A while ago, Ally was inspired by a YouTube video and wrote a post about flexible training design. In the comments section, Annabel posted her experience of inspiring her learners through telling a personal story and has agreed to elaborate her thoughts here…

Thanks Annabel!

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A Goal without a Plan is just a wish

In the Past I’ve struggled to find an engaging way to train managers on writing business objectives. Some feedback I got was that the learners knew all about writing S.M.A.R.T. objectives and that was the problem.

They spent so long crafting perfectly worded objectives, crammed with unintelligible business lingo, that they didn’t have time to talk to their teams or get their views.

Their teams also didn’t understand what the objective meant and by the time it had been written, the world had moved on and it wasn’t relevant or timely! The other barrier was that the objective was just a sentence on a piece of paper, it had no plan of how to achieve it.

It occurred to me that it was the process of writing perfect business objectives that was getting in the way so I tried an experiment.:

• I asked a group of learners to forget about work for a moment and focus on a goal they had outside of work.
• It might be to paint the spare bedroom or loose 2 stone.
• Then I asked them to list out all the steps they would need to reach their goal, along with timescales.

I shared a recent personal goal of mine

To restore my 1950’s military jeep from a pile of rust to a prize winning vehicle with an MOT in 7 months.

I shared the fact that I had a measurable goal- to get the jeep to pass an MOT in August 2009

I wrote down all the individual jobs I needed to do, with time scales.

I did one thing towards my goal every single day. Some days I’d spend a few minutes taking old paint off a bolt, some days I’d work for hours making a new wiring harness for the lights.

I reviewed the steps each week to check my progress – to give myself a pat on the back when I was on target and a kick up the behind when I wasn’t.

The group then repeated the exercise thinking about a goal they needed to achieve at work.

In 10 minutes they had all written an understandable objective with a timescale and a list of actions that they needed to do to complete their goal.

Because they’d only spent 10 minutes they were all open to changing the wording of the objective too, something they admitted they were loath to do usually.

The group thought this was a great practical way of writing their own objectives and also getting their teams to write objectives too.

They also had a plan of how to paint the spare bedroom and drop a dress size!

Can’t be bad in a 30 minute session!

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Annabel is a Training Advisor in UK Local Government and stumbled into training 15 years ago. She has loved it ever since.  She loves watching learners get the lightbulb moment and is still surprised at peoples capacity to learn, change and overcome seemingly impossible obstacles.

Outside of work Annabel restores old vehicles, plays the guitar very loudly and very badly and loves life.

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