Banned: Now Lectures Prohibited in Delivery of Business Courses

A few years ago the major Kenyan hospitals banned the prescription of cough syrups for kids in their facilities. Cough syrups by then were among the most prescribed drugs in the country, especially for children who had coughs. The hospitals observed that these medicines, though a big money maker for them and the pharmaceutical firms, at best did not work and at worst caused more harm than treatment.

Today Growth Partners is making a similar declaration in relation to use of lectures as a way of delivering its training programs. We can confidently say that lectures don’t leave the trainees any better and hence companies are losing money through courses delivered through lectures.

Lectures may be good in universities but that is where they should remain. In fact, many learning experts have rated lectures as very lowly when it comes to teaching adults anything.

Missing Customer Expectations

What do you want from a training session? Whether sponsors or a participants we have found out that our clients’ expectations fall into three broad categories:

•  Behavior and attitude change after the training;
•  Ease of recall and practice of the lessons learnt at work ;
• Better task performance as a result of applying the skills and knowledge acquired in the training.

We have used these expectations to gauge the effectiveness of our training programs, which have been at least 50% PowerPoint driven lectures. We are embarrassed to concede that our content/presentation driven training approach fall short of measuring up to these expectations. This is regardless of the fact that our training materials and presentation approach is way much superior to what other trainers offer. Most of our training clients have given us raving reviews. Our philosophy has always been – don’t pay if you don’t get value. So far we have not had a single client who has refused to pay because they did not get value.

Unfortunately, this still has greatly missed on achieving the key success measures of any training intervention, which can be summarized in the expectations mentioned above. Our customers have been judging us on how impressive we have been in presentations and mastery of content and consequently missed on what matters most – impact post training. I still maintain that we are great at making presentations and everyday we have refined on our style and approach. We have invested time and money in the same.

Learning is not a Spectator Sport

Our lectures have been highly refined in content. We have always used top most subject experts to deliver the courses. We have impressed the participants with our mastery of the subject. We have been passionate about our areas and invest heavily to become better every day. However, regardless of this we have been giving our customers a raw deal through the best PowerPoint led lectures and presentations.

We have been mistaken to think training is a spectator sport, where the star is the trainer and Growth Partners.

Lectures Strictly Prohibited

That’s why effective today, we are banning use of lectures in our programs. We will use PowerPoint only as one of the visual aids, and not necessarily the most important of these aids as it has been for a long time.

In line with this ban we are declaring the following principles as the beacons to guide and direct development and delivery of our courses:

1.       Our programs will no longer be organized to deliver training but provide learning experience

 2.     We will consider those who go through our courses are learning partners, not participants. As a result every group will be invited to facilitate learning for we will become a learning community

 3.    We will no longer have trainers spewing knowledge and information to the learning partners but learning facilitators who will guide and direct the learners in the process of discovery and creation of knowledge, information and skills as well as application of the same

 4.      We recognize the unique learning preferences of the various people who attend our courses as well as appreciate learning best takes place when the whole person is involved in learning and as such we will design and deliver learning programmes using a variety of activities to involve as many senses as possible

5.       People learn best by doing not hearing and watching. They will learn sales by selling, management by managing, leadership by leading and customer care by practicing it. As such everyone who partakes in our courses will need to practice as much as possible during the course what they have learnt.

Surest Way to Maximize ROI on Training Investment

We appreciate that by adopting these principles, our work in preparation and facilitation will be more demanding. We also recognize that many traditional organizations might still want us to do training the old presentation/lecture way but, we will not waver in ensuring that we stick to these principles. We will be committed to them because it will help unlock the full learning potential of those who come to our courses.

We also believe in that the only justifiable reason for us to be in business is to give more value than we are paid for and thus by being faithful to these principles we will maximize returns on training investments made by organizations and individuals that pay us to improve skills and performance of their people.

Our lead consultant has taken a very intensive course led by a leading American Accelerated Learning Expert on how to develop and deliver courses that will transform the participants. With the lessons learnt and many materials acquired in the process we believe we will give the best value for money for all those who will be trained by us.

We note that although all the respectable hospitals do not prescribe cough syrups to kids many pharmacies and small clinics continue to stock and sell them. The reason for this is that old habits are hard to break. We expect the same from those who are stuck to being prescribed to lectures. But if they give us a chance we will show a very different approach.