Action-First Learning: Turning Passive Learners into Active Participants

Introduction

Nolan: Welcome, everyone, to the Learning and Development podcast sponsored by Infopro Learning. As always, I’m your host, Nolan Hout. Joining me today is a very special guest with us, Dr. Karl Kapp. I was telling him before we started that, this is actually somebody who was probably my first reference ever when I started in marketing. I was writing an article and I referenced Dr. Karl Kapp’s work on game-based learning. Super excited to have him here.

Over 27 years now, Karl’s written award-winning books, spoken at probably too many conferences that he could even count, and consulted with several organizations on gamification, interactive learning, eLearning. He’s also the founder of the Learning and Development Mentor Academy, where he provides a lot of seasoned L&D pros with access to libraries of on-demand content, self-paced workshops, monthly live sessions, and a community of other like-minded folks for a lot of the people probably on this podcast would love to go and check that out.

There’s so much more that Dr. Karl Kapp has done—way too long to put into a podcast intro, or else you would never actually meet him. So, let’s kind of get to it. Today we’re going to be talking with Dr. Kapp about his book that he published in April of 2025 called “Action-First Learning.” It’s been gaining quite a bit of a following on how we’re, because of its ability to turn passive learners into more active participants.

We’re really going to unpack a lot of components of that book. And as a gift to the community, we’re going to give away a copy of that book for free at the end. You still have to go get the book—we’re not going to give you everything. You do have to get the book, but we will purchase a book, and Infopro will purchase a book for the listeners. We’ll have some details on that afterwards. But without further ado, I’d love to get into our podcast. Dr. Karl Kapp, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining.

Dr. Karl: Nolan, thanks. Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be here. Very excited to be one of your earlier references. So, appreciate that. And please call me Karl for our conversation.

Nolan: Wonderful! Thank you, Karl.

Karl Kapp’s Origin Story: How It All Began

Nolan: Before we begin, how we always start with all of these podcasts is just learning a little bit more about how everybody came to be. I mean, you’ve had a long-storied career, but we’d love to learn your origin story, if you would. How did you break into this field in the first place? Why did you break into this field? Did that field even exist when you started? We’d love to learn more.

Dr. Karl: It was quite strange. This origin story goes way back to sixth grade. So, when I was in the sixth grade, a woman named, a girl at that time named ‘Kitty Neal’, who I thought was very attractive joined something called “Little Theatre” where you know, you’re learning to act and everything and I’m like, wow, that’s, okay. I don’t know what that is, but I’ll do it. So, I joined “Little Theatre” and then one of the projects we did was this video called Willie whistle which, stuffed puppet, which was a whistle, taught kids how to cross the street so they got us and we were like crossing the street and stuff and so that was what we were doing.

And fast forward to, I graduated from college and I’m like, okay, I need to get an internship somewhere. Where am I going to get an internship? And they’re like well, remember that company that you did that video with long time ago? Well, they do something with Learning or Development or something. You might want to check them out. I’m like, okay.

I went for the interview and asked them. I said, “I’ve worked here before” and they’re like, “what do you mean?” And I said, “well, I was in the Willie whistle videos” and the woman, Lori, was there. I tried it out; I got in there.

I didn’t exactly know what they did, something with English and education and I said, “what do you guys do here?” they’re like “oh! it’s Instructional Design”. I’m like, oh man. This is cool. Its combination of technology, the combination of figuring out how people learn. I was studying to become a teacher and had done my student teaching with middle school kids, which just about killed me, I’m like, there’s got to be a better way to do, there’s got to be another way to do this.

And that’s corporate. I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as corporate training until I got there, found out what it was. I was already planning to go to grad school; I changed my entire grad major to instructional design and technology and never looked back.

Nolan: Wow, wonderful. That’s really fascinating. And what is it that you think attracts you and has kept your attention in this field for so long?

Dr. Karl: Yeah, I think it’s interesting to determine what’s the right way to present the information and the content to people so that they want to learn what you’re teaching them. So, there’s a lot of stuff that we must learn all the time and in school they just kind of throw information at you and that kind of stuff. But I was more interested, because I almost minored in psychology.

And I was really interested in things like, what motivates people, what do they do? But also, not just motivate in general, but motivate for an outcome. And so, then I started thinking about, okay, well, what are some ways that you can help people solve that problem or organization? So, to me, it’s almost, it’s a little bit like being a detective, right?

Here’s the type of information you want to learn. You want people to learn. Here’s the behavior you want them to do. Here’s some instructional strategies.

How do you put all this together to maximize the output and the performance on the other hand, satisfying both the organization, but also the individual, right? You can’t just do training that the organization loves. If people hate it, they don’t take it, and it doesn’t help. So, it’s a lot of moving puzzle pieces. And to me, that’s kind of interesting.

Nolan: That’s fascinating because my degree is in marketing and I had wanted to pursue a minor in psychology, because I wanted to, I am fascinated with how people think and why people think the way that they do. In marketing the thing that attracted me most was the ability to try to move those levels, and I’ve always noticed that the role of a marketer is really like the role of an L&D. We’re both seeking engagement. We’re both seeking people to change behavior, to do something that we’re trying to have them do.

Now maybe the meanings are a little bit different. I think people would assume L&D is a little more altruistic than marketing capitalist, buy my toilet paper, whatever it is. But it is that component of how you get people to do something and how is it the way that their brains are wired, make them do that? Or help them to come to that conclusion faster.

What is “Action-First Learning”?

Nolan: So, wonderful, really good. So, I want to get into this most recent book that came out in April, which is titled “Action-First Learning”, And I want to unpack a little bit, Karl, on really what is “Action-First Learning” and how is that different than any other type of instructional design that we know?

Dr. Karl: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, the book is a little bit of a journey, but also a little bit of an epiphany and backlash. So, a lot of training starts out with, today you will learn, right? And we lecture at people, whether it’s eLearning lecture or its online lecture or it’s whatever. And in my years of experience, I found that the most engaged students I have are, students that I engage with right away.

So, if I am doing a workshop, let’s say, and I lecture for like half an hour to 45 minutes, and then say, ok, now I want everybody to get into groups and do an exercise, you get like, oh, come on. I’m just enjoying being passive. But, if I start out instruction saying, hey, here’s a problem that I want you to spend 15 minutes trying to solve, people are active and engaged right away, and that seems to go throughout the whole training. So, I’m like, okay, there’s something about this active-first learning.

There’s something about being active first. And so, then you look at the research and there’s a lot of research that says that people learn best when they’re engaged in a meaningful task. So, I’m like, okay, well, let’s put these concepts together. So, the idea of action first learning came about where making the learner do something right away, because what it does is, it helps the learner understand what they don’t know.

So, a lot of problems with adult learners is, when you go, “hey, I’m going to teach you five ways to close a sale”. And adult learner goes, “I know six”. This is like a waste of my time, right? And you’re like, ok, well, yeah.

Nolan: Yeah, the old adage of, “I always want to learn, but I never want to be taught”.

Dr. Karl: Right, exactly. But what if you said to that same salesperson, “do you know the number one-way sales are closed in our organization?” Now, we’ve got their curiosity. So, that’s kind of the idea behind the action-first learning, if we can pique curiosity. And then they’re like, the way they close sales is, it’s you know, it’s the hard close. And then you find out, no, it’s a soft close. And they’re like, really? So, now they’re more open to learning.

So, Malcolm Knowles, an adult learning theorist, said, adult learners learn best when they know they don’t know something. So, I think our job, a little bit as developers of instruction, is to point out to adult learners, hey, you don’t know this. And catch your attention.

Nolan: That’s so fascinating because I interviewed a lady who created a simulation, they had a simulation created for them, the design of the game was to remove unconscious bias.

Like that was the whole goal. I said, what I love so much about it is that I don’t know how you raise your hand or attend unconscious bias training without bias. You know, like for the exact same thing, which is such a meta thing to think about if we’re going to teach people on how to remove bias that they don’t know exists in the first place. In the second that you shine light on it, like goes away because now, they’re like you, well, I know six. So, interesting.

Dr. Karl: Right, their defensive skill. So, if you can kind of stealthily do that, you can get to that outcome. So, you know, in that case, I wouldn’t call it unbiased training, right? I would call it something else. And then guess what we just learned. You know that kind of stuff.

The Aha Moment: Discovering Action-First Learning

Nolan: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. And so, what was the moment that you realized that was the trigger point, right? Because there’s a lot of different avenues that were in your lecture series that you’re like, well, if I just applied this or was there something else that led you to this is what it is. Like this action-first is that ‘aha’ moment.

Dr. Karl: So, I think a lot of what it did was, I’d done a lot of work in games and gamification and that kind of learning. And I would consult a lot and look at people developing games. And people would say, okay, I’m going to develop this game. First you got to go through these 10 screens that tell you how to play the game.

Nolan: Oh My God, I hate those.

Dr. Karl: And I’m like, right. I mean the game becomes how fast can I click next to get to start the game, right? So, that’s the game. So, I’m like, this isn’t work. So, I know people understand games and gamification, but they’re not like getting it. Like you got to do it first. And so, I’m like, how can I convince people or shortcut this, right?

Because we know that sound bites can get people moving and give people action. So, I’m like, yeah, okay, today’s going to be action-first. And as soon as I said that one time in a training class or a classroom, like people said, okay, what are we doing? They immediately knew that we were going to do something. And I think that is an important way to move forward.

Practical Applications of Action-First Learning

Nolan: So, what are some of these action items? Like what does that look like in practice? I’m starting to think like, well, some seem obvious, you know, but like how do you take this concept from, yeah, start with an action to like, okay, what are you seeing in practice? What are some things that people are doing?

Dr. Karl: So, the book outlines nine action-first learning approaches, but I don’t for a moment think that’s the whole universe of action-first learning. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. But one of the nines is using cards as a tool. So, for example, let’s say you’re teaching insurance agents to assess damage to a car, right?

So, you could immediately start out with, I have pictures of damaged cars. I want you to sort them into front-end, side, or rear crashes. So, immediately, they’re doing something. And then you can say, okay, well, why did you classify that as a front-end crash? Okay, well, because it was on the headlights and stuff like that. Well, if you look at the angle, that was a side collision. So, you can kind of get them right away thinking about that. Another thing that we do often is use board games. So, a board game would be, okay, we’re going to start everybody.

This is your role, your goal is to make the company profitable, right? And so, you figure out the rules and you kind of go for there and you go, yeah, well, I’m not going to invest anything in cybersecurity because I’ll waste all my money. Three years later, you get a cyber-attack, and you’re wiped out. Maybe you should have invested some money, right? So, you have those kinds of conversations. Another way to do it is with an escape room type environment.

Like here’s a problem that you have to solve. You’re an auditor and you have to audit this manufacturing company because there’s an oddity in the books. And then you go, okay, well, what do I need to do? I need to look at a spreadsheet. So, then you start doing spreadsheet calculations. The problem is oftentimes we say, we’re going to teach you how spreadsheet works, right? Like nobody in real life needs to use a spreadsheet. They need to do a budget. They need to sort data.

Dr. Karl: So, teaching somebody how to use a spreadsheet is so abstract. Teaching them how to do a budget, now that makes sense, right? Teaching them how to forecast, teaching them how to read P&L, all that kind of stuff. So, the idea is to not focus on the software or the object around, but the task that needs to be performed, like the task of sorting out crash items or the task of investing today so that you prevent disaster tomorrow, the task of knowing how to budget.

The book goes through a bunch of different ways to do that, like in the classroom, you know, audience response systems haven’t been around forever. And one of the things that’s disappointing is people just ask question and response, question and response. Okay, that’s great. But what if you actually created a case study and you had a question and you said, okay, in this case, what would you say to the healthcare provider? And they make their choice, and then you could say, that’s the wrong choice. And now you can debrief everybody.

But in that moment, you force that learner to commit to an answer. And when you commit to that answer, you either feel like you’re, yeah, I got, or I’m not sure. And now you’re more open to learning. And so those are the kinds of opportunities I think that really lead to the learning outcomes that we’re trying to accomplish.

Kitschy vs. Meaningful: The Game Design Divide

Nolan: Something you’d said in the book that kind of caught my attention a little bit was this idea of activity for activity’s sake. You know, because it’s not a new concept necessarily, you start a lesson and we’ve all seen them in facilitator packs, right? There’s like a squishy cube, you throw at someone and say, tell me the first, the worst date you’ve ever been on, you know, that kind of stuff. So, like, what’s the dip? Yeah, like what’s the difference between those kinds of kitschy kind of game. I don’t know how you would describe those versus what you’re talking about here.

Dr. Karl: So, the difference to me is like when you like have to say, your work’s first date, that has nothing to do with learning how to identify damage on a car for an insurance salesperson, Or an insurance adjuster, right? Nothing to do with that at all. So, the idea behind this is that the activities that we do are related to our learning outcomes. So, instead of just doing an activity for the sake of an activity, we do an activity to lead to an outcome which is better understanding adjustments when looking at collisions or better perform, better or creating a faster, more efficient budget or being able to read the P&L statement.

So, you could do an activity, you could say, okay, here is the P&L and the cashflow statement for company X, would you invest in this company? And if you’re teaching about investments and P&Ls and that kind of stuff, now it’s an activity that makes sense. If you’re just saying, okay, we’re going to throw around this beach ball and anybody that catches it has to tell me, you know, what their favorite candy is, right? That has nothing to do with budgeting. And when you have an adult learner in the room, their time is very precious. They don’t have a lot of time. So, the more we can be focused on that, the more they’re going to appreciate, the less they’re going to push back and the more they’re going to get value out of that instruction. And even online learning, like a lot of people just go through online learning as fast as they can because they just want to get over with.

So, rather than starting with, here’s your objectives, here’s the terminology, here’s what we’re going to do, just say, your boss has just accused your coworker of embezzling $10,000, what do you do, right? Okay, now I got to make a decision right away, I have got something to do. And that piques my attention, I think I know what to do, but I’m not sure.

Maybe, and so now more motivated to go through the instruction. So, the difference is when you tie to a meaningful behavioral outcome or performance-based outcome, then the action makes sense and people buy into the action. If you tie to something that they can’t see the relationship, that’s when you get pushback, that’s when you get people going, this is boring, this doesn’t make sense to me, this is a waste of my time, all those kinds of reactions which put up a wall to learning.

Nolan: Yeah, and that is interesting because I reflect on some of those, you know, things that the typical activity, you know, beach ball kind of stuff. I do find myself sometimes I’m that type of person, so I know not everybody feels that way, but I am that type of person that is like.

All right, you’ve got me here in this room. I want to do something like, yeah, I’m happy to get to know my people, but if you give me the opportunity, this sounds very vain, but it’s true. If you give me an opportunity to show how smart I am while also getting to know somebody, I would love that. I would love to give it in a context. So, it really makes sense to me, but I feel like, that I would assume that creates a barrier as well to getting this because to know, to be able to create an activity, an action first learning experience.

You have to know deep enough, right? To create something like that. You need to know the topic or the idea or whatever.

Storytelling in the Corporate Classroom

Nolan: How do you know, and specifically in the corporate world where you’re having to train on or educate people on a thousand different things, you know, one day it’s P&L, the other day it’s sexual harassment, then the third day it’s marketing principles. How do you get to that, how do you kind of weave that story in when maybe you don’t know so much about? Is there like, you know, yeah.

Dr. Karl: Yeah, that’s a great question. As I said, the book is kind of a culmination. So, in each chapter of the book, we talk about step by step, what do you do for step one, step two, step three to make this happen. So, following that can be helpful. If you don’t know, if you’re more of a subject matter expert and not as an instructional designer, you can follow that. But if you’re an instructional designer, the thing I always say is become a story connoisseur.

And what I mean by that is, ask the subject matter expert, the person that knows about, stories about what happened. So, what would happen, you know, what’s the worst, most spectacular failure that ever happened on this job, right? Or what was the most spectacular success or what mistake does everybody make? And you’re like, you’re going to make this mistake, right? So, if you gather those stories, then you can start developing action around them.

So, if everybody makes like, let’s say everybody makes a mistake of, let’s do a dumb example, like going to door A or door B, then you set up. So, hey, where do you want to go? Door A or B, and everybody goes to A, and there’s your learning moment right there.

Capturing SME Insights Without the Burnout

Dr. Karl: But you’ve got that from talking to the subject matter expert and asking them to tell you stories about the behavior that you want. Tell me a story about the best salesperson ever. Tell me a story about the most effective marketing campaign ever. Okay, so now let’s give people bits and pieces of, here’s six things you could do in a marketing campaign, which one would be the most effective? And they’re like, I don’t know, okay. But the subject matter expert knows, and they’re going to tell you this is the most important and this is why.

So, you kind of set up as the trainer or developer or eLearning designer or experience designer, whatever phrase we use today, is you set up the framework, you set up the schema and then have the subject matter experts fill in the knowledge or information.

Nolan: We’re leveraging at Infopro about AI is kind of this reduction on SME time because we all know that that becomes a huge roadblock traditionally in developing our training programs is access to these subject matter experts. And so now, you know, we’re loading in as much subject matter expertise as we can into these models to pull from.

I don’t know if you’ve seen much of this in practice, Karl, but I feel like if somebody came to me and asked me, podcast as an example, I’d be kind of bored. I’d give them what they want, but I wouldn’t make time for. But if somebody came to me and said something like that, like, hey, tell me some funny stories about the worst things that have ever, I feel like I would be more receptive because it would also be more entertaining for me. Are you seeing this? It was like, it’s better for the learner, but you’re also getting richer information from a SME because it’s what they probably care to talk about.

Dr. Karl: Right, you are. And the interesting thing is, like most SMEs, they’re doing 10 million things, right? And so, trying to get time from them is very difficult. But I’ve had SMEs, like when I say, hey, I want you to tell me stories. I want you to tell me a story about this, this, and this. Like I’ll get emails like two o’clock in the morning, like, “hey, Karl, I couldn’t sleep. I just thought of this cool story that we, this one time”. And so now they’re not only giving me information when I ask for, but now they’re like, stop, I have enough information.

And you have to ask for instructions. Like you can’t just leave too wide open, but I have a structured process. But if you go through that process, it can be really helpful. And the other thing that I’m seeing with AI now is that you can set up like an AI chatbot to engage in this conversation with the subject matter expert. Like, hey, I want you to tell me a story. Who were the characters? What were the characters doing? What was the tension that was in the room or in the environment that happened?

Harnessing AI for Storytelling

Dr. Karl: So, you can actually, now instead of having, because sometimes sitting down for an interview with subject matter experts, I don’t have time to do that, but I do have time on my phone to like to speak in a story or something like that. So, you can capture stories in all kinds of different ways, have AI to parse out the data or the contents and know that you can use that way. You can also, once you have a story and you have kind of parameters, you can also use AI to say, “hey, wait a minute, can you give me a similar story to this that’s realistic?”

And then you can give back to the subject matter expert and say, would this be a real story? And they’re like, oh yeah, and that’s great. And what if we added this? Oh, okay, that’s fantastic. And now you’ve got this sense of content. So, I was talking to somebody the other day and they were talking about, they were in sales for insurance. And they said, yeah, when a push comes to shove, what we need to do in our insurance sales is have people overcome objections. Like that’s what we need to do. I said, okay, that’s great.

So, it’s like a two-week training session. I said, okay when do you first start introducing these, is there a list of objections? No, I’m like, well, what do you mean there’s not a list of objections. Isn’t that what they have to do? Well, yeah, but just because it kind of comes out in the instruction as, and I’m like, no, you can’t just call my, just can’t surface. So, I said, tell me stories about overcoming the biggest objection. And then they gave me a story and then I said, okay, now the next biggest.

And then now all of sudden you’ve got this content and this ideas of how to do that. And I said, okay, let’s sprinkle the instruction with these stories about how people have overcome an objection. And by the way, let’s start with a branching scenario. You’re a salesperson, you walk into this client, and this is what they ask you. And maybe you can answer correctly and overcome, but maybe you can’t. And now let’s keep track of that. And then let’s give feedback and let’s do again in a couple of days and see if you’ve gotten any better and kind of go through that process.

The Role of Branching Scenarios in Sales Training

Nolan: It’s just a phenomenal, one of the biggest things that we found in learning, but then I also happened to, a big portion of our business is placing talent, like L&D talent, instructional designers, things like that for people. And one of our biggest barriers in that, the recruitment side, is finding time to talk to people.

It’s like the whole, like, you know, everybody always scratches their head, like, why do bank hours line up? And these days they’re like, it’s 10 AM to 4 PM. It’s like, well, who are they serving? Like, you know, nobody worked, everybody’s working during that time. When are they coming into the bank? And so, the same kind of thing happens when people are looking for jobs, they’re at their job 9 to 5, and that’s when the recruiters are at their job 9 to 5. And so, they created an agent that just sent a text message to the people and said, listen, we have this job that we want you to apply for. Click the button.

When you click that button, it will start the interview process. At any point you can pause it and come back to it. But, that component of capturing, whenever worked for them. You don’t have to do it, now I’m ready or, you know, check my calendar. And as you mentioned with SMEs, they’re, you know, I don’t know, they’ll think of excuses to get out of that meeting if they don’t already have one. So, I love that idea of, you know, kind of having an agent ready, queued up for this. You start any training program to say, hey, whenever you get, you know, 15 minutes, talk to this person, they’ll figure it out. So, that’s really cool.

Connecting Game-Based Learning and Action-First Learning

Dr. Karl: Yeah.

Nolan: One of the things that I’ve been kind of curious about as we’re talking through this, and I have some ideas in my mind, but when you have the expert, why share my ideas? How does this all associate back to a lot of what you’ve talked about, which is game-based learning, simulations, things like that? There’s obviously a heavy overlap, helping me draw that connection and how people are leveraging that to see even better results.

Dr. Karl: Yeah, so the other day I was talking to somebody, you know how you always say, well, I’m no expert and we were talking about learning and development. I’m like, I’m no expert. He started laughing. He goes, well then who is if you’re not, but 9 times out of 10, whatever I’m talking about, but this is that lane. And the other thing is that I just came back to AI.

So, one of the things I did in this book, like every time you write a book, like the first book I wrote, people like this great book, but there’s not enough case studies. So, second book I put case studies in and it’s a great book with lots of case studies, but not enough how to say put how to and the next book is like a great how to in case studies, but there’s not enough, you know, whatever. So, one of the things I did in this book is I put some prompts in there for prompting.

So, if you’re going to want to do an escape room, like how would you prompt that, if you want to do AI coaches, even a chapter on doing AI chatbot as we talked about so. A lot of people think those aren’t accessible, but they really are accessible. And then the overlap of activity-based learning and games, gamification is about doing something. The problem that this overcomes is that there was too much preamble, I think, in a lot of cases. And games are great for critical thinking, because you’ve got to maybe think ahead of what an opponent might do or what the environment’s all about.

Games are great for manipulating ideas and concepts, classifying ideas and concepts. Action-first learning is around concepts. Games are great for bringing people together. And a lot of times, action-first learning allows people to come together, to work together. A lot of social learning, going back to Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. So, there’s a lot of those overlaps. And action-first learning uses a lot of games, like card games, board games, video games, video game concepts like branching scenarios, escape rooms, all those kinds of thoughts and activities.

And the problem is a lot of people, especially when you can get content with AI from all over the world, then it’s not a content game anymore, right? It’s a performance game. It’s an Aristotle or somebody that was once quoted, and I think misquoted, as saying, you know, I spent an hour playing a game with someone, which is better than having a lifetime of conversations with them to understand who they really are, right? And you can understand a lot from person how they play a game, like do they suddenly become, you know, flip the monopoly board or do they, you know, sweep the Stratego board or whatever they happen to do.

So, you can learn a lot about people’s interactions and how they interact through doing something. And there’s, you had talked about before, like getting to know people is important part of social learning, but there’s no better way to like, if you’re both working on a problem, you really get to know somebody, you know, and that is part of the action-first learning. So, those are places where I see the overlaps. I’d be curious as to where you saw the overlaps and if we’re aligned or something I missed.

The Importance of Action-First Learning

Nolan: It’s hard to describe, I guess nobody would probably classify themselves as overly competitive, maybe, you know, so I would like to say I’m not overly competitive because I see some of my brothers and my brother and his wife, every family reunion, they do not talk to each other for an hour after the family charades game. I mean, there’s nothing on the line. It’s boys versus girls. So, maybe that’s, but they just do not talk to each other for an hour afterwards. So, I’m like, okay, well, I’m not them, but once there’s a game at play, I just have to. I just love competing.

So, to me that instantly would trigger like you, even if it’s a game against myself, you know, like arrange these in these cars, arrange this in this car, I’m now competing with myself at this. To me, I would classify a lot like the word, you know, crossword puzzle.

A crossword puzzle is really a game against yourself, but now with the apps and stuff, you can compete with your friends who completed fast enough. So, I saw a ton of components of how you do game-based learning, but actually seems to me, action-first learning seems much more approachable and feasible in kind of today’s environment of, as you mentioned, where content is going. It just seems really widely applicable.

Especially with what AI will have a hard time doing. AI would have a hard time capturing that. And so, I think people can also discern in their minds. I have no facts to back this up. This is just a conversation that I’ve had with my brother before. I learn something, if I can easily Google the answer, I never retain.

But if I’m hearing something that I know, like this is the one shot I have, I retain a lot more. And so, I think a lot of those things are at play that all tie into this game-based simulation-based learning that also just seems, again, so readily available and easily accessible

Dr. Karl: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to me, the really interesting thing about the future of learning is not so much knowing something like content, it’s knowing connections. Like how does this fit in with that? And how do these two things relate or not relate? And I think that’s important and valuable.

And so, yeah, we only have so much brain capacity. So, if we can Google something, why in the heck do we have to memorize? Right? Like people say, like, what’s your phone number? Like, I don’t know. Well, why don’t you know? Well, because it’s in my phone.

There’s no reason to know this number like why would I ever know that but when I was younger, you know, we memorize all our friends phone numbers right and I still have that so we’re very efficient about what we learn and what we don’t learn and so what we now need to focus on are the human elements of critical thinking predictive thinking connections juxtapositions, like I always say, creativity is a juxtaposition of two things that don’t go together, right?

So, that’s what, and AI is going to put things that go together, I mean, that’s what it does, right? This naturally follows this; they must go together. And so now humans are like, doesn’t have to go together, you could do this, you could do that. So, that’s really, I think, where we’ve got an advantage and where, as designers of instruction, making those experiences apply those kinds of skills and making people do that is important. I always find it fascinating to me, especially with training.

Like you’ll talk to, let’s pick sales for example, like, hey, you know, I know you’ve been a salesperson for 15 years. Do you want to go to sales training? And they’re like, “No”. Why in the world would I go to sales training? But you go, hey, Tom Brady, you’re the best quarterback in the world. Going to practice today, I’ll be early and I’ll be staying late.

Nolan: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Karl: See you then, right? So, if, it’s good enough for Tom Brady, who knows everything about football plus to practice every single day, why do you as a salesperson feel like you’ve got nothing left to learn? Like that doesn’t make any sense to me, none. So, the idea of action-first learning is where you’re going to practice those sales skills. You know, someone said to me once, you could have 10 years of experience, or you could have one year of experience 10 times. And I think a lot of people in a corporate environment have that one year of experience 10 times because they feel that there’s not anything to learn.

Now, in their defense, a lot of the learning was so bad that of course they knew all, right? Because you dummy down. The tradition is you start really simple and you get more complex. Well with action-first learning, it’s kind of flipped, right? Okay, here’s the situation. It’s complex, you figure out. And now you’ve got their attention. Now they’re learning something rather than being like baby stepped along.

Nolan: Yeah, it’s funny because we have an agent that helps create instructional design blueprints and frameworks. And so, when you put something and you ask the agent to give you an answer, always ends, most always ends with the practical application of whatever this is that you use. And so is kind of interesting to hear how maybe we need to flip that around to instantly kind of, it’s like the, I’m a huge Christopher Nolan movie buff guy.

This element of like start at the middle, we come back to the beginning and then end at the end. Like it’s kind of to me, giving me shades of this like inception based, you know, thought of storytelling, which is really, really interesting.

Overcoming Barriers in Action-First Learning

Nolan: So, what is, you know, I mentioned one of the potential barriers was going to be subject matter or expertise and kind of getting these stories.

And, when I was thinking about traditional game-based learning. I was looking at the intersection, I was like, well gosh, I feel like there’s always so many barriers to game-based learning that people put on themselves or that some are very real. What are the roadblocks that you see in action-first learning that people maybe just need to be aware of that they exist?

Dr. Karl: So, I think one of the ones, especially if you’re doing face to face and even online is the initial confusion is people have been trained for you know all through high school and college that you come into a room and people talk to you and that’s how you learn and in fact is one of the worst ways to learn but anyway, that’s what we believe right? So, when you come into a classroom and you say hey, I want you people to do something or okay, the very first eLearning screen is making a decision. People where like there’s a lot of confusion, chaos, and frustration. Like I don’t know this material. Why are you making me answer a question right now? Like I don’t even know, right? So, understanding that there will be confusion and that there will be some pushbacks. But, I always, say it’s kind of like, you know, go into a doctor, right? You broke your arm and you’re like, the doctor says, I got to set this. And you’re like, it’s going to hurt, and I don’t want you to set it, because it’s going to hurt too much, right? The doctor’s like, “I got to set, otherwise long-term, it’s not going to work, right?” So, you don’t want to do, but the doctor knows better, so the doctor says, we’re going to set your arm. So, same thing with this eLearning, like, hey, I don’t want to be active right away. Well, I know, it’s good for you, so do right away and get that. So, that’s one of the obstacles.

The other obstacle is we’re not used to develop, when I talk to instructional designers all the time, say, don’t start out with objectives. In fact, I call them objections. And that example I gave you, five, I know six, so who cares? And they’re like, my God, like we’re not telling the learners what they need to learn? You don’t tell them right away; you can tell them this is what you learned.

You definitely need to have reflection. So, this is what the experience you had. This is how it translates into what you need to do in the job. This is why we did this, right? You’re going to tell them, but not, you don’t have to tell them right away. And there’s some research that even tunes out objectives. So, it’s not even worth the ink they’re printed with.

So, that’s another thing is that the learners aren’t prepared for learning like that. So, you kind of have to say, hey, trust the process, know that this is going to work, know that the outcome’s going to be there. And then I think you mentioned before, if we’re not used to developing like that, it does take a little bit of work and effort to, I mean, it’s really easy to go to AI, put in a topic, get some screen. It’s a little bit harder to say, okay, well, how do I get the learner involved right away with a difficult question? And then what type of feedback do I have to give them? And then how do I move them to the next situation?

So, it’s much more critical to do that. But on the other hand, if we don’t do that, we’re also competing with, like looking at the entertainment industry and how they’ve kind of flipped stories on their head and they take tropes like I wrote something about the Wolverine and Deadpool movie, right? Some critics were panning out, like there’s no plot in this movie, there’s nothing happening in this movie, nothing’s going on. And the fans are like, my God, I loved seeing.

You know, Blade, I couldn’t believe Blade showed up in the movie, right? So, that sense of character, that sense of breaking trope, like we know, you think of Johnny Storm, right? Like, oh, that’s Thor. I’m sorry, that’s Captain America. And then all of sudden, no, it’s not. Storm. It’s the human flame. And it’s not part of the movie because you have to know that, that actor played that part before and you have to put together, but’s almost kind of being meta, like above the movie, like, okay. And I think training needs to be that a little bit.

I think a lot of times we treat the learner like they’re not very intelligent and they’re not very smart, but they know that they’re in compliance training or they know they’re in, and so’s kind of a waste of their time. They don’t see the link to real life. So, I think if we can develop that way we can overcome some of those obstacles we can make the more enjoyable for them and for us I think that’s going to be like it’s kind of like you get a bunch of actors together and you’re like wow look like they really had fun making that movie right and comes through in the screen well if you’re drudging through the creation of training comes through the screen.

Nolan: Yeah, you bring up a couple of points there like that. The first one being you mentioned, you know, so this is a marketing principle of these days when you read the same thing over and over and over again, your mind erases, not you don’t intentionally do. So, in America, at least, and there’s a big difference between how Americans market versus Europeans versus Asians.

Americans have become so saturated with adjectives that they remove an adjective when they read ad copy. You know, world’s best learning company. They read learning company. They might read world. If they’re a global company, maybe they’ll read world because that pertains to them. But a lot of them just filter out the adjectives. And so, because they’ve seen it so many times.

There’s also this guy, very random, who had said, you know, when you have a gun pointed at your face, you can perform an action that offsets the other person’s mental like focus and that will cause them to miss the shot. Like if you have no other option, bark like a dog, do the most ludicrous thing you can do because it’s going to get them out of this mindset that they’re in. And I think a lot of what you’re talking about is kind of shaking that up right from the beginning of, “I thought this learning was going to start with teaching me what I was going to like, telling me what I was going to tell them in the beginning. Okay, we’re starting with this game, what’s this all about?””

So, there’s something I think there that really seeks a lot of interest. And I can see a little bit of the pushback, because there are going to be some people who are like experts and you know, if we, if we go back to the game-based thing, like they’re going to think like, well, shoot, I don’t know this at all. Like I don’t, my action is leading to a bad consequence and oh! I’m going to be judged based off of my ability to do this. I understand, you know, yeah, maybe some of those roadblocks exist. But I, just love as a way to prime people, and I think the trade-off is well worth considering the alternative is they just don’t take, which is what people do most of the time anyways so that really helps.

Dr. Karl: Or zone out as they’re taking. We don’t want them to zone out either. We want them to be engaged. We want them to learn to see the value of. And I also want them to have a little bit of fun in learning, like, why not have fun? It’s all drudgery, then why do it? It’s worth.

Nolan: And do you think, have you seen this work in every type of training kind of program that you’ve seen, whether it’s, you know, ILT, VILT, async learning? Are you able to read this?

Applying Action-First Learning Across Training Methods

Dr. Karl: Yeah, I think any delivery methodology can be open for action-first learning. I don’t think that there’s any kind of learning that you don’t want to do. I also think people will say, well, we’re too serious, right? Our topic is way too serious, right? Well, I think back, think of the military. Like, what do they do? They don’t do war lectures; they do war games.

Nolan: Yeah, that’s true.

Dr. Karl: And what’s a war game? Well, okay, I want you to go and try to capture their flag, right? Well, yeah, but I don’t know. That’s okay. We’re going to talk about tactics later. You figure out, okay, you got massacred. Okay, now why did that happen, right? After action review, right? And they talk about what they figure out. Next time you go, do it again, okay? But it’s a little bit better, right? So, that’s kind of the whole idea. You even think of the first Maverick movie where, you know, he flew out first of all and got shot. Everybody’s getting shot down day one, like right away, right?

So, that nothing’s more serious than killing fellow humans, right? So, it’s serious enough for military action, certainly can work for your insurance sales, your, you know, that kind of like, like, so, you’re serious, you’re bank training, like, oh, you’re too serious to, you know, to do action first. Well, we’ll know because, in a bank, you have to do action, like maybe you have to open a new account. Okay, how do you do that? Okay, you have to secure a big loan. How do you do that? Like those are challenges that you have to overcome in the actual job, but wouldn’t be great to practice that, overcoming that in a safe environment where you can get feedback, you can get coaching, and you can then go to the Top Gun for banking or whatever.

Closing Thoughts

Nolan: Yeah, Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for investing your time with us. And this has been a phenomenal podcast, tons of great insight. The book is available; I’m guessing Amazon is the best place for people to get. I mean, that’s where I’ve seen. Again, it’s Action-First learning. It’s on Amazon and I’m sure every other place. If you don’t know where to buy books these days, I don’t know what to tell you. You probably aren’t listening to a podcast.

Dr. Karl: Yeah. Right. As the phrase goes, it’s available where better books are sold. And I also think where some not, so good books are sold too. It’s probably available there as well.

Nolan: So, definitely check that out. How do you like people to engage with you? What other ways, know, Dr. Kapp, do you think want people to engage with you?

Dr. Karl: So, LinkedIn is probably the best place. And I have a LinkedIn newsletter called L&D Easter Eggs, where I talk about interesting and unique things in the learning and development industry. And if you go there, if you get on my page and scroll down, I actually have an action-first learning curriculum of all kinds of courses. I’ve done a bunch of LinkedIn learning courses.

So, I say, this LinkedIn learning courses match this. So, you can go down and see that and some articles and things like that. And then I’m on YouTube. So, I have a really fun series called the ‘Unofficial Unauthorized History of Learning Games,’ which sometimes it’s the unofficial, but I look at Oregon Trail, what can we learn from Oregon Trail and stuff like that. So, I got a lot of stuff on there. So, those are the places where if you want to engage more, those would be great places.

Nolan: Lovely. And for those that are just listening, Karl Kapp, it’s K-A-R-L-K-A-P-P. So, not phonetic on the last name and Karl with a K. Well, thank you so much, Karl, for joining us. We’ve appreciated and look forward to possibly talking again in the near future.

Dr. Karl: Sounds good. Thanks for having me, Nolan. I really appreciate it.