5.6: How to Break Down the Work Required

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🗣️ Transcript

Hello there and welcome back! This lesson is called: How to Break Down the Work Required.

And it’s going to help you to decide what work goes into your course cascade.

So here’s what you’ll learn:

Before we start, let’s quickly refresh your memory about the cascade.

As you just learned, the cascade is a three-level structure with the main result right at the top, the essential achievements underneath and the chunks of doing and learning required to make those achievements happen at the bottom.

And this lesson is all about what’s going on in that third level at the bottom.

Because if you don’t get those doing and learning pieces right, you won’t capture the real work to be done, and your course won’t be effective in achieving its result.

My process for breaking the work down involves two separate “passes”.  And you already saw a version of it in the lesson where you first met the cascade and we revisited the example of drawing a flower.

And you follow the same two-pass process for each of your essential achievements, i.e., that middle layer of your cascade. So here it is.

First, you decide what students will have to DO to make that achievement happen. What steps will they need to take to make progress?

Second, you review the “doing” work you just identified and add any necessary learning work. So what are the principles, models, tactics, skills and so on that students will need to know to successfully complete that doing work?

Let’s look at an example that’s a bit more realistic than the flower drawing one.

Imagine a course that helps you create a profitable blog that earns passive income.

I actually worked on a course like that. It took you all the way from coming up with an idea for your blog to creating simple products to monetise it. It was a big course!

Now, as you’d imagine a good number of essential achievements are needed on the journey to that end result of a profitable blog.

But I’ll focus on just one of the achievements and break it down into its doing and learning work, and the specific achievement I’ll focus on is actually setting up your blog.

I don’t know if you’ve been through that process yourself but whether you choose WordPress or some other platform there’s a bunch of different steps you have to go through before your blog is up and running and available for people to read.

So let’s go through the two-pass process for the achievement called “setting up your blog”.

Pass one is deciding what students have to DO, i.e., what steps they need to take, to make that achievement happen.

And if you were the student taking this course so here’s what I think you would need to do.

First, you’d need to choose your platform, i.e., the blogging software and the web host you’re going to use.

So is it WordPress and one of the many WordPress hosts, or is it SquareSpace or Wix, or some other platform?

Next, you’ll need to create your blog. In other words, create a new account, install the software (if it’s not installed already), configure the basic settings, add a design theme, and so on.

Finally, once your blog is created, you’ll need to add your content. So that’s the static pages like an About page, and any blog posts you’ve already written for your big launch.

Moving to pass two, we look at each of those DOs in turn and decide if there’s any learning that needs to happen first.

So, to successfully complete the first DO, choose your platform, I think you’d first have to learn the most popular blogging platforms and hosts and how to choose between them.

For the next DO, create your blog, I think you’d first have to learn how to create and configure a basic blog on all the major platforms.

Then you’d have to learn how to give your blog a distinctive visual identity using design themes.

So those two chunks of learning would equip you to create your blog.

And for the final DO, add your content, I think you’d first need to learn what pages your blog should have (About, Contact, etc.) and how to structure them.

Make sense?

Now, seeing all of those chunks of work laid out, you can see it gives you a good overview of the work actually required to set up your blog - both doing and learning.

And this is exactly the process you’ll go through with your own course.

Before we wrap up, I want to give you a quick heads-up that you sometimes need to totally flip your approach. Let me explain…

Starting with the “doing” work keeps you firmly focused on identifying the steps that help students make tangible progress. That’s why I teach it that way first and foremost.

However, some achievements are legitimately more about learning than doing.

For example, the foundational knowledge you might need to establish at the start of a course or a substantial piece of theory you need to teach somewhere in the middle. Those might just be pure learning.

So here’s what to do in that situation.

First decide what students will have to LEARN to be able to safely “cross off” that achievement. What are the major chunks of learning work?

Then try to add at least one meaningful chunk of doing work that the learning makes possible. In other words, find a way to put the learning to immediate use.

For instance: after learning three copywriting formulas, you could decide that students must identify which ones are being used in various different examples.

But whichever approach you take, you should be able to look at your final list of DOs and LEARNs and be confident they’re both necessary and sufficient to make the overarching achievement happen.

Okay, that’s it! We got through a lot there. I will see you in the next lesson.