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Evaluating Training Effectivenes

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    An Olympics confession, Improving Performance and the Power of Kaizen

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Aug 21,2012

     It's time to confess. July 2005,  when we learned we would be the hosts of the 2012 Olympic Games, I wasn't that fussed. I wasn't anti. But not being much of a sports fan, the excitement mostly passed me by.

    Little did I think, 7 years later,  I would be cheering Team GB along and delighting in the fantastic achievements of the winners and empathising so much with the losers.

    In case you're wondering, I haven't suddenly become a devoted sports fan, but I couldn't help being swept up by the interest we all have in seeing truly remarkable individuals succeed. And the L&D bit of my brain couldn't help be fascinated by how this group of people had achieved so much stunning success.

    Actually, my interest started a couple of weeks before the Olympics with Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour de France. (Another confession - I'd never heard of the bloke until about a week before the Tour de France started).

    In the deluge of press coverage following the competition, we started to get some insights into how that fantastic win came about.

    Several things grabbed my attention. First, when Wiggo and team announced their ambition, most people thought they were bonkers. Second, not only have they proved those doubters wrong, they have done so far sooner than even they had imagined they could. Finally, 2011 had been a truly abysmal year for them and anybody looking on from the outside would probably have laughed even louder at the possibility of them achieving their stated ambition.

    So what changed? What turned things around so rapidly and so decisively?

    I can't claim to have the absolute scoop on all this, but here's what I gleaned from watching interviews on TV and reading articles in the press.

    That truly abysmal year I just mentioned was the catalyst for change and, ultimately, success. It was reaching a terrible, crushing low in their performance that forced the team to step back, re-asses and re-think their entire approach.

    They went against conventional wisdom. From what I can understand, the conventional wisdom in the cycling world is that you get better by being in lots of competitions. That seems intuitive doesn't it?  Practice makes perfect, after all.

    They decided to go for the counter-intuitive. Cut back on the number of competitions and focus instead on training and preparation for competitions they were going to enter.

    They completely re-engineered their approach to training and preparation. This involved breaking the entire process down, examining every aspect in detail and squeezing performance improvements out of every last bit of it.

    This, it turns out, is the secret of Team GB's success, too.  They refer to it as 'the science of marginal gains'. Dave Brailsford sums it up nicely in a recent BBC interview:

    "The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together. There's fitness and conditioning, of course, but there are other things that might seem on the periphery, like sleeping in the right position, having the same pillow when you are away and training in different places. They're tiny things but if you clump them together it makes a big difference."

    The Japanese were the pioneers of something very similar in the world of business  - you may have heard of  kaizen. It's the 'continuous improvement of working practices'.

    Two things strike me about all this. First, most employees in most organisation are taught to fear failure in their day-to-day work almost as much as they fear receiving a redundancy notice. In fact, for many, the two are inextricably linked. If the first happens, the second will almost certainly follow.

    Yet, as the example of team Wiggo shows, failure is sometimes the most powerful motivator for subsequent success. Nobody wants or sets out to fail. It feels awful when it happens and it can be soul destroying. And I'm certainly not suggesting organisations should go around encouraging their employees to fail.

    But, I'd bet a fairly large sum of money that organisations which take a grown-up view of failure are better places to work and, overall, end up being more successful.

    Second, because employees fear failure so profoundly, most follow conventional solutions. So in many organisations, everyone just chugs along in quiet desperation. Everyone knows it could be so much better, but who's going to rock the boat and suggest outrageously unconventional change? Only a brave soul, but oh boy, the ones who do are likely to reap the benefits.
    Topics: Instructional Design Learning Psychology Measurement and evaluation
    1 min read

    Designing Training Programmes: What About Learner Self Awareness?

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Jul 18,2011

    When we are designing training programmes, how much should we consider learners' self-awareness of their learning preferences?

    At the risk of doing a Donald Rumsfeld (he of the 'known unknowns'), one of the things that I find fascinating about learning and knowledge transfer is whether we know what we know.

    In other words, how much are we really able to assess our own learning needs and preferences?

    On this topic, I offer you a fascinating piece of research carried out by a group of people with the snappy surnames of Schnackenberg, Sullivan, Leader and Jones.

    In their research, a group of learners taking an e-learning course, were given a survey about their preferences for the amount of practice they do when learning - either high or low.

    The learners were then assigned to two different e-learning courses one with a high level of practice, the other with minimal practice.

    Half the learners were given the version of the course that matched their preference, the other half were deliberately mismatched.

    I've written previously about the significance of practice activities in learning, so you may not be surprised to discover that regardless of their preference, those who took the version of the course with more practice scored significantly higher on a post-course test than those who had taken the version with minimal practice.

    First of all, this highlights the importance of practice activities in learning. But the results are important for another reason. They chime with quite a bit of other research that points to a frequent mismatch between what we think we want as learners and what actually produces results.

    In other words, our perceived preferences about how we like to learn are not always good indicators of the way we actually need to learn.

    If you are involved with designing training programmes and what to learn more about instructional design (or get help with creating a course) take a look at our instructional design programme.

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design Learning Psychology
    2 min read

    Does Motivation Play a Role in Our Learning and Development

    By Pacific Blue on Wed, Jul 6,2011

    Is a successful learning experience purely about external factors or do our own internal beliefs and motivations play a part?

    We've all had good and bad learning experiences, so this is a fascinating question. How much is that success or failure purely down to external influences?

    If we go back to the 1930s, Thorndike's Law of Effect holds that a correct answer needs a response to reward the learner. A "Well done, that's the right answer", from the trainer helps strengthen the association between the question and the correct answer and increases the probability of a similar correct response the next time around.

    I think most people in the world of learning and development would broadly agree with this view. But this emphasises the external environment. What about if we also put an individual's beliefs into the centre of the picture. It's likely that we then have several other factors to take into account.

    1. Beliefs about yourself
    Do you believe you can succeed and acquire the knowledge and skills you are setting out to learn? This level of belief varies tremendously and is influenced by existing knowledge and experience. Go outside of familiar territories and domains and it is likely our self-belief and confidence will plummet.

    2. Beliefs about the learning content
    Is the content interesting? Genuine personal interest makes learners far more willing to engage with content - even when dull and boring. If personal interest is low or non-existent than we need to create situational interest. In other words, grab learners' attention and interest by making sure the learning content is well-crafted and engaging.

    3. Beliefs about the success or failure of learning
    Do learners believe the outcome they achieved was under or outside their control? Do they believe it was a poor trainer that caused them to fail or sheer good luck that they did well? Whether the outcome is positive or negative, research into something called attribution theory suggests a learner who believes an outcome was caused by factors outside their control, is far less likely to be motivated to succeed in the future.

    By contrast, a learner who attributes success or failure to their own effort (or lack of it) is far more likely to be productive and put in more effort next time around.

    This suggests it is hugely important to foster an environment that encourages learners to understand (and believe) that the success of learning outcomes is clearly within their control

    Of course, all of this is just scraping the surface of an immensely complex (and very interesting) area. But it's a good reminder that we shouldn't just focus on external factors (important as they are) when thinking about how to achieve successful learning.

      

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design Learning Psychology