Replying to LO24910 --
>July 17, I am delivering a workshop with the above entitlement. I would
>like dialogue from the cyber gurus on the subject. Is there a method that
>you are willing to share to help HR managers, managers, and supervisors
>get the best results from training programs?
Dear Julia,
I have an idea. (If I had nothing to loose, I would give it a try ;-) )
You have a computer with you, you program it with prepared module by
module and show how the performance rises from intervention to
intervention, how it can do what it could not before. Finally, you
conclude that this is how training would work if humans were computers.
Unfortunately, humans are not computers.
Before you started you had prepared a plant in a Blumentopf (a small tug
with soil where the plant is growing in). You had put it in the sun, you
added a little water.
Then you start officially, doing the computer thing. Then you go back to
the plant, do a bit gardening, explaining what you are doing. Use words
that will make your audience believe that you want to use the plant
growing as a metaphor for training. I guess you will have some sceptics
who don't like such expansions of metaphors on humans. In the end you can
say: 'And this is the way to grow plants. Humans aren't plant either. - In
order to know how to make training work, we should take humans as
examples. You, the participants of this workshop are humans, aren't you?
What about you as examples.'
Then you may collect an estimate of the cumulated experience (days) of
being trained within the life of the participants. It will be an
impressive number of day's. To impress even more you may multiply the
number with a mean cost per day in dollar. You have established your
audience as a roundtable of experts on the question of the workshop.
Then you can start to collect the expertise and facilitate a process to
answer 'How to Make Training Work?' If you strictly restrict the
participants to their personal BEING TRAINED experiences, you will
encounter difficulties to achieve sensible results. When frustration grows
at some point you will have to give feedback to the group on this
frustration and concentrate on the question: 'What to avoid?' as a first
step. This will give relief and thus a huge flow of answers. Just before
the flow ends, while the group is still happy, you can interrupt and state
that unfortunately, this will not help with answering the primary
question.
Make a serious face, have everybody something to drink and then pour some
water at the plant. Wonder whether it is worth to have a try on taking it
as a metaphor together with the previous 'results' to see what can be
learnt from that days experience.
As I said: Just an idea. But I would be really interested in the answers
produced by this process.
Liebe Gruesse,
Winfried
--"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>
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