Mark Bower offers this challenge to trainers in his blog: ‘What Happened to “Training”?’ Mark looks about as old as me, and dresses in an unfashionable sweater to match his gray hair and rimless glasses, so he’s old enough to know our profession is as prone to fads as any - more than most. He starts provocatively - useful for generating an emotional reponse, eventually sprinkles holy water on the words “performance” and “learning.”
My response to Mark:
High performance is comprised of results-ful behaviors, usually directed not only by the brain’s having learned some information and skills, but also from a mental set that operates above the skills level. There are fads in how you describe these, and academia dances around this by teaching the history of the hypothetical constructs: behaviorism, multiple intelligences, self-image, etc.
A lot of corporate climbers have jumped on the term “learning” and that’s a reflection on the competitive and somewhat faddish nature of life inside Starbucks/Qwest, etc.
This is natural. A lot of business is still trying to play catch-up with other fields where performance measurement is decades ahead. Sports for instance. This is true not only in individual performances like running 10k, but also in team sports where baseball statistics from 1907 are readily available. You don’t hear team managers or track coaches talking about “learning up for a meet” or “learning began three months before the season.” NASA doesn’t talk about “learning-up for a mission.” The highest levels of performance have always required learning basic skills and theory and mission detail, and then rehearsing up for a particular performance, or opponent. The 3 most important factors in winning:
Practice.
Practice.
Practice.
I always thought it odd that people, for instance, think that they will be able to do a webconference effectively without a lot of practice. Things will go wrong during any high-demand situation, and people get flustered and their performance falls off if they don’t have the basics so well-mastered that their performance on the basic level is on auto-pilot, leaving them more mental bandwidth for the tactical decision-making and adaptation.
Practice.
Practice.
Practice.
Plus, rehearsal gives you confidence, whether it is in handling a sports opponent’s new tactic, or handling a balky network connection.
Whether you use “learning” or “training” you need people with high levels of talent and motivation for a particular game/mission/job, who are willing to
Practice.
Practice.
Practice.
Not picking the right people for the job and not getting the required amount of practice is probably where 50% of every performance-improvement budget is wasted, and whether you call it “learning” or “training” is completely immaterial.
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