Games Trainers Play

As a student in B School my first experience of a structured experience was when the professor had some actors dress up in rags and carry weapons while chasing one of my classmates through the campus. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. We were all stunned and immobilized by fear. The professor then asked students to write down their own version of eye-witness accounts of the incident. Each one of us had a different version of the event. We could not even agree on how many people were attacking our classmate. We could not agree on the kind of weapons the group members carried. The professor then proceeded to use this incident to draw out important lessons in group behavior, individual perceptions and cognitive biases that affect “eye witness” accounts. The incident is fresh in my mind after years.The professor had explained to us that for learning to be effective, an experience has to be followed up with a period of reflection and then the reflection leads us to form a hypothesis about how we should change our behavior. The reflective process has to generate insights that give us the energy to drive behavior change. The skill of the facilitator lies in generating these insights.Structured experiences or training games are effective only when the facilitators are able to use their observation skills to draw inferences, hypotheses & learning. So the effectiveness of a structured experience is directly linked to the skill and knowledge level of the facilitator. In the absence of which, these become party games. The participants enjoy the entertainment and hence there is no impact back on the job. They are as good as entertaining activities run by an event management company.Trainers too go around with a bag of these games and are forever ready to oblige a customer who says, "No gyan. I just want the boys to bond. Why don’t you do the ‘rope twisting ‘exercise. That was so much fun." Organizations get the trainers they deserve.Experiential learning is a very powerful approach to learn. But the experience has to be followed through with a reflective process. Most organizations skim through this and that is when the game is nothing more than a gimmick or entertainment option that creates an illusion of learning. Many organizations use event management companies to run these games at an offsite. It helps to park the expenses under the training budget and legitimizes the team outing.They say we learn from our failures and successes. People do not automatically draw lessons from life until they pause to reflect on why they failed or succeeded. Some people use a diary to reflect. In case of a structured experience or a game it is the facilitators who mentor the group to look beyond the game and draw parallels from the work environment and create processes that will make those processes translate to new behaviors. Else these are reduced to an entertaining party game that event management companies should run – not facilitators.------------First published in Human Capital magazine Dec 2014Join me on Twitter @AbhijitBhaduri