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Archive for the ‘training’ Category

If Your Company Came with an Instruction Manual You Don’t Need “Strategy to Action in 10 Days”

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

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By William Seidman

Ever wish your company had come with an instruction manual? Michael McCauley and I have written a book, Advantage Media has published it, and we’re excited. You can buy  “Strategy to Action in 10 Days: Creating High Performance Organizations”  directly from us, in bookstores, or on Amazon. There’s a Kindle edition, too.

Join our Facebook page and come with us as we travel to promote our book.

Ron Nakamoto, CEO of Strategic Financial, has praise:  ”I recommend Strategy to Action in 10 Days to any person interested in creating a high performance organization. It clearly illustrates how to break from the status quo and create a truly sustainable change. It is as much a practical guide as it is a game changer.”                              

We’re as excited about our book as we are about the many people who are using it to create real, lasting, and positive change in their organizations.

Posted in best practices, business, captology, knowledge workers, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change, organizational culture, persuasive technology, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership, training, wisdom discovery, wisdom transfer | No Comments »

Experiential Learning and Conventional Learning: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us

Friday, December 11th, 2009

By William Seidman

I’m working with a company that is asking traditional instructional designers to develop experiential learning activities - which are different in conception, design, and actual practice from what these designers are used to doing. There’s an inherent struggle: it’s difficult to be learner-focused if you are sticking to traditional design.

In experiential learning, everything begins with the learner experience.

New ideas and new stimulation are useful only if they connect with the learners’ current abilities and ways of doing things - with who they are, right now.  A student isn’t a vessel into which the instructor pours knowledge.  In addition, the learning must have enough of the right types of repetition to be internalized.

Traditional instructional design is much more about telling people what they should know — and telling them very specifically what they will do — to learn something.

In my view, there’s an unspoken inherent mistrust of the learner in the process, and in any “teaching” in which the course designer and instructor are in charge.

The neuroscience of learning proves over and over again that experiential learning, in contrast, is all about providing learners with activities,  and trusting that they will learn the “right” lessons, and also trusting that they will continue to learn the right lessons often enough to produce long-term change.

The difference in perspective between a trusting and a not-trusting teaching method is where I’ve found great opportunities for learning, creativity, and growth.

Posted in best practices, getting change to "stick", neuroscience, organizational change, personal change, training | 1 Comment »

Training for Learning and Real-World Application

Monday, October 12th, 2009

By William Seidman

I’m working in two settings now where there’s a tension between traditional classroom instruction and experiential learning.

Most training organizations like to train, which means classrooms, instructors, and - sometimes -elearning.

Most people prefer to learn, and they learn better when they can immediately apply what they’ve learned.

The art of training is to make classroom content tie tightly to real experience.

The art of experiential learning is to ensure that the right content is learned.

The trainers often want to drive the program, but this really doesn’t work.

Experiential learning is more powerful and effective, though it absolutely needs formal classroom instruction for specific skill building

Most of the people we work with stop talking about training and start talking about “learning activities” that include many forms of experiential learning as well as classrooms and elearning.

This broader definition is a good idea - the best idea - because it leads people to retain what they’ve learned and to be able to apply it to their real world.

Posted in best practices, mentoring, optimization, organizational change, personal change, team learning, training | No Comments »

Transformative Change’s “Ah-ha!” Moment

Monday, September 28th, 2009

By William Seidman

In setting a goal of transformative organizational change, management typically goes out and presents sweeping images of the future, which people tend to regard as meaningful but distant. We continue to work toward these changes until, finally, there’s a moment when it isn’t so distant: the transformation is  palpable or, even, visible.

Then there’s that moment when each person knows the change is real — and it really hits them.

This has happened to me twice in the last few weeks. A service person was going along fine until she hit an “avoid” section of her old program that told her that a key aspect of her program was being obsoleted.

She just froze. She couldn’t believe it.

The other was a senior manager who was reviewing the summary portion of our persuasive technology. When he got to the portion that would be summarized to him, he realized that this was for real. He was going to be holding others accountable for a significant change, but he was going to be accountable, too.

For both of them, there was a moment of terror.

Ultimately, this was good because the terror happened in safe environment and could be worked out.

But the moment of the realization was very clear and specific and not always completely comfortable. It’s an important part of the process and something we prepare for and support.

Posted in business, company culture, getting change to "stick", management consulting, organizational change, training | No Comments »

Positive Deviance’s Debt to Leonardo da Vinci

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

By Rick Grbavac

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”

- Leonard da Vinci

Isn’t it interesting that, nearly 500 years ago, Leonardo Da Vinci identified one of the main causes of learning and training failures today as lack of desire?  Put in slightly different terms,  it’s not thinking about it in the right way first.  Positive deviants in any organization think about things in a different way, usually with a higher moral purpose than the rest of us.  They want to be great at what they do - that ‘desire’ that Leonardo mentions -  and have figured out how to do it effectively in their organization’s environment.  Leonardo said that without desire, study is wasted.  So it makes 500 years’ worth of sense to get people thinking like the positive deviants FIRST, which will contribute so much to making their study worthwhile.

Posted in organizational change, positive deviance, positive deviants, training | No Comments »

More on Organizational Change: Attitude Really IS Everything

Monday, August 17th, 2009

By Rick Grbavac

Bringing about - and sustaining - change to any organization requires a series of shifts in thinking and behavior. It also requires people who have great attitudes. There’s little point in wasting time and money - and the goodwill of the people who are on board - trying to convince, cajole, or convert people with attitude problems.

David Fox, Chairman & Chief Executive at PP Business Improvement, part of Power Panels Electrical Systems Ltd, puts it like this:

  • If a business wants to continuously improve its performance and productivity, it needs to start by recruiting the right people with the right attitude.
  • Traditional training is not the answer.
  • Training should not be considered a cost but an investment.
  • The attitudes and values need to be embraced by the entire enterprise, not just isolated pockets of individuals.
  • You can’t simply throw lots of money at improving business performance without first dealing with the people issues.

There’s really no better way to express it. Attitude IS everything!

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, getting change to "stick", leadership, management consulting, organizational change, organizational culture, training | No Comments »

Training Brains for Improvement in Reading - and Work Performance, too

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

Researchers recently set out to answer a question that dogs educators and parents:

Why are some kids better readers than others?

They used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging  (fMRI) to study the brain activity of both high and low performing readers.  Brain activity turned out to be significantly different in the two groups.  

This raised another question: Could the brains of the low performing readers be somehow “trained” to mimic the same brain activity as the high performers? The researchers set about developing a software program, called “Fast ForWord,” to specifically address this question.  It turns out that language acquisition has to do with how the brain “hears” and interprets sounds. The software was designed to deliver acoustically modified speech that helped students learn. Over time, new synapses were formed in the brains of the learners, allowing improved language processing. The results were staggering. Initial students that used the software in one-hour daily labs showed significant improvement; there was an  average reading level gain of eight months in 29 days.

This research has implications for early learning, but it also has implications for businesses. It demonstrates in a very tangible and measurable way that the brain is trainable. The tired adage that “old dogs can’t learn new tricks” doesn’t apply any more. Given the right stimulus, we can now “train” the brains of lower performers to mimic the activity of top performers, even at an early age. A similar approach can be used to help lower performers in business think and act like the highest performers.

Posted in US education, neuroscience, training | No Comments »

In-House Training for Success in New Technologies: A ‘Must-Have’

Monday, June 29th, 2009

By Rick Grbavac

A recent survey of the construction industry conducted by a large US accounting, tax, and consulting firm had some interesting results:

  • 60% of the respondents did not have succession plans
  • 30 % participate in joint ventures.
  • 57% don’t have in-house training programs
  • Change orders continue to be the largest factors in litigations
  • 57% have a business plan, 40% have a marketing plan

Nothing here really earth-shattering in these numbers  but what caught my eye was in the area of training, as the article states: “With the need for increased training in safety standards and new technologies, training both in best practices and technology emerges as a ‘must have’ for many construction companies. There appears to be need for more improvement in this area.” 

I’m fairly certain that these numbers are indicative of most businesses today: no succession plans, many must form alliances with other companies to do business, most need more training, specifically around their best practices to keep up with the changes in their environments and business and marketing plans always need tweaking.  And in the construction arena, if they did better planning up front (and used the latest modeling software) they might reduce change order litigation.

Cerebyte takes care of the in-house training and best practices implementations in one step.  Let your local construction company know!

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