In a LinkedIn training group I frequent, I often see posts looking something like: "I'm holding a workshop on communications plz share your plans". Did I say a post? More like 'a heading without further content' is a more accurate description.
Nonetheless, the irony of demonstrating an inability to communicate effectively (no details of intended audience, session objectives, addressed problem) nor the utter cheek of soliciting complete strangers to perform design effort for them, posts like this occur quite frequently.
Early in my teacher training days, we countered the notion 'everyone believes they can teach because everyone has attended school' with 'everyone believes they can be a doctor because everyone has been ill sometime', addressing the widespread misconception that teaching is a simple task achievable by anyone. There are those that - after watching a one-hour TED talk - proclaim 'I can do that - talking and advancing a PowerPoint presentation for an hour on stage.. how hard can it be?'
I can only see the small tip of an iceberg sticking up from the water. How big can the iceberg be?
Let's imagine we're at a theatre performance, in which we see the lead actor portray their character so well for an hour that an enthralled audience bestow applause, admiration and adoration. Think you could do the same job as them? Prancing about on the boards, delivering lines? Dead simple, right? But wait... did you see the hours of rehearsals, all the practise and preparation to polish the performance so that the one hour real thing is delivered to perfection?
And did you think these thespians wrote all their own lines? No, this is a task allocated to teams of scriptwriters discussing, debating, penning, reviewing, re-editing, amending, trialling... and still tweaking lines during rehearsals when the delivery doesn't sound quite right. Hours are spent analysing minute details of every scene to ensure that actors have the right content.
Did these scriptwriters think that if they put together conversations between people, the story would build itself? No, this responsibility lay with the author, someone who had a story to tell, a journey to share with us: a vision presented to the scriptwriters who would then transform that tale into conversations and actions portrayed on the stage.
Did this author begin writing a story then let it automatically unfold before their eyes? No, they had a number of considerations: what is the moral of the story? Who would it appeal to? What would the characters' motivations be, how would their actions shape the story? What twists and turns would feature in the story, challenges and barriers that give the not-easily-gained end goal some value?
Sometimes we see only the finished product, that tip of the iceberg, and are blissfully ignorant of what exists below the waterline. Measure effort not in the one hour of the final showpiece, but by all the work that came before it in making that brief contact time a success. Thus, organisations balk at the cost of a training day because they only see what occurs in front of the stage curtain when it's necessary to see the investment hidden below the surface.
At Quanta, we trainers work hard at creating a well-crafted workshop or programme with a polished delivery, but the trick is in doing it right and assessing the needs of the audience.
In the next part of 'Training Done Well', I'll address how this can be done. Find out more about customising a course for your own organisation.
Dave Smith - Technical IT trainer at Quanta