Does your training focus on what’s coming out or what’s going in? You can probably answer this question most easily by looking at who’s doing the training. Are they academics, actors, teachers, or psychologists?
Why is the question even important? Well, depending on where they come from, they will bring with them baggage. It’s probably useful, but baggage nonetheless. Their baggage will carry the learning that they’ll pass on.
The academics will bring a lecture; the actors will bring an interactive and role play style; the psychologists will bring Maslow, Myers Briggs personality tests and a whole host of fascinating and well researched theories. But all of them will have squeezed the learning to fit the shape of their baggage.
And unless an enormous amount of effort has gone into remaking the baggage, it’ll result in an output rather than in take approach. The focus will actually be on the trainer’s or coach’s learning style than on the styles of the people they’re supposed to be helping.
We’ll hold our hands up here and reveal our acting heritage. However, when we set up Infinite Space, we were determined to create an approach that brought together the various examples of best practice that we’d encountered working with other learning and development organisations. It’s how Stuff That Sticks was born.
So one of the things we’re going to be trialling over the next few months is a brief but helpful ‘Sticky’ questionnaire that we’ll send out and get back before our programmes. The aim is not to categorise people, but instead to discover some of the things, values and experiences that are important to them. It should help us frame our workshops in a way that directly engages people and ensures that the outtake is much more important than the input.
We’d love to get your feedback on this.