The science of learning design

This is the story of our attempts to engage a group of sceptical scientists in the subject of management. It is an experience that has established a new process for learning design that we now place at the heart of every project.

The problem

The Institute of Physics is a large scientific membership body. The members are diverse and dispersed, but they share a common distrust of management as a subject, believing it to be unscientific at best and at worst a collection of HR political correctness designed to get between them and their science.IOP described to us a situation where managers were selected not because they appeared to have any natural aptitude, or because they had expressed any enthusiasm for the role, but because they were the most senior person on the team. They tended not to engage with management enthusiastically and as a result were often unsuccessful in the role. This manifests itself in few technical people progressing into senior roles and ultimately in scientific organisations having insufficient specialist scientific representation at Board level.

The challenge

The IOP wanted to help their members make a more effective transition into management. They asked us to research, propose and develop a solution. The approach we took came pragmatically out of the needs of the project, but has now become our standard approach to learning design ...

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