When I mentioned I was reading this book
at Expert Support the other day, it led to a discussion about what cephalopods can teach us about technical communications.
Sound crazy? Well, bear with me here.
In Other Minds, Godfrey-Smith traces the biological beginnings of consciousness to explore how the octopus developed a mind that runs on a brain that’s mostly distributed, instead of packed into a skull like the brains that we mammals have. He mentions the octopus, cuttlefish, squid, and nautilus as examples of creatures sporting dramatically different physiology than our own, but still having evolved into fairly intelligent creatures.
One of these creatures, the nautilus, grows and lives inside a hard shell that helps protect its soft cephalopod body from predators. As the nautilus grows, it creates bigger and bigger chambers for its increasing body size. You can see the results of this progression in the photo below.
Even when very small, the young creature is quite capable of going about the business of being a young nautilus. It’s completely functional even at a tiny size. And when a chamber becomes too small for the growing creature, it moves into a new, larger one.
So what does the growth behavior of a nautilus have to do with technical communication?
Fostering understanding, which is what technical communications is all about, happens most efficiently by following a similar pattern (which also happens to be the fibonacci sequence, but that’s another blog post).
When your understanding is small, you learn best when the first lesson imparts information for a small, simple task with traits importantly akin to the first nautilus chambers.
1) The first lesson is right-sized for new learners.
When a newbie has to take a first step, that step has to be both attainable and productive. (Note that I didn’t say “easy.”) The idea is to teach the learner a skill that’s both learnable in a first lesson, and useful immediately. The tiny nautilus can build a small chamber, and then move right in.
When a new learner can immediately apply their skills, it fosters satisfaction and builds confidence that can keep them from becoming bored, frustrated, or both. Many of us surely remember classes or tasks where we got bogged down early, never realized adequate satisfaction from the effort, lost interest, and dropped the class or put down the book.
2) The skills attained early on exemplify the right approach.
If you simplify a task so much that it’s “just a learning example” but not the right way to do something, be prepared to help the learner un-learn that technique before learning the right way.
The good news for the nautilus is that the small chambers follow the same basic plan as the bigger chambers. If the first tasks a learner masters are fundamentally similar to more complex tasks farther down the syllabus, the student begins to understand and apply those patterns. The sooner newbies learn to “think about things the right way,” the sooner they “get it,” which is exactly what both the instructor and the student want.
3) Early learning sets the stage for the next topic.
Looking back at the nautilus shell, notice how the ceiling of a smaller chamber becomes the floor of the next. When producing materials to explain complex topics, technical writers and instructional designers employ a similar approach. Mastery of each task provides the foundational understanding required by the next higher task.
Taken in sequence over time, this approach can transform a naive beginner into an expert performer over time. Finding this optimal pathway to shorten learning curves pays tremendous dividends over time.
As such, thoughtful sequencing of these tasks is a big part of instructional design and the information architecture of documentation and training systems.
Is your documentation and training constructed in a way that follows this pattern? Is there a better analogy than a nautilus shell? What’s the best way you’ve found to shorten the learning curve of your product or API?
If you have ideas about this analogy, or need help explaining and organizing the documentation and training you use to onboard employees, partners, and customers, we’d love to hear from you.
Or, if you just think cephalopods are cool, check this out this article or this video.
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