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is not… unless we're talking 'out-of-date, largely discredited'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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