I love designing training, but the bit that I love most is creating scenarios.
Weirdly, most training in the aid sector is very light on good scenarios.
My take is there are two factors that cause that.
One is clinging to overly academic ways of training – with presentations that cover theories or frameworks. Those are supposed to help people understand principles, but normally don’t. They do manage to confuse and bore people though.
The other is a worry that scenarios means complicated immersive simulations, and that the person building the course will do a “bad job” if they try that.
I’ve had projects where I’ve suggested scenarios and the clients have got worried that this means hiring actors and finding some out of the way location with space around it and so on. But it doesn’t.
If you’ve got the time and resources to do an immersive simulation, great, go for it. I love them and they’re really powerful. You will inevitably hit some scaling problems – how will you reach all the people that would benefit from learning about this topic? Maybe there’s an alternative which gets you most of the way without the simulation – or maybe not and you just have to accept that scaling will be very costly, or time consuming, or may not happen.
But scenarios and less immersive simulations don’t have to be “great” to help people learn, and they certainly don’t have to be expensive to run.
What they do have to be is about realistic problems that people face in their work.
Where scenarios shine is when you give people a realistic, nuanced dilemma.
That can be a table-top simulation, or a room with some role-playing. But it can also be a single paragraph case study.
I’m working on a (slightly unusual for me) project at the moment that doesn’t target aid workers, but affected people – in this case refugees at risk of GBV. So we’re looking at the real risks they face and creating really short case studies to discuss. Not abstract descriptions of risks, but little vignettes – and asking them what they think about the situation.
That’s not hard to do. It doesn’t take that long. So you (or your team) can and should do the equivalent.
It’s also where you get to the bit that I love, and that does sort out the less good scenarios from the really good ones. You have to write scenarios that feel real. That even in a couple of sentences contain some little detail that brings it to life. Where the learner can imagine themselves in that situation.
That lets them think about how they’d respond – which is really important for their learning.
But it’s also a creative act, which is an amazing thing to have in your work day. It’s an outlet for what I would flatteringly like to think is the frustrated author in me – but is much more realistically a lazy and distracted author!
That’s scenarios done well though – what about if you’re new to them? Isn’t that hard or time consuming?
It’s true a well done scenario can take a lot of time. When I’m building a new course, it’s one of the things I spend most time on. But I’m very committed to creating challenging scenarios that maximise learning.
If you or your team are building training courses, you might just want to get to a place where they’re “pretty good”. There’s no shame in that. And given how many boring presentations infest training courses in the sector, some average or even below average scenarios will probably be a big leap forward.
So step one is just to say – what is a tricky decision that my learners would have to make in their work?
Write it down, and next – add some details. Don’t give a massive backstory, but put in some people’s names, some information about a programme, or something realistic that’s going wrong. This gives it some life.
That will probably be fine. It will give your group something to think about. It will be memorable.
If you really want to write great scenarios, then you should check out the work of Cathy Moore, who’s written about this brilliantly and clearly. This is what really inspired me, and made the scenarios I create five times better than they were.
Otherwise – just give it a go! How much worse than three slides of bullet points about why it’s important to consult with communities can it be?
