Have you ever sat in a training course and known that what they’re telling you about will not work? That there simply isn’t time to do this along with all the other things you’re being asked to do? That it seems like it might be nice, but the government ministry just won’t allow it?
Here’s something that might not be a secret or a surprise to you. It’s a surprise for some of you reading this, though. I’m sure that’s true, because it was a surprise for me.
The people sitting in your training courses feel the same way.
They’re also listening and hearing things that they know just won’t work. They’re practicing skills that they will never use, because their manager isn’t going to check that’s the way things are being done. If you’re lucky, they’re paying attention and searching for something they can take away and use. Otherwise, they’re ignoring you.
That’s the first reason you need to work out whether something’s a skills problem or not. It is boring to do training that’s not going to lead anywhere. If you’re prescribing training medicine for a system disease, the learners are going to switch off. They might even push back, frustrated at having their time wasted.
Outside the training room, there’s more bad news.
What the organisation has done so far has not worked. Even worse, it’s not the learners’ fault. The programme is faulty. The programme is trying to skirt around fundamental systems and process problems and solve it with skills. It’s not on the team or the learners, it’s on managers, training designers and their choices.
You need to be well prepared if this is where you find yourself. A gut sense won’t be enough if you’re going to criticize someone’s pet training programme. Many senior managers have a big personal stake in different courses – they love them dearly. You need to be really clear on what is actually creating a problem, if it’s not the skills their beloved course is teaching. If you don’t pull apart skills and process issues, then you’ve no chance to persuade them that a different approach is what’s needed.
A lot of the time, you’re a lone voice.
Whether you’re a consultant brought in to help create a course or a manager with a problem to solve, if you’re even starting to think about these issues, you will feel on your own in the aid sector. There are a few other people sprinkled about, but compared to the mass of “capacity building” that takes place, you’re a rocky islet in the South Pacific. There’s not much support for a different approach. No-one is banging down your door, asking for your analysis of the underlying reasons why the food parcels were late again. Either you’re expected to just fix it, or it’s accepted that things go wrong in a crisis.
Just training people is the way things are done. That’s not right, as you know from sitting bored and full of doubt in training sessions. To do things differently, you need to focus in on precisely what’s making things go wrong. And as you’re not in an environment that really supports it, second best won’t do. You have to unscramble the pieces of the puzzle to start to make a difference.
And the result of that is… change.
Thinking through the skills, process, systems and culture parts of a problem gives you the chance to actually change things. To find what’s going wrong and fix it. If you’re trying to improve skills without doing anything about defective systems, then you won’t see real change. You’ll be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
In the humanitarian sector this is not a dramatic metaphor. You really are dealing with a disaster. When things don’t work well, it’s people’s lives at stake. If you’re going for an operation, you don’t want a doctor who’s trained to reduce infections after surgery when the hospital doesn’t have cleaners. Despite how humanitarian workers often feel, much of what they’re doing is that critical. If they’re not the doctors, they’re the cleaners stopping infection.
Solving problems in aid organisations saves lives. It means that more of the help gets to the people it was meant for. They get more out of the aid project. And the people who gave the money, many of them living very ordinary lives without much to spare, have their help get to people who need it, rather than being lost in aid agency systems that don’t work as they should. Disentangling what’s really a skills issue (and training might help with) and what is a problem with systems or culture really makes a difference. Without that, you’re drifting and hoping, with no north star to guide you where you need to go.
