domestic 1usa

DOMESTIC STEROIDS

3 Keys to Valuable Growth and Development

I spent many years facilitating learning opportunities in a traditional classroom, where I worked to incorporate thought-provoking questions into the U-shaped, herringbone or theater seating arrangements. My teams and I developed engaging activities based on what we’d researched or seen, but the environments were still similar to every other conference or workshop our learners had attended.One day, a chief strategy officer came to a test training offering our team had developed. We received wonderful feedback and felt great about the development opportunity. However, the strategy officer invited me to his office a few days later to say that he thought the offering was good but wouldn’t achieve the desired outcomes in the time frame needed. We went through the barriers we were up against, and the biggest one was time; we only had two hours to accomplish our objectives, and this offering was going to be offered to thousands of people in the organization.He then said, “We are looking at two hours as not a lot of time, but what if we were able to create an offering where two hours felt like a lot of time? Think about a haunted house. You spend 10 minutes in it, but it feels like hours in the moment. It’s quite the experience.”With that statement, we were off. We built a 30-minute learning simulation that met our objectives and amazed our learners. They retained a high percentage of what they learned and asked if they could return to go through the experience again.Challenge your team to seek value through experimentation and new ways of engaging learners. It may be difficult in the beginning, because you’ll have to overcome what you’re used to in order to create great learning experiences. But that hard work will be well worth it.