Any training based on mis-diagnosis is destined to fail, says Paul Kearns. It doesn't matter how professional the trainer is, they will be dealing with the wrong issues, for the wrong reasons, with the wrong people.
If I could bring this whole series down to one learning point – a single, role-defining distinction between 20th Century trainers and 21st Century learning professionals - it would be the infinitely superior diagnostic ability of the latter: a learning professional will always ensure their diagnostic is as accurate as possible.
Trainers who do not get involved in diagnosis just do whatever the customer wants and excuse themselves by arguing that even if training is not doing any good it won't usually do any harm. This is the sort of simplistic logic - training is good for you! – that is manifest in most government driven initiatives, including Investors in People and Train to Gain, and it's time this nonsense was exposed for what it is.
"Trainers who do not get involved in diagnosis just do whatever the customer wants and excuse themselves by arguing that even if training is not doing any good it won't usually do any harm. This is the sort of simplistic logic - training is good for you! – that is manifest in most government driven initiatives."Imagine walking into your doctor's surgery and, before you even have a chance to sit down, your GP hands you a prescription for a course of antibiotics, on the assumption that regardless of your ailment these are bound to have some benefit. Far fetched? Apparently not - the latest NICE guidance (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, July 2008) "doctors to tell patients suffering from respiratory infections that they do not need antibiotics... Patients should be reassured that antibiotics will 'make little difference to symptoms and may have side-effects'".
For many GP's (one estimate says up to 80% of common viral infections are still treated with antibiotics which are inappropriate) this flies in the face of their Hippocratic oath and has contributed to the increasing immunity of superbugs to antibiotics. Presumably they justify it to themselves on the basis that the patient at least goes away feeling they have received treatment.
The parallel here with a disinterested management view of training is obvious and just as worrying. A doctor will describe a patient as 'presenting with symptoms' and so too would a learning professional. The symptoms in an organisational context though are under-performance, inefficiency, a lack of innovation, low sales and inferior customer service. The only difference is that the 'prescription' for training is pre-written by a manager who wants a course - and all they want their training manager to do is toddle off to the 'pharmacy' and prepare it for them. It was the failure of the average 20th Century trainer to ask even the most obvious diagnostic questions - like why are we doing this? - that has created a 'superbug' we call the 'course attender', a strain now so virulent that it is resistant to any alternative treatment.
We should not lay the blame for this just at the door of line managers though because often the mis-diagnosis (or complete absence of any diagnostic) comes from training managers themselves or organisation development 'experts' who bring with them a 'medicine cabinet' full of preparations. The result is always a programme (e.g. leadership) without anyone ever asking what exactly ails the business. All it takes to remedy this situation though is a simple, yet highly focused, diagnostic question – 'if we organise this learning activity where might we expect to notice a difference in business performance?'
Any training based on mis-diagnosis is destined to fail. It doesn't matter how good a presenter the trainer is, or how professionally they have prepared the programme, they will be dealing with the wrong issues for the wrong reasons with the wrong people. Also, as with any doctor's patient, individual managers might be able to articulate their own symptoms (e.g., we keep getting lots of customer complaints) but learning professionals will never rely entirely on self-diagnosis. Learning diagnostics are a major skill set for any learning professional and it is precisely this skill that puts them on a par with any other, highly skilled profession.
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Paul Kearns specialises in measuring the value of the human contribution to organisational success and teaches real evaluation around the world. He is the author of the CIPD's best selling 'Evaluating the ROI from Learning' and has campaigned for many years to raise professional standards.
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This feature first appeared on site in September 2008
