An extract from
EFFECTIVE TRAINING

Insight, integration and application
One of the ways I believe that we can help ourselves to relax as trainers is to reach an understanding about the relationship between learning process and training design. It is this that I want to focus on now. I have developed a model which I hope will articulate this relationship, based on three components: insight, integration and application. Here is a story that I will use to illustrate these three components and their relationship.

I was working with a group of senior managers from a major multinational last week. They had each volunteered to mentor a senior manager from a school. One of them described to me how he had arranged for the Headteacher he was mentoring to shadow him for two days at his office and how, afterwards, he had had no idea whether the experience had been of any value to her. I asked him how he would know: he replied "I would expect to see a list of actions that she would take as a result of the two days. She hadn't done that. She said it had been valuable but there was nothing to show for it." I wondered whether he had asked her why it had been valuable: he hadn't.

This isn't a training story, but it is a perfect illustration of one of the problems with training: the need for demonstrable gain, for the instant application of learning, for tangible, measurable improvement in performance, for value for money. This is both understandable and entirely counter-productive - and I say this having played the game myself for a long time: the game of selling training on the basis of measurable gain. This thinking is too reductive. In particular, it is reductive of the learning process: it generates a rush from insight to application which is often far too quick for the learner. It puts a value on insight in terms of action only. It says the only reason to learn is to do and if you can't do when I want you to then you haven't learned. The mentor's response was the result of what I refer to as 'help-anxiety' - the helper's need for feedback which reassures them that they have been helpful.

Another example: I was working with a group of trainers who were describing a problem they were having with their Negotiation Skills programme. In the design, there was an input on planning a negotiation - a complex input with three or four key concepts - and then participants were given a case study and asked to plan the negotiation. The intention was that they practise and apply the principles covered in the input. The problem was that they didn't do this very well. The trainers sounded disappointed with the participants. It was as if they had been personally let down - they had put all this effort into the input and the participants had learnt nothing.

As I saw it, the problem was an indication that the participants were not ready to move to application. They needed time to process the input: to convert the input into insights and to explore those insights and how they relate to their real-world experience. The input is not the insight: the input is only the raw material from which the learner may fashion insights. If we mistake our input for the learner's insight, then we are likely to underestimate the time they might need to formulate their insights. This was the case on the Negotiation Skills programme and it is a mistake that I have made countless times myself. I want to rush the learners on from input to exercise to input. I have a timetable to keep to, and if I don't, then I won't cover everything. So come on! get on with the case study. It is difficult for the learner to apply insights in such circumstances.

And then I reached the point when I asked myself: so what? so what if I don't cover everything, if I don't keep to the timetable? so what if the learners need longer to process an input than my time-table allows? are they there for me or am I there for them? what's more important: their learning or my timetable? There is nothing to be gained by shortcutting the learning process. It won't work. We need to respect the learner's process, we need to understand it and we need to help them understand it, for it is not always what they think it is. In short, we need to support them to learn well.