Trainer Tools

In this episode of the Trainer Tools podcast, I welcome back Garry Platt to continue discussions on his specialist subject: Transactional Analysis. Transactional Analysis, or TA, is a theory of how humans interact with each other - its main application being to help understand human behaviour and communication: each interaction between people being called a "transaction". It was developed by Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne and has been a tool in the trainer and coach toolbox for many years in helping us understand ourselves and our own interpersonal behaviours, but also understand those of others. In this episode Garry talks about "Drivers", also known as "working styles" and this builds on the first TA series This podcast includes a promotion for the 2019 Learning and Development Executive Summit Garry Platt is an experienced training consultant with more than 30 years experience in the business. He has worked with a number of international organisations helping them to enhance their approach to trainin

Dr Nanette Miner believes that many companies risk going out of business within the next fifteen years because they have failed to train people to be leaders. She works with organisations to help them plan for the long-term, investing in their people to build business acumen and thinking skills, so once they reach leadership positions, they are in a position to guide the organisation successfully. In this podcast, I chat with Nanette about her thinking, the learning pathways she recommends and what sits behind her big scary claims. Dr. Nanette Miner is a leadership development and workplace learning strategy consultant. She is the founder of, and Managing Consultant for, The Training Doctor; a South Carolina-based consulting firm that helps its clients to prepare today, for the organizational leadership they will need tomorrow. Clients appreciate her skill at asking relevant, timely, and often challenging questions that stimulate new thinking and help organizations to prepare for the future of work. Her f

How many stories do you have of crappy e-learning that is designed to tick boxes rather than improve knowledge or, perish the thought, improve performance? Most e-learning packages I have done work best as anesthetics, putting me to sleep in an instant, and putting me off e-learning for life. That's the problem, bad e-learning doesn't just fail to as a learning experience, it scars learners so that they never want to engage the medium ever again! Edan Kertis made it his quest to make e-learning - or digital learning - into something engaging, that people enjoyed and valued, that made a difference to real world performance. To do this, he came up the AFT model. Learn more about the AFT model in this podcast, and how it can be applied, not just in the digital world, but in any learning programme. Edan Kertis is the CEO at myQuest. He is an entrepreneur, behavioral change expert, software engineer, and the creator of the AFT learning model. Edan has dedicated his life to the quest of developing digital tool

In this podcast, I continue discussing the "Five Secrets of Accelerated Learning" with Krystyna Gadd, focusing on the last of the five secrets which is about understanding how the brain learns. We don't go too deep into the neuroscience of learning, it's more about simple techniques to adopt to increase the likelihood of retention. Krystyna Gadd is a leading authority on accelerated learning and its application in the UK. As an engineer in a former life, it has shaped her thinking towards creating learning that creates measurable performance impact. She has been training trainers since 2008, through CIPD professional programmes and her own workshops. She has published a book “50 ways to Accelerate Learning”, which expands on her “5 Secrets of Accelerated Learning” that she shared in the Training Journal article “Quick off the Mark”. Both these publications help to dispel some of the myths surrounding accelerated learning. There are 5 broad areas or “secrets” to accelerated learning, that Krys shared in a rec

Knowledge and skills are not even half the battle when it comes to getting lasting performance improvement. People not only need to know what to do and how to do it, they need to have the confidence to do it, the judgement to know when to do it, and the dedication to break old habits, overcome self-limiting beliefs, and construct new - more helpful - mental models. Only then will we consistently see people taking the great leaps forward that we - and they - aspire to. In this podcast, I chat to Emma Shaw, an enthusiast for L&D that's all about mindset shifts - which also happens to be my own favourite part of the business. Emma Shaw discovered Learning and Development purely by accident and has had a passion for it ever since. With a very varied career within the field, she has always found one thing consistently fascinating; what makes people tick and how they evolve. As a facilitator and natural coach, Emma uses accelerated learning techniques, NLP and other creative approaches to bring out the bes

We learn new skills through repetition. When we repeat actions with the intention of getting better, we call this practice. It works, but it's laborious, and without guidance can lead to bad habits, poor technique, and - most often - failure. That means lower confidence, lower performance, and self-limiting beliefs. As learning professionals we can improve the effectiveness of this process by providing the right knowledge and structure, and then through coaching as skills are practised, reflected upon, and new mental models developed. The problem now is that it's not realistic to scale this level of support for a whole organisation.   Douglas Seifert, PhD is the founder and CEO of Syandus He founded Syandus 15 years ago to create a new way to learn. By combining cognitive science with game technologies, Dr. Seifert focuses on providing scalable ways to solve issues related to knowledge retention and skill acquisition. Dr. Seifert served as Principal Investigator on 8 Small Business Innovation Research

Let me be honest, I am biased. I hate smartphones in the training room. If I deliver a learning event, I am trying to create a space where learning can happen safely. It's social, it's inclusive, it's active, it's fun, it is - I hope - challenging and valuable (I hope so, because it's costly!) ... and this requires a level of participation and engagement from the learners, and - because we're people in the same space - a level of courtesy ... but then I'm not one of the Millennial types, so what do I know. Paul Levy argues that today's youngsters have (or may have) a new skill set and that all the assumptions I packed into the above paragraph may be wrong. He says we should be open to the idea of embracing smartphones in the learning space and using them to enhance and share the learning. I'm not convinced ... what do you think? Paul Levy is the founder of CATS3000, a change and innovation company that helps people and organisations to realise potential and thrive. He’s worked with individuals and organis

Garry is back, this time to talk about his approach to using competences in learning and development. I would guess that competences are not used that much in your organisation, and if they are, they are only dragged out for performance reviews and little else.  Even then, if my experience is anything to go by, they probably don't really drive workplace behaviour or performance improvement, and maybe they feel more like a tick-box exercise that HR make you do. It needn't be thus. Competences can be really useful! Well written ones, with good descriptors of effective and ineffective behaviours, can be a great guide for superior performance and an invaluable tool in learning needs analyses and learning design. Garry Platt is an experienced training consultant with more than 30 years experience in the business. He has worked with a number of international organisations helping them to enhance their approach to training and development. Within the last 12 months he has worked with Deutsche Post DHL, Formica,

In this podcast, I continue discussing the "Five Secrets of Accelerated Learning" with Krystyna Gadd. We're up to the fourth secret which is about the importance of the environment. This isn't just the physical environment, but also the social and emotional environments. Krystyna Gadd is a leading authority on accelerated learning and its application in the UK. As an engineer in a former life, it has shaped her thinking towards creating learning that creates measurable performance impact. She has been training trainers since 2008, through CIPD professional programmes and her own workshops. She has published a book “50 ways to Accelerate Learning”, which expands on her “5 Secrets of Accelerated Learning” that she shared in the Training Journal article “Quick off the Mark”. Both these publications help to dispel some of the myths surrounding accelerated learning. There are 5 broad areas or “secrets” to accelerated learning, that Krys shared in a recent article called “Get up to speed” that appeared in the Tra

In this podcast I talk to Sunita Sehmi about being an inclusive facilitator, and also about how we can deal with sensitive topics like diversity, both as facilitators but also as a learning topic in itself. Sunita Sehmi is a Certified Executive Coach, Consultant, Speaker and Trainer. She is of Indian origin and was born in London before moving to Geneva in 1992. She has a Psychology degree, specializing in Occupational and Developmental Psychology and a Post Graduate certification in the Development and Training of Adults from the UK. She also has a Masters in Human Resources, Coaching and Career Management from HEC University of Geneva. Where she wrote her Master Thesis “How does proficiency in English affect French-native professionals at work?” A qualitative research conducted in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. She is the founder of Walk The Talk, which provides tailor-made professional coaching consultancy and training. Her business background includes working with International companies i

One of my favourite conversations for a while was with beer-lover and influence expert Alex Swallow. Influence is a perennial topic in the professional world, and most of us are in roles where we not only need to help others be influential, but we need to be influential ourselves. In this podcast, I ramble on to Alex Swallow about what makes people influential, what we can do to be more influential and what we can do in workshops about influence to make them more meaningful. Alex Swallow is The Influence Expert– helping high achievers grow their influence to increase their impact on the world. He is currently a digital nomad- living and working in a number of European cities (and soon, India) with his wife. He is also the Founder of Young Charity Trustees, an organisation that promotes Board diversity for charities. He has previously been a charity Chief Executive, a political intern and an assistant teacher for two years in Japan. He was educated at Cambridge and Sussex Universities.  

Paul said he wanted to talk about "involution". I had no idea what he meant, but I was willing to along with it because Paul Levy tends to have interesting things to talk about. Involution means the opposite of evolution. If evolution is about the fittest surviving, about decisions being taken by those who show up, about rewarding winners, then involution is about taking the time to look at those ideas and content that didn't make it, those people who aren't there ... and reflecting on what that tells us and what value we can get from them. It's a useful technique in brainstorming in particular, but also in the facilitation of meetings and decision making, as well as part of "the humble facilitator's" approach to training and other learning workshops. Paul Levy is the founder of CATS3000, a change and innovation company that helps people and organisations to realise potential and thrive. He’s worked with individuals and organisations all over the world for the last twenty years to challenge mediocrity, and

A lot of learning and development content is generic off-the-shelf stuff, built on shaky foundations and of variable value. Many mainstay models and theories that pepper workplace learning are not robust, not subject to the rigours of research and peer critique, and often not supported by evidence. This doesn't mean they're useless: they're not. They have pragmatic value in that they work sufficiently well to survive and are often good conversation starters, but if we want the L&D business to be a serious profession, having a more scientific approach to research and the development of theories and models would be a good thing to develop. In this episode of the Trainer Tools podcast I talk to Dr Adam Le Nevez about how we might apply academic rigour to the world of L&D. Dr Adam Le Nevez is a learning consultant for the UK Foreign Office's Diplomatic Academy. This doesn’t mean he teaches diplomats to unwrap a Ferrero Rocher in one hand while holding a glass of Champagne in the other. Rather, he part

This is from 2015 too, and a deceptively useful model for having skillful conversations in facilitated sessions, coaching or even real life! In this Trainer Tools Essentials episode, I talk to Catherine Thomson about David Kantor's theory of Structural Dynamics. In the podcast, Catherine explains how this theory of communication is applied to conversations in training and coaching. Catherine Thomson is founder of The Houston Exchange and is also an Associate Consultant within the People and Organisational Development (POD) Division with Edinburgh Napier University. A graduate of Sheffield University, she is an accomplished organisation development consultant with domestic and international experience across all sectors. Her expertise is in supporting organisations develop leaders to attain a level of agility that matches the unprecedented level of change and complexity currently being experienced in the 21st Century. She is an advocate of working with leaders using “systems intelligence”, helping them to

The Essentials Mix are those TT podcasts that have had the biggest impact on me over the years, the ones I've learnt the most from and become a better L&D professional. In this one (with a bit of director's commentary breaking in), Paul Levy talks about the facilitator's role in challenging mediocrity (i.e. anything less than potential), even at the expense of becoming unpopular! Paul Levy is the founder of CATS3000, a change and innovation company that helps people and organisations to realise potential and thrive. He’s worked with individuals and organisations all over the world for the last twenty years to challenge mediocrity, and to open space for change and transformation. Paul is also a senior researcher at the Centre for Research in Innovation Management at Brighton Business School in the UK. He’s the author of several books, including “Technosophy” and Digital Inferno (based on his acclaimed blog, The Digital Inferno. He is also lead facilitator with the Social Media Leadership Forum. He’s als

A while ago Krystyna Gadd presented her Five Secrets of Accelerated Learning and after that we decided to break it down to discuss each of the five "secrets" in a lot more detail. In this podcast we look at the third golden nugget of essential advice "design with variety in mind". We discuss various models you can use to ensure workshops are designed with variety, including David Meier's accelerated learning cycle as an overall structure, and many others. Krystyna Gadd is a leading authority on accelerated learning and its application in the UK. As an engineer in a former life, it has shaped her thinking towards creating learning that creates measurable performance impact. She has been training trainers since 2008, through CIPD professional programmes and her own workshops. She has published a book “50 ways to Accelerate Learning”, which expands on her “5 Secrets of Accelerated Learning” that she shared in the Training Journal article “Quick off the Mark”. Both these publications help to dispel some of the

In this episode of the Trainer Tools podcast, Garry Platt gives the ubiquitous learning styles theory (or theories) a jolly good kicking and talks through research that calls into question their validity and usefulness (to put it politely). I stopped using learning styles to structure learning workshops some years ago, mainly because I continually tweaked things and replaced things that worked less well with things that worked better, and this meant, quite unintentionally, learning styles fell by the wayside. This was a pragmatic approach that accidentally stumbled into the same place as Garry discusses in this podcast. Garry Platt is an experienced training consultant with more than 30 years experience in the business. He has worked with a number of international organisations helping them to enhance their approach to training and development. Within the last 12 months he has worked with Deutsche Post DHL, Formica, Siemens, Mercedes AMG F1 Team and was the keynote speaker at the SHE Conference in Blackpool

Quite a while ago, I received a mail from a listener asking the following questions: I guess many of your audience are freelance so it would be an interesting topic to discuss how they learn from or get community feeling when working alone. How do you trust your own internal feedback when all your clients think you're great (but you only have a happy sheet). In an organisation how do you champion best practice when the culture is content with chalk and talk? We recorded something that touches on the first part of this with Claire Simmons (called "Training can be a tough and lonely business, so look after yourself") but I thought we could dig deeper and so I asked Paul Tizzard, someone who has worked as both an internal and external consultant, to have a crack at providing some sage advice. aul Tizzard did his first "Train the Trainer" course in 1986 and has been a professional trainer since 1996 and independent since 2001. He is a trained presenter, coach and facilitator. Since becoming independent, he

A few months ago we chatted with Krystyna Gadd about her Five Secrets of Accelerated Learning, and then we talked about the first of those secrets in What's your objective. In this latest podcast we drill down into the second secret: be a facilitator and not a trainer. This is about moving away from being the font of all knowledge, the sage on the stage, to being a guide on the side who is in charge of creating an environment and ensuring an engaging process so that learning happens. Krystyna Gadd is a leading authority on accelerated learning and its application in the UK. As an engineer in a former life, it has shaped her thinking towards creating learning that creates measurable performance impact. She has been training trainers since 2008, through CIPD professional programmes and her own workshops. She has published a book “50 ways to Accelerate Learning”, which expands on her “5 Secrets of Accelerated Learning” that she shared in the Training Journal article “Quick off the Mark”. Both these publication

As I get older, wiser, more knowledgeable, more skilled ... and more impatient, ... OK, and more stroppy, I am increasingly dissatisfied with the idea of rocking up and banging out a few training courses and calling it a learning and development strategy. It doesn't matter how good the workshop is, how dedicated and talented the facilitator is, if the learner goes back to an environment that doesn't support learning. This means that I am increasingly interested in, increasingly fascinated by ... and OK, increasingly going on and on about, the important of creating an environment that is conducive to learning. This doesn't just mean pre-work and follow-up activities surrounding a learning event, it means support from leaders, managers, colleagues and the organisational culture that will allow for learning, sharing, growth, opportunities and all that good stuff. In this podcast, I talk to Robin Petterd who calls it a "learning ecosystem" ... I hope you find it useful! Robin Petterd has a PhD in creative int