A new article that will appear in Human Invest's newsletter.I am an ASE graduate from the Commerce faculty. I majored in Tourism and Services so basically both my academic and working background relates to the things we can feel but can’t touch – services.
The reason why I love services is exactly that! Or in different words, I think it’s an amazing experience to just know when something is wrong or right for you because of the way it makes you feel. No arguments in the world, at the end of the day, can change the way you feel about something and that’s the most important truth in the world of services.
Working in training and dealing everyday with learning services I have constantly questioned and challenged what are the things that make a difference in this field. As it is for me now and definitely not a novelty, the difference is made up from a mix between three factors: intention, content and context.
In our inherited mechanistic attempt at measuring and at dealing with tangibles we try turning even learning services into products. Therefore, the least talked about subject in most of my client meetings is context. The space, the environment, the energy created within a learning experience that enables learning to take place. A beautiful service from my perspective, completely intangible and still making so much of a difference! Moreover, quite hard to be faked or forged.
As Albert Einstein said: “I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” But what could these conditions be?
I believe the first one is designing a learning context with the understanding of who is this experience about! We spend a lot of time with ourselves and with the client focusing on client needs and how we can do our best in the classroom setting, forgetting that the most important person in the room, at the end of the day, is the participant in front of us. Not us or the way we manage to prove our knowledge, not even the corporate strategy. At the end of the day, learning takes place if as a participant it feels it was all about me, my questions and it all feels good according to my learning style and priorities.
The experience needs to fit me. I, as the core of the learning process. I, the participant.
So, in this context, do we ever ask: “how participative would YOU like the day to be?” how much interactivity, how much time to work by yourself or just listen to the trainer and write down would YOU need? How often do we ask “how important is this day for YOU?” We assume it is all important since it is part of the corporate strategy or, on the other hand, we might know it’s not important at all. In the first case, we assume that we’ll have a great learning context given the mutual interest. And we’re often wrong. In the latter case, we assume that the context can’t be any better so we just do our job right. How often do we ask “what could we do together to shift the context so it makes a really important day for me?”
We must remember: in creating a context, it is not about us!
The next conditions are flexibility and follow-through. The more flexible you are prepared to be, the more you will sense the needs of the audience rather than the internal calls of sticking to the plan. There is no plan. There is content as such but creating the learning context is sensing the needs and being flexible in meeting them. A role-play can become a space for debate, a theory bit can become an individual exercise with a group debrief, and a learning space that suits you as a trainer can be transformed into one that suits the group. The misunderstanding of flexibility though is the lack of follow-through. The best context is the one that fits the needs of the people in front of you in an open manner and still meets the stated content to be reviewed.
An enriching context comes with purposeful flexibility and appropriate follow-through. To give an example, purposeful flexibility is to take the decision beforehand that you’ll turn the wheel right when the road takes a turn rather than turning the wheel right whenever you decide the road should have taken a turn. Follow-through on the other hand is arriving no matter if the turns of the road were the way you’d expected them to.
To sum up, what energizes me when working with the context, is the unique opportunity of discovering, sharpening senses and enabling learning to take place from within rather than pushed from outside. And at the end of the day follow-up comes if the learning felt right for me and no arguments in the world can change the way you feel about something! That is the most important truth in the world of services, including learning ones.
