There are no mistakes; only happy accidents

Do you remember Bob Ross? If you never watched his "Joy of Painting" series on PBS, then you missed a real treat (FYI, you can still catch the show in some PBS markets). In thirty minutes, Bob would take a blank canvas and turn it into quite a lovely painting.

I was always fascinated by the process, in part because I have virtually no talent when it comes to visual arts. More than that, however, what I enjoyed about Bob was his attitude: if something doesn't work out quite the way you'd planned, that's okay. You can work with it and come out with something terrific. As he often said, "There are no mistakes; only happy accidents."

That's a great attitude to have when it comes to delivering training, and it's especially useful in classroom training. You see, classroom training is particularly challenging because your audience is seated (and therefore likely to get restless and/or tired), and you may not have an in-your-face task for your students to accomplish. This can result in no sense of relevance or urgency, which in turn leads to lack of retention.

Here's where we separate the trainers from the presenters. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with giving presentations; I often give presentations. But a presentation or speech, however enlightening, is not a training session by my definition. If the goal of training is to help your students gain competence in a particular skill, then you're going to need to do a lot more than simply talk. And the talk you do give needs to engage your learners and get them involved in the process.

At a high level, here's what you need to do in order to maximize the classroom time and make sure your learners get what they need:

1. Identify the discrete tasks that the learners should be able to perform at the close of the session. If you're training people, then there must be skills transferred to the learners; no matter how entertaining you are, if your learners don't gain the skills you're trying to teach them, then you didn't do your job. So your first step is to figure out precisely what those skills are. Go ahead and get as granular as you want here; you can filter later.
2. Figure out the components of each task. Are there new vocabulary words they'll have to learn? Foreign concepts that they'll need to grasp? New tools they'll have to know how to use? What are the procedures they'll need to perform?
3. Determine the most effective way to facilitate learning for each component of each task. It's at this point that many trainers head down the wrong path. In a corporate environment, where Time=Money, we're often convinced that we need to get training completed as quickly as possible. This hurry-up mentality sometimes leads us into doing the worst thing possible for our learners: spoon feeding.

Why Spoon Feeding is Eeeeeeeeevil

Spoon feeding - as I define it relative to training - is the act of the trainer walking his or her learners step by step through the task that s/he's teaching. Spoon feeding is quick, to be sure; if you tell the students everything that they need to know, and you do that the moment that they need to know it, well then... you're going to zip right through the material.

Here's one problem with spoon feeding: if you spoon feed information (or even provide a demonstration), the students never engage their brains; they don't have to make any cognitive leaps, and there's nothing to get past what Kathy Sierra refers to as the brain's crap filter.

Here's another problem with spoon feeding: if they do manage to learn anything, your students will learn only the right way to perform the task. What's wrong with that?, you ask. Well, how do you expect folks to be able to deal with a problem in the process when all they've learned is what to do when everything goes right?

Here's one last problem with spoon feeding: it requires that you, the trainer, must know every last detail about the task; it requires that you become a subject-matter expert rather than a facilitator. This means a lot more work for you. That's not to say that you shouldn't be knowledgeable about the task you're teaching - but you can do a great job of training without being an expert.

Here's What You Should Do Instead

When you design the method you're going to use to train your learners on a given task, start thinking creatively: you may have to introduce some of the concepts via a lecture (of sorts), but that doesn't mean that you don't have some tools at your disposal to help engage the students. I once rewrote the lyrics to the song "M-O-T-H-E-R" in order to help my students remember the characteristics of root cause for a root cause analysis class. Silly? You betcha - but they remembered it.

When it comes to performing (or simulating) the task in your training session, you should probably give a lot less direction than you think; provide a framework, and provide guidance, but make the students do the work. Yes, they're going to make mistakes, but that's the point: we learn best from the things that don't work right the first time. By giving the students the opportunity to make mistakes in a safe environment, you're going to help them figure out what to do in the real world when a mistake happens. You're going to be able to help them learn how to troubleshoot the process or procedure; you're going to teach them to fish, instead of giving them a fish. And you might learn something new, as well. And I promise you, it doesn't hurt your credibility if you occasionally say, "You know what? I'm not sure how to fix that; let's figure it out together."

At the end of a training session, what matters is whether or not your learners can perform the task or function independently. If they think you're terrific, that's great; but what's important is whether they learned how to do what you brought them there to do. Liking you is gravy.

Here are some questions to ask yourself the next time you develop a training course:

1. How can I creatively help my students understand this concept? Can I use music? Art work? A crossword puzzle? A game of charades?
2. What are the most common mistakes people make when they perform this function? How can I guide them to make those mistakes in training, so they learn how to deal with them in the real world?
3. Is the way that I'm building this training designed to make me look smart, or is it designed to make sure that they get it?

In tomorrow's post, I'll be talking about what to do when everyone else thinks that training is the answer, but you know it isn't.

Comments

[Penelope Trunk]

Congratulations on the new blog! I love the line, "we learn best from the things that don't work right the first time." That's great encouragement for us all to get moving in the area where we were procrastinating for fear of failure.