A few years ago I worked for a while in what you might call “mainstream” web development, with a marketing/advertising slant. Even back then, there was a notable difference in the quality of the relationships between suppliers of web content/services and their clients.

This is probably a gross generalisation, but I reckon that in the web/new media marketing mainstream, there’s a lot more in common between suppliers and clients. Web marketing staff in large organisations often come from agency or advertising backgrounds, and many agency staff develop their careers by moving in and out of large organisations. Quite often, both sides have common professional qualifications and experience. And as a result, they usually speak more or less the same language. Of course, many problems and misunderstandings arise (because they’re human too…), but the relative maturity and scale of their industry provides some kind of common ground.

I don’t think that’s the case in the e-learning industry. I’m often struck by how very different suppliers and buyers are, culturally, in terms of background, qualifications…it’s sometimes feels like we’re speaking from opposites sides of a deep echoing chasm and only catching the occasional word that’s shouted across the void. We’re a young industry with barely a common vocabulary and culture even amongst the fragmented suppliers of e-learning products and services.

So what? Well, I love 2 x 2 matrixes (some would say “putting people in boxes”, but I’d say that’s only so I can ignore them). And here’s another one.

Let’s imagine that you can map people involved in e-learning along a couple of dimensions. The first one is all about knowledge of the reality, the parameters, the constraints of what e-learning can and can’t do. So if you’re a supplier of e-learning products and services, you should probably be on the high end of the dimension: you have a good knowledge of the constraints. On the other hand, while many buyers within large organisations are up there at that end as well, a substantial proportion are not. They simply (and understandably, given their roles and experience) don’t know enough about what e-learning can and can’t do; what it can and cannot be.

I’ve taken the other dimension from various theories of personality and of creative thinking. I’ve found that many in the industry (on both sides) have what you might call a “convergent” orientation or mindset. They like things sorted out, organised, precision-engineered. They start from a problem and converge, through a process of logical analysis, to a single solution. Traditional instructional systems design encourages this, and many of the values surrounding instructional design support it. And it’s certainly a necessary orientation in many cases.

But not all. Others I encounter are more divergent. They dislike organisation and disciplined process and linear thinking. They head off from a single point and diverge. At the extreme, (unless they’re aware of the constraints) they need the convergent types to help bring things to a conclusion (apply your Belbin or MBTI types here if you want). These types are great when you’re looking for new solutions, which incidentally, is what I think the e-learning industry needs to do more of.

So what happens if you map the two dimensions against each other? Probably just another bullsh*t matrix, pseudo-tool. But it may have some use. I’m just wondering whether something like this might help improve relationships between suppliers and buyers. Awareness, as they say, is curative. See what you think.