Train Harder?

I listened to a really good podcast this week. It was taken from The Wavell Room, which is where ‘Army stuff’ gets discussed. I like listening to them because that organisation is having some good conversations right now. This one was - amongst other things, sharing an opinion that training at ‘staff’ (higher management) level wasn’t as good as it could be.

The speaker was arguing that there needed to be a bold change – more realism, more hardship, more friction and finally, more failure. I’ve reflected on how that might transpose into general management training in other organisations? How effective is our training really?

More ‘realism’ is an interesting concept. Sometimes, simulation is more real that the real thing. Look at commercial aviation. You could fly 10,000 hours as a pilot in a commercial airliner and never have an emergency to deal with. Put you in a simulator though and you are at the mercy of the instructor. Who’d have ever thought you could have an engine failure, a passenger medical emergency, a decompression and your nearest diversion airfield to be unavailable all on the same sector? So training has to be real, but we can cram a lot more in if we are creative and realistic. If we are under-staffed, run the simulations at those levels because when the crisis evolves, that is likely all you have got.

What about hardship? The Army chap argued that training in a warm building with hot meals every day wasn’t a reflection of his workplace. He has a point. Do you decamp to a nice hotel somewhere, with a spa and swimming pool? Is going on a course actually more of a perk than a learning experience when it is like this? I did several firearms command courses in nice hotels, and whilst it was nice to unwind from the pressures with a sauna at the end of the day, it didn’t really reflect me having to make time pressured decisions at 4 a.m. with sleep deprivation in the back of a Land Rover Discovery. Do we need to clearly demarcate between giving someone a bit of a reward – which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and providing training for reality? Noise, distractions, discomfort – whatever your workplace ‘normal’ is, all likely have a part to play to some extent in learning. And if nothing else comes from it, maybe improvements in the working environment will be catalysed?

Friction. In this context, the word refers to the interaction of chance and action – a disruption. It links back to the benefits we can take from an intense and realistic simulation which I mentioned earlier. Do we always train for the reality, or the reality we want to exist? If we do the latter, the chances are that we lose engagement, because our learners can’t see a connection with their real world environment. Creating this sort of ‘friction’ in our training (rather than the more traditional use of the word in learning, where we try and design out the stuff that makes using a learning platform harder) means that we develop agile minds in our people. When the big challenge comes in reality, they are already conditioned to deal with it.

Failure. Nobody likes failure, right? But failure is where the learning really takes place. The training environment should be where it is safe to take a risk, and push the boundaries. It can’t be where the directing staff ask “What the hell were you thinking?” Failure through innovation how is breakthroughs happen. James Dyson ‘failed’ 5127 times, before the final iteration of his cyclone technology for his revolutionary bag-less vacuum was up to scratch. How long would he have survived in your own organisation?

Training that supports and even encourages failure widens perspective. Operationally, your employees will more likely conform to industry norms, and your policies and procedures if they have at least had a chance to bend them and see if something new might just work. And if you do get a breakthrough as a result, then the organisation wins again.

Is it time to fundamentally review how you train your people. In business, time is money, so don’t you owe it to your organisation to make sure it is time well spent?

Derek Flint Cert.Ed., MCIPR

https://wavellroom.com/podcast/wavell-talks-train-harder-drop-loyalty-and-hyper-elitism/