Making a difference

I guess all us trainers (facilitators, lecturers, tutors, coaches, mentors) like to feel and believe that our interventions make a difference. Yet how often do we encounter friends and acquaintances who look forward with dread to training courses that they are scheduled to attend? Or who can take us through a litany of horror stories about training that they have attended?

In my experience most of us operate from a position at odds with Gandhi's saying that we should be the change we want to see in the world. We all think that change is necessary but that it needs to start somewhere, and with someone, else.

I will always remember the opening session I had with a group of hardened supervisors who were working in a particularly harsh manufacturing environment. After an opening hour characterised by everyone sitting with folded arms (and it was a very hot day) I asked the fateful question "What's wrong?" The immediate hearfelt chorus was "We don't need training, they need training!" with index fingers punching vigorously up in the air signifying the mid and top managers who were located on the upper floors in the building.

In this series of blogs I hope to explore ideas, approaches, and tools that can help us to get out of this death by boredom trap. In doing so I want to explore some of the things that i have found to work. Also to get insights from other inhabitants and fellow travellers of trainingzone who may have found the holy grail of training effectiveness.

I look forward to sharing this journey with some other fellow travellers.