This is the idea behind Presntation.io, which I saw this post about this week. In a nutshell:

Presentation.io does this by allowing the members of your audience to see your slides on their laptops, iPads, and Android tablets and watch them change when you advance your slides. This ensures that everyone is on the same slide at the same time. Presentation.io includes a backchannel that allows your audience to comment on and ask questions about your slides.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. One the one hand, most people are bringing some sort of web-enabled device and this eliminates the need to deal with a projector and screen in a room when giving a presentation, doesn’t it? On the other hand, where you do want your attendees eyes? Looking down at a screen so they can see your slides, or looking up at you and the slides. Without the benefit of eye contact, do you get the same connection with the people you are presenting to? Or does the back channel allow for even more connection, as your attendees connect with each other as well as the speaker?

Perhaps the best use, however, may be the ability to make your slides available for a limited time after the presentation.

I’d be curious to see it in action, though. Obviously, as a software trainer, most of my presentations are not done with slides, but working in the software. Has anyone else been in a presentation like this one? Maybe one where you had printed handouts and no screen to look at? How did it make you feel about the presenter?

After taking a read of this post, Start with the Why, and the linked Ted presentation, I’ve been thinking about software trainers and how much we could learn from this.

It’s easy, when teaching people how to use software, to focus on how to get things done. Obviously, those details are somewhat important, you buy software to accomplish some task, a new user needs to know where to click, what options to choose, etc. to accomplish those things. It should definitely be a big part of the curriculum.

On the other hand, if that’s all you’re teaching your students, won’t that make for a pretty dull class? Are you really giving them anything they can’t get by reading the help file? I think not. I think the other part of our job, as a trainer, is to also show your students the why as well. I recently had a conversation about training with someone and shared that I found the easiest way to get up to speed with teaching something new is to figure out the big picture, the why. As I look over the outline, at each section, I need to figure out how that piece fits into the overall picture, and teach it accordingly. It’s not enough to simply say “This is the tool that does ‘x’, and this is how you use it”. It’s important to explain why we have this tool, what the student is trying to accomplish with it, how it fits with their workflow, and where it fits in the overall picture of training. New technology is going to mean a change in how these people do their every day work. In general, people are resistant to that kind of change. If you truly want them to embrace the material, you have to give them a reason to embrace the change.

There’s no better way to get folks to buy in to change than to help them understand why the change is being made, and how it’s going to actually improve their day-t0-day jobs as opposed to simply making them learn something new. That should absolutely be an integral part to any training program.

OK, granted, I am a trainer by profession, and when I see something like Seth Godin’s piece about listening better, I want to scream “Amen!”. Let’s take a sample:

The hardest step in better listening is the first one: do it on purpose. Make the effort to actually be good at it.

Don’t worry so much about taking notes. Notes can be summarized in a memo (or a book) later.

Pay back the person who’s speaking with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm shown by the expression on your face, in your posture, in your questions.

The thing is, speakers are generally only as good as the feedback we get from our audience. When I am training, whether it be onsite or online, I’m making subtle adjustments all the time based on what I see and hear from my students. When I see that they are actively listening, and understanding a specific point, I know that I’m safe to move on to the next one. If I don’t see that, I don’t know that it’s safe to continue on, and I’m very likely to go back over a point to make sure you get it. That’s my job, to do the best I can to make sure you walk out of the class with an understanding on how the tool works, and what you might do with it. I know that is being accomplished when you, as a student, start to form your own ideas and start to take the things I’m teaching you and apply them to your own work. If you simply sit there, looking down at your iPhone, staring out into space, I have no idea if the training is accomplishing what it’s supposed to.

There’s nothing worse than having a class full of people who do not interact at all, do not appear to necessarily be listening, and then get feedback that the class was too slow-paced and repetitive. The truth is, it probably was, but only because the speaker didn’t get any indication from the audience that it was safe to move at a faster pace. So, you didn’t get the best that a trainer could do, you could the trainer responding to your lack of listening. Believe it or not, you do have some responsibility here. As Seth says later:

Good listeners get what they deserve–better speakers.

That’s because good listeners give better feedback, verbal and non-verbal, that a good speaker can adjust to. Good listeners make it clear that they are thinking about what is being taught, and starting to apply it, and take advantage of the opportunity to discuss those applications with a trainer. They get a better classroom experience, by far, than the students who sit and count the minutes until class is over. Good listeners understand that the classroom is an opportunity for them to learn something new, and take advantage of it. They challenge the trainer to up their game, to adjust the curriculum to match the questions being asked and ideas being discussed. Bad listeners get the same stuff, taught the same way, because there’s nothing to adjust to, the focus has to be driven by the trainer instead of the student. Even the best trainer in the world is not going to always drive the class to match your focus if they are left to simply guess what the focus should be. It’s up to you, students, to make sure you get what you need. If you walk away from a class without some key bit of information, and you don’t speak up or give any indication that you need it, how can you blame the trainer for that? Sure, we do our best to pass on as much information as we can, and prioritize it as best as we can, but that trainer up there can’t read your mind. If you don’t actively participate, you share some of the blame for not getting the speaker you wanted.

As Peter Sims said in another article I saw today, Going From Suck to Non-Suck as a Public Speaker:

It’s an experience for us all, not a lecture.

Experiences will always be better than lectures, especially in a training environment. If you aren’t an active part of it, then the experience will be driven by other people and their interests. Is that going to be the best training for you?

Research shows us that, at every age, people are pretty terrible at estimating just how much things will change in the next 10 years:

Research recently reported on in the New York Times about a study on self-perception published in Science shows that individuals at every age and demographic make this kind of error: They call it the End of History Illusion because at each age we tend to underestimate the changes we will go through in the coming decade — even when we can point to all the changes we’ve been through in the last 10 years.

I’m going to go ahead and claim that this error stretches into the business world as well. People look at their career 10 years from now and severely underestimate how much is going to change. This fact leads me to two different conclusions.

1. The absolute requirement to keep learning.

Unless you are very close to retiring, and really who can afford to retire nowadays?, the fact is that your job is going to change, and you are going to have to learn new skills in order to continue to do your job, let alone change jobs! If you think you can “slide by” on your current skills and just continue to do what you’ve been doing, chances are that time, technology, and progress will prove you to be completely wrong. You are not at the “End of History” in your job. It will change, the only question is whether you’ll still be able to do it when it does. So you might want to pay attention when you are giving the opportunity to get additional training. (I’m not just saying that for my own benefit as a trainer, either!)

2. Trainers can represent the change people can’t see coming.

I’ve mentioned this previously, but this is a good example of the unseen forces that are at work whenever someone is in a training class. This is especially true if you are a software trainer and being brought in to roll out a new, or updated product. This new product is bringing about change, and it is very unlikely that the people sitting in front of you today saw that change coming. There’s a good chance they are underestimating just how much is changing right before their eyes, and an even better chance that they will not be able to recognize how much this one change will bring about more changes as they move forward. Changes in technology, hopefully, bring about more efficient workflows and more productive workers. I’m willing to bet that most, not all, but most, people would not be able to predict that there are more efficient workflows and better productivity available in the course of doing their job. Most people are simply doing their job to the best of their current ability. The don’t see what changes are coming over the horizon, and being confronted with those changes can be challenging. As the person now standing in front of them presenting this challenge to them, you may bear the brunt of their uncertainty.

Hopefully, most of your students understand the need for change, the need to learn to adapt to the change and can treat you professionally. There’s really nothing better than a class full of people who understand point number one, and are eager to embrace new things in order to improve themselves. But not everyone will be ready to learn, and you are now challenging their status quo. That’s never an easy thing to do.

For myself, this article made me go back 10 years in my career. Looking back on the last 10 years, I can honestly say that the career path that has led me from Network Admin/IT guy for a small not for profit lobby organization, to trainer for a Litigation Support software company, was not one I could have seen coming. It has been an interesting one though. What about you, how much change has your career seen in 10 years? Did you predict it?

One of the most interesting things you run into when training is when you start to contradict the personal narratives of the folks in your class. What I mean is, we all have narratives. These are the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world around us. These narratives become part of the cognitive dissonance that can make it so difficult to change minds because information that conflicts with our narratives is a huge challenge for us. You see this all the time when dealing with world-views and politics. Statistics, facts, stories that fit our narrative are accepted without delay or any skepticism, while those that contradict our narrative are much more likely to be dismissed. That’s not because we are so very good at determining the truth, it has much, much more to do with whether we want our narratives challenged. Most people do not, thus most people are not at all good at determining truth from fiction.

This post, however, is not about cognitive dissonance. I could go on and on citing examples of it, but I’m going to assume that we all know it exists, and also that most of us have no idea how deeply rooted it is in ourselves, even if we know it is in other people.

This post is, however, about training and the challenge of having to contradict long-held narratives of the people you are training. Now, obviously, when doing software training, you’re not dealing with large political issues or issues of faith, but you are dealing with workplace issues and possibly changing the way people work from day to day. Believe me, these things can be as deeply held as political views for some people. They can be very reluctant to change the way they work. They already know how to get things done, new technology that changes the way they get things done, even when the technology makes it much, much more efficient, means going from a world where the narrative makes sense, is comfortable, and most importantly, that they have mastered, to one where they have to start over from the beginning.

You can always tell when people are having trouble with their narratives about their job. The start asking questions about how they will do this or that, when this or that isn’t really needed any longer. They will struggle to fit the new technology into their old workflow, because their narrative tells them that the workflow is the thing to aim for, not the final result. Frankly, sometimes, the most effective way to reach these folks is to be very direct with them about this fact, but you have to be very careful with this method. If you’re too harsh, they will tune you out. Not harsh enough, and you risk them not truly understanding that they need new narratives, even if the idea is uncomfortable for them.

Frankly, I’m not sure that there’s an easy answer here. On the other hand, I think good trainers will recognize when they are teaching someone who is struggling with their narratives and have a plan for dealing with that, gently. It’s one thing to simply plow forward and tell everyone that this is new, and better, and the way they’ve been doing things is just plain wrong now. It’s quite another to understand that the narratives are powerful, and that being good at the current workflow is an important part of self-identifying as a good worker, and move people toward trying to become better, as opposed to holding on to old ways of doing things.

Learning a new way of doing things is never easy, but not learning a new way does leave you behind the times, which is also not a good career move. Don’t let the narratives of your day to day work, or the narratives of your organization, get in the way of doing things better.

My good friend, Kevin Donahue, who works in the hotel sales industry, posted a story today that talked about how much bad service costs a hotel versus all the other things guest might complain about.

But there is one problem – over and above all others – that causes not only dissatisfaction, but a complete break in a hotel customer’s trust.

What could negatively impact hotel customer loyalty so greatly? According to data-analysis firm Market Metrix, staff-related problems in hotels can lead to a whopping 26.2% drop in guest loyalty 

As Kevin explains in his post, there are lots and lots of things guests complain about at hotels. As someone who spends a fair amount of time in hotels as part of my job, I can see that. As someone who works in a service industry, training, I can see that as well. The fact of the matter is, if you stay in enough hotel rooms, or do enough software training, things will occasionally break. I think most people understand that.

What is harder to understand, is when your staff just doesn’t seem to care. Again, the same holds true in the training industry. During the course of a class, things may go wrong. Software running on a Windows machine, inside a web browser, is probably going to crash once or twice, right in front of the whole class. It’s inevitable, and most people understand that. What ruins the trust between a company and it’s customers faster than that is when the customer feels like the company, through the staff interactions, simply doesn’t care or isn’t capable of overcoming those small problems.

So, for me, the takeaway from reading Kevin’s blog, is that being a good trainer is not about avoiding things occasionally breaking, it’s about being able to not panic when they do, and make sure you can get it fixed and move on to providing a quality training class for your customers.

Recently, I was having a conversation with my massage therapist about what I do for a living. She mentioned that she thought we had some skills in common that were important to being successful in both of our jobs. We agreed that there was one that was absolutely vital to both of us, the ability to read people. In her job, she has to pay careful attention to how people respond when she is doing her job. Their body language tells her a lot about whether she is using too much pressure, or touching somewhere they aren’t comfortable being touched, (Some people really don’t like having their face touched for example), whether they are cold, too warm, etc.

Obviously, I don’t do a lot of touching when I’m teaching a training class, but I do spend quite a bit of time looking around the room and trying to read people’s body language. Do they look bored, confused, angry, frustrated, etc? Does someone look like they are ready for a break? Do I maybe need to go over that topic again, because there isn’t a look of really understanding something? As much as I would like to think that we are all professional, and if someone had a question, they would ask it, I know in the real world that there are lots of reasons why someone wouldn’t ask a question. When you’re in a room full of your peers and coworkers, there are all sorts of personal and political dynamics that I have no idea about. I’m not going to come in from the outside and understand the dynamics, but I should absolutely be paying very close attention to the facial and body language I’m seeing. That can tell me whether people are understanding what I’m teaching, whether I need to slow down, speed up, take a break and go over to one individual and offer to explain it to them one on one, etc.

Now, I’m not saying it’s the most important skill to have as a trainer. You certainly need to know your subject, put together good material, and be able to deliver it. Those are essential skills that you can’t be a good trainer without. But, the ability to read people, and adjust to what you are seeing in front of you, can take a decent training experience into a great training experience when it’s done correctly.

And don’t we all want to be remembered as great trainers?

Last night, while hanging around the house with the wife, I had the soundtrack to the Rolling Stones concert/movie Shine a Light playing on my iPad. When the song She was Hot came on, I made the comment that this song really got a bad rap back in the day. I recall hearing the song frequently back in the 80s, but unlike other Stones songs, it just sort of disappeared after that. When I saw the movie and heard it on the soundtrack, it occurred to me that it really is a pretty good song. It’s got a nice bluesy riff going through it, it’s fun, and it’s got that hint of naughtiness that you expect from them.

If you are of a certain age, however, when I mentioned that song, your mind immediately went back to MTV, and what was one of the worst, cheesiest, lame videos of the time. And that was no small feet in a decade full of cheesy music videos. My theory is that the video left such a bad taste in our mouths that the song could never be considered “serious” blues music.

I think software training can have the same effect on the taste left behind about about any product. Don’t get me wrong, even the greatest training experience can’t help much if the product isn’t any good, but even great products can get derailed when the users first “experience” with it comes during a training session they hate.

As a former IT guy, I can recall plenty of attitudes among the people I was supporting that tied directly back to bad impressions of the person who trained them to use a product. In some cases, they never really got over that. The product was marred in their eyes, and there was no changing that, all because the training didn’t go well.

So, trainers, you’d do we’ll to remember that it only takes one bad experience when users are first learning a product to mar it forever. The training experience you provide can help decide whether the user considers your product a cheesy 80′s tune or Sympathy for the Devil.

What do you think? Do you even remember the song, or the video?

Seth Godin coined this term last week, describing situations where we crete a proxy measure for success, because the true goal is more difficult to measure. It struck a cord with me, because it seemed very, very similar to things I’ve said previously about working in tech support. Namely, that if you measure “success” as the number of help desk tickets closed, you won’t get better support, you’ll get more tickets closed.

I can think of quite a few examples where we do this on a consistent basis in the business world, and the majority of them are because we are trying to measure something that is by it’s nature difficult to measure. How do you measure whether someone’s service is good, or could be better? You base it on things like customer surveys, but most customers don’t fill out surveys,  and generally speaking, those who do are the ones more likely to have something to complain about. The 99 people out of 100 who were relatively happy don’t have as much incentive to communicate back to you. as the one who was really angry, so is their feedback a good measure of the service all of your customers are receiving? Not especially.

Now that I’m training for a living, I see yet another example of false proxies. How do you measure the effectiveness of a training class? Truth be told, the effectiveness takes a long time to show itself. It shows in the every day work habits of the people who attended the training. If you’re training inside of an organization, there may be some reward in being able to identify students who have shown improvement in their skills after taking a class, although that is still open to interpretation. (Was it effective training, or some other factor that led to the improvement?)

For outside trainers, like myself, this gets even more complicated. How do we measure the success of a training class? Typically we look for feedback from the students. We do this in traditional methods, surveys, or evaluation forms. We also do it in non-traditional methods, by paying careful attention to the students as they participate, or don’t participate, in the class. However, do the evaluation forms tell us what we really want to know? I like to joke that the easiest way to get good evaluations is to finish class early. If that’s true, then I’m not measuring success, I’m measuring my ability to let the class go early. Not exactly the goal of training.

If the surveys are a false proxy, how do we measure the success of training? Do we measure repeat customers? After all, if they have us back that means they values the first training class we did, right? Of course, if they have us back to train the same people, maybe that’s not such a good sign?

I do measure my own success on the immediate feedback I see in a class more than what comes back in surveys. From the front of the room, it’s easy to tell if people are checking out on me, or whether they are getting it. The interaction is an important part of understanding how to tweak the material to fit their needs better, and how to apply it to their workflow, and so when I see students giving me that interaction, I know they want to learn, and are applying what I am showing them. Of course, this makes it very difficult to measure the success of online training, where I don’t see the students and cannot measure the non-verbal feedback they are giving me. So that’s not a perfect solution either. It also doesn’t help that the people I report to aren’t in the class, so they need something else to measure success by, don’t they?

Lastly, one other really important aspect of measuring the success of training is actually outside the control of a trainer. If you send me a bunch of people who really, truly, do not want to learn, it doesn’t matter how good of a trainer I am, the class will not give you the effect you are looking for.

Given all of the variables, how would you measure the success of a training class?

Yes, I’ll be there, and we’ll be doing a random assortment of hands on training sessions for Summation, as well as all our forensic products. So if you have interest in attending the AccessData User’s Conference at the Aria resort in Vegas next April, you might as well take advantage of early-bird pricing, no?

You can check out the details on the website:

http://www.ad-users.com/