Training thoughts need to be directed outside of the box

Personnel Today - 23 September 2003

by Donald Clark

Training has an image problem. Too many see participation in training as a punishment for poor performance, as a sign of failure. This is because training has allowed itself to be thought of for too long, not as the tungsten tip of the organisation, but as some sort of remedial backwater.

Let's face it, the industry doesn't do itself any favours with the strange argot it habitually employs. 'Behavioral objectives', 'transactional analysis', 'neuro-linguistic programming'? It's the language of a profession looking for academic credibility, but more often than not ending up sounding merely faddish. Pick some half-baked theory, package it in pseudo-serious language and present it as science. Bang, you're in the training business. Well science this is not… unless we're talking 'out-of-date, largely discredited' science.

Too much of this modish conceptual clap-trap draws on behaviourism, for which the presiding genius was one BF Skinner (1904 - 1990).

Skinner is best known today as the man who kept his daughter in a box and extrapolated his theories of human psychology from experiments on pigeons - for which purpose he invented a different type of box, called The Skinner Box.

An animal placed inside the Skinner Box is rewarded with a morsel of food each time it makes a desired response, such as pressing a lever or pecking a key. Skinner discovered and elaborated his principles of 'operant conditioning', a type of learning based solely around rewards and punishments.

Skinner believed that everything we do - everything we are - is shaped by such rewards and punishments. Consequently, training (whether it's pigeons, dogs or human being) should begin and end with stick and carrot. The point, for Skinner, was not to understand behaviour, but to control it.

This is an attitude whose principles can still be seen underpinning a surprising quantity of the training world's more 'sheep dip' approaches today, as well as some of the cruder thinking about organisational learning, which tends to see learning as a strictly linear process, imposed by the organisation, with no requirement for trainee buy-in to be effective.

The persistence of such ideas is all the more surprising because the type of thinking Skinner represented has long been a busted flush in mainstream science. Faddish, backward-looking, maybe training needs to get out of that Skinner box. Or maybe it just needs to get out more.

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