The “What You Will Learn” trap in learning and development`

It has become almost obligatory for descriptions of management courses, development workshops, training programmes and the like to include a section headed "what participants will learn". This seems like common sense. After all, if we don’t know what people will learn, how can we know that the investment has been worth it?

Some training and development providers eagerly rise to the challenge. They produce detailed lists of the new knowledge, skills and attitudes that learners will acquire as a result of their participation. And they take confidence from the belief that clearly defined outcomes, coupled with the packaged ‘transfer of knowledge’, will ensure the desired learning. The anxiety-reducing promise of structure, predictability and control acts as a further incentive to follow this route.

Unfortunately, this is the same trap that designers of formal change programmes fall into when they assume that their well crafted strategies, plans and projects will guarantee particular organizational outcomes. The reality is that they won’t.

Organizational dynamics

Organizations don’t work in the simplistic, if-you-do-this-you’ll-get-that sort of way that most approaches to organizational change assume. Nor does individual and group learning. This is especially the case where the focus moves beyond what might be called the ‘foundation’ knowledge and skills in a particular profession, craft or administrative function. A statement of so-called ‘learning outcomes’ then becomes - at best - a declaration of intent. What actually happens, in terms of individual learning and organizational impact depends on:

• the conversations that people have with others (and themselves!), to make sense of the formal content of the learning event and of any other matters of interest or concern that arise informally;
• the immediate actions that they take as a result of this initial and subsequent sense-making (learning) process;
• the novel and/or habitual ways of thinking and behaving that this leads to over time; and
• the extent to which these local conversations influence, and are influenced by, the more widespread patterns of taken-for-granted assumptions that reflect earlier sense-making activity.

Most importantly, this learning takes place in the context of all of the other things that are going on for individuals in their own ‘here and now’. Often, some of the most important (that is, useful) knowledge that participants might gain has nothing to do with the manifest purpose and content of the formal events at all.

The normality of not knowing

Those who design and run learning events - whether as consultants, academics or in-house training and development staff – need to become comfortable with this natural state of ‘not knowing’. And so do those who commission specific interventions. We don’t know what, specifically, each participant will learn as a result of engaging in the process. Indeed, we cannot know. Nor can we say how they might decide to act as a result. Less still can we predict what impact the subsequent actions of participants and others might have on overall organizational performance.

Changing the conversations

What we can say, though, is that learning events offer new ideas, new experiences, new interactions, new possibilities, new skills, new frames, and so on. And these can provide stepping stones to improved activities, capabilities and performance. They can also lead to personal and collective insights that open up new ways of seeing, thinking and acting. In the process, new patterns of conversation might emerge. And, if the conversations change so will the organization.

What is most important here is for leaders (at all levels) to pay attention to the ways in which this 'new learning' is helping to shift the patterns of conversation and action. Actively participating in this ongoing process, to help shift those patterns in organizationally beneficial ways, is a primary leadership task and part of the wider and continuing process of organizational change.

The messy reality

So, despite their "What You Will Learn" statements, leaning events can’t offer guaranteed outcomes. This might not fit neatly with the ‘measurement culture’ and ‘managerialist’ assumptions that dominate current management practice. But it is a reflection of how things are in the messy reality of everyday organizational life.

Comments

[Chris Mowles]

Nice observations, Chris. The other things that are going on in any learning situation, in which we are helplessly social animals, is the possibility for feelings of incompetence, and hence shame, that arise when we are seriously grappling with something new. Most statements that begin courses seem to me about reassurance, about dampening down anxiety, whereas learning situations are intensely anxiety-provoking. So we could summise that such commitments at the beginning of courses are to foster stability rather than change, and in this sense they have some social function.
Chris

[Chris Rodgers]

Thanks, Chris.

You make an important point about the social function of outcome statements in reducing participants’ anxiety, whether this is in individual learning or organizational change. And it seems to me that this goes as much for those who produce them, as for those at whom they are aimed. I’ve made a similar point in the past to a client whose team are involved in developing an array of documents around the organization’s business strategy and plans. Their work similarly performs an important anxiety-reducing role for senior managers and members of the organization at large.

The problem for me, though, arises when those involved(managers, consultants, trainers or whatever) believe their own rhetoric, and the predictability and control that it appears to promise. The approach also panders to (and arises from) the obsessive focus on targets and measurement, which is now a taken-for-granted part of established management practice.

I guess I feel that it is mainly this latter consideration that motivates the use of such statements, rather than the felt need to provide some stability for people or to attend to their anxieties. But your comment has made me reflect on whether I’ve paid enough attention to these important social functions of the formal statements.

Cheers, Chris

[Tom Gibbons]

I very much like this article and would like to share the link with a client who is very, very stuck in learning as content driven events. I have sent them an older short blog I wrote (http://www.tms-americas.com/blog.cfm?id=386772164) and it would be helpful to have other sources as well to hopefully break through their petrified perception of 'training' (they have yet to use the word learning I think... :) I would also agree with Chris M. that learning is a social and interactive process which will always create some level of anxiety and finding a 'container' for that anxiety so it can be dealt with in a learning initiative is far more helpful I think than trying to manage it away. Thanks for a clear and concise article!