Team Tomorrow
According to the World Economic Forum’s most recent Future of Jobs Report (Oct. 2020), a large swath of today’s jobs will be obsolete by 2025.
2025 folks!
If someone told you today that the stock market was going to crash in three years, or that your car was going to breakdown and require thousands of dollars in repairs in three years – would you do something about the situation today, or would you just wait to see if it happens, with the hope that you’ll “figure it out then.”
Too many organizations are operating with the latter strategy (although it can hardly be called a strategy).
If you’re ready to be proactive - here’s one way to be prepared.
Team Tomorrow
Team Tomorrow is made up of a “special” group of individuals in your organization who can help to define the future and what it will take to get there.
The first group to include are your boomers. Boomers are just on the cusp of retiring and right now they hold the most knowledge in your organization. They are good prognosticators because they’ve seen and weathered many ups and downs and have an historical perspective on the organization.
It’s important to capture what they know and the wisdom of their years.
Note: None of the individuals necessarily need to be leaders in the company. In fact, it might be more useful if they are not. People who are not currently leading and strategizing don’t have preconceived notions of the direction of the company.
Team Tomorrow
The rest of your selected group should be made up of individuals of all types
· Different departments/ specialties
· Different age ranges
· Different experiences and exposures to other industries in their prior employment
A great idea is to ask people to apply to Team Tomorrow, with a short application and interview process. They should identify what unique perspective they bring to the discussion and provide at least one “vision” for the future.
You don’t want more than 12 individuals on the team so that team process doesn’t get bogged down, BUT consider swapping out team members every six months or so to keep new ideas flowing. (Suggestion, every six months 3 people rotate off the team and three new people join.)
The Process
The Team Tomorrow process includes three distinct conversations/brainstorming sessions:
1. What is happening in the world / in our industry that may affect us? How can we capitalize on that so that it’s an asset? For instance, the use of robotics and artificial intelligence is a conversation that every organization should be having right now. Computers changed the way most work was done 30 years ago and digitization/robotics/AI is in the midst of doing that again. You don’t want to be playing catch-up. (You need to come at this “what is happening” conversation from many angles: personnel, productivity, government regulations, etc.)
2. The second conversation to have is, What are our competitors doing? You cannot stay in your own bubble and think that you will survive the future. Your organization should constantly be taking the pulse of its competitors to learn from their successes as well as missteps.
3. The final conversation is Who (or what) is complementary to us? In business we’ve been taught to be wary of the competition, but we haven’t been taught to look for alliances with complementary companies. Complementary industries or organizations create synergy and greater outcomes. Why did Microsoft recently buy Activision Blizzard? They are vaguely in the same industry in that people have their hands on a keyboard/device but there must be a greater synergy that hasn’t been revealed yet. This conversation is aided by the team members who have other-industry experience.
Action
The final course of action is to create a vision for the organization 5, 10, and 15 years down the road.
An activity that is often used in coaching is: Picture that you / your organization has won an award ten years from now. What is it for? What does the headline of the WSJ article about you herald? This headline is something tangible that gives the vision substance and helps your employees to know what you are working toward.
Planning for the future is not a one-time event.
You’ll want the Team Tomorrow meetings to continue monthly and to be constantly scanning the horizon for opportunities for excellence both internally and in terms of serving the ever-evolving desires of customers. This is one of the reasons that iPhones have such loyal fans – the folks at Apple keep re-envisioning the future and presenting it to us.
As you are constantly cycling new members and new ideas through Team Tomorrow, you’ll find your organization becomes resilient and forward thinking… making it future-proof.
Pivot, Pivot, Pirouette
The Training Doctor is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year!
We were founded in June of 1991, during a recession (the best time to start a business it turns out); and through the decades, as you might imagine, we’ve had to pivot a few times to keep up with industry changes and trends.
We thought we’d share a peek into our time capsule.
At our start, we weren’t even called The Training Doctor – at first we were named Business Visions Consultants or BVC for short (dreams of IBM dancing in our heads). Why did we change our name? You try to say either of those things (the full company name or the abbreviation) when answering the phone. They are both completely unintelligible.
PIVOT
Also at our start, we were focused on contract facilitation for various organizations in the Northeast such as school systems, insurance companies, casinos, and state agencies. After four years in business and one particularly grueling, year-long, facilitation gig teaching supervisory skills using a million-dollar curriculum our client had purchased from a well-known leadership development company who shall go unnamed because it was sooo b a d (suffice it to say, they are no longer in business), we commenced our FIRST PIVOT and decided that there were a lot of great facilitators around but NOT a lot of great training designers and we would be better suited to focusing solely on instructional design.
For the next 20 years our sole offering was to design custom curriculums for our clients and hand it back to them for delivery. This was typically because the work our clients did was either very technical or proprietary, and they needed something custom designed for them. Since our expertise is in how adults learn, and particularly how adults in the workplace learn (where behavior change is the expected outcome), we had the pleasure of working in all sorts of industries and for companies you have never heard of like a cheese processing plant in New Jersey, a startup medical company founded by one of the original founders of WebMD in Atlanta,
a 15-store kitchen wares retailer in Connecticut (think Williams Sonoma, but on a much smaller scale) that was doubling its number of retail outlets in one year, the precursor to VMware in Massachusetts, a twenty-year-old, UK-based, global insurance broker that had never had a training department before, and many, many more. If you are interested, you can go to our home page and see some of the logos of the more recognizable companies.
During this time we crisscrossed the US speaking at many industry conferences which were focused on training, adult learning, human resources, and organizational development, helping others to learn how to take knowledge from SME’s heads and turn it into a curriculum, how to design fair and legally valid tests administered post-training, and how to ensure you are designing a training program that actually gets at the root of a performance problem, not just a symptom. Additionally, we had two books published – how to be a successful one-person training department since many of our clients were just that, and how to design a blended learning approach to workplace training.
PIVOT
It was also during this time that we completed our SECOND PIVOT into Virtual Instructor Led Training, or vILT. While the focus on instructional design stayed true, the delivery mechanism changed. Throughout the nineties and first few years of this century the only option was classroom-based training. But with the advent of the internet and computers at every desk, and the development of WebEx (which was the front-runner in synchronously delivered training, followed by many others), we saw the potential for global companies to embrace the use of vILT to cut costs and still provide high-quality training in a “classroom” environment.
From about 2002 to 2015 The Training Doctor specialized in designing virtual instructor-led training curriculums for many Fortune 500 organizations that had global footprints. This became the expertise we were most known for since designing engaging, interactive, online learning to a group of people who are all sitting alone at their desks is no easy feat. Especially when the end goal is to get those people to change their behavior as a result of participating.
Virtual Instructor-Led Training is the format that pulled together all our history and skills: facilitation, design, adult learning theory + radio and television training (because as hard as it is to design for vILT, it’s even harder to be the facilitator).
As an aside, you might be interested in learning about the pivot we DIDN’T make - which was NOT giving the time of day to eLearning which was all the rage in the late nineties. eLearning – in our opinion – is not effective for learners or clients, for a number of reasons: it’s largely self-study and we know that most people are not self-directed… there is no one to ask questions of… back in the 90’s and early 2000’s it was very linear and real-life is not linear, so it wasn’t teaching “real world”… the completion rates are abysmal… adults are collaborative learners and there is no collaboration with a computer… the cost and time to “program” are astronomical… and the maintenance to ensure content is up-to-date can be cumbersome or neglected. vILT overcomes all of these faults, which is why we embraced this form of learning via computer.
PIROUETTE
Our last pivot was more of a pirouette which occurred in 2015. We now focus solely on the design of leadership development to help organizations to develop leadership pipelines and bring their future leaders “up” from within. Throughout our 15+ years of designing custom curriculums via vILT two topics were consistent: sales and leadership. And what we saw large, well monied, reputable organizations doing in the realm of leadership was wrong, completely wrong. And we were PART OF THE PROBLEM.
You cannot teach someone to be a coach in a 2-hour coaching course with a breakout for roleplay. You cannot teach someone to be emotionally intelligent in a class. It’s impossible to learn to manage stakeholders if people aren’t out in the organization interacting with their stakeholders learning what their values and needs are.
Yes, there is a time and place for classroom (or eLearning) – such as when learning facts, underlying rules, and how-to, but leadership is a behavior and changing people’s behavior is an experiential process done over time and approached in many ways.
Now, in our 30th year, we are committed to forestalling the leadership development crisis that companies have fallen victim to over the last few decades. Our exclusive focus (and passion) is helping small to medium-sized organizations to create a leadership pipeline by having a development strategy that starts when an employee walks in the door. Some of our unique techniques include experiential learning, job visitations, mixed cohorts of learners, and other proven development strategies that you won’t find in “off the shelf” leadership development or a one-and-done course.
If you think we can assist your organization – please give us a call or you can download an overview of our process here.
The Training Doctor turns 30 this year!
We know – we don’t look a day over 29, right? 😂
Each month this year we’ll share a “flashback” to how we got started in the last century.
To start – we weren’t always called The Training Doctor. That name change occurred 21 years ago, at the start of 2000. For our first nine years of existence, our name was Business Visions Consultants, which was a mouthful to say when answering the phone (this was back in the days when we actually had people answering the phone and routing calls!), so we always referred to ourselves as BVC.
Try saying that out loud. Notice a problem with it?
All the letters sound the same. B V C
Also not good on the phone.
(Amazingly, we were able to find our old logo a few days ago.)
Since a lot of our work at the time was “fixing sick training” (see our ebook here, if you have training that doesn’t work – we can help), one of our clients suggested The Training Doctor as a sort-of play on words:
A lot of clients would hire us to figure out why their training didn’t achieve the outcomes they expected (and to fix it for them) – hence the Doctor
Our abbreviation was now TD – which aligns with the field of Training and Development
And our company founder – Dr. Nanette Miner – has a doctor of education
Voila! The Training Doctor came into existence.
Interestingly, the name change has brought us a lot of business because it is so easy to remember.
And because it is so clever – it is now a registered trademark.