SIG Manager’s Thoughts
by Jane L. Smith

Ahhh! The integrated brain of the technical instructional designer! Some of you may be asking right now, “And what does she mean by that?” Let me illustrate with a bit of personal information.

When I was a kid, I loved to teach in my garage, but I mostly taught Math, rarely English or Spelling or Reading. All the way through school and into high school, I excelled in Math. As a child, I was also very logical and organized, most frequently coming out of my left brain and functioning quite well in the world of analysis and rationality.

When I was 16, however, I was an exchange student to the Netherlands. I came back a different person after learning about another history, another language, another culture, another family, and another very different way of living. My senior year, I barely tolerated the first semester of math and quickly dropped it the second semester to take Cultural Anthropology. I had begun to make decisions and operate more by feel and by what I now know as intuition. I was starting to use the right side of my brain.

Over the course of my life, I’ve alternately worked out of one or the other sides of my brain. Today I recognize, however, that I regularly work out of both sides of my brain as a matter of course. Sometimes I question whether a conclusion I’ve come to is based on logic or on a feeling or knowing I have. Mostly, I know it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’m open to information that comes to me from all directions.

Regardless of how we get there, if we are to be truly effective instructional designers in the technical fields, we must utilize our left-brain to analyze and make sense of the technical content while simultaneously accessing our right brain to tap into our audience and how to effectively and creatively teach that same information. In reality, the bridge between our audience and the technical information is their jobs and the businesses in which they work. If we engage our curiosity about how someone will use the information on their job, we can then integrate our feelings about the people and their jobs with the technical aspects.

As we learn about more businesses and more jobs, we can more readily blend our intuition and our technical knowledge to write more appropriately for our audience, creating more accurate, effective, and engaging business scenarios that truly reach our learners. As we become more comfortable with the integration of our creative and our logical technical sides, we also have more fun as we design and write. That fun and that whole-brained approach come through in our training to help our learners also become more effective on the job and perhaps more whole-brained, too.

How lucky we are when we utilize an integrated brain. It serves us so well!