Have you ever explained something to someone who is either hearing it for the first time or is still trying to get their head wrapped around the concept? You know how they will nod slowly in seeming agreement while looking off into the ether and saying dreamily, “Yeah…” really, really slowly?” That far-off look is confirmation that they are indeed interested and yet remain clueless for the most part. The room was full of those folks in the Tin Can break out session where I heard this new sound bite. I must confess now knowing enough to be dangerous and yet confident in the implications to the point of being way too excited to sit down.
Tag: performer support
When Einstein defined insanity as “Continuing to do what we’ve always done and expecting different results”, he was on the money. We continue to train with hopes that some form it…some technology enhanced venue of it…some exotic blend of it…is going to produce sustained capability that produces tangible business outcomes. Does training contribute to results? Sure it does, but does it sustain them? No, it cannot. It was never chartered nor was it scoped to do so.
Moments of need are either triggered by an issue or challenge where the knowledge worker is confronted with either remembering what/how to do something and then are forced to rely upon recall knowledge. Where we would like to be is giving them an efficient resource where reference knowledge is readily accessible. Given the amount of information we all have to deal with daily and the documented loss of up to 85% of knowledge gained from training within three weeks, it is no wonder mistakes happen. Yet, we continue to train our people the same way over and over and expectantly wait for different results. I think Einstein defined insanity using a similar example.
A few years ago, I am quite certain, I would have been fighting this “cloud” concept tooth and nail. There was something about having my own staff running my own servers behind my own firewall that provided a sense of security and control. To an extent it did, and the IT staff would be the first to man the ramparts to fight off having anything living outside the firewall – much less allowing anyone outside to get into our systems. I feel their concern, and I respect the need to protect the network and data resources behind the firewall. So does that make a cloud-based LMS a better solution?
Sunday morning I stumbled over a post in one of the community groups I follow on LinkedIn. The question put to the community asked about the use of performance support. The author referenced hearing a lot of buzz lately about performance support, but there was not much evidence of success stories short of application to computer systems training. I had to agree, and I believe there is a purely business reason for that – it is called protecting competitive business advantage.
Competency. Urgency to perform flawlessly. Business risk. Sustainability. Pick whichever one of these strikes your fancy, but they all speak to what we hope effective training will deliver – avoid – and/or create in our workforce – meaningful and legitimate outcomes all. Unfortunately, we cannot realize these outcomes from the classroom or because of on-line training; rather they manifest downstream from our training efforts – in the work context. Are we spending our time, resources, and energy in the right place? I am not convinced we are, and as a result, human performance will not be widely sustainable.