Training Reconn - Capturing What Matters

In a lot of environments, corporate training is like the city fire department. When the organization realizes there’s an emergency, like invoices routinely being inaccurate, equipment being mis-operated, sales not being made, etc, training whirls to the scene. Instruction is designed and classes are taught. And the transfer of knowledge is validated.

Over time, fire departments expanded their functions - going beyond mere extinguishing. Pro-active prevention is now a staple aspect of most fire departments. Pro-active action leads to less fire emergencies, findings being rolled-up to city management and product developers thereby influencing change, and fire departments educating citizens on best practices and behaviors.

So what if corporate training operated in the same way – pro-active training? Sure training would be there for the emergencies and planned training events like always. But training could be there in a more constant way as well, not just reacting to problems but sniffing them out.

Management gets a lot of credit for identifying problems and more so for identifying the causes of problems. But problems are sneaky and stealthy. And a lot of times they live in the heads of workers well before management detects them. So how could training become more of a pro-active force?

If you hook a hot network cable to a computer’s network card, the active network will constantly poll the card to assess the card’s status. Is it still there or not?  In a pro-active model, training could do much the same – performing something like a performance reconnaissance mission among the workforce.

This recon-ning would initiate with no assumptions about anything being wrong or broken within the organization. In this activity, training would be polling the workforce, at all levels of the organization, for their insights and assessments about the tasks, tools, and processes that impact corporate performance.

The feedback would be analyzed for trends and illuminations on matters that could be the tellings of burgeoning issues. This isn’t a reformed gap analysis. Because that would imply that we know where we are and where we need to be. And we just need to figure out how to fill in the middle. This reconnaissance would know no start, middle, or end.

Its objective would be to ask intelligently designed questions that gain from workers (all workers) what they think works well and the things that work not so well regarding the tasks, tools, and processes that impact their work. While there are numerous predictive analytics and statistical models that can predict friction points and even behaviors, this type of surveying could  work to gain insight into workforces’ thoughts and sentiments.