Recently I walked into a client’s office to say hello and con­firm our agenda for the day. As our cor­dial stand-up meet­ing pro­gressed I was really pleased to hear how gen­uinely pleased he seemed to be with the tech­ni­cal sup­port train­ing that was about to begin. In fact, he went so far as to say that the orga­ni­za­tion had made the right deci­sion and was sure to ben­e­fit. Yes, I was beam­ing. Then he said, “Oh, and can you make it any shorter?” Sigh. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that; I’m ever hope­ful, each time, it will be the last time.

At Impact, we believe learn­ing – espe­cially learn­ing to com­mu­ni­cate effec­tively – takes plan­ning, con­sid­er­a­tion, prac­tice and fre­quent, peri­odic revis­it­ing of the key con­cepts. The “how”—whether you employ tra­di­tional class­room, eLearn­ing, social learn­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion or a com­bi­na­tion of all of the above—doesn’t change the fact that learn­ing is a process not an event. Behav­ior change hap­pens on the job, over time, and for the best results needs the hands-on atten­tion and sup­port of management.

Prac­ti­cal oper­a­tional con­sid­er­a­tions drove my client’s desire to shorten his spe­cific train­ing event. While I sup­port short learn­ing seg­ments, I also believe in lots of engag­ing activ­i­ties, lots of prac­tice, lots of col­lab­o­ra­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties, and lots of learn­ing by doing—and that takes time. I tend to believe that when it comes to learn­ing we’d be bet­ter off tak­ing a les­son from the slow food move­ment.

Is it really inevitable that all com­mu­ni­ca­tion as we know it, includ­ing train­ing, will be trun­cated by tech­nol­ogy? In his blog post, “Get­ting Shorty—The Ele­va­tor Pitch is Dead,” Jay Baer writes about what he calls the “Law of Bound­less Brevity” and claims “tech­nol­ogy has killed small talk”. He was refer­ring to per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion not busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tion much less train­ing but much of what he wrote struck a chord. Ulti­mately, he sug­gests we all cre­ate 120-character descrip­tions of what we do to replace our old ele­va­tor pitches. Even though I don’t totally buy the trun­ca­tion trend I’m will­ing to give it a try in the spirit of respect­ing diver­sity of opin­ion. So here’s mine: Opti­miz­ing per­for­mance for sales, cus­tomer ser­vice, and tech sup­port while sus­tain­ing results that make a dif­fer­ence. (118) Very retweet­able. (My spellchecker doesn’t think that’s a word. How very 2008.)

With a back­ground in per­for­mance improve­ment and instruc­tional design, Mon­ica Postell works with Impact Learn­ing Sys­tems in design­ing and deploy­ing train­ing and devel­op­ment pro­grams that fos­ter real cus­tomer loyalty.

Mon­ica Postell

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