We are in the 'human performance' and 'results' business.

Our role initially involves gaining a deep and clear appreciation of your goals, irrespective of whether these are; business, functional, team, individual or personal. 

We work with you and your local team to establish the gaps between your goal(s) and your current situation. Gaps can be caused by many things, including the capabilities of the people in your business.

Performance capability gaps can be often be clustered into distinct areas - allowing for a simple 'performance diagnostic' matrix to be created and used to identify where and how to target gap-closing techniques

Once the correct reason for a performance gap has been established there may be several different ways to address it - some will be more effective and appropriate than others, for example;

• It has been well researched and documented that every individual tends to have a preferred learning style, whether as an; activist, pragmatist, theorist or reflector. 

• People often have a set of preferences in how they absorb or use information, for example; visually, auditory or kinaesthetically. 

• Online learning may work for knowledge transfer but fail to build skill acquisition.

• Mentoring may be useful for new hires, but rejected by more experienced employees...and coaching may do the opposite. 

Therefore learning methods need to take these preferences into consideration. This is something we specialise in. We know, for example, that most knowledge can be acquired outside of a classroom (perhaps as online pre-work), that classroom training is best used for skill-building, and that such a session must be carefully constructed to take individual learning preferences into consideration.  

Our design and delivery process for skill-building in a classroom also includes well established 'adult-learning' principles:

• The opportunity for the learner to demonstrate current 'inherent' capability, rather than assume their skill level.

• Trail-and-error (most adults learn by 'doing' and by making mistakes in a safe environment).

• Feedback and demonstration by an expert.

• Disclosure from the learner about their thoughts and experience.

• Repetition and reinforcement.

• Reflection and action planning.

So, what are some of our 'learning principles'?

60-70% practice (KNOWING is NOT the same as DOING)

Many people can comfortably tell you ‘what’ should be done – but being able to confidently and consistently DEMONSTRATE confidence in the application of the right behaviors, techniques and tools is often significantly under-developed. We therefore provide plenty of opportunity to practice. This practice comes in two forms:

• Vignette: Opportunities to repeatedly practice core skills and behaviors in pairs, trios or small groups.

• Real-plays: Skills are then applied in a real-play setting. Each real-play requires the deployment of all the skills previously covered throughout a virtual or face-to-face workshop - ensuring they are continuing to be honed and developed throughout the journey. We use a variety of different types of real-play, each developed to maximize engagement of all participants and to reflect their real working environment.

A focus on strengths

All too often people focus their development solely on their weaknesses. We focus much of our time on enabling participants to identify their strengths and preferences for how they learn. As part of their development planning, they identify which strengths they want to hone into world-class performance. We also provide participants with a list of ways in which they can develop themselves and ask them – based on their strengths and preferences – which ones they want to incorporate into a plan. This focus on strengths is often more motivational than focusing on weaknesses.

Feedback should come from an EXPERT

Having just learnt a concept, skill or approach it is unrealistic to expect a newly trained participant to be competent enough to observe and provide meaningful feedback to a peer. The majority of the feedback will therefore come from the facilitator. However, participants will be given tools to enable them to observe their peers as part of any real-play, to provide dedicated and specific feedback in addition to feedback from the trainer.

Do NOT ‘boil the ocean’

A major failing of many training workshops is they focus too little time on too many skills and tools. We have identified a small number of critical skills and behaviors that have the biggest impact on success and our workshops enable participants to master these. The focus is therefore on depth of skill not breadth.

Attitude and Mindset REALLY matters

People need to develop positive ‘self-talk’, the ability to bounce-back after a set-back (having carefully undertaken some critical self-reflection) and strong emotional intelligence. Skills deployed without the right mentality and self-awareness are significantly less effective. This is where our proven tools and approaches on the removal of 'interference' add significant value.

Role-plays should be grounded in reality

From our significant experience we find people ‘switch-off’ and ‘blame’ the lack of ‘reality’ in roles-plays – using these as excuses for poor performance or lack of application. Carefully crafted business-based real-plays have been shown to provide significant value. It demonstrates a deep understanding of the business together with offering the opportunity for people to practice on real-life challenges. 

Appropriate participant/facilitator ratios

For our more intensive workshops we typically recommend a class size of ten people maximum. Often in a client train-the-trainer context, we recommend  the trainers 'double-up' to deliver the workshop initially. This is not mandatory, however it provides additional support for each of the trainers as they build their skill and confidence with the content. Alternatively, one trainer can be the lead on everything and the second trainer can be a support person (often a great role for a more junior L&D person) on: observation, activity management and feedback. 

Time for self-reflection and processing built in throughout

For the process of learning to have the most impact, it is important for people to have the time and opportunity to reflect on their own performance and learning. We therefore create multiple opportunities throughout our workshops for participants to have this time.