It’s not smart to criticize fashions of previous years.
It’s almost inevitable that the second you start doing so, Paris catwalks are full of them again, and two years later, so is the high-street. Within about 2 years of me finally giving up on baggy jeans after years of hanging on, tight jeans were going out of style. Bad results from fashion choices are in the eye of the beholder, and the beholders perspective keeps changing.
But bad results from chasing fashion when it comes to learning are inevitable. If it does happen to work out for you, that’s more good luck than anything else.
You never get enough scale to move the needle when you keep changing your focus.
You run a workshop on accountability and one on gender. You make an e-learning course on diversity and hold a webinar on preparedness. It’s true that there’s a lot to fix. If all of these are sufficiently low effort that they actually happen, when a better way forward would simply not happen, then go ahead. Don’t expect massive results, but I’m generally in the camp of doing something rather than nothing.
The pull towards a lack of focus in big, complicated, diverse organisations is really strong.
I feel it all the time. Like a black hole, you better be aware it’s there, or getting sucked in is inevitable. The main cause of that pull is that there are lots of things that are not working the way you want them to. You might have several critical problems. An aid agency with a budget of many hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and several thousand staff can tackle more than one problem at a time. But you can’t tackle all of them. And most likely, you can tackle many fewer than you think you can.
But what if you ran four workshops on accountability?
Let’s assume they’re well designed. They target an actual skills gap, which is actually critical to your organisation getting better performance. That’s a lot of assumptions, and vanishingly few workshops will meet that standard. But let’s say that they did.
With four, perhaps you can build up enough people who have those critical skills to influence how you work. It’s a well-designed workshop, so you’re not running it if the environment won’t permit them to use those skills. You’ve now got four groups of people leaving those workshops and going to apply the skills on the job. You can get a real, noticeable improvement from that. Even with some staff turnover.
If you’d only run one workshop, even if it was just as good, you’re not getting a critical mass of skills in your projects. You’ve got a few people dotted around. The chance of them making an important difference to how your organisation does its work isn’t zero. It’s not far off, though.
Not fixing a problem isn’t some abstract thing.
It’s not just a matter of you not progressing towards some target for organisational efficiency. You are talking about having lots of people without training and without skills doing work that really needs those. At best, that means that you’ve got all the costs (financial, ethical, psychological…) of work not being done as well as it deserves to be. Often, you’re putting your organisation at risk, and people affected by crisis at risk too. Again, those risks are a powerful pull to spread yourself thin. But that is a different pull than following fashion. You may still have to prioritise, and those decisions will be hard. But if you’re addressing critical risks to your agency and the people you serve, then you’re going the right way.
There’s the question of false confidence too.
You ran a course on preventing sexual exploitation and abuse. So now you can tick that off, right? Let’s run a course on spotting fraud next! How about one on community development and involving people in project design? Awesome, job done!
That’s a parody, but when we’re not paying attention, we’re not immune from thinking this way.
We’ve trained people on one topic, so now we can focus on something else. Life’s not like that, for many reasons. And if you start believing that your team can do what they need to because you’ve held a workshop, you’ll fool yourself. False confidence can be an inconvenience – and it can kill. We might not see it clearly, but WASH teams who aren’t getting it right on latrine design or on water quality measurement could be letting lots of people get very, very sick. As you flit from one topic to another, you could end up overconfident in a lot of areas – and lacking depth in a skill that is really life-saving.
Trying to do it all at once normally doesn’t work, either.
When you’re following fashion, you might find yourself with a bunch of funding to teach people about a new topic, now. You run a series of workshops. You run them in different regions around the world. You spend the money. And your experts are burnt out and never want to do it again.
Hold on, you just said to do that, didn’t you?
It’s subtly different. When you don’t move with fashion, you run a budgeting course twice a year, every year, for three years. When you’re following fashion, you run six humanitarian principles courses in one year. Naturally, your team can handle one better than the other. Once your trainers burn out, it’s very hard to train up the new people who are constantly coming in to your agency. As others move out, the skill level drops.
You can have a big push, occasionally, if you’re fixing an urgent problem. More of the time, it needs a sustained effort to change the way things are done though. It’s got to be at a decent scale or it will never make any headway. But sustaining it is crucial.
Without sustained scale, you don’t get impact – you get frustration.
There are lots of things that can make training not get the impact it should. Not basing it on an analysis so that you’re targeting the right thing. Trying to train your way around management problems, rather than addressing the problems directly. Using approaches to training that are based on knowledge retention rather than skills practice.
Another is constantly bumping around from one topic to another. You won’t get much impact. And then the budget holders are going to start getting frustrated. Even worse, the staff, the people who are supposed to take part in the learning programmes, will get frustrated – “we have all these training courses on all these different topics and there’s no effect!”. That kills people’s motivation to take part in the next programme. Without some sort of willingness to put in effort and change how they work, all of your future programmes are going nowhere.
As you follow fashion, you move from topic to topic.
And that keeps you at the surface level. You’re covering so many different topics that all you have time for is an overview. Some of the time, for some people they might just need an overview. It’s possible. If you’re choosing to run training, though, you probably need people to improve their skills. If you’re just informing them of a new policy or telling them to take one approach rather than another, you might be better with some information materials or a promotional effort.
What can you do about it?
Work out what works.
Evaluate impact, not participant satisfaction. Participants might love hearing about the new topic. And it really might help them to know about a new topic and work out if they have to do anything about it. But them liking it doesn’t mean that it’s what your organisation needs. You have to look at how you are measuring your performance and see whether your learning programmes are improving that. That will help you not jump on a passing bandwagon and keep you focused on what your agency actually needs.
Repeat what works!
If you’ve got a programme that’s getting results, keep doing it! Yes, reassess it from time to time. But if you’re getting results, keep going. You’re working on something that is meaningful.
Find the most critical performance issues and what is causing them.
When you’re looking at “learning needs”, don’t just look at things that people don’t know about. People will always not know much about the newest topic or framework. That might be getting in the way of performance, or it might be tangential. Often, knowing a framework is important for a very small subset of staff, often in HQs. Everyone else just needs to be able to do their jobs – perhaps with a new nuance, but often not. Or they don’t actually need to know the new thing. They can just look it up some time. Maybe there is a knowledge gap, but it’s not what is causing your problems. Find your most critical issue and focus on that.
