Grungy photo of feet with toe tag on a morgue table
Andrew Jefferson and Roy Pollock
“Dead on Arrival” is a term that originated in emergency rooms to describe the unfortunate circumstance when someone arrives too late for any effort at resuscitation to succeed.
Sadly, a significant portion of corporate training and development is also “dead on arrival” because it is the wrong solution to the performance problem and therefore, no matter how brilliant the design, or how engaging the facilitation, or flashy the technology, it is going to fail.
How often does this happen? Far too often. We often ask participants in our 6Ds Workshops “How much of the training you do in your company today is for problems that training cannot fix?” The estimates vary widely, but even in well-known and otherwise well-managed companies, they are often 25% or more. That means that a quarter of the time, the training is doomed to failure before it even begins. It is going to be just more learning scrap.
Why does this happen? In part because when managers are faced with a performance problem, the first things that comes to mind is “they need training.” But there are many reasons why performance might be suboptimal, ranging from unclear objectives to a lack of feedback to a lousy process or lack of incentives. Training will improve performance only if the root cause is a lack of skill or knowledge among those being trained.
Another part of the problem is that managers have grown accustomed to ordering training like they would an over-the-counter pain killer. And we, as learning professionals, have contributed to the problem by being too willing to play the role of order-taker: “One program coming right up. Would you like to super-size that?”
How do we avoid promising programs that are going to be dead on arrival? We need to shift our mindset from providing training to enhancing performance. We can begin by asking Robert Mager’s question: “Could they perform adequately if their lives depended on it?” If the manager says “Sure they could, but they aren’t!” Then you can forget training as a solution because training people how to do what they already know how to do won’t improve performance. You need to work with the business leaders to find out what the real impediment is and fix it.
Your time and your reputation are too valuable to waste developing and delivering training programs that are going to be dead on arrival.
Want to know more about this and other ways in which you can improve your value as a learning professional? Join me for an LTEN 6Ds workshop. For more information and to register, go to: https://l-ten.org/Web/Web/Trainer-Programs/6Ds.aspx