How to make sure you don’t get invited back

This weeks guest post is from Simon Bostock. He’s has been helping people and organisations to learn for twenty years. His main interests are in ‘experiential’ learning through play, projects and Knowledge Management.

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My uncle can barely use a computer. He has an old and very-expensive-at-the-time computer which he uses to play golf. But he taught me how to programme computers 30 years ago and he’s the best teacher I’ve ever had.

My uncle was in the Air Force. One of the things he did was to give people ‘aptitude’ tests. Which is where you give people a rope, a bar of soap and a broken ladder and ask them to cross the mess hall without touching the ground – or something. It was all very confusing as a child and totally different from the kind of tests that I was used to. I get it now, though.

Some problems are ‘unbounded’. This doesn’t mean that they are infinite, necessarily. But they’re not easily defined. You can’t easily lay them out as a set of learning objectives, for example. The stuff that people in the Air Force do definitely falls into the ‘unbounded’ category – anything can and does happen. (The phrase ‘unk-unks‘, or ‘unknown unknowns’ comes from the aerospace industry.) So does learning to programme a computer.

My uncle sat next to me every evening for a week and all day at the weekends. Clueless, he asked naive questions. Patient, he told me to stop and take a break when I was tired or stuck. Firm, he persuaded me to stop stopping and make a breakthrough when I was tired or stuck. Without him there’s no way I would have learned much at all.

It was his idea to make a Pac-Man game. This was typical of his cluelessness about all things computer. I knew with the certainty of a twelve-year-old this simply wasn’t possible for a twelve-year-old to do.

A week later, we had one. It had no ghosts (they were much too complicated) and I couldn’t stop my Pac-Man from eating the maze. So we made Pac-Man into a mower and changed the game. Instead of eating the dots you had to ‘mow the maze’ without cutting the ‘hedge’.

At work, more situations are unbounded than we care to admit. Or, at any rate, more than the average consultant or trainer is prepared to admit. Experts are paid to answer questions and so they do. Why would you pay somebody to tell you, with pursed lips, “Ooh, it’s complicated” (Unless they’re a plumber or a car mechanic.)?

Experts want to be needed and to be invited back.

My teams of “Customer Advisors” were in unbounded territory. On paper, their problem was clearly defined. There were a finite number of things they had to know inside and out. These things were even written down.

But it wasn’t their job to know this stuff – the ‘bounded’ area. They had to explain this information. Things quickly become ‘unbounded’ when you work with people. People are boundlessly creative when it comes to having problems, tirelessly striving to misunderstand the simplest piece of advice.

I put it to the advisors:

You shouldn’t just be telling these people the answer to their problems. You should be teaching them how to solve their problems so they don’t come back to you again (at least not with the same problem). You should be helping these people to do your job better than you do.

They knew with the certainty of experienced advisors that this wasn’t possible for advisors to do.

I ran an intensive three-hour Training the Trainer course, more to get a shared vocabulary than anything else. Then I sat with groups of advisors as they planned learning workshops for colleagues and customers on their various specialist subjects. I gave them breaks when they were tired . . . etc, etc, yes, just like my uncle.

The groups fought over content for their learning workshops, arguing over which bits of information were most crucial. They transformed key points into simple, memorable – even human – messages.

They learned to hide their expertise and become better communicators.

Towards the end of the Pac-Man project, I became irritated with my uncle. At a certain point, his questions became more draining than inspiring. And I’m ashamed to say that I probably let him know a little too abruptly.

The advisors were much more subtle. But I hope they won’t be asking me back.

What are you doing to make yourself dispensable?

The ultimate goal of learning activities is to make sure you’re not needed any more. Smart customers should be looking for more than a ‘blip’ in performance levels, they want to see sustained improvement.

Writing learning objectives is hard no matter how long you’ve been doing it:

• It’s hard because it’s always tempting to follow the training textbooks and work to something spuriously concrete.
• It’s hard because you sometimes only discover what they are after you’ve started.

And if it’s hard for trainers, it’s even harder for customers. In order to make yourself dispensable, it’s sometimes necessary to persuade customers that they’re wrong.

Learning has to include risk, improvisation, conversation and discovery if it’s to work to ‘unbounded’ objectives. And if it’s not about the unbounded, you’re probably better off leaving it to eLearning packages and managers.

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Simon has been helping people and organisations to learn for twenty years. His main interests are in ‘experiential’ learning through play, projects and Knowledge Management.

Simon Bostock blogs at Bunchberry & Fern about practical tips for learning, at Infinitely Orthogonal about ‘little’ Knowledge Management and, of course, you should follow him on Twitter.

pacman ghost image from doodlepress.co.uk
mown grass image by johnthurm
rubiks cube image by Steve Rhodes

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