Good trainers learn from their students
Here's a little marketing puzzle for you:
The owner of a carwash wants to increase business and decides on this straightforward plan: He has classy fliers printed and hires teenagers to put the fliers on every dirty car in every parking lot for miles around. The teens put out thousands of fliers, but after a brief blip, business is right back to where it was before the fliers. What went wrong?
The owner assumed that people with dirty cars are the ones in need of his service. Yes and no . . . mostly no. Dirty cars tend to be driven by people who don't care that the car is dirty, can't afford a carwash, don't have the time and/or are driving a loaner/rental.
Conversely, the best carwash customers are the ones who have their cars washed multiple times a month. This means that the cleaner the car, the better the prospect. Further, following that logic, the cars that are the most pampered (including most washed) are the ones kept in garages or parking structures, not surface lots.
All my marketing homies out there undoubtedly spotted yet another problem: the ``one-and-done" nature of the advertising effort. Further, if the flier included a coupon, the teenagers probably gave them to their friends, the people who are most likely to wash their own cars once the coupons have been used or have expired. So a simple solution, one that seemed so sound, so practical, so certain, turns out to have a series of flaws, with the biggest and sneakiest being ``the dirty-car fallacy." The owner didn't fail to be logical; his logic failed him.
What got me thinking about levels of logic was reading the work of Ken Cooper, who runs ej4, a training company in St. Louis. He offered a lively response to a recent column in which I pointed out an alarming trend of employees' resenting corporate classes and becoming so frustrated that they turn ``training" into a three-syllable word, with emphasis on the ``rain."
Cooper's firm specializes in e-learning . He's the author of a thought-provoking piece called ``12 Truths About E-Learning" (which you can read in full at ej4.com). He starts that article by addressing the HR question, ``How do I get people to take this class?" and responds: ``People vote with their time and attention, and they're telling you that your content stinks. If learners clearly benefited from your courses, employees would be beating down your door to sign up."
Cooper adds: ``If a course helps someone make money, save time, reduce problems, make life easier, excel at work, stay healthier, look better, have fun, etc., then learners will take the course voluntarily. That's the primary requirement of all learning -- regardless of delivery method or clever instructional design."
Most training is designed around what management thinks employees ought to know, or distressingly often, what some sales rep for a training firm has convinced management that employees ought to know. What Cooper is talking about, of course, is figuring out what employees need to know. Thus, many HR departments ask employees what courses they'd like. Here we run into another cul-de-sac -- familiar to market researchers -- where we hear that no customer survey would have invented the light bulb, just better candles.
Cooper's solution is to come up with courses built around tasks, not topics, with titles like ``How to Leave Phone Messages That Get Returned."
So we can see how to get corporate training to turn away from its version of the dirty-car fallacy. Educators are educators because they know more than their students, right? That's dirty-car logic. The truth is that educators have to learn from their students -- learn what needs to be learned, and how and when.
Only when every attempt to teach is an experiment does real learning take place. They learn. And you learn from watching them learn.
Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com. 