Where we are
Five sessions of design, aimed at an imaginary room. Tonight it meets the real one, and the design that survives is the one that was built expecting to be interrupted.
★ What you walk out with tonight. A one-page job aid, a cut list ranked before the day, a materials set that works without you, and the designer track finished.
Decide what gets cut before you are standing up
6 min liveYou will be behind. Everybody is always behind. The difference between a session that survives that and one that falls apart is whether the cut order was decided in advance or is being invented while thirty people watch.
LiveFive things about the room, and what each one changes5 min▶
| What happens | What it changes in the design |
|---|---|
| You get 40 minutes, not 60 | Your cut list, already ranked. Never improvise this |
| The display does not work | Every activity must be runnable from paper. If a slide is load-bearing, print it |
| Four people are on a video link | They cannot hear the room. Every question gets repeated, and pair work needs a channel they are in |
| Somebody leaves at the half hour | Put the thing that matters most in the first half, on purpose |
| Two people already know it | Give them the ambiguous cases early, or a reviewing role. Bored experts are a facilitation problem you can design away |
The test that catches most of it: could somebody else run this from your materials? Not perfectly - adequately. If the answer is no, the design lives in your head, which means it cannot be repeated, delegated or improved by anybody but you.
The one page they keep
6 min liveSome things should never have been memorised. A job aid turns a memory problem into a reference problem, and on the transfer board in track B it is one of the cheapest lines available - because it is the only part of your design that is still in the room ninety days later.
LiveFour rules for a job aid4 min▶
- One page, one side. The moment it turns over it becomes a document, and documents get filed rather than kept.
- Organised by the moment of use, not by your session. They are looking at a pull request. What do they need in that second? Not your section order.
- No explanation. Explanation was the session. This is the answer. If a line needs justifying, the justifying belongs in the room and the answer belongs here.
- Test it cold. Give it to somebody who was not in the session and ask them to use it. If they cannot, it is a souvenir.
Real contrast on printed and projected text - the same 4.5:1 as anywhere else. Never meaning in colour alone: the job aid above says "breaking" as a word, not as a red square. Captions if there is video. And a handout that works for somebody who could not attend, because there is always somebody who could not attend.
The one page, and the cut list
★ 22 min · everyone buildsMoment of use. Write down where they will be standing and what will be in front of them when they need this. That scene decides the layout, not your session order.
One page. The answer, not the reasoning. If it will not fit, you are still writing a summary of your session rather than a tool.
Cut list. Rank fifteen minutes of cuts, and mark two things NEVER. Do it now, at your desk, where nobody is looking at you.
Paper test. Could you run every activity if the display failed? If one cannot, either print it or redesign it - and the display will fail eventually.
Cold test. Hand the job aid to somebody who was not there. Ask them to classify a change with it. Watch without helping.
Describe the moment of use in one sentence. "Reviewing a pull request, in the diff view, deciding whether to approve." Everything about the layout follows from that.
Draft the job aid with no explanation in it at all. Notice how much you want to add a sentence of reasoning to each line. That urge is what makes job aids into documents.
Rank your cuts and mark the never-cuts. Worked examples and the closed-book two minutes are usually the never-cuts, and they are usually what people cut first because they feel like the optional parts.
Do the paper test. Go through each activity and ask what happens with no display. The classification exercise works on printed cases. If yours needs a screen, ask whether it needs to.
Write the video-link version of one activity. Pair work where two of the pairs are remote. This is the most commonly broken thing in hybrid training and it is a design problem, not a facilitation problem.
Cold-test the job aid on somebody who was not in your session. If they cannot use it, the problem is the aid rather than the person, and you have found it before it mattered.
Ask the other-facilitator question. Could somebody else run this from your materials, adequately? If not, decide whether that is acceptable - sometimes it is, and it should be a choice rather than an accident.
If you take one thing from the designer track. Build the job aid. It is the cheapest thing in this course, it is the only part of your design still present in ninety days, and it is the one deliverable that helps the people who never attended.
Where to go from here
ongoing- Build one job aid this week, for something you already teach or already explain repeatedly. One page, one side, no explanation.
- Write a ranked cut list for the next session you run, before the day.
- Do the paper test on an existing session and fix whatever fails it.
- Now take track B. Everything you have designed still depends on things outside the room - whether it was a training problem at all, whether anybody is motivated, and what happens on Monday. Start at b1-needs-analysis.html.
- Or go sideways. learn-communication-with-phoebe for the delivery craft, learn-ai-ppt-with-phoebe for deck work, learn-ai-education-with-phoebe for teaching with AI.
Three questions
Clear all three and this session gets stamped in your passport.
1 · You are twelve minutes behind. What should already have happened?
Everybody runs behind; the variable is whether the cuts were chosen in advance. Speeding up is how the practice gets squeezed and the telling survives, which is exactly backwards - and it is what people do when they are inventing the decision in front of thirty faces.
2 · What makes a job aid different from a summary of your session?
Length follows from the other two. A summary reproduces your section order and includes reasoning, which is what makes it a document people file. A job aid is laid out for the second they are staring at a pull request, and it answers rather than explains.
3 · Which two things should almost never be cut when time is short?
These are the two people cut first, because they feel like the optional extras around the "real" content. Without worked examples beginners flounder; without the retrieval check you leave the room with no information about whether anything happened.
What this session teaches, and where it came from
Every fact on this page, and its verification tier, is recorded in the course's source map. The job-aid content shown here is the same rule set taught in learn-system-design-with-phoebe session 2.
Designer a6 cheat sheet · pin this
You have an objective that can be failed, a proof written before the content, a sequence that respects working memory, an activity that is the objective, assessment that diagnoses, and materials that survive a bad room. That is the design. Now take track B, because every one of those is still hostage to three things outside your session: whether it was a training problem in the first place, whether anybody wants to be there, and what happens on Monday. Start at b1 - Needs analysis.