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Lies About Learning: Leading Executives Separate Truth from Fiction In a $100 Billion Industry ReviewOne of my friends, a client and former colleague, Larry Israelite, has written a book that I wish I had written. Lies About Learning: Leading Executives Separate Truth from Fiction In a $100 Billion Industry exposes many of the lies - "conventional wisdom, self-serving rumors, unfounded insinuations" - that learning professionals and executives must interpret from vendors, industry pundits, training conference presentations, and learning marketers as they try to make basic decisions about the strategies and tactics of corporate learning.
Lies About Learning features 11 chapters written by experts in the field of training and consulting. Chapter titles include:
*Lies about Chief Learning Officers (by Len Sherman)
*Lies about Learners (by Murry Christensen)
*Lies about the Design of Learning (by Melinda Jackson)
*Lies about Consultants and Vendors (by Charlene Zeiberg
*Lies about E-Learning (by Elliott Masie)
If you're a veteran of the chapter topic, you'll recognize the half-truths, gambits, falsehoods, pronouncements, misleading proclamations, and lies and will have a good laugh. If you're new to training, training management, e-learning technology, or working with training vendors (like my company, Entelechy!), the chapters will provide you with honest, frank insights that could prove valuable.
Setting the tone early, Larry writes in the preface, "The road we in the learning profession travel is littered with expensive failed experiments, unfulfilled promises, unachieved goals, and frustrating disappointments."
While this sounds like a rather pessimistic view of the training world (and Larry himself would classify himself as a cynic), I believe that the book and the opinions of its contributors begin to chisel away at the mountain of hype and exaggeration that surround corporate learning. Some of this comes from my previous life as a training consumer - Sales Training Manager for a large Fortune 100 company. Before starting my company, I - like Larry and many of you - was on the receiving end of the promises of training vendors whose products and services "virtually guaranteed" to solve world hunger, not to mention [fill in your performance issue: increase sales, reduce turnover, improve customer satisfaction, etc.]. Since starting my training company, Entelechy, 13 years ago, I've competed with other training vendors - and the sometimes unbelievable promises they make to clients.
Larry is kind. He states:
"Although I don't think that most people deliberately attempt to deceive, I think there is rampant over-optimism about the new products, tools, and technologies that we hear about every single day. When something works in one situation, learning professionals desperately want to believe it will work in all situations. When a success is achieved with one population, success is expected with all populations. When a new product possesses technical capabilities that could lead to a desirable result, trainers accept without evidence that the result will be achieved. And, in all of these cases, it is too easy to commit resources, promise results, and in other ways put personal and organizational credibility on the line."
I might not have been so kind. My company has been called in to repair the damage caused by training companies who over-promise and under-deliver. And we all pay the price; as an industry, a corporate function, as an individual within the training profession, every time one of us "lies," we all lose credibility.
Larry asks, "Why do learning professionals do this?" and answers his own question:
"Everyone is on a quest for the holy grail of learning - the one product, process, program, or promise that will allow them to dramatically improve the quantity, quality, and impact of learning in their respective organizations and to do this faster and cheaper than ever before. Because of this intense desire, learning professionals are willing to believe almost anything; they willingly, even enthusiastically, fall victim to some or all of the lies about learning."
Larry and I used to work for Digital Equipment Corporation eons ago. It was there that I learned some of the truths of training - truths about learners, about trainers, about evaluation, about job performance, about technology. I vowed that, if I ever started a training company myself, I would build the company on the following truths and principles:
*Generic training produces generic results. While off-the-shelf training may be useful for those individuals motivated to translate the skills and techniques into skills and techniques that work for THEM in THEIR jobs, only training that has been customized can truly achieve effective, sustainable performance changes for the typical corporate trainee.
*There are core skills to most jobs; deviating from these fundamentals produces the bulk of performance issues. Sales is sales, customer service is customer service, management is management, training is training.
While every single client has insisted that their problem is unique, they are only partially correct: the SKILLS required to (for example) position a product are quite universal; the TECHNIQUES for positioning Company ABC's TopLine Widget to CFOs in the financial services industry IS unique.
And it's this level of training customization that is required for many people to recognize the skill and internalize it through practice and feedback. Most people have - or are aware of - the general skills required to perform their work. What they're often missing is the direct application of the skill to THIS particular customer or in THIS unique situation.
*Effective training is 90% needs assessment and design. Truly understanding the business goals, the performance required to achieve the business goals, and the learning activities that will cement those skills and techniques requires expertise and effort. There are few shortcuts on the road to effective training.
*Effective training is 90% follow-up. The fact is that many of the skills and much of the knowledge addressed in training could be handled by the trainee's manager or supervisor. And the reality is that much of what is learned in a training class is unlearned on the job when there is no follow-up or reinforcement by the manager. Effective training works when the trainee's superiors are the key reinforcers of learning.
While I don't receive anything from plugging Larry's book (the profits of Lies About Learning go to a charity), I DO have a less-than-altruistic reason for encouraging you to read the book: you will understand why I started Entelechy 14 years ago and the philosophy that underscores how we continue to approach training and performance to this day.
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