Praying for the Right Answers

A few months ago, the Catholic Church decided to make text changes in some of the hymns, prayers and responses in the Sunday Mass. Apparently the intention of these changes is to have the English translation of the Mass more accurately reflect the Latin from which the Roman Missal was translated.

Now as a life-long Catholic, I am pretty much on autopilot when it comes to delivering my responses during the Liturgies of the Mass. The new word changes just don’t feel normal or natural, so it will probably take the second half of my life to commit them all to memory.

As I was looking around in church today, I could see that my fellow parishioners are pretty much in the same boat. Many of the devoted have been at this much longer than I have, so I can imagine the challenge of breaking away from the old habitual responses and replacing them with new phrases is even tougher for them.

Of course, the Church has updated the prayers and responses in the Monthly Missalettes that are scattered about the pews, but that alone is not enough to help people through this change. To provide additional support, the Church has created a double-sided laminated card that you can pick up and quickly scan when you find yourself getting tongue-tied or out-of-synch with the rest of the congregation during those moments when your voices should be joined together harmoniously.

Today, it was obvious our parishioners are relying more heavily on this card than the Missalette. As a workplace learning professional, this just reinforced for me the importance of helping the employees in my company to get simple answers to work issues into their hands when they need them. For quick answers, a good job aid beats a good manual any day. Similarly, using instant messenger or other social media tools to quickly connect with subject matter experts at the point of need, beats sitting through a formal class that is disconnected in time and space from the moment real answers are needed.

The bottom line is that we in the workplace learning industry need to continue to capitalize on the social media tools and technology that allow us to imbed learning into the workstream so that our workers are getting the right answers when they need them and we are all singing from the same hymnal.