Via Green Chameleon, I came across Nathan’s blog post on his project methodology of Clarify, Simplify, Implement – great advice, and so simple. Later in the same post, Nathan gives some more advice that should have anyone in the training business questioning their value proposition:
Zero training
Every user is time poor. They have no interest or time for attending training sessions. Training is the first and biggest hurdle to adoption of your new system and process. While complexity exists and training is required, users can always reject or work around the process with a politically acceptable excuse – “It’s too hard”.
Our aim, through simplification, is to make people’s life easier, reduce the burden on their time and remove all the excuses. The reward is adoption, engagement and relief that that finally it’s been done the way everyone always thought (individually) it should be.
Training is the last resort, and usually the most expensive solution, when all other performance support options won’t work.
I wouldn’t even argue that things “are too hard” for people. I think the reality is that most people don’t care to learn a new way to do things, when the old way was just as easy.
Just today I wrote about the focus of knowledge management being making things simpler — yet we seem to stray from this mantra so often. I absolutely, fundamentally agree that making things easier for people is the point — and you if your project does not adhere to that basic principle, then you deserve to have it fail.
P.S. Fantastic blog! You’ve got a ton of great content that I’m looking forward to looking at (obviously, my first time here). Keep up the awesome work. :D
In keeping with the thrust of Harold’s (and Lucas’) point, JP Rangaswami has pointed out several times that the knowledge workers now coming into the workplace are by and large already “all trained up” on how this social computing and social networking stuff works.