It’s Saturday morning, and am fully caffeinated…sitting on the deck and nursing on the business end of a fairly decent cigar. It’s odd moments like these that a craving to rip out a blog post gets flung upon me. Out of the blue a question landed on my brain and I thought was significant enough to help make the point I seem to endlessly make on my previous posts. Training alone does NOT drive performance, it only contributes to potential. I know, I know, those of you who keep coming back here to read my rambling may tire of this, but it is a mission to me…a mission to promote a performance paradigm over the limits of the traditions of a training paradigm. Hey…it’s what I do…
Tag: Continuous Learning
Yeah, this could be classified as another rant, but that’s what happens when someone gets radicalized by a new paradigm…a Performance paradigm, to be more specific. My radicalization did not take place until after I had been in L&D for over twenty-five years, and looking back, I had racked up an impressive string of failures during that timeframe. Not failures in my output or those of teams I led, but in the workforce performance our efforts sustained…or more accurately…what our efforts did not sustain.
The down-lights were all turned on and illuminating the island in the middle of our kitchen when my wife turned the corner and saw me immersed in a creative moment. The red wire had just been inserted into the sausage when she stopped in her tracks; hands firmly planted on her hips with that this-better-be-good look on her face; and she let fly, “What the heck are you doing?”
Those are words a parent never wants to hear. After enduring sixteen hours of labor, my wife delivered our son, and due to general anesthesia from an emergency C-section, I was the first of us to see him. I can only imagine what the doctor and nurses must have thought, because he was one ugly baby. I’m talking pointed head, swollen lips and distorted face from being the proverbial marshmallow being forced unsuccessfully through a keyhole for over 16-hours. But this book is not about babies. It is about training. And in the course of what you read here I just might refer to training as the “ugly baby”; however, not so much at the course-level, but at the level of our intentions for the role that “baby” plays in giving back to the organization later in the span of its life.
A recent post “Evolving Training Into the Perfect Hole” brought a comment to me that I could really identify with as being a key challenge – justification for seriously considering learning @ the point of work. I find it stunning that the concept of learning @ the point of work is such a hard sell, especially when you consider that opportunities to learn and moments of potential failure happen at the same time…and very often in the same place – @ the point of work. Better training…or more training…have little-to-nothing to do with justification. What could you possible justify in the absence of real risk?
I can remember my first Learning Management System (LMS) implementation from years ago. Actually, in those days they called them Training Management Systems (TMS). This one, Registrar, if I recall correctly, despite its limited functionality, worked better to meet our needs than the four LMS platforms I have endured since. Registrar was simple. It tracked learning. Learning was simple. You did it in a classroom. Period. With the advent of e-learning, the innovation dam broke, and the TMS morphed into LMS and soon a component of a more complex Human Capital Management (HCM) beast. The core competency of registering, tracking and administering training remained intact, but the feature-rich technology largely overran our ability to embrace all the potential it represented. In other words, many training departments fell behind compared to what the technology they owned could ultimately deliver.
I like the concept of “re-thinking” training organizations based in HR, and I say this from personal work history primarily based in the training space over the last thirty plus years. The blended perspective I have comes from working both inside and outside of HR in training organizations. I found them to have a very different focus.