Making Training Transferable: Or, How Sheep Are Not Like Spreadsheets
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back to the last training course you signed up for that was aimed at
changing the culture of your work environment, such as Agile, Lean or
Scrum: was the learning you were asked to do based around imaginary, or
overly simplified scenarios? Most training courses that aim to introduce
cultural change focus on creating hypothetical situations and showing
you new ways to work within them, using the techniques the course is
trying to introduce. In the interests of doing this, the trainer might
tell you that, for the next hour, you’re to think like a sheep farmer,
for instance, and make decisions as a sheep farmer that will help you to
shear your sheep better. Unfortunately, a scenario of that kind is
going to be both too simple and too far from your own experience to be
much help.
Thinking Like A Sheep Farmer
Could you slip yourself into the shoes of the sheep farmer, or whatever unfamiliar job role the trainer asked you to take charge of? Were you transported to the sights and smells of the sheep pen and immediately aware of all the specific challenges your rubber boot-wearing counterpart would be up against that day? Probably not, especially if your day job doesn’t involve shears and sheepdogs.
It’s unfeasible to ask someone to imagine their way into a completely unfamiliar situation and extrapolate from its specifics. With neither previous knowledge nor a vested interest in the outcome, why would we care?
To a sheep farmer, those questions would be absolutely fundamental, and his or her interest would immediately be piqued. Here, would think the sheep farmer, is someone who’s going to help me breed happy, healthy lambs to skip across my fields. To the sheep farmer, this training example is the most helpful it could possibly be, because it relates directly to his or her experience. But, to the rest of us, in our varied and wide-ranging occupations, it’s not quite so easy to identify with – and that’s a difficult challenge for a trainer: how do you find a hypothetical scenario that’s going to suit everyone in the room?
The answer is: you can’t. It’s impossible to create a scenario that will be immediately relevant to the person you’re trying to teach, unless you use their own, personal scenario. The key to making lasting changes to how you approach your work is to address real problems that are affecting you, in your working life, right this minute. Unless you’re a sheep farmer, bypass the sheep.
Taking the Knowledge Away
In this example, everyone but the sheep farmer would likely come away from the training session feeling that, though they understood the concepts quite well during the course, they have no idea how to apply them in their actual working environments. It is a simple fact of nature and evolution that sheep are not the same as spreadsheets.
Rooting
out real problems that are at that very moment affecting your working
environment, and guiding you to solve those problems using a different
way of thinking, is mutually beneficial. By doing so, not only does the
trainer have an effective way to teach you to see and understand how to
apply the new way of working, you get immediate value to your work at
the same time.
The Best Learning is by Doing
Whether
because of time constraints or for ease of understanding, the
hypothetical scenario is likely to be as simplified as possible, and
that poses another important problem: how do you then translate this new
way of working from a simple, classroom example to our complicated,
interwoven, ever-changing working lives?
The
key to taking theoretical knowledge and making it useful in your
context is to find ways to apply what you’ve learned as soon as possible
to your real world environment. For instance, most of what Agile, Lean
and Scrum trainers teach can sound very simplistic at first, causing
people to think, “Oh, yeah, that’ll be easy to do.” That same simplistic
appearance might conversely make people think, “That’s all fine and
good in this simple scenario, but it’ll never work in my complex
environment.”
Both sentiments are born of trying to understand how the new knowledge applies by thinking about it instead of doing
it. The best way to understand these new ideas and develop the
associated new skills is by applying them to your work. Unless the
trainer then shows you how the concept applies to you, personally, and
the work you’re doing right now, it might not click into place for you.
When
you’re seeking cultural change such as Agile, Lean, Scrum or Kanban
training, and the associated shifts of mindset, applying new ways of
working one at a time, with the support and guidance of an expert, is
what helps make those changes stick. Doing things, one at a time, to
improve your work experience makes training a rewarding experience from
start to finish.
So, Can You Make the Most of Training You’ve Already Had?
“You’re
right,” you might be thinking. “I’ve had training like that and I’ve
already forgotten everything I was taught, because it didn’t work for me
when I went back to my desk. I took down pages of notes, but it seemed
like way too much to do all at once. Any tips?”
Actually,
yes. It’s never too late to make use of the training you’ve already
had, even if you couldn’t see how to make it work in your own context at
the time. We strongly recommend applying the principle of “one thing at
a time”:
Step 1: Go back to your notes.
Identify
something you remember from the training that you think has potential
to address one of the issues or problems you’re facing right now, or
could improve the way you do a certain element of your work.
For example: Let’s say you think you could use One Piece Flow
to streamline the process of adding inventory to your store. One Piece
Flow is a way of working in which you see one thing through to
completion, rather than perform one stage at a time for every item in a
batch (for example: write, address, stamp and post one letter rather
than write 20 letters, then address 20 letters, then stamp 20 letters,
then post them all).
Photo courtesy of At The Twisted Pine Gallery, Wyoming USA
Step
2: Come up with some criteria you feel would indicate an improvement in
that problem area after using the new technique or idea.
For
example: Adding inventory is a confusing process because it involves
applying number codes to every item you want to set out for sale. By the
time you get to the final stage, where you enter those codes into your
database, you’ve invariably forgotten which code applies to which item
and have to keep going back and forth to check. By using One Piece Flow,
you could give the item a code, tag it, place it in the store and then
enter it into the database and you would, by doing so, get rid of the
problem of forgetting codes, because you wouldn’t have to keep more than
one in your head at a time.
Step 3: Start applying that technique to your work.
Periodically
check against the criteria you decided on to see how well your new
technique is doing to make the improvements you wanted. Make adjustments
as necessary.
For
example: You’re finding that you’re still, by the time you get to the
database stage, forgetting the code, so you decide to switch up the
order you do things in: apply the code, add the tag, then enter it into
the database before
placing the item on the shop floor. That way, the item is right next to
you when you’re working in the database, code and all. Checking back
later, you realise that you have finally managed to get rid of the
forgetting problem - hurray!
Step 4: Move on to the next piece of learning that you think will help you out.
It
doesn’t necessarily have to be a single thing at a time that you
implement - that may not be practical - but the point of the principle
is to not take on too much change at once. The one-thing-at-time
approach keeps you focused and gives you time for the new technique
you’re adopting to sink in. You should find that, the next time you spot
a problem, you’ll find it easier to also spot how that new technique
might help you solve it.
It
might not be as easy to make use of new techniques if you weren’t shown
how during the training session, but don’t let that stop you. Improving
the way you work is worth the effort if, in the end, it’s going to make
your life easier!
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