Written By: Bob Mosher, Founding Partner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies
Lesson 8. It kept me up at night. Literally! I was a trainer for a large and very successful IT training company and lesson 8 was the second-to-last lesson on the first day of an Excel spreadsheets course. It was “that lesson”. The one that every trainer dreads. The lesson where the content is way too advanced for the topic, won’t be used for months (if ever) by learners, and is hard to contextualize with previously delivered content. I vividly remember looking out at groups of learners, seeing that 5% were excited about the topic, 15% grasped it well enough to see why it might be nice to use some day, and 80% stared back with their eyes glazed over and hair blown back. It was terrible instruction, but the Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs) really wanted it in the course because it was “so important for the learners to know and understand”. Sound at all familiar? If it does, welcome to the world, and prison, of a “training-first” mindset: not necessarily yours, but that of the organization you support. What a terrible place to be and, frankly, what terrible design and instruction. Let’s take a closer look at this age-old problem and elephant in the room.
L&D organizations have been suffering from the “over teaching” problem for far longer than the 41 years of my career, as have many school systems and universities. (More on the academic side of this in a future blog!) When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It’s true that training is a powerful part of the journey towards performance. Historically, the problem has been that we’ve led with it, been known as the ones who produce it, and been forced to deliver it as the sole solution for the organization’s learning and performance needs. We’ve taught our consumers to associate our good work with training deliverables, so that’s the box we’re put in. I understand the urgency of SMEs. They want others to achieve the level of competence they’ve achieved, and there is so much to know in order to perform successfully. Many SMEs started their journeys through some type of training engagement. Over the years, as they’ve worked to become SMEs, those training experiences have blurred their perspectives. They have associated their success solely with training interventions. They’ve forgotten, or taken for granted, the source of their true expertise: years of successful and unsuccessful on-the-job experiences. Training has played a valuable role, but it is not what made them SMEs. Today, our problem is that because we continue to perpetuate this myth, SMEs continue to insist on training as the tip of the sword. This results in training solutions that are overburdened with content, and in experiences that overwhelm learners and don’t enable performance in the workflow. Training alone carries too much weight and is unfairly positioned as the predominant professional development tool, be it live, virtual, or asynchronous (e.g., e-Learning).
We must break this cycle and perception to help those we support perform in every changing moment. That won’t happen until a few things change:
- We must stop positioning training as the end-all to performance challenges. It can help, but it’s not a one-hit-wonder and needs to be positioned in support of a challenges–not as its sole solution.
- Our initial analysis should focus on the performance problem(s)—vs. training problem(s)—we’re trying to solve. That will take the discussion about the solution we build in a whole new direction.
- We must first build for the moment of Apply (the workflow) instead of the moments of “New” or “More”. When we focus on performance first, we don’t start with training. We build Performance Support and a Digital Coach FIRST!
- By starting with a Digital Coach, the training solution can be limited to just those tasks that are critical in nature. These tasks have potentially negative outcomes that could severely impact the business, meaning they are not safe to learn through experience, even with a Digital Coach as support. We’ve found that this Targeted Training approach can cut the overall training footprint by at least half, which solved the “over teaching” problem. Instruction is less overwhelming, more meaningful, and supported by a Digital Coach. The learner returns to the workflow not just knowing and having experienced the task, but also feeling empowered to support themself when performing the task.
We must stop ignoring the elephant in the room! We know we “over teach”! We cover too much material, much of which is beyond what’s needed to perform effectively on the job, leaving our learners overwhelmed and ill-equipped to survive in the workflow. This has been a broken model for decades. The principles outlined above help us design for the workflow first, allowing L&D to finally step up to its true calling: helping those we serve perform effectively in every changing moment they encounter at work. It’s a teach-to-fish model.
As change continues dominating the world of work, we too must change. Let’s focus on performance first and equip our workforce with more than stand-alone training. By making this shift, we can empower our workers to perform at their best, troubleshoot problems, and adapt to the continuous change they will inevitably encounter in their day-to-day work.
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