How even doing the right things in the wrong order can negatively impact training design, learning transfer and the results your L&D work delivers.

There’s a famous Morecambe and Wise sketch in which Eric Morecambe attempts to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto in front of conductor André Previn. When Previn points out that he isn’t playing it correctly, Eric grabs him by the lapels and insists that he is playing “all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”.

Watch the Morecambe and Wise sketch

Why doing the right things when designing training isn’t always enough

I was reminded of that sketch recently during a conversation with our Volunteering Manager, when we were talking about some conservation work that we’re having to do again because, although many of the right things happened last time, they either didn’t happen at the right time, didn’t happen in the right order, or in some cases the important follow-up activity simply didn’t happen at all.

One example was the green hay we spread last year to encourage greater biodiversity. The principle is fairly simple: freshly cut hay from a species-rich area contains seeds which can be transferred to another area and, hopefully, establish themselves there. The problem is that the timing is important, and our hay sat at source for more than a week before it reached us, eventually arriving the day after our weekly volunteering session. For this approach to be successful, the hay really needs to be spread within 24 hours, or 48 at most, so we did the right thing but too late for it to have the effect it could have had.

Then there’s the willow. We’re once again cutting back fast-growing willow that we’ve tackled previously because, although the cutting was done, the promised treatment of the freshly cut stumps to prevent regrowth didn’t happen. The first piece of work wasn’t wrong, but without the follow-up activity it was never going to achieve the intended result, which means that some of that effort now has to be repeated. As we were talking, I found myself thinking about how often we do the equivalent in L&D.

Timing and sequence matter in training design as well as delivery

When we design learning experiences, we can be doing perfectly sensible things, using perfectly sensible methods, and still get disappointing results because we’ve done them at the wrong point, in the wrong sequence, or without making sure that the other things they depend upon are in place.

We might, for example, start designing from the content or syllabus before we’ve properly established the outcomes and what people actually need to be able to do differently. We might spend time researching the latest thinking, models or approaches before we’ve understood the culture of the organisation, the starting point of the people within it, and their existing expectations and attitudes towards whatever we’re trying to change.

Sometimes the problem is more obvious. Training for a new IT system is delivered several weeks before people actually get access to it, which means that by the time they need to use what they learned, much of it has been forgotten. A new performance management process is explained to employees before managers are confident in how it works themselves, or before the supporting systems and processes are ready. We roll out a programme and only then start thinking seriously about what follow-up, reinforcement or opportunities to practise will be needed.

There are plenty of less obvious examples too. We involve managers when we need them to release people for training, rather than much earlier when they could help us understand the problem and create the conditions for people to use what they learn. We develop useful job aids after the training rather than having them available when people first need to perform the task for themselves. We decide that we want to demonstrate impact several months into a project, only to discover that nobody established a meaningful baseline before it began.

We can even provide really good learning that is undermined by everything happening around it. We train people to have better performance conversations while targets, processes or management expectations continue to encourage the old behaviour, or we set up coaching, action learning or communities of practice without making sure that people have the time and permission to participate in them. Again, the individual activity may be perfectly sound; it’s the timing, sequence or surrounding conditions that let it down.

Even experienced L&D professionals still need to revisit the basics

This is one of the reasons I think it’s useful, even for experienced L&D professionals, to go back to basics occasionally. When you’ve been doing this work for a long time, it’s easy to think of the basics as things you already know, and of course most of us do know them. The difficulty is applying them consistently when we’re working with real organisations, where we inherit programmes, systems aren’t ready when they were supposed to be, stakeholders arrive with solutions already in mind, deadlines move and managers have half a dozen other priorities competing for their attention.

Under those conditions, it’s surprisingly easy to find ourselves with all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order.

So perhaps we shouldn’t just be asking whether we’re doing the right things: We should be checking that we’re doing them in the right way, at the right time and in the right sequence, and also whether the things that need to happen before and after our learning intervention are actually in place. Designing training in 6 simple steps, and following MASTER will help make sure that you get it right.

Because otherwise we can put considerable time, money and effort into doing something perfectly sensible, only to discover later that its impact was limited by something that had very little to do with the quality of the training itself.

And, like our willow, we may find ourselves coming back and doing the same work all over again.

If you haven’t reviewed your approach to training design for a while, I have some resources that can help you take stock, sharpen the saw and check that the foundations are in place, so that the effort you’re putting into learning has the best chance of delivering the results you intended.

Browse the Resources