Forced Learning - Can You Really?

Photo courtesy of markhillary

How many times have you found yourself in front of a room full of hostages, forced to be in your training session or on your conference call because of a mandatory requirement disguised as a training event?  Is it possible for learning to occur in this environment?  Is the participant even ready or willing to receive new information or have they come in with a road block the size of Mount Everest? 

If this is the case, why do organizations continue to force learning?  Study after study has shown that it does not work, but we continue to try to prove the research wrong.  I find myself embroiled in this exact situation.  We have created an "experience" to help our leaders focus on the improvement of technical skills via a mandatory live meeting every Friday morning.  While the intent is well founded, the participants, as you can imagine, are less than thrilled.  I suppose they might just think there are other things they'd love to be doing on Friday morning. 

In her blog, If You Force Them, They Won't Learn, Jane Bozarth explains that this effort to require training does not serve the intended purpose of making the training event important, but in fact has the opposite effect of making the event a chore.  Something we must complete, thus stifling any sort of collaborative, peer to peer learning.   Which is probably what we would all love to see happen.

Here's the deal, I am not so sure that collaboration and learning can be engineered.  It seems to be something that comes about naturally.  However, in an environment in which one wants to control that collaboration occurring so you can see it and measure it, we tend to try to create ways to engineer it.  So many times this backfires damaging your organizational climate. 

So, when we do get folks together, it's important to follow some basic rules that apply across many lines.  Let's remember to be clear about our purpose, be efficient, let the learner take ownership, do things the learners are competent at and make it look appealing.  Because, at the end of the day, it's about creating an experience for the learner, not the organization, leader or facilitator.  Learning or collaboration is not something that can be checked off, it's just not something that can be forced.