I hope the recession will cause pointless training to wither and die

SPEAKING at two public sector conferences last week, I was struck by a palpable wave of incoming nostalgia. It was like being at an emigrant wake. All present had the sense of saying goodbye — to each other and to the possibility of a similar conference next year.

Speakers made repeated references to conferences and seminars being in the front line for cancellation when finance gets tight. Conferences, seminars — and training.

It is just amazing how quickly an economic meltdown kicks the lining out of all those warm and cuddly mission statements stressing that the company knows its people are its greatest asset. That line gets stressed a little less as half the people are shown the door and the other half are told no investment in their development can be made at the present time.

Since my company provides training to the public and private sector alike, you would expect me to rail against any reduction in expenditure on training and development anywhere.

Sorry. I can’t. The last decade and a half has seen a growth in utterly pointless training courses and I hope the recession will cause at least some of them to wither and die. These are the kind of training courses which lead to no measurable improvement in performance on the job, because they are glorified talking shops based on A Model. One of the favourite models at the moment reduces humanity to four or five categories, defined by clusters of characteristics, and then puts hats on them. You fill in a form and discover you’re a blue hat person. Or a yellow hat person.

That bit offers the same kind of fun you get when you pick up a girly magazine in the dentists and tick boxes in a quiz to find out if you’re a shopaholic. The bit that’s not fun is what you’re supposed to do with this spurious categorisation. You’re supposed to go through the rest of your business life instantly stereotyping those you meet: “Aha, you’re a red hat person!” Then you select images or words from your mental store room which are supposed to influence that kind of person.

What a joyless, pointless approach to humanity and to business. If the human race was meant to boil down to a handful of stereotypes, wouldn’t you think God or evolution would have achieved it, after all these millennia?

Another kind of training that could usefully be withered by the recession is the kind dominated by the matrix. This takes the form of a right angle with writing up the side and across the bottom, which — it is claimed — allows you to select the characteristics which make up the perfect leader/manager/project manager/organisation. If the matrix approach were applied to motherhood, you’d find one side was labelled:

Obsessive to slob.

Across the bottom, it might say;

Fiery to comatose.

The group would then spend two hours “exploring” this, eventually coming to the kind of choice Goldilocks came to, all on her own, in the cottage owned by the bear family. Goldilocks wanted porridge that was not too hot, not too cold, but just right. She wanted a bed that was not too soft, not too hard, but just right. All she had to do was a bit of breaking and entering, taste each bowl, poke each mattress and she was set. On a management training course, the inevitable progress towards the mediocre median takes much longer. That’s to allow insights to develop. Insights are the get-out clause in useless training courses. The trainees don’t change, but, they claim, emerge from the course with new insights. Now, my feeling is that if I was being flown home in a replacement plane for the XL flight I was supposed to be on, I sure as hell wouldn’t want a pilot who has developed insights. What I would want is a pilot who has learned and can deploy SKILLS. A pilot who has the right actions tattooed into their reflexes. Insights? Every beer-swilling couch potato has insights. Or believes they have.

Insights are expected to come out of Diversity training, another great fad of the last few years. Here’s an example of what’s been offered in this genre. A facilitator presents the group with a scenario involving a cruise ship which has hit an obstacle, mid-ocean. One of the lifeboats will reach an island some few hundred miles away. But no other ship will reach that island for decades. It is your job to pick from the available passengers half a dozen people who will populate the island with a new generation. On offer is a range of passenger types along these lines: A gay one legged violinist.

A post-menopausal midwife.

A twenty-something cocaine addict.

A Nigerian accountant.

A young widower who is a Progressive Democrat councillor.

A Munster rugby player.

A nineteen-year-old sex worker.

You’re not allowed to ask what kind of marketing the cruise ship company does that ended up recruiting such an extraordinary bunch of people. You’re not allowed to ask whether the island is a south pacific job filled with oversize flowers, coconuts and turtles or a frozen rock the size of Ireland’s Eye located near Iceland. You’re not allowed to query the morality of the entire exercise — in logic, you’re going to pick the midwife, but have you the right to condemn the poor woman to a life sentence of solo baby-catching? Have you the right to select survivors based on their capacity to procreate?

Don’t go there, you’re told. Just concentrate on picking the people.

If, having picked the sex worker and the addict, (on the basis that the addict will get through withdrawal and be clean before she gets pregnant) the rugby player, accountant and widower, you go on to select the violinist, you’re in trouble. You thought you were proving a) that culture and music is going to be an important aspect of surviving the island and that b) you have no prejudice against gay people, with or without all the normal complement of legs. But the facilitator may suggest that this is really reverse prejudice and you’re homophobic as hell. To deepen your insights, don’t you know…

You end up hating not only the prospective procreators, but the facilitator and other participants in the programme, as well. Then you go on a time management course where you learn that the urgent frequently misplaces the important (duh) and that making lists allows you the orgasmic thrill of ticking off what you achieve during the day. And don’t get me started on team-building by throwing paint balls at each other.

No, the recession should not lead to mass cancellation of training and development for staff in either public or private sector. But it should lead to cancellation, nay elimination, of talking-shop training courses the only outcomes of which are a snazzy folder and a new set of buzzwords.