDIE & DMAIC: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Many of you are familiar with the ADDIE model of instructional design, yes?
- Analyze the audience, any current training or documentation, the organizational need.
- Design a training intervention…turn process documentation and tribal knowledge into useful training.
- Develop the intervention you designed…build web-based training, ajob aid, instructor-led training, etc.
- Implement the intervention…bring it to the people.
- Evaluate the results…by comparing the original needs of the audience with the experience after training.
When followed, these steps should ensure that training is designed with the learner and the organization objectives in mind. If you imagine that these steps boil down to:
- Determine the current state (Analyze)
- Determine the ideal state (Design)
- Build a bridge between those two states (Develop, Implement)
- Check your work (Evaluate)
Then you’ll start to see the ADDIE model as one facet of what is a pretty common problem solving model.
It seems important first to say that this reductionist model of problem solving isn’t the the only way to approach improvement or change. I won’t attempt to be sufficiently informed about chaos theory and quantum physics, but I can say that there always seems to be more to the world than meets the eye. So if you’re an aficionado of chaos theory as a problem solving methodology, please share it with us here.
For the rest of us, the process of reducing something to its constituent parts for analysis is common. This method can be boiled down even further to:
- “Don’t like what you’re getting? Do something new.”
Did you know that Six Sigma, driver of organizational change and spawner of management books, boils down to the same basic methodology? By understanding the basic steps in the ADDIE model you already have a basic knowledge of Six Sigma!
Six Sigma uses the DMAIC (pronounced “Duh-May’-Ick”) model, which stands for:
- Define the customer and their requirements
- Measure the current business process performance compared to those customer requirements.
- Analyze the difference between customer requirements and current performance.
- Improve the current process through changes that align to customer requirements.
- Control the achieved benefits by ensuring that the process doesn’t revert to old patterns.
These steps provide a framework for driving efficiency (reducing defects) in business processes. They also map easily to our previous 4 steps:
- Determine the current state (Define, Measure)
- Determine the ideal state (Also Define, since customer requirements drive the desired state)
- Build a bridge between those two states (Analyze, Improve)
- Check your work (Control)
These and other models like them are simply descriptions of a logical process for making sure something (training, an airplane manufacturing process, a selling strategy) does what it was designed to do…again, we see the relationship between design and measurement.
One of the foundations of Six Sigma is the work done by Dr. Edwards W. Deming in the early part of the 20th century, and one of Dr. Deming’s simple contributions to this idea of reductionist problem solving was his PDCA model, or:
- Plan for what you want to do.
- Do it.
- Check the results against your plan.
- Act on what the check tells you.
Dr. Deming’s work was a cycle…the “Act” portion, fed back into the “Plan” portion, and that’s one of the ways he illustrated the idea of continuous improvement. Six Sigma, includes “Control” as a way to ensure that results of improvements are embedded into regular processes and lead to continuous improvement.
Similarly, although I think this is rare, one of the primary consumers of the “Evaluate” information in the ADDIE model, should be the Instructional Designer(s) for updates to the course and to continue to improve the ability to design to stakeholder needs.
Just for fun, this model isn’t at all limited to business processes and training! In 1965, William Glasser wrote a book called Reality Therapy in which he outlined Choice Theory (described in greater detail through the Glasser Institute). The short version of Glasser’s therapeutic approach is that if you’re not getting what you want out of your life (relationship with your mom, success in school, whatever) then design some new behavior that will result in a different outcome. The point here of course, is that this reductionist method of problem solving is pervasive.
~Geek~
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