Janice Wilson lives by a simple business philosophy: "If you're going to do something, then do it well."As the founder, owner, and managing director of Lucid® Learning Systems, a division of Blanchard-Bedford Inc., she offers clients a new, interactive approach to training.

"We don't just sweep in with a load of notebooks and sweep out, leaving people behind who do not know what their next steps should be. We know that if they go through one of our courses, they will change what they're doing afterwards,"she says.

Lucid Learning Systems was developed to address needs for training in the healthcare industry. Recently, the company has applied its methods to the educational and corporate realms as well. Wilson and her team use a process called Problem-Based Learning, which creates a virtual workplace situation. In a simulated medical clinic, elementary school classroom, or human resources office, a trained facilitator uses a case or problem that helps learners increase knowledge or skills. The group works through the case, and in a way lives it.

"It's not like a didactic method where someone comes into a classroom and they get a workbook, they get lectured, they see slides, and maybe there is some discussion. This is totally opposite to that. They come into a group session almost unprepared. But before that, the facilitator has done a lot of work to prepare a scenario or a case, to guide the participants to the agreed learning objectives," Wilson explains.

The facilitator only provides enough information to create an inquiring atmosphere, releasing more details through a process called progressive disclosure. For example, a facilitator might run a course in sexual harassment, but the specific learning objectives would not be revealed up front. Instead, learners would delve into a fictitious situation and determine what might be happening. The facilitator would then impart more information, followed by more discussion to enable the group to work the problem through.

In the healthcare realm - which until recently was the company's prime focus - Lucid Learning Systems has covered such topics as allergies, asthma, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's disease, women's health, domestic violence, and diabetes.

From London to Santa Fe Wilson's own background is in healthcare. For 25 years, the pharmaceutical industry occupied Wilson's time and energy, and she has spent much of her career working for pharmaceutical companies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Born in London, she grew up in England's "home counties"north of London: Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Cambridgeshire. With a degree in applied biology and a qualification in information science, Wilson joined the research department of Glaxo, a large British pharmaceutical company. She also worked for several other major pharmaceutical companies in research, regulatory affairs, and marketing. In 1979 she joined the British subsidiary of the American pharmaceutical company Schering Plough. In 1982 they asked her to move to the head office in New Jersey.

The allergy product Claritin, she says, is her "claim to fame." She helped develop this product and launch it worldwide. In 1990 she left Schering Plough to start her own business, Blanchard-Bedford. Then, in 1992, her husband was offered a job in Santa Fe.

"It was his turn. He gave up his job to move with me to the states," Wilson says. "And when he said it was Santa Fe, I was not going to argue about it. I just picked up everything and moved the company to Santa Fe. And it really didn't matter very much, because my clients then were all healthcare, and they were in Israel, England, South Carolina, Boston. They were all over the place. So moving to Santa Fe didn't make much difference."

Wilson's decision to exit corporate life and set up her own business with healthcare and pharmaceutical corporate clients was a natural one, she says. "At that time, it's all I knew how to do. I had achieved a great deal in the corporate world, and it was time to head out on my own."

She began working with Howard J. Zeitz, MD, of the University of Illinois, Chicago, on the Problem-Based Learning process. She says that her passion is now more focused on education itself, rather than just healthcare content. "I've seen how all sorts of people can really enjoy learning, no matter what their background is, when using this method,"she says.

Although much of her company's work has been in healthcare, Lucid Learning Systems also works with Dr. Zeitz and his team to train teachers to educate school children using Problem-Based Learning. "We just worked on a large project in Mississippi, training teachers how to do Problem-Based Learning in the classroom,"Wilson says. "It works really quite brilliantly, because children are naturally so inquisitive and curious that you only have to give them a little spark of information. And off they go."

This method appears to register in the children's memory more successfully than learning from a book or teacher's lecture. Rather than just studying the information for an exam, they're applying it to real life. "It's a really fun way of learning."

Facing Challenges The few obstacles Wilson has faced are familiar to most small business owners. It has been a challenge to balance the company's workload and broaden its training for new industries, she says.

"You never really know where the next client or the next piece of work is coming from. It's either feast or famine."

Wilson and her staff have been through years when they worked almost every weekend, traveling and running training courses. At other times, they look ahead for a few months and see an open schedule.

"You never want to be a hire-and-fire organization. You have to keep some level of staff so you can do the work when it comes in. But you don't want staff sitting around and doing nothing when there is no work,"Wilson acknowledges. "I think it's just a question of planning, trying to be looking forward, always out there selling trying to do the work for your clients."

The transition from a primary focus on healthcare to a broader impact has been challenging as well. But Wilson says that she and the people she works with know that their training methods are versatile. "I don't think there is a single subject about which you could ask us to help educate and train people that we couldn't do."

Typically, Wilson starts out with small pilot projects, showing clients what can be done, and then moves to a large-scale project. "I've learned to not go in and tell people you can do everything for them and give them this huge, great proposal that costs an awful lot of money and expect them to believe that it will work for them," she says. The company follows up the pilot by measuring the outcomes of the educational interventions over a few months and, if it is successful, they expand the program.

A New Focus on New Mexico A key goal for Wilson is strengthening her company's presence in New Mexico. She says the transition from New Jersey to Santa Fe was a wonderful experience for her family. "We found our spiritual home. We really enjoy this part of the world. My focus now, because I don't want to live anywhere else than New Mexico, is that we'd like to develop business more locally so that we're not dealing with customers that are thousands of miles away. We're almost like absentee residents. Up until last year, we were still traveling 60 percent of the time. We don't really feel we're involved in the community, so that's what we'd like because we intend to stay,"she states. However, her British accent is a good talking point with clients, and she intends to keep it.

Her daughter, 27, lives nearby in Albuquerque and is a student at the University of New Mexico. Wilson became a grandmother a couple of months ago and is excited about the addition to their family. The Wilsons' son, 26, also lives in Albuquerque and is a restaurant manager.

In her spare time Wilson enjoys domestic life. She is a passionate gardener on their four acres of mostly rocky land outside of Santa Fe. "For an English person, it's quite a challenge, gardening in New Mexico,"she comments. She also loves to cook and sew, especially with a little granddaughter to dress up. Although she often complains about traveling too much with work, she says she loves to travel for pleasure, and considers herself fortunate to have experienced many cultures around the world. Reading good science fiction is another joy for her.

A personal priority Wilson identifies is to try to get as much out of life as she possibly can. She speaks openly about surviving breast cancer a few years ago. "I'm very aware of how it's changed my whole outlook on life in the last couple of years. I'm a much more laid-back person and try to take each day at a time,"she says. "I try very much to take life as it comes, and that sort of fits in with the lifestyle around here, anyway."

back to Table of Contents

Call (505) 247-9195 to get your copy of New Mexico WOMAN Magazine.