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Letter from the Editor
This is a special issue of The Key.
One of my friends, a client and former colleague, Larry Israelite, has written a book that I wish I had written. Larry and I used to work for Digital Equipment Corporation eons ago. It was there that I learned some of the truths of training – truths about learners, about trainers, about evaluation, about job performance, about technology. It was at Digital where I – along with two colleagues, Jeff and Dave – formulated the idea that would become my company, Entelechy.
Larry’s book is titled
Lies About Learning: Leading Executives Separate Truth from Fiction In a $100 Billion
Industry. It features 11 chapters written by experts in the field of training and consulting. Chapter titles include:
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Lies about Learners (by Murry Christensen)
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Lies about the Design of Learning (by Melinda Jackson)
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Lies about Consultants and Vendors (by Charlene Zeiberg
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Lies about E-Learning (by Elliott Masie)
I encourage you to read the book. If you’re a veteran of the chapter topic, you’ll recognize the half-truths, gambits, falsehoods, pronouncements, misleading proclamations, and lies and will have a good laugh. If you’re new to training, training management, e-learning technology, or working with training vendors (like Entelechy!), the chapters will provide you with honest, frank insights that could prove valuable.
While I don’t receive anything from plugging Larry’s book (and I think the profits of
Lies About Learning go to a charity), I DO have a less-than-altruistic reason for encouraging you to read the book: you will understand why I started Entelechy 14 years ago and the philosophy that underscores how we continue to approach training and performance to this day.
Before starting Entelechy, I – like Larry and many of you – was on the receiving end of the promises of training vendors whose products and services “virtually guaranteed” to solve world hunger, not to mention [fill in your performance issue: increase sales, reduce turnover, improve customer satisfaction, etc.]. At Digital, I learned the truths about learning, performance, and training from the lies of training vendors and industry pundits and vowed that, if I ever started a training company myself, I would build the company on the following truths and principles:
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 Generic training produces generic results. While off-the-shelf training may be useful for those individuals motivated to translate the skills and techniques into skills and techniques that work for THEM in THEIR jobs, only training that has been customized can truly achieve effective, sustainable performance changes for the typical corporate trainee.
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There are core skills to most jobs; deviating from these fundamentals produces the bulk of performance issues. Sales is sales, customer service is customer service, management is management, training is training.
While every single client has insisted that their problem is unique, they are only partially correct: the SKILLS required to (for example) position a product are quite universal; the TECHNIQUES for positioning Company ABC’s TopLine Widget to CFOs in the financial services industry IS unique.
And it’s this level of training customization that is required for many people to recognize the skill and internalize it through practice and feedback. Most people have – or are aware of – the general skills required to perform their work. What they’re often missing is the direct application of the skill to THIS particular customer or in THIS unique situation.
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Effective training is 90% needs assessment and design. Truly understanding the business goals, the performance required to achieve the business goals, and the learning activities that will cement those skills and techniques requires expertise and effort. There are few shortcuts on the road to effective training.
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Effective training is 90% follow-up. The fact is that many of the skills and much of the knowledge addressed in training could be handled by the trainee’s manager or supervisor. And the reality is that much of what is learned in a training class is unlearned on the job when there is no follow-up or reinforcement by the manager.
Effective training works because it leverages the trainee’s superiors as the key
reinforcers.
Entelechy’s name bespeaks our approach; entelechy is a
entelechy is a Greek work meaning the realization of potential; we at Entelechy call it “unlocking potential” since it’s what we do. We design training based on your business needs and the performance required to achieve those needs. We draw from our tried and true models and learning activities to craft training that achieves lasting performance changes. And we work with your managers and supervisors to ensure that the training – and the performance improvement – sticks. Anything less would be a lie. And we’ve been true to our approach – and to the truths of learning – since 1993.
Terry
Win an Autographed Book
Entelechy will be giving away two copies of Lies About Learning signed by the editor, Larry Israelite. All you need to do to enter is to share with us one of YOUR lies – or truths – about learning. Simply email Terry Traut at
ttraut@unlockit.com with your lie or truth and the detail behind it (where and how you acquired the insight) by February 21, 2007. All respondents will be entered into a drawing and we will draw two lucky winners. The lies and truths – along with the winners – will be announced in the next issue of
The Key.
If you can’t wait or don’t win, you can order Lies About Learning directly from the ASTD Store at
http://store.astd.org/product.asp?prodid=3991
or on Amazon.com.
Preface from Lies About Learning
 The following is the preface from
Lies About Learning: Leading Executives Separate Truth from Fiction in a $100 Billion
Industry, pp v-viii.
In the late 1990s, I used to receive frequent phone calls from suppliers of enterprise learning management systems. Most of them sounded the same to me-some introductory comments, a quick reading of the learning tea leaves, and then the pitch. Most of these calls were uninspiring but pleasant. One company, however, used a pitch that was, shall I say, a little unconventional and very aggressive. I would answer the phone and hear someone shouting something like this: “This is John Smith from [fill in your own catchy Internet-era company name]. Do you know that e-learning will comprise 90 percent of the training offered in your organization within the next two years and that your chief executive officer will demand to see detailed training reports for all of your employees on a regular basis?” (I would often hear John’s fist pounding on a desk in the background as he delivered this warning.)
I would politely say, “No, it won’t, and no, he won’t” and then try to hang up. But, before I could even remove the phone from my ear, the enthusiastic sales consultant would berate me for not accepting my responsibility as a learning leader and, I think, yell something about a curse of one sort or another on my children. I never bought anything from this supplier, but many others did, not only from this company but from many others like it.
In fact, a great deal of money was spent on a variety of complex systems that were supposed to be able to track the vast amount of e-learning that would be delivered on practically every subject known to humankind. Some funny things happened on the way to this digital forum, however. First, classroom programs didn’t disappear, and, unfortunately, most learning management systems were not well suited for managing anything except e-learning. Second, as it turned out, all the large e-learning course catalogs that neatly populated learning management systems and on which many companies spent even more money were never really used all that much. In the end, learning managers scratched their heads and wondered what had happened; they had spent plenty of money but had little to show for it.
Was this an isolated incident? Was this the first time that a new approach to learning or some new technology captured the imaginations of those involved in corporate learning to such an extent that their irrational exuberance caused them to ignore that little voice in their heads that kept telling them to “slow down.” I wish the answer were yes. I wish the lure of e-learning and learning management systems were so far beyond anything that learning professionals had experienced that they momentarily lost their senses. Unfortunately, this just isn’t the case. The road we in the learning profession travel is littered with expensive failed experiments, unfulfilled promises, unachieved goals, and frustrating disappointments.
Now, don’t panic! I am not saying (or implying) that those who are the custodians of the corporate schoolhouse have not enjoyed tremendous success, as measured in satisfied learners, improved business performance, seats at the table, the respect of business leaders, and other equally significant metrics. What I am saying, however, is .that there have been a few errors along the way. The biggest mistake, however, may be the failure to identify, evaluate, and learn from those errors. I should mention here that the need to find simple solutions to big problems is not isolated to the learning professional. I have tried a few fad diets. (No smart comments please! That’s why I have a wife and children!) I have bought, repurposed, and sold all sorts of exercise equipment over my lifetime. I have even responded to the odd – and I do mean odd – infomercial from time to time, all in my quest to reduce some burden that I believe I am carrying. Guess what? I don’t weigh any less, I am in no better shape, and, well, let’s just say that it was only a small fire that we were able to contain and extinguish quickly. The pressure to find quick fixes is almost universal, and this pressure makes people believe things they shouldn’t believe and do things they shouldn’t do.
Exposing the Lies About Learning
 This book sheds some light on the hype
– the lies – about learning that are spread by product marketing literature, training association conference presentations, and pronouncements by industry pundits. What do I mean by lies? I mean conventional wisdom, self-serving rumors, and unfounded insinuations. I mean all of the data and information that learning professionals and executives encounter as they try to make basic decisions about the strategies and tactics of corporate learning.
So are they really lies? Do I really believe that there is rampant deceit in the learning industry? Am I that cynical? People who know me well probably would tell you that I am about as cynical as anyone who has been around for a while. Although I don’t think that most people deliberately attempt to deceive, I think there is rampant over-optimism about the new products, tools, and technologies that we hear about every single day. When something works in one situation, learning professionals desperately want to believe it will work in all situations. When a success is achieved with one population, success is expected with all populations. When a new product possesses technical capabilities that could lead to a desirable result, trainers accept without evidence that the result will be achieved. And, in all of these cases, it is too easy to commit resources, promise results, and in other ways put personal and organizational credibility on the line.
Why do learning professionals do this? Everyone is on a quest for the holy grail of learning –
the one product, process, program, or promise that will allow them to dramatically improve the quantity, quality, and impact of learning
in their respective organizations and to do this faster and cheaper than ever before. Because of this intense desire, learning professionals are willing to believe almost anything; they willingly, even enthusiastically, fall victim to some or all of the lies about learning.
Just in case you were thinking this is all about technology, you are wrong. That would be too simple. It is tempting to believe all sorts of things in the name of better, faster, and cheaper solutions to persistent problems. Technology is only one piece of the puzzle. There are many more.
One of the challenges faced by most editors (and authors, for that matter) is how to choose content. In this case, the problem was to select the lies that would make for the most interesting and helpful reading. I would like to tell you that there was some science behind the selection process, but there wasn’t. I simply chose the topics that I hear my colleagues talking about at conferences, in meetings, and in personal conversations. Learning professionals worry about their customers, the products they deliver to them, and their careers. In one form or another, all of the chapters touch one or more of these topics.
How Can This Book Help You?
The purpose of this book is to explore the most common lies about learning and then to offer some practical tips about how to deal with them. My goal, and the goal of all the book’s contributors, is to provide business executives and learning professionals with enough ammunition to ask the right questions, kick the right tires, and maintain the right level of skepticism about what they read and hear about learning products, tools, and technologies as they pursue their goals. You need to be able to make prudent decisions that lead to measurable, predictable, meaningful results.
I hope you will find something useful in these pages and that something you read here might enable you to make your way through the maze of corporate learning with a little less resistance and with fewer wrong turns. If this book helps you to do that, then we will have created something of value.
Larry Israelite, September 2006
Copyright © 2006 from Lies About Learning, Edited by Larry Israelite. Reprinted with permission of American Society for Training & Development.
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