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The Risk of Daylong Training
All posts tagged: learning
Stop the Exploding Brains
Take No Prisoners is a free weekly memo from Scott Wintrip that explores how Radical Accountability prospers companies and changes lives. Instead of taking people hostage with outdated, heavy-handed, and ineffective methods of management, measurement, and motivation, Radical Accountability focuses on creating an unwavering responsibility for getting done what matters most.
How people learn and how they are taught are often not in sync. This shows up as inconsistencies in execution, untapped market potential, and the need to get “back to basics.” Simply put, if staff consistently did what they are supposed to do in the manner in which they are supposed to do it, execution would improve and results would grow exponentially.
Making matters worse, is the amount of content that is delivered in a relatively short period of time. A daylong or weeklong seminar is the equivalent of unscrewing the top of someone’s head, cramming it full of details, and then reinstalling their skullcap. Is it any wonder that people retain so little and use even less on the job?
Education, done well and done right, is not training. Delivered correctly, it includes the following:
Drip the learning to support retention.
Instead of requiring people to gorge themselves on a buffet of knowledge, give them meal-sized portions of content. Learning Limits, how much content people can digest in one sitting, requires this form or portion control to manage the delivery of ideas, strategies, and best practices.
Countermeasures for the human tendency of making the simple, complex.
Humans are masterful at making things much more complicated than they need to be. To counter this, quality education must promote simplicity, a systematic approach, and methods that are sustainable. These countermeasures mitigate or eliminate our innate foibles, especially when it comes to making mountains out of molehills.
Opportunities to apply what’s been learned.
Practice is said to make perfect. While it’s rare that people achieve anything near sustained perfection at anything, we need more opportunities to try out new skills and behaviors. It’s through repetition that we gain mastery, and trying to master any approach or technique only in conversations and meetings with prospects, clients, and candidates often leads to poor or even disastrous results.
Radical Accountability to counter the momentum of the status quo.
Momentum keeps an object going in the same direction. Since the pull of the status quo is so strong, it takes something even stronger, Radical Accountability, to break the momentum and create a sustainable shift in the opposite direction.
By stopping traditional training and starting real education, you and your organization can create real learning opportunities that benefit all parties, with no more exploding heads.
This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Begin to employ the four interventions to shift from a training culture to a sustainable learning environment.
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Why Training Fails
Learn why most training fails and how to increase the ROI of quality educational initiatives.
If you’d like to learn more about DripFeed Learning, including how to create a Learning Lock that eliminates Learning Limits and Leaks, click here.
Stop Training, Start Learning
Take No Prisoners is a free weekly memo from Scott Wintrip that explores how Radical Accountability prospers companies and changes lives. Instead of taking people hostage with outdated, heavy-handed, and ineffective methods of management, measurement, and motivation, Radical Accountability focuses on creating an unwavering responsibility for getting what matters most done.Cracking her whip, the lion trainer runs these noble beasts through their paces in preparation for the upcoming circus show. At Sea World and other marine parks, trainers of aquatic animals go through their own training regimens, rewarding their charges with handfuls of fish. This is training, and training is best left for animals, not people.
You may find this commentary odd coming from a guy referred to, at times, as a trainer. While it’s true that I teach leaders and some staff, in addition to my consulting work, I’m an educator, not a trainer, as I don’t work with animals.
Education, done well and done right, is not training. Training works for animals because of the repetitive nature of the act of getting a lion or a killer whale to perform a task for a reward. Humans, while they benefit from repetition and rewards, also require additional interventions. These include:
Countermeasures for the human tendency of making the simple, complex.
Animals don’t have the cognitive ability to convert what’s simple to something complex. Humans, on the other hand, are masterful at making things much more complicated than they need to be. To counter this, quality education must promote simplicity, a systematic approach, and methods that are sustainable. These countermeasures mitigate or eliminate our innate foibles, especially when it comes to making mountains out of molehills.
Opportunities to apply what’s been learned.
Practice is said to make perfect. While it’s rare that humans achieve anything near sustained perfection at anything, we need more opportunities to try out new skills and behaviors. It’s through repetition that we gain mastery, and trying to master any approach or technique only in conversations and meetings with prospects, clients, and candidates often leads to poor or even disastrous results.
Radical Accountability to counter the momentum of the status quo.
Momentum keeps an object going in the same direction. Since the pull of the status quo is so strong, it takes something even stronger, Radical Accountability, to break the momentum and create a sustainable shift in the opposite direction.
By stopping training and starting education, you and your organization can start creating real learning opportunities that benefit all parties.
This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Begin to employ the three interventions to shift from a training culture to a sustainable learning environment.
Want to learn more about Radical Accountability? This topic is just one of many covered on GAIN. Learn more about GAIN.
Follow me on Twitter! You can find me here: https://twitter.com/ScottWintrip
Every day I provide pithy pieces of advice and wisdom. Join the growing crowd who read these gems every day.
You may subscribe and encourage others to subscribe by clicking here.
Check out my podcast series called Simply Scott on iTunes.
If you’d like to reach me, email: scott@ScottWintrip.com or call my direct line: (727) 502-9182
Visit my web site: https://www.WintripConsultingGroup.com
Do-Over Redux
Being wrong chafes the ego yet often leads to a greater right. Nowhere has this been more true in my own life than my failed ten-year marriage that ended in 2007. That decade of futility saw two amazingly stubborn people persist in a relationship that neither wanted to admit was fated from the start. Only when gut-wrenching honesty prevailed was I able to admit that not wanting to be divorced was a terrible reason to remain in an unhealthy and incompatible marriage. I had forgotten one of the greatest lessons of my childhood, that’s its okay to call a do-over when something does not work as I had hoped.
In a little over a month’s time I get to initiate one of the most significant do-overs in my life, thus far, as I marry Holly in New York City’s Central Park. Being fully conscious of the opportunity this do-over represents, I’ve chosen a highly compatible partner who meets the list of needs I have for a quality relationship (for those of you who know me the fact that I had a list for selecting my mate should come as no surprise). This opportunity makes me grateful for my previous mistakes since, without those, I wouldn’t have the insights that have helped me make better choices the second time around.
How can a do-over mindset serve your life and your company? Here are three steps for accessing those do-overs we did as kids:
1. Whether it’s an overly difficult customer generating little to no profit or a relationship filled with drama and strife, accepting the fact that something is not working for you is the first step. Acceptance does not mean you have to like the situation or even your original choice. It merely requires an acknowledgement that the status quo no longer works for you.
Marcus, the CEO for one of my West coast clients, knew he had erred with one of his additions to his leadership team. Rather than wanting to admit he regretted the hire, he kept finding ways to try and fix what was unfixable, especially since this was the third person within two years who failed in the role. The breakthrough moment came when I was able to get Marcus to acknowledge that the hire was a mistake and to accept that nothing was going to change that. As he put it to me, that was the “freeing moment” as he could now move on to step two.
2. Ask yourself what are the possible ways to initiate a do-over. Engage colleagues at the office for work-related do-overs or friends at home for those on the personal side of life.
I am often the sounding board for possibilities, so Marcus bounced different ideas off of me during one of our meetings. Within 20 minutes, he had two workable plans for making a better hire and removing the ineffective executive from his team.
3. When you find a possibility that you believe will work do it, right away. Life is about progress, not perfection. Even if your do-over is less than perfect, better to be headed in a new direction than stuck in the same old rut that you know doesn’t work. Most of the time you’ll find that your do-over creates either a better result or requires just a bit of fine-tuning over time to achieve a significantly improved outcome when compared to the previous set of circumstances.
Marcus hired and onboarded a new leader in under five weeks, calling this the easiest hire he’d ever made. “Amazing what happens when you get over yourself, accept mistakes, and call a do-over,” said Marcus.
Kids are masterful at learning from mistakes as they take risks, make mistakes, yell “do-over,” and then try again. So join me and let the kid in you come out more often as life happens. While I may not convince Holly that I should yell “do-over” as part of my vows, I promise I’ll at least be screaming it in my head.