Today, you have apps for everything. Apps for movie tickets,
fitness, flight tickets, banks, payment, religion, spirituality etc. Name the
service and you have an app. Kar lo duniya apni mutthi me..is actually a
reality. I am waiting for the day, when I click something on a phone and it
goes and burns my bulging fat.
The other day, I met someone who came to me with a tech
solution. She runs multiple training centres and uses technology to keep tab on
the trainers, the quality of teaching etc. She has an army of trainers
conducting training sessions simultaneously across multiple locations. She has
a tracker which tracks where every trainer is and whether he / she is going to
reach in time for the session.
The need for this feature, is based on the inherent premise
that normal trainer behavior is to be late. But why would a trainer be
deliberately late? His / Her bread and butter depends on the training, so they
will always try to be on time.
I wonder if I am one of her trainers, and 10 minutes before
the start of the session, she comes to know I am not going to reach in time.
Say there is a traffic jam, or the local train electricity grid snaps, or I
have an accident, or I have just started late. What can she do? Sitting some
hundred miles away, can she fire a command and have a jet or drone, or time
machine sent to me, which will lift me from my current place and transport me
to the training centre? The answer is no. The only benefit is that the app will
automatically shoot an email or a message to the training co-ordinator at the
location that the trainer will be late. But then this can even be done by the
trainer himself or herself.
What if the trainer is a habitual late comer? Three sessions
and he / she will be found out by customer complaints. You don’t need to build
a sophisticated tracker. As a customer this feature is good, but like a lot of
such features is just a mirage. Just simple trust in the trainer, saves me the
cost of building this tracking feature. However, trust isn’t sexy, apps and
technology are.
Another feature tells you how much time the trainer has
spent on which slide. The whole focus is on following the process, the
assumption is that if you follow the process the results will be fruitful.
Unfortunately training is different from manufacturing. In
manufacturing, multiple raw materials need to be subjected to different
processes in specific environments to get desired outputs. Training is more of
an art. By focusing too much on the process, you will kill the art and slowly
robots will take over training. Then you will find that training is not
effective, and you will go back to the trainers.
Every trainer is different, brings with them their own
flair, style, creativity, anecdotes. Being a trainer for 20 years, I can see
into a participant’s eyes and decipher whether they have understood the subject
or not. There have been instances, when I have seen into somebody’s eyes, and
asked the query what they wanted to ask. This my dear friends, is the art.
There are so many other trainers I know, who have superb flair and are great
trainers and story tellers and are also effective. The best trainer is one who
runs the session without slides.
I am personally uncomfortable with such tracking features
and later being appraised by ‘analysts’ who rely on ‘data’ to tell me where I
am going wrong. If you employ me, trust my abilities, else I don’t want to work
with you.
Remember, freedom comes with responsibility. The sign of
effective law and order is minimum policing. What the world needs today is a
Trust App.
No comments:
Post a Comment