Recently, I was at a presentation by a high-level CEO of a multinational confectionary company. The speaker said that he received helpful advice from a colleague: “fail early, fail cheap, but always fail forward.” In other words, learn from the mistakes. I talk about failing like I mean it…which also means taking on sufficient risks in order to grow professionally and personally. In the spirit of these, I decided to review some of my worst instructional designer mistakes.

People and Habituation

While much in culture suggests that one should give others plenty of chances, I would suggest that some of my worst ID mistakes have been continuing with team members that have already shown themselves to be wanting in particular aspects of their work. If an administrator tends towards callousness and political deafness, she will not necessarily change because she sees this or she has alienated various people. If a project lead is not candid about funding prior to the project, this person will not necessarily be candid once the project has started. A grand administrator who throws the instructional designer under a political bus will not necessarily restrain himself. A PI on a grant who dominates the limelight will not suddenly back off in a shared live presentation. An editor who does not show much in the way of supportiveness will not suddenly be supportive. People who do not deliver on various prior projects will not suddenly see the light and deliver.

One has to go with empirics to know what to expect from the future, in a sense. It is not going to be different this time. Further, at the risk of over-generalizing, circumstances will not necessarily improve very much from the beginning point.

I am a person who believes in second and even third chances. But I’m also a person who believes that after a certain point of endeavors, any more chances is just asking for more of the same.

The interesting thing here is that people who start out being conscientious and honest also tend to be so over time. Those who don’t “scare easy” and take new projects head-on and are open to learning and innovating…amazingly…continue on in this way. Those who tend to come through on work…amazingly…continue to do so. There are upsides to seeing the patternings to people.

Handing over the Reins

When I first started my job at K-State a little more than six years ago, I took over a documentation project that included the help files for a learning / course management system. The software was fairly complex (RoboHelp)…and it was my first time using it. I was having a hard time getting the file to output correctly, and I worked with a colleague who worked in IT but never used this technology before. His instincts were right to noodle around, but the error was noodling around in a live project that had to go out to the world in a day or two. He tried various buttons and managed to disappear all of the images. (I think it was the button for accessibility…and any images without alt-text disappeared, which explains the state of the files I inherited—with no alt-texting.)

I learned a couple lessons. One is to know what is going on first. The next is to use due caution before letting anyone deal with sensitive files. Always. Always. It’s easier to commit the gaffe oneself and then learn from it than be left without a clear sense of how one arrived at a certain point of befuddlement.

Building Redundancy

For the sake of security, it is said that one should build duplications. This extra step should be automatic and unobtrusive, in that sense. When I was writing up the steps to a process for creating an online lab, I wrote a whole duplicative step that was wholly unnecessary, with no value-add. This involved versioning images for publication—even though that event would be an anomaly (at which time a manual process could be put into place to version a few images for a respective publication). As soon as the project actually started and high-resolution images were created, I dumped that step. While I left a space (a folder) for that step if we chose to follow up, it became clear that that would just be a time waste.

Visiting a Live Lab

Another gaffe as an ID was to visit a science lab in order to try to change it into digital format. I already knew that the complexity of the learning would be too high…and that the technologies we would need do not exist yet. I thought that there might be a small element that would be possible to translate to online learning.

I came away with a sense of the daunting nature of the job. I did form a conviction to learn more about how to animate videos to portray various relationships and micro-level phenomena.

Unusable Technologies

Another mistake was that of accepting a technology that I knew I wouldn’t use. Another unit on campus had bought many seats of a particular software. Even though I received a solid tour of the software by a representative of the company, I was already hard-pressed to find a use for the software. I already had several programs I could use that would do the same thing. I thought that maybe I would end up with a project that could maybe use the technology, but it was hard to find reasons to use it. I would go with what I already knew. And that technology pretty much took up space on my working computer for years because I couldn’t dump it.

What’s worse is signing up for third-party services or software and then letting that languish. I create accounts on various social networking sites and micro-blogging sites for research. And then when people start emailing me to join networks or to follow my feeds, I realize that I’ve over-reached and messed with people’s expectations. I should just sign in using my proper email but not use my identifying information. If I’ve learned nothing else, people are very willing to add someone else to their electronic harems and followers. The problem here then is one of wanting to be forgotten. Just recently, out of all the various spaces which I’d signed into for various needs of a project at a discrete time, only one vendor knew to delete an account (this one to a blog service). I want to be forgotten if I am not active in an account, but that’s often easier to say than do.

Planning to Add to the List

So far, these are my worst ID mistakes that I can think of—to date. I hope to add more risks to this list because these are actually fairly tame. Well, it’s not that I’m pursuing mistakes. I want to take more risks in my work…to add to my learning set but also to really contribute to the field. Mistakes are to be expected. The worst mistake would be to be unambitious and non-risk-taking.