The best instructors in the business say ‘I don’t know’ rather than try to BS* their way thru it.

One of the best pieces of teaching advice I ever got was “If you don’t know…say you don’t know.”

I was a young pilot instructor teaching in a major flight training center and pilots hate seeming to not know everything about their craft. Maybe we think that somehow makes us seem less a safe pilot, less the aviator extraordinaire than other pilots or why exactly. But, we do. And instructor pilots can really struggle with this – especially when we’re young and/or inexperienced. 

As such, accepting that it was OK for me the instructor to say “I dunno” in front of a room full of experienced pilot learners was a hard thing for a young instructor pilot like me to want to embrace. Especially when I would be doing so when standing in front of a room full of pilots who had 1) traveled great distances to come to training and 2) probably paid my company serious money for the privilege to do so.

But, that advice was invaluable. Because almost without fail, instructors of any subject – finance, music, science, auto mechanics or whatever - who are BS’ing some kind of flim-flam answer to a question to which they have no clue what the answer is, will – sooner or later - expose themselves as not knowing the answer. And once that happens, their credibility with that audience of learners is gone.

If you’ve ever had the painful experience of watching an instructor fail on-stage as they get caught in the act of trying to fake an answer to a class of learners, you know what I’m talking about. What did you think of that teacher/facilitator/instructor once you’d realized they were just “shining you on?”

The point here is, there’s no benefit to trying to BS your way past the question. The risk in trying it is huge - if you care about reaching your students and keeping them engaged for the rest of the training. But! Fear not! The benefits of admitting ignorance are equally big. That’s because someone who has the courage and self-confidence to admit when they don’t know something is instantly deemed as honest and believable – or credible.

Once I learned the smart play was to say "I don’t know" when I truly didn't and to immediately follow it up with, “But, I’ll research that question and get back to you,” life at the podium or the simulator's instructor station got a lot less stressful. And - best of all - the bonding with my learners and their engagement with the learning became that much more deep and impacting for all.

And style's what it's all about, right? It's an engaging, impacting, effective and credible style to just 'fess up to the class and say ya don't know. But, the other half of that credibility is immediately doing the research necessary to get the correct answer to those learners as soon as you possibly can.

PowerPoint gets a bad rap (part deux).

 In my previous entry onpoint , I asked the question “Is it the medium of PowerPoint…that puts the “Death” in “Death by PowerPoint?” In that entry, I asked if it was the medium or a boring instructor that is to blame.

Here we are almost four years downstream from that entry and still I hear people “poo-poo’ing” PowerPoint.

Granted, I grew up back in a time when we kids were the only TV remote control our parents had ever heard of. And when I took Speech class, the only “visual aids” involved were eyeglasses worn in the audience or inanimate objects the speaker displayed to help make a point or two.

In other words, the visual aids were used to help support and enhance the speaker.

But fast-forwarding to the 21^st century now we see that now the tail wags the dog. Instead of visual aids supporting a strong speaker making his or her presentation stronger, we have far too many speakers rely on the “flash and dash” of PowerPoint and other software as the main part of a presentation. Anymore it’s almost like the carbon-based life form speaker is only around to take up volume and space and mumble a few stammered phrases during an otherwise silicon-based electronic presentation.

And I’ll go even further; in such bassackward presentations, I notice an infatuation with having some kind of jazzy-and-more-decoration-than-cognitive-support graphic (at least) or, worse, a half dozen images flying round the screen in some useless animation done more “just because” than for any sound instructional design or presentation logic.

In other words, the whole structure and flow of the presentation becomes too much digital entertainment – aka “edutainment” – and less on content and delivery. It’s almost as if the “if ya can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS” phraseology has morphed (decayed) into “if ya can’t dazzle them with gee-whizzery and lightshows, then ya ain’t tryin’ hard enough.”

Newsflash, folks; bombarding your audience with slide after slide of decorative graphics (those that don’t add to the point but are just there to have some kind of onscreen graphic) or those that make points that could just as easily be made by the speaker do nothing but “numb” your audience to the impact of graphics in presentations. Why? Because everyone and I mean everyone one is bombarding their audiences with pointless graphics too – endlessly – slide after slide after slide….

So, it’s small wonder folks still hate PowerPoint presentations. The Irish have a saying, “You can put lipstick on a pig…but, it’s still a pig.” In other words, if your content and/or speaker sucks, you can have all the software toys you want going during a presentation and it’s likely to still suck. Why? because the focus of the presentation is the content and how it’s presented. If it’s a presentation that is done with some kind of speaker on stage, then keep the speaker supported by and not dominated by the visual aids.

It’s ok to have several blank slides (dark screen) in your presentation. Those could and should “show” while the speaker in front of the audience is presenting and is the focus of the audience. Then when an graphic appears on screen it should only be because a graphic is needed to help get the point across. It’s time to get back to the mindset that graphics and visual aids are there to support the presentation not BE the presentation. If we don’t we’re just gonna keep on numbing the audience and alienate them from software-supported presentations even more so than they’ve already become.

Powerpoint gets a bad rap (Part 1)

When it comes to training presentations, “Death by PowerPoint” is a popular phrase these days. The phrase is usually referring to classroom presentations composed of seemingly endless PowerPoint slides accompanied by lecture.

But, in a lot of ways, I think PowerPoint gets a bad rap. Someone once told me Einstein said something to the effect of something is truly beautiful when it is simple. PowerPoint is simple. It’s also intuitive, allows photos or videos and even audio files to be attached to selected slides.  Because of all this, it makes creating relatively engaging presentation visual aids quick and easy. And best of all it’s very reliable, stable and can be accessed and played almost anywhere on fairly limited hardware.

So…we must ask ourselves; is it the medium of PowerPoint that’s to blame or…dare I say it? Is it more the result of a boring presenter that puts the “Death” in “Death by PowerPoint?"

Why does a mindset that “training is easy and ‘anyone’ can train” exist in the workforce today?

As a workforce learning professional, it is very frustrating to encounter the attitude that training is easy and anyone, almost anyone, can be a trainer. Anyone involved in learning and development profession knows the exact opposite is true and such assumptions from champions and stakeholders has led to an absolute train wreck of disappointment, frustration and missed timelines and outcomes by those holding such opinions.

As learning and development professionals, we’ve all encountered this phenomenon numerous times. Through the years, I’ve formed a theory about why this is. It is because so many things get lumped into "training" (the laymen's definition of it, anyway) this is a very common misconception amongst everyone but workforce learning professionals.

Because almost everyone - regardless of profession - has participated in some activity in that broad laymen's definition of "training," (like showing the new person around the office or working with the new person for a day or so to show them the ropes) such activities give the misconception that those who perform these orientation tasks are therefore experienced providers of effective, high-quality training. Not so.

Also, many in the workforce get asked to put on presentations of one form or another on or off the job. Participants in such activities often springboard to the idea that though such presentations are based on very little standard, involve very little evaluative criteria of either presenter or audience or both, they are automatically, again, an experienced provider of effective, high-quality training.

These give rise to the misconception that learning development is quick and easy. Hence the old wave of the hand and directive, "go make a training program to fix this issue and start running it next week."  Why? Because it probably didn't take them long to prepare for it (if any preparation was involved in the above scenarios) and didn't take them long to deliver it.

All professions battle with their share of “urban legends.” The misconception that developing and delivering effective learning programs is so easy anyone can do it is ours.

Peer-to-peer learning is the goal here.

Like in many vocations, as training professionals, our community of practice benefits greatly from the sharing of knowledge and experience of other professionals - particularly the seasoned veterans.

For quite some time, I've pondered whether or not adding another blog to the digital world of opinion and commentary would be beneficial to the industry or to me personally. But, I've decided to create this blog and pass on what I've learned in my over quarter century of delivering and designing training.

In that time, I've designed and delivered training in classrooms, lecture halls, flight simulators, aircraft cockpits while in flight and for the web. And I've seen both content, delivery and facilitation that was...well, to coin a Clint Eastwood title, good, bad and ugly. Sometimes it had all the earmarks of being outstanding training but actually ended up stinking out loud. Other times it was so-so design and content but ended up being expertly and splendidly delivered and learners thought it was awesome stuff.

My point here with this blog will not be to ridicule content or delivery. Rather, it is to let us all "go to school on someone else's money" and learn what worked and what didn't work and incorporate these lessons into our future training design and delivery for maximum benefit.

We might even cover some project management ground here as well.

I won't be publishing blog entries on any kind of schedule. Rather, when I notice or remember something working (or not) and feel moved enough to commit thoughts on paper, that's how one of these blog entries will be born. You might want to join the blog as a "follower" or advise me your email address so you can be added to the publication notice.

Either way, from one training professional to another, it is hoped the information presented here is helpful to you.