Last week I was talking with a manager named Hank about how to help his team become better forecasters. Totally frustrated, he blurted out, "I've run two separate training sessions with the team on this and they're still not doing it!"
My reply confused him. All I said was, "Ok, so you've run a couple training sessions, what else?" He said, "What do you mean, what else?! I walked everyone through the slides twice and taught them how to do it, it's not that hard!"
Do you ever get frustrated like Hank? I know I have. I made this mistake a lot, that was until I learned the 'adult learning model'. I've also seen it called the 70-20-10 model.
Here are the basics. Adults tend to learn new skills in three phases:
- 10% of learning happens in trainings or formal educational settings. This is what Hank has done so far (twice).
- 20% of learning happens by talking with friends/colleagues about the thing you're learning. I find the best way is facilitated conversations where I get a few colleagues to share how they've done the thing we're learning and then pause to talk about it with the group.
- 70% of learning happens from actually doing the thing. This lets people internalize it and make it their own. With new skills, people need time to practice, make mistakes, get some coaching and eventually they'll get it right.
Circling back to my convo from last week, needless to say, Hank was annoyed that he was only 10% of the way done with training his team to be better forecasters. We were able to talk through a plan that that'll help his team go through each of these steps.
Sure, it'll take longer to do all these steps, but I'd rather take the few extra steps to get my team 100% of the way there rather than continuing to go in circles of why they're not learning the new thing.
Have you ever used this model with your teams?
