Now that you have read this book, you should better understand our overall thesis. In our own experiences working in and around schools and businesses, we have found that the best leaders, the best service‐oriented professionals, the best salespeople, and the best trainers are those who do – either by instinct or by conscious effort – what the best teachers do in effective classrooms. We wrote this book to help those in and around business – and serving in those roles – to better understand the best teaching and learning practices and the related opportunities for improving business practices.

There are a few things (or lists) that we believe will help you understand our “learning experience design” and the intentional choices we made throughout the book.

Scholarly Practices

We deliberately used some scholarly practices in how we approached this work:

• We aligned to a research methodology – design‐based research – by which we constructed theories, tested them in the field through our own experiences, through analyses of historical and contemporary (at the time of writing) events, and through our conversations with experts. Then, we went back and refined those theories and repeated the process.
• We used an academic reference style not only to credit the researchers or literature domains from which we increased our own understanding, but also to leave a breadcrumb trail for people to follow in case they wish to pursue more deeply an idea or perhaps challenge our interpretations.

Educational Research Practices

We used 10 educationally researched practices to connect our observations and insights to corporate environments:

1. Preassessment
   • Asking the right questions up front to understand where customers are in their individual or company journey; using that information to prepare for interactions and transactions with those customers.
2. Formative assessment
   • As things develop, adjusting plans or information based on needs.
3. Understanding by design
   • Defining customer or company goals and then working backwards from there, intentionally tying every move to the goal or goals.
4. Design thinking
   • Being able to iterate, at scale, any/all kinds of motions to continually improve processes.
5. Active/visual listening
   • Demonstrating to the other members of a conversation that you are listening and thinking critically about what is being said.
6. Brain breaks
   • Reseeding time and the human brain to allow for processing and stepping away from problems or circumstances.
7. Reflection
   • Building in time for reflection, thinking, or application; also, helping to establish the habit.
8. Meaningful, personalized feedback
   • After an interaction, demonstrating expertise within a personal message so as to inspire the learner or customer to take action and build upon constructed knowledge.
9. Differentiated instruction
   • Depending on who the audience is, being able to reach the same learning goal through different approaches.
10. Storytelling
    • Due to the fact that information transmission is no longer relevant, producing meaningful stories that accurately connect intended information and therefore lead people to fill in gaps or set the stage to fill in gaps.

Primary Roles

We also focused on four primary roles throughout the book. For each, we provided a glimpse into our design work, making a more specific “user persona” against which we constantly checked our work. The roles were:

1. Salesperson: This persona completed transactions with a customer around a product, service, or good.

   

2. Leader: We used this persona to refer to anyone who has direct reports or who owns the responsibility of a significant area of the company. We also extended this persona to those “unofficial” leaders whom, through their natural activities and outcomes, serve as beacons within their organizations.

   

3. Service professional: This persona represented anyone seeking to provide a service to clients or customers, whether existing or new.

   

4. Trainer: This persona represented anyone with a responsibility for learning and development in an organization.

   

Paths

Finally, we designed this book so that you might engage with it in myriad ways. Based on our design, there are five paths you may have taken. Ideally, you would have tried more than one, and as a result, engaged with the book in a slightly new way each time:

1. Look for/at the pictures.
2. Skim through and read only the callouts specific to your existing role in an organization.
3. Skim through and read all the callouts.
4. Read select chapters or sections, based on interest or current needs.
5. Read the entire book from cover to cover.

Throughout this book, we visually differentiated the access points to those paths. A quick riffle through the pages should have made it easy to dive in. Also, at the end of each main section of the book, we turned your attention to some of the things that good teachers consider in advance of a learning experience and suggested a few things that, depending on your role, interests, and curiosities, we hoped you would find the time to try.

Instructor Evaluation

The design of any learning experience can only be measured by the near‐term and long‐term impact and influence on the subject toward meeting the learning objectives. As a result of reading this book, are you equipped to be a more authentic seller? Will you practice more immediacy in your leadership? Will you consider the delight of a customer whom you are serving? Will you better train your colleagues, borrowing from the practices of the best classroom teachers?

We hope so, and please let us know how we did and how you're doing. Send us a note at [email protected] or visit us at makeyourselfclear.xyz. And if Twitter is still a thing when you are reading this, follow us at @reshanrichards and @sjvalentine.