Designing a learning process
Design a training program can be an arduous task. If you are not a subject matter expert in the topic, it is difficult to create a good training program while being forced to rely on someone else for the actual content. If you are a subject matter expert, you don't know enough about training protocol to design a good training program.
These dilemmas can easily be solved by designing a training process rather than designing a training program. Adult learning theory tells us that learners like to be part of the process; they like to have a say in how the training is delivered and what content they are going to learn. It sounds impossible to be able to turn over the methodology of the class to the students who make up the class-but it's actually a great way to design meaningful training for your learners.
Case in point:
A group of salesmen were brought together for an all-day training class. One of the topics to be addressed was overcoming objections. Since this was a highly skilled group of salespeople a generic review of how to overcome objections was not going to fit the bill. And the person designing the training did not know enough about sales or the particular product is being sold to create a meaningful learning opportunity.
The solution: Have the participants design the content themselves. Here is the process that was designed in order to enable this outstanding learning activity -
The group was divided into three teams: A, B, C
Each team was given 10 minutes to brainstorm a list of five of the hardest objections they had encountered during their sales career, with this product.
Team A was instructed to pose one objection to team B.
Team B was given one minute to come up with an excellent response.
Team C was given the opportunity to challenge that response and provide a better response, if possible.
Team A was allowed to determine which response was the best and the winning team received one point.
The process was then repeated with team B posing one objection to team C and team A being given the opportunity to outperform team C.
The activity continued, round robin style, until all objections had been posed and responded to. The team with the highest number of points (determined by their peers, who awarded the points) was declared the winner and given coffee mugs with the company logo.
This activity took nearly an hour to conduct in the classroom and received rave reviews from the participants despite the fact that neither the training designer nor the training facilitator had enough information about the product or the sales process for this organization to deliver a quality training outcome. The participants themselves created the content and had a fabulous learning outcome because of a well-designed training process.