I travelled to Vienna last week, and met with a number of trainers from Central & Eastern Europe. I enjoyed our discussions about varying levels of use and application of experiential and activity based learning techniques in various locations. One particular discussion however rather disturbed me – I met a Polish trainer and showed her some of our metaphor-based tools such as Images of Organisations and problem-based activities such as Seeing the Point. She maintained that she did not like any of them and questioned how useful such tools could be in training. My concern was not that she disliked RSVP Design activites but that she seemed to hold such strong personal feelings about what is ‘right’ without even considering what her ‘trainees’ might need or want. How often do trainers let their personal likes and dislikes colour the training material they design and use? Is there a particular cultural reason why experiential or activity-based learning would not be popular in Poland?

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There are times when a trainer or facilitator ask me for an ‘icebreaker’ and it makes me shudder. I’ve seen some great training delivery in my time – and I’ve sat through some pretty awful sessions too. I think most learners have made up their minds about what a session is going to be like after the first few minutes and that decision is often made on the basis of the introductory activity – or lack of it.  So I’m quite prepared to stand on my soapbox and claim that getting your introductory activities right is a crucial part of your learning design process. Any old ‘icebreaker’ just won’t do!

Face-to-face time in learning is becoming increasingly precious. Yet very often, the process of introducing the course, the participants and ‘breaking the ice’ takes a disproportionate amount of time and doesn’t add value or move towards the learning objectives. And I’m sure we’ve all sat through the lengthy ’round table introductions’ that we could have done informally in a few minutes if we’d had the opportunity to get up and move! So here’s the challenge – find a means of introducing yourself and the group that delivers new insights and learning and ‘tunes people in’ to the core content of your training session.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Use what I call ‘people bingo’. Create a grid of 25 squares. In each one, write a statement about something that it would be genuinely useful to know eg. ‘Someone who is currently working on Project X’, ‘Someone who has experience of Y,’ ‘Someone who has experience of working with a competitor’, ‘Someone who has qualification Z’. Choose things relevant to your group and objectives. Give everyone a copy of the grid – the ‘bingo’ sheet – and give them 10 minutes to circulate and collect as many different signatures in the boxes as they can. They’ll need to talk to each other!!

2. Use imagery. RSVP Design’s ‘Images of Organisations’ and ‘Images of Customer Service’ are great examples of how carefully selected images can generate useful and relevant early discussion and focus people on the theme of the training or to benchmark how they are feeling at the start of an event.

3. Begin with an activity that gets people thinking and talking about the content of the programme. Our  ‘Challenging Assumptions’ puzzle is a quick and simple way of introducing people to themes around problem-solving, innovation and  change management. In just a few minutes they experience an activity that they want to talk about and, as they do so, the introductions happen naturally in a relevant learning context.

4. On a ‘technical’ training programme, use a group activity that gets a group working together and also identifies what they already know of the material they will be learning about. RSVP design’s ‘Learning Loops’ is a great example – a quick, multiple-choice question game that can be tailored to use your own content and then provides an excellent way of testing pre-training and post-training knowledge, whilst also building your learning group as they problem-solve together.

For more ideas and more information about any of the activities suggested above, have a look at the website or drop us a line!

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RSVP Design is fortunate to have built-up an extremely strong portfolio of learning tools, learning design capability and learning experiences that we can now provide to a wider range of clients. With our strong global associate network we have a fantastic capability to deliver anything from a single workshop to a global leadership programme. If you are an independent business development professional and wish to add our IP to your sales portfolio, please contact graham@rsvpdesign.co.uk

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We regularly run in-house and open sessions where trainers can come along to see how our learning tools work and consider how they might use or integrate these kinds of tools in to their development programmes.

Here are some confirmed dates for these programmes:

• London (Wallacespace) June 3rd 2010
• London (Wallacespace) July 8th 2010
• London (Wallacespace) August 19th 2010

To obtain a booking form please email kim@rsvpdesign.co.uk or call +44 141 561 0387

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We have found in recent months that holding a short 30 minute webinar focused on one of our tools has been a useful addition to the written materials provided on our website for those customers wishing to learn more about how our tools work. We plan continue these on a monthly basis, and will hold a Webinar on Webmaster on Tuesday 15th June 2010 at 2pm UK time. Please contact kim@rsvpdesign.co.uk if you would like an invite to the webinar as the technology limits the amounts of participants we can have on the system.

The Webmaster toolbox

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I had an interesting discussion with my colleague Boyd Watkins recently – owner of Interel (an Action-learning devices company – see www.interel.com ). We were discussing terminology as we increasingly come together with our respective businesses – Boyd sees himself as a ‘challenge’ designer: the creation of challenges where individuals and groups can improve performance in teamwork, leadership and a range of other skills by interacting with engaging and intellectually stimulating ‘challenges’. He sees a distinction between this and the (US) ‘games’ industry which maintains a whole set of specific rules about what constitutes a ‘game’ and often includes a range of  ‘trivial’ props from rubber chickens to bean bags. I must admit I agree that the presentation of such props to a group of senior executives can pose a credibility problem for even the most confident and capable facilitator/trainer! Perhaps a more important distinction is that in ‘game’ play the tendency (much like early experiential learning in the UK) is to watch the participants play the game then debrief at the end – however in challenge or simulation ‘play’ we would advocate that the faciliator can intervene as coach if and when required to aid the learning process, and make best use of the most valuable commodity that a trainer has these days – quality attentive time from learners! The other conclusion that we came to is that RSVP Design is probably best described as a ’simulation’ designer in that all of our learning tools started life as very specific response to a client need, and we design our programmes and activities for clients with their very specific needs in mind, even if the ’simulation environment’ might look very different to real life.

However does all of this matter or is it just semantics? Games, challenges or simulations – what do trainers and faciliators look for when deciding to use learning tools?

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Just come back from a really energising morning in London with a group of around 20 trainers (both independent & consulting trainers, and internal L&D staff). It was one of our regular Open programmes where we give people the opportunity to see how some of our learning tools can be applied in practice as well as discuss the design criteria used to create engaging learning tools and programmes. A couple of things seemed to be emerging:

1. Getting 20 people to give up a morning suggests that organisations are back considering how to best spend money on developing their staff!

2. The training profession is being asked increasingly serious questions about how it can provide real engagement for learners, and to demonstrate well thought-out and researched methodologies, and the use of professional tools and resources.

Will a result of this recent recession be an increasing use of experiential learning methods in workplace training, and a decreasing use of any kind of ‘powerpoint-based’ lectures?

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We have noticed recently that a phenomenon typically associated with larger class sizes in areas like India and China, is now being repeated in the US and Europe – trainers working with much larger groups that the typical intact team size (typically 6 to 15 people).  Requests seem to be around multiple teams coming together, and a desire to bring more real learning into what were typically passive large group meetings, conferences etc. Perhaps it’s also a feature of the squeeze on travel, time and financial budgets that if organisations get groups of people together then they are looking for economies of scale! Perhaps it might be that the benefits of cooperative learning are making a comeback, versus sitting on your own in front of a computer in an ‘e-learning’ workshop? As we are now increasingly looking at putting more development time into our larger Powertools, to cater for larger group sizes, and helping clients configure how to use multiple Toolbox sets with larger group sizes, it would be great to know if this really is a longer-term trend.

If not then tell us what tools would make your life as a trainer easier!

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We have a vast range of Learning Tools & Resources available including Toolboxes, Powertools and Workshops.

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Welcome to RSVP Design’s website and online shop. We are designers, authors and facilitators of a wide range of activity based learning tools, resources and programmes.

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