From Innovation Training to Innovation Runway
I’ve been designing and delivering design thinking-based innovation workshops and programs for the the last 5 years. The problem that I’ve observed over and over again is the dissonance between the participants’ engagement during the training and their inaction afterwards. Gradually, I’ve come to the uncomforting conclusion that innovation trainings do not work.
So, what can we do to fix this? To begin with, we should focus on the end-to-end participant’s journey. As Dr Eduardo Salas writes:
“What happens before and after a training session, is just as important as the actual instruction itself.”
Dr Eduardo Salas is a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Central Florida and one of the leading experts in training effectiveness. He has studied corporate training programs for more than two decades. Through his studies he finds and reveals misconceptions about training effectiveness. One of these is that most companies think that if there is a positive reaction to the training, that people will learn. But in fact the correlation is very weak between reaction to training and actual learning, he says.
It might seem like a minor thing, but this is a turning point for procuring innovation trainings. Clients insist on high delivery standards and will measure and evaluate you on this. As a result training companies have been perfecting their content and delivery and many have achieved really high standards, receiving consistently positive feedback. This in itself is not a bad thing — innovation trainings have become more practical, fun and memorable.
The consequence of the above is that innovation workshops have become a commodity — easily available to purchase at affordable price. And this is the real issue. More and more companies expose employees to innovation instruction en masse, without focusing on what happens before and after it and as a result not producing any actual learning.
According to Joshua Foer, who studies memory and context, information which is not relevant to one’s own experience and doesn’t build upon prior knowledge will most likely not be retained. Yet many companies send their employees to innovation trainings without any previous exposure to the topic. And while the before part is important the crucial part of the journey is what happens after the innovation training.
According to some studies adult learners forget about 50% of what they learn within two weeks after the training and about 90% within a year. This phenomenon is called “training decay” and depends on various factors, training quality being only one. Others include frequency of use, complexity of material, previous experience, aptitude and opportunity to practice.
As an analogy, let’s think about one of the most important moments in pilots training — moving from simulator to live flight. Sim training has long been recognized as essential to safety of flight. Through sim flights a pilot learns how to deal with engine failures and fires, blown tires and crosswind landings, comm and nav radio breakdowns, brake malfunctions and many more. While undoubtedly sim training prepares a pilot for real flying, there are things that she learns simply by taking off the runway. But most importantly how quickly you start real flying matters as well.
There is a fascinating study on training effectiveness and decay conducted in the Swedish Air Force during the seventies and eighties. One of the most interesting findings is that once skillful, the pilots can be away from their systems for quite a while and make a successful comeback. But it’s not the case for newly trained pilots, they need to fly or else face quick skill decay.
While pilot training and say design thinking training are incomparable in their essence, I have observed a lot of “training decay” in corporate innovation training programs. For many participants the innovation training is the first and often the last step in their innovation journey.
This narrow focus on the training event and the expectation that it will produce “changed, improved and skilled employees” is described by Dr Eduardo Salas as the first myth that organizations have about training. And it’s time to let it go! To follow on the aviation analogy — innovation training participants need to take off on a real runway. I call this an “innovation runway”. An innovation runway means you get to work on a real assignment immediately after the training. You know it will happen already before the training. And you get the team and leadership support needed to do it after it.
While the concept sounds simple, we have experienced that moving from innovation training to innovation runway is never so easy in practice. Once an innovation team starts to work on a real project, there are a myriad of daily questions and hurdles that the team needs to overcome. These vary from team dynamics and time planning, to structuring research efforts and finding test users to when is a prototype ready for tests?
That is why we provide innovation facilitators, who can support innovation teams on a daily basis. Unlike innovation trainers, who come for a couple of days, facilitators stay on-site for the duration of the project sprint and act as one part on-the-job coaches and one part team members.
We believe that innovation workshops alone don’t work and we wanted to change this. If you believe so too, we should talk.
About the author:
Elina Zheleva is Managing Partner and Director at launchlabs Sofia — a business redesign studio with an international network of offices. Elina is a design thinking evangelist trained at the HPI School of Design Thinking and Stanford d.school. Together with her team she works around the world with organizations to help them transform into more customer-centred and innovative workplaces.
