Training Makes You Stupid

End of the Day - the Nysa Tree, a photo by gingerpig2000 on Flickr.

The title might sound a little strange, and you would be forgiven if you thought I did not believe in training. Training can be a very good thing, the problem is the beliefs that training, and education in general, imply.

Imagine I asked you what steps the World Bank should take to improve its operations. If you have no link to the World Bank you might feel overwhelmed by the sheer lack of knowledge of the bank's operations.

This is OK, it is not what you know now that is important, it is what you will know before completing the task.

And if you do have some links with the bank, then you have a major handicap - you assume you have some knowledge.

Training always involves past knowledge, in the hope that this knowledge remains relevant in the future, and that if the knowledge changes then hopefully the new knowledge will be deducible from the old, or at least resemble it.

In an expanding economic situation the mismatch between what you know and the current requirements of the environment is often not that significant, it is more important to be taking some actions that resemble those required than to not be taking actions. However, in a freefall situation, those mismatches will grow and the matches shrink, or will appear to grow as one's means shrink. For example, if you are making 20% profit, not making 21% is not significant. If you are making 1% profit, not making 2% is much more significant.

Most training does not deal with the mismatches, because those mismatches are from the unknown future, there is no knowledge of them. What is worse, those mismatches may not resemble our past knowledge, and our normal responses may make our problems worse because we are using up resources without achieving a solution. And this situation happens every day, all around you, it is just people don't notice it or they make excuses for it - it is just a trouble-making client, for example.

The problem with training is that it often attempts to instil confidence in the trainees - learn this and you WILL be able to do that job. What it mostly fails to instil is the concept 'keep an eye open for situations where the fix does not work as well as expected, it might need a new idea to solve it'.

In almost every situation where things have started to go wrong, the biggest fight has been with the people who believe that their training and position means they can solve the problem. And they cannot.

So, it is not what you know now that is important, it is what you will know.