I
t’s a common and even understandable question and not an unreasonable one: So much training and education is done online these days instead of in classrooms, why can’t conflict resolution and communication skills be taught the same way? Why should organizations have to spend the time and resources on coordinating schedules, travel and on-site instruction?
Fair questions, those, and they’ve got honest, realistic answers. But first, a quick trip down memory lane.
How to Crash and Burn When Learning a New Skill: A Case Study
Back in the 1980s, when women’s bangs were big and shoulder-pads were bigger, I found a Yoga videotape (if you’re under the age of 30, these were sad things that produced video roughly the quality of watching a DVD underwater from the other end of a swimming pool). It was on sale! For $10! Even I, a poor High School student, could afford that! So I picked it up. Because who doesn’t want to become long and lean and strong and metamorphose into a supermodel-actress, amirite?
I took it home, changed into my best pink sweatpants, popped my fried mop of over-permed hair into a side ponytail, and popped it into the VCR. The intro was great! “In this workout, you will learn [blah blah blah, secrets of ancient practice, inner peace and meditation, something something strength and flexibility”]…It was 30 years ago, after all.
Then two incredibly advanced yoga practitioners began to fold themselves into self-propelled origami shapes. Um, OK. I could get my fingers within six inches of my toes—was that close enough to lying flat on my own knees with my hands wrapped around my feet as if they were stirrups? Oh, wait, now they were unfolding and sticking their hands behind their ears and WAIT A MINUTE WERE THEY JUST CASUALLY PUSHING THEMSELVES INTO A BACKBEND?
It was when I fell on my head midway through the attempt at pushing up into the backbend that I decided Yoga Was Stupid. Yoga was Dangerous. Yoga Was Idiotic. Yoga Was Not For Me.
How to Actually Learn a New Skill: A Case Study
Fast-Forward roughly ten years, and your humble narrator is now out of High School, and graduate school, and is working at a Very Large Organization in downtown Chicago. And lo and behold, one of the quirkiest benefits is onsite yoga at lunchtime.
I certainly wasn’t about to try that again.
It was, after all, stupid and dangerous and idiotic and not for me and besides, I was pretty sure my neck was still mad at me about that whole falling-on-head thing from the previous decade. Except the yoga instructor turned out to be a mischievous and sprightly little 60-year-old woman I worked with pretty closely, and she wasn’t going to let me out of it that easily. I’m not saying she dragged me to class, exactly, but certain forms of peer pressure were employed (“You’re 30 years younger than I am and if I can do this, you can,” for example).
But here’s the thing.
Learning something in person from an expert practitioner? Totally different from trying to muddle through a one-size-fits-all video that can’t see you, or hear you, or react to what you’re doing in the moment.
In fact, over the course of the next few months, as my sprightly colleague worked with a small group of us (never more than 8), introducing us to poses that were appropriate to our experience level and physical abilities, making physical corrections when we were leaning too far forward or too far backward, squaring our hips, lifting our ribcages when we were sagging in the middle, and offering hundreds of other little insights that could only have come from somebody who herself was deeply skilled at both the subject matter and teaching it, I grew to love yoga. It was for me, after all.
In fact, through in-person teaching, I discovered I was naturally far more flexible than many other people, and that yoga wasn’t just about stretching. I learned that while most people’s challenges with yoga tend to be related to flexibility, mine were going to be related to strength.
For two years, while I worked that job, I never missed another session of lunchtime yoga if I could help it.
The difference between simply watching a video of a skill being practiced by an expert and learning to start practicing that skill in person, with the opportunity for live feedback and corrections, can absolutely be the difference between developing proficiency and falling on your head.
A Brief List of Other Skills Best Left to In-Person Instruction
- Rock climbing
- Improvisational comedy
- Welding
- Using a chainsaw
- Driving
- Loading and shooting a gun
- Cooking (especially knife skills)
What do most of those have in common? They’re all high-risk if you get them wrong.
Communication skills are too. You may not immediately think so, but a botched attempt at Active Listening that has “roadblocks” woven in or sending a poorly crafted I-Message at the wrong time could actually do more harm than good, destroying trust rather than building it.
And that is why investing in live, in-person communication and conflict resolution training, with integrated situational practice and real-time feedback and corrections when they’re necessary, are as valuable to a novice Leader as they are to a novice yogini.
Online Learning: The Good, The Bad and The Oh! A Bird!
I’m not sure why—karma, maybe?—but my next professional gig was working at a dot-com that was doing something new and exciting: Producing online university-level courses. But this was 1999. Little did we know that the dropout rate for online learning would turn out to be staggering—up to 90 percent in the earliest years of the grand experiment. Even today, up to 80 percent of people who enroll in in massive open online courses (MOOCs) never complete the course.
And it isn’t just college-level online education that suffers from lost learners. A study published in the International Journal of Training and Distance Learning surveyed online learners who had not completed assigned online modules. Their reasons for not finishing job-related modules included, among other things:
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43.75% |
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37.50% |
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37.50% |
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25.00% |
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56.25% |
Learning new high-risk skills like conflict resolution is (ideally) an intense experience. It requires focus, presence of mind, a distraction-free and supportive environment, the implicit and explicit support of the organization (including freeing up time to learn and practice) along with the ability to practice and apply new and unfamiliar skills in an atmosphere of trust, with expert guidance.
If Its Really Important, Should We Just Be Checking the Box?
Finally, let’s face it—an online learning module often feels like just ticking an item off a to-do list. Especially in professions with annual education requirements, online modules are probably the quickest and most objectively verifiable way to make sure Employee X sat through all 45 slides, answered 7 post-questions, and is good to go.
Unless, of course, we genuinely have an interest in whether Employee X will remember anything from those slides next week, or the week after, or next year.
Communication and conflicts happen every day. They are the source and the solution to people problems. Learning the skills to get them right—every time, in every situation—takes a lot more (from both learners and the organization that’s asking them to learn) than they’re ever likely to receive from canned content, no matter how high-tech the delivery system is.