trainerscafe

“...fail earlier and fail faster...” Ideas from AG Lafley, CEO, Proctor & Gamble

“In the innovation game, which is a risky game, more at bats leads to more hits... We’re running a continual tryout camp... (And, in response to a query about the failure rate of approximately 50% of new product prototypes)  Innovation is that kind of a game... What we are trying to do is improve our success rate.  And, what we are also trying to do is fail earlier, fail faster, and reallocate the resources from the failures so we can put the money against innovations that have a chance to become a commercial success.”  (5.19.08, WNYC, Marketplace)

“...we are also trying to do is fail earlier, fail faster, and reallocate the resources from the failures..." Words to live by!  I love it! 

These ideas formed the foundation for a conversation with one of the participants in my class last week.  During a break in the videotaping of people’s training sessions, he and I were talking about learners taking risks - trying new and different techniques in the delivery of their sessions.  He wondered why he and others didn’t really push the envelope.  We reflected on my suggestion at the beginning of the course that everyone take a risk because the setting is a safe environment, one where learners can choose to be bold and daring... and we know that work environments are not always so supportive.  I offered these thoughts to the discussion, not excuses more realities:

• we didn’t know people’s baseline behaviors and therefore maybe we were witnessing risks of greater proportions than we realized
• anxiety (re: training delivery) often inhibits learners’ feelings of confidence to take on new challenges and narrows vision/what they believe to be possible
• “failing forward” or learning from one’s mistakes is understood conceptually yet rarely embraced in practice.

Here’s an addition to Lafley’s idea, “Fail earlier, fail faster, fail forward.”

What do you think? 

I’ll be taking a look at The Game Changer by  AG Lafley, for more interesting ideas.

Don’t come to training if you’re not ready for it!

My ruminations about people who haven’t prepared themselves to fully partake in training

Okay, so this is a bit of a rant, I’ll admit it. I just gave a teleclass this week, with a focus on competitive advantage. I always send prework to folks, asking them to read the material and be prepared to share their expectations for the class. When we did introductions the other night, several of the participants came up with the lackluster response of, “I want to learn what I can about the topic.” Now while their open-ended comment may appear laudable to some, to me it’s the death knell to commitment. (Perhaps I am engaging in a bit of hyperbole here... yet I feel passionately about this!) I really believe (as the quote in my email signature states, “In the end, we only hit what we aim at” (Thoreau) and my thinking is that these folks were aiming too low! I want learners to be as concrete about their expectations as possible: I am waiting to hear people say, “I want to learn the difference between strengths and competitive advantages” or “I want to identify three competitive advantages that I have/my company has” or I want to learn how to quantify my competitive advantages so that I can share that information with my clients and prospects. And if participants state expectations that are off the mark for the class - that’s okay! I need to know where they are coming from and perhaps steer them back to the stated objectives of the class. (And if the class isn’t a good fit for them, then they should know that too - and choose to stay or go.) As you can well imagine, the folks who came to the class with the clearest expectations left the most satisfied... those that ‘learned more about the topic” didn’t really have a plan for what they were going to do with that information. So, I guess I have been clear about my expectations! Folks should always have ‘em!

Now my three day class last week, that was a class full of folks who clearly articulated what they wanted - and when we closed the class I checked in with them. As you can imagine - they got it! It was a class in which everyone grew into the material and left feeling that they had new knowledge, skills, and attitudes about the content and processes learned. They were walking out prepared to go back to work and implement their new abilities. How awesome is that! (And it generates so much good feeling too!)

Training too much! When too much of a good thing threatens to get in the way...

I have fallen victim to my own good fortune - and so abandoned writing my blog! The upside to all of this is that there’s LOTS to talk about! So in this first installment of “What I’ve learned about being overbooked” I want to talk about just that! How the heck do you get time to do all the tasks associated with actually doing the training when you’re training? I mean...
* writing the Welcome Letter, assembling the prework, and getting it all out to folks two weeks in advance
* making sure you have all the goodies - from the scented markers to the music to the pipe cleaners to the slinkies, playdoh (!) and koosh balls in between (I tell you, folks LOVE my “tangles” from Trainer’s Warehouse so much that they just seem to disappear from my tables)
* getting the notebooks together
* making sure that the logistics (time, room, number of folks, breaks, food, etc.) are set...

And, of course, that’s not to mention the work that you need to do in terms of...
- reading over the final evaluations
- chatting with the training manager about the results of the session
- keeping in touch with the folks who were recently trained (answering their queries for resources)
and, touching base with the folks you want to train again!

It’s a never ending cycle - well, I guess that’s a good thing - though sometimes I feel like the little hamster in the wheel... how ‘bout you?

Could be time for me to focus on practicing what I preach... no more thatn 10 days training per month - in the training room... so there’s (literally) room for all the other tasks that accompany the training and coaching processes!