A few years ago, I was working on a course design for a client. 

They didn’t have much money and wouldn’t allocate time for me to do my own analysis. They said they’d already done it. I went along with it. That was a mistake.

When I got started with the design work, their learning needs analysis was really vague. There was no real target (“aid workers with some experience in the field”). The learning needs were a list of topics that they wanted it to cover.

I made an effort, and reached out to some contacts to get their ideas on the topic. Then I tried to square the circle. There were some skills that would make a difference, and I tried to reconcile those with the list of topics that the client had given me. I don’t think I managed it. Even after my work was done, the client decided that it wasn’t close enough to what they had in mind and I ended up revising it to fit what they wanted to see. 

Whether you’re coming in from outside, or fixing it yourself, you face related problems, but not the same problems. 

What I’m talking about here is from the perspective of someone who’s brought in to help fix a problem. You might not be in that position. You might have problems and be trying to figure them out for yourself. There is no reason why you can’t. There’s nothing magical in what an external person does. A fresh pair of eyes is helpful, but it’s not everything. If you’re fixing your own problems, then think of this as a warning to not base your work on what’s been done before or assume that the suggestions you have from others are ready-to-go solutions.

There are all sorts of clients.

If you’re a consultant or contractor, you’ve got a simpler life, in some ways. You either take the work or you don’t. And you decide how much you need the work. If a client wants you to use only their analysis, it’s a warning sign that you may be in for more work than you’re planning for. If you’re in a position to leave it and focus on something else, that’s a good idea. 

It’s more complicated if you’re an internal expert with internal clients. You can’t just tell them to find someone else. But you might have some leeway to “do them a favour” and take on the analysis yourself. 

But why are we going to such a lot of trouble to do more work? Isn’t it better to take their learning needs analysis, get the project done quickly and move on? The short answer is “no”. The longer answer is “95 times out of 100, no”.

Your clients do know a lot. They’ve come to you for help, which speaks highly of their taste and judgement! 

And they certainly know what is bothering them. There’s a good chance that they also know what the solution is – at least a big part of it. You need to get hold of their insights. The question is whether you will get those insights on a platter, in a way that you can use to diagnose if a problem is caused by skills or something else, and which can help you construct the best solutions. 

And the answer to that is generally no. They may be able to do that. But they’re not experts in it. They haven’t captured tacit knowledge and analysed it, many, many times. 

Even if they had the skills, it’s unlikely to happen. They’ve got many projects, big and small, that they’re working on. They are busy. That’s not the frame of mind for untangling what’s causing complex problems. They might be too close to the problems and the personalities to sit back and work things out dispassionately. Being dissatisfied and frustrated doesn’t help, either.

They often have the answers. But it’s not about that. It’s a matter of what they will give you as an analysis. 

A conversation with you, where you sit with them and ask about their pain points and what causes them, will bring so much more to the surface than a pre-written analysis. That will be either too simplistic (“they don’t meet the Sphere Standards so we need to train them on the standards”) or overly complicated, with an intractable web of issues that loop round on themselves.

Solving problems is fun…but relationships are crucial

Working out which factors are critical is the kind of intellectual puzzle that I love. You probably do too. But there won’t be a change in the real world if you don’t have a good relationship with the person who most wants them fixed. And that person is probably your client. 

There’s no good that comes out of a perfect analysis if the person that’s going to use it has stopped listening to you. Using your client’s analysis can seem like a way to keep the relationship strong. Especially if your client has really got their mind made up (like mine did), it can be hard to see how you can not use that analysis without causing a rift. 

The answer lies in not rejecting it. You want to welcome that analysis and find what seems true, helpful and important in it. 

First off, that might not be hard. I’m not saying that there’s no value in that analysis. I’m saying that you can’t just accept it. That you’ll want to do more. But that might just be going the last 20% of the way. In my experience it’s usually more than that, but it certainly could just be you rounding out and extending things.

And second, when you find what you can agree with and appreciate, rather than argue against or criticize, people don’t have to defend their ideas against you – and they can start to let go of them.

Welcome their analysis. Read it and work out what seems right, incisive and important. Praise it. And then suggest that there are some aspects that you’d like to explore more.  

The most typical problem with a client’s analysis is that it’s full of pre-conceptions about what needs to be done. 

They’ve been thinking about this for some time. Perhaps it’s keeping them awake at night. And because it’s important, it’s pretty unlikely that this is the first time they’ve tried to do something about it. You might be coming in after a long line of interventions – some of which had a degree of success. At least they have been liked, admired or praised. So they’ve got preconceptions based on what they’ve been thinking about and their own opinions. And they’ve also got preconceptions based on what has been done before.

That makes it hard for you to steer onto a different path. There was a training course before that covered topics A, B, and C. It’s really hard to propose that a new course should not cover those and cover X, Y, and Z instead. It’s even harder to propose to not have a course at all, and have managers complete a checklist. They’ve had a training course running for several years. Participants like it. Why would they change that?

You’ve got less baggage – though you’ll still have your own biases. Sometimes those help, sometimes they get in the way. But if you start with relatively few preconceptions, and come up with a good synthesis of what your client and others are telling you, use your experience to guide you on where to dig in, and sprinkle it with your own ideas, you can get something really useful. 

Here’s what they should know…

Maybe it comes from their preconceptions. Maybe it comes from what has been done in the past. But what you get presented is often not an analysis. It’s a list of things they think people should know. That’s what happened to me – they were sure that they’d already worked out everything that needed to be covered. They wanted me to come up with some way of wiring those topics together. 

There’s a lot that people need to know to do their jobs, for sure. But a list of things to know is a red flag. There are very few jobs (Quiz show contestant? Pharmacist?) which depend on being able to recite a bunch of facts. Most jobs need you to do something. Even on a quiz show, you would need to be able to buzz fast, anticipate what was going to be asked, use the structure of the question to work out what kind of answer was needed, and so on. 

And it misses all the other things that could be going wrong. What kind of instructions are the potential learners getting from their managers – both explicit directions and implicit priorities? Are the forms they need to fill confusing? Is there a standard system that they roll out, or do they have to create it from scratch every time? With a list of things for people to know, there’s none of that. There’s no exploration of what are skills problems and what are systems problems.

Experts can’t see with a beginner’s mind.

When your client is an expert, or their subject experts have done the learning needs analysis, you’ve got another problem. An expert has forgotten what it’s like to not know how to do their job. When you’re new to things you have no idea where to start. You don’t know which of four reasonable-looking options to take. You don’t know where to find the paper clips. You don’t know who in finance you need to email about budget approvals. There’s an enormous amount that an expert just knows. This is what people mean by “tacit” knowledge.

That stops them seeing where things are hard for beginners and where they’re likely to go wrong. Perhaps the hardest thing for a beginner is getting inputs from the right people, not creating the shelter design itself. But for the expert, that’s so automatic as to not even figure in their mental processes. For an analysis to work, you need to be able to get at what the people you’re training struggle with, not what an expert thinks they ought to know. 

The crucial details are missing.

It is the details of doing a job that often gets in the way of people doing their work well. They’ve been briefed about the importance of being accountable to crisis-affected women, men, boys and girls. But they don’t know what the steps are to establish a phone line for complaints. 

Lots of client analyses are at that higher level. There’s a problem with accountability, so we need to train them on accountability standards. Without going deeper into what’s actually going wrong and why it’s hard, the training will cover things they know already. Or it won’t cover the details they need to actually change. 

Surely their analysis could be that detailed, though? It’s not logically impossible. But it tends not to happen. Some of that is to do with the tacit knowledge they have. Some is that people write guidance and standards to cover every possible situation (which then ends up being kind of vague), rather than writing procedures that cover 90% of the cases. Once you’ve got that guidance it seems logical that’s what you’d train people on. But it’s not specific enough for people to be able to take and use in their real jobs. 

There’s one more reason too. 

Many managers don’t know how to do what their teams do.

There’s a lot of managers who’ve climbed the tree without really knowing much about how the work is done. They’ve smiled at the right people and stepped on the heads of others. They don’t know what their staff do or how they do it. They know just enough to keep their manager fooled. Luckily, their manager’s done exactly the same thing and is easy to fool!

Of course, there are also managers who are perfectly competent, but simply have a different background. They can’t know everything about what their team does – and if they’re wise, they’ll try to get out of the way, if their team is making progress.

But neither of these groups is well-placed to analyse how to improve the performance of their teams. If they have the time and the skills and the energy to ask them and analyse it, then maybe you won’t be needed! You’re likely no expert, either. Normally, they just make their own judgements. Those are important. They could be right. But they’re not rooted in a detailed and profound understanding of what’s being done and what’s going wrong. You’re going to need to explore how the people who are actually doing the job see things. 

If you win the lottery and find out that when you do your analysis, that the client covered all the details, then OK, you’ve lost a few days. You’ve got even more certainty about it, too.

What can you do? 

Listen

You need to preserve the relationship and that means listening. If you don’t listen, they won’t listen to you, and the project will fail. And they know an enormous amount. So listen. Try to learn. Be curious. None of this means accepting their learning needs analysis as the full, complete and final one.

Respect what they’re saying – find at least a grain of truth

When you find something to agree with in what they’re saying, you show two things. One, you’re listening and understanding. Two, you’re on their side – you agree with them! It can be hard to do that when you’re hearing ideas that you’re positive will not work for them. But there will be something true, interesting and important. Find it. Agree with it. Praise it. 

Talk about impact from the start

This is key to avoiding the laundry list of knowledge items and getting a way to explore things yourself. By challenging them on what will concretely be different, you create a new context for the analysis. Now it’s clear you’re not just recapping an old training course in a new format. You’re trying to fix a multi-faceted problem. That means understanding it and its nuances. 

Explain how your analysis will help make sure that you focus on the right things

Focus doesn’t mean excluding everything they’ve mentioned. At least, not necessarily! Talking to some other people – target learners, practitioners, experts – will just help you focus on what will get them the impact that they’re looking for. And if your analysis ends up showing that some of the old ground doesn’t need to be covered any more, then you’ve got a strong basis to have that conversation. 

Be firm about the need to do it, even if it’s not in depth. 

When it comes down to it, you need to insist. Even if it’s brief, you’re not doing your professional duty if you just accept an analysis that someone else has prepared. You’ve got to at least have a few conversations to confirm or challenge those findings. If there’s unanimity, great. If there’s disagreement, then you can re-evaluate. We’ve all got our own boundaries for the work that we do. I’m not going to tell you what work to take on and what to run away from. I will definitely turn down work if the client insists that there can’t even be a basic analysis, though.