Mike Lynch on why the best Trainers know when to step back. From trusting the game to resisting the urge to help, discover the three secrets that make experiential learning - and the debrief that follows - truly effective.
Experiential learning is a process where participants work on a task reflecting on it later and learning lessons from how they behaved. Often called “active learning” or “learning by doing” it’s not about just listening to a Trainer – it’s about active engagement in a real task.
It’s an antidote to lectures by PowerPoint, addiction to screens and passive training sessions. It’s engaging, fun and demonstrates key skills – or lack of them!
To get the most out of experiential learning Trainers need to understand the three secrets of success.
Secret #1 - Trust the game
Some Trainers worry about using experiential activities such as management games or business simulations. What if things go wrong? What if they don’t work? It’s safer to stick to my lecture notes and theory.
It can’t “go wrong”. Either the teams will do well (terrific!) or they will not so well (ideal!!). From the Trainer’s point of view it’s a win/win. The situation where teams do not do that well is the best outcome. You can then lead into the theory you were going to give them in the first place but now it makes a lot of sense and isn’t just theory because they have put it into practice and may have realised it’s not as easy in practice as they might have thought.
Secret #2 - Don’t interfere
Every Trainer is in general a people person – they are naturally helpful and friendly. They like to get involved. If they see a team struggling, their instinct is to get in there and help out. Sorry, that’s not the way to go.
With experiential learning it taints the experience. The whole point is that teams should learn through experiencing difficulties and overcoming them. They learn through making mistakes. The Trainer who sits with a group and steers them towards the right answer or who coaches them to work better as a team may feel they are helping but they are undermining the process.
Their time will come – at the debrief.
Secret #3 - The game is not the point
Sometimes an experiential game is set in a realistic business context and is quite serious. Participants might be making decisions on a product – its pricing, marketing spend, pay etc and getting a Profit and Loss account showing their results. Or, it may be set in some fantasy situation which bears no relation to business at all. In one popular activity teams construct funny hats and carry self-made flags. What is the point of that?
In fact it’s about teams working together and sharing information but the point is that the game is not the point. The game is a process, an exploration. It’s an experience which gives the participants and the Trainer the context to bring out the learning. The experience has been designed (however realistic or fanciful it may be) to demonstrate certain skills or behaviours. These are all brought out at the debrief.
The All-important Debrief
The main point of the whole activity is the debrief where the team experience is analysed and the key lessons are discussed and highlighted. And then crucially there is one more stage – the transfer of learning. How do the lessons relate to the workplace? In the light of what happened in the experience, what can be changed or improved back at work. This is the whole point – this is what the activity has been driving towards all along.
However fanciful it may seem, however much fun the experience is (and they usually are fun because people learn more when they are enjoying themselves) the main point is about the key lessons and the transfer of learning. And this is where the skills of the Trainer really shine.
