Critical Thinking Training

Improve creativity and problem-solving skills with critical thinking training. Create an environment of innovation in your workplace and increase employee satisfaction!

20
feb
0

The Forgotten Art of Strategic Thinking

Posted by Critical Thinking TrainingNo Comments

written by Alice Waagen

One of the challenges of any consultant’s life is to be vigilant in spotting trends. When a number of clients are asking for the same service, I sit up and ask: what is going on that the same pain, the same challenge is popping up with some regularity.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had four different inquiries for help with strategic thinking skills and practices. Normally I am asked to help new leaders to let go of their focus on tactical and to move to be more strategic. But these recent requests were to address the long-range view for every level of leadership, from front-line to C-Suite. I smell a trend at work here.

Addressing these client requests with a series of workshops and coaching sessions, I kept my eyes open for some reasons why strategic thinking should suddenly be deemed insufficient. Here are some of my observations:

  • “What gets measured, gets done” is the mantra behind most business planning methodologies. Our current business metrics focus on measures that are tracked monthly and quarterly with an occasional annual roll up. The much maligned yet still ever-present performance management systems nearly all cycle on an annual basis. If your window of rewards and corrections is based on 12 months of effort, how can you expect someone to gaze past that horizon?
  • Marry these short-term measures with our ever-on, instant-response mobile communication culture and you get a person focused not on the next week or month but on the next minute and hour. We are mired by in-the-moment information acquisition and decision-which makes it nearly impossible to think strategically.
  • The pace of work today limits recovery time from errors produced by short-term thinking. Miss a critical trend and your competition can leverage that gaff into a fatal loss of revenue or market share.

Strategic thinking utilizes a completely different mindset and skills than the analytical and critical thinking short-term views engage. Thinking long-range involves engaging in what-if and maybe postulation. The further ahead we think, the more vague and ambiguous our cognition becomes. More unknowns enter the equation and certainty evaporates. If a person is comfortable in a concrete and controllable universe, thinking into the future where predictability is limited can be an unsettling experience. Tactical planning and action can be a comfort zone beyond which leaders may not want to go.

The business world is littered with failed organizations that did not see a damning trend approaching. Leaders who fail to look ahead and stay in the comfort of today risk obsolescence. One of my favorite authors for strategy topics is Martin Reeves. Reeves states: Public companies have a one in three chance of being delisted in the next five years. Those are some scary statistics for any leader who wants to leave a legacy of success.

lice Waagen, PhD is president of Workforce Learning LLC, a management consulting company that provides business leaders with the skills and knowledge they need to build organizations that are productive and healthy. Dr. Waagen is passionate about helping her corporate clients and the missions that they serve.  She strives to make every engagement produce tangible value by helping business executives discover better, faster and more efficient ways to lead their workforces to business success.

HRDQ-U and Alice Waagen hosted a free webinar you can  Watch here. 

 

14
jun
0

Remove the Sting of Compliance Courses: Make Them Short, Succinct, Easy to Learn

Posted by Corporate Training Materials, Critical Thinking Training, HR Training, Human Resource TrainingNo Comments

By Ray Jimenez, PhD
Chief Learning Architect

More often than not, compliance courses have received a bad rap and reputation. The main complaint is that compliance courses are just “clicking boxes to meet lawyers’ needs.” As the perception persists, part of the blame is caused by designers, trainers and leaders abandoning the “learning side” of compliance. Consequently, these courses have been relegated to the category of being necessary evils.I am not giving up on compliance courses. From what I know of compliance courses, the intent is to protect peoples’ lives, reduce costs, avoid fraudulence, keep our environments safe and many others. Without good compliance courses, we are all at risk.

Recently, I spoke at the  ATD (Association of Talent Development) Conference in Las Vegas on the topic Micro-Compliance Learning. My goal was to share how to remove the sting of compliance courses by making them short and easier to learn.

Why and How Micro-Compliance Works

The key principles are:

  1. Shorten compliance courses by focusing on the most important lesson.
  2. The average time of a lesson is 2-3 minutes.
  3. Relegate readings of policies and procedures as reference links. You can still track these readings by using a tracking device when learners scroll the page.
  4. Invest in the lesson story and not in a series of long slideshows about the policies with just text.
  5. Deliver the micro-lessons in smaller bits and pieces, weekly, daily or spaced over time.

Insights Invaluable to Successful Implementation of Micro-Lessons

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At the conference, it was interesting to have participants raise challenging questions, yet, at the same time offer answers and solutions.

“What if it is required that learners must read pages?”

The cheaper way is not to put lengthy policies and government rules in long, narrated slideshows. Keep them in PDFs or text that learners could scroll through and still track if learners have done so.

“Is it enough to focus on the story and some important parts of the lessons?”

This approach engages learners and help them to remember better as well as apply ideas at work.

Overloading learners will likely bring results, although, records show they simply clicked through all pages in typically long, very long lessons.

“But our lessons must be learned in 2 hours. Lawyers require this.”

Let learners focus on key ideas, like the examples, then let them do additional activity and readings to consume the hours. By doing this, you are not boring the learners.

“We are required to test for knowledge retention and compliance.”

In most cases this works. However, oftentimes, this encourages the learners “to game” or “cheat” the system. True or false and multiple choice types of tests are clicked repeatedly for a trial and error approach just to complete the test. Asking learners to write something may also help them to reflect their understanding of the lesson. There are authoring ways to provide feedback to learners without having someone track all the answers.

How can you deliver by spacing out lessons?

Learners are busy and would welcome receiving maybe once a day or once a week, a 2-3-minute micro-compliance lesson. Most compliance courses are repeated once a year and to avoid the yearly end rush, advance spaced out lessons are usually convenient.

Conclusion

Compliance courses are often the first line of defense to keep companies compliant. It does not mean, however, we relegate these courses to data dumps and verification of scanning pages. They can be made engaging, short and help learners learn important contributions of compliance courses.

This article was reprinted here with permission from the author.

acb81f5317c9882f892f7b6d892badd9_Ray-Jimenez-200-c Ray and HRDQ-U are hosting a webinar July 27 at 2pm ET. Save your seat here!
Ray Jimenez has spent 15 years with PriceWaterhouseCoopers in the areas of management consulting and implementation of learning technology solutions.  Currently, Ray is the Chief Learning Strategist for www.vignetteslearning.com. Ray has worked with American Bankers Association, Dollar Tree Stores, U.S. Force, NASA, Blue Cross, Good Will Industries, Pixar Studios, California Institute of Technology and many others.  Ray is the author of 3-Minute e-Learning, Scenario-based eLearning, Micro-Learning Applications and Impacts and Story Impacts- Using Stories and Systems to Impact Performance. Workshop participants describe Ray as “fun”, “engaging”, “technically savvy”, “provocative”, “and inspiring” and “has depth in e-learning experience and innovation solutions.”

25
aug
1

Would you rather work in an atmosphere of enlightenment or repression?

Posted by Communication Styles, Corporate Team Building Games, Critical Thinking Training, Experiential Learning, HR Training, Human Resource Training, Leadership, Leadership Games, Leadership Style Assessment, Learning Style Assessment, Team Building Exercises, Teamwork GamesNo Comments

I recently spent two weeks on vacation exploring Portugal, a country with a rich mix of culture, history and geography. We toured everything from Neolithic sites to Roman ruins to Moorish forts as well as many castles of Portuguese royalty and many Catholic churches. We also visited schools where the Portuguese developed and launched naval expeditions. For a good dose of history and Portuguese culture, we toured modern democratic institutions, some of which are still quite fragile from the Salazar dictatorship era that ended in 1974.

While there were many interesting patterns to be learned from this lengthy and rich history, the pattern that struck me most was the differences in leadership, from a period of liberalism to extreme rigidity.

Portugal’s culture flourished during the periods when education was encouraged and economic equality was promoted. During this time, there were incredible works of art and great advances in economics, industry, global exploration and, of course, leadership. Everything was fluid and functioning like a well-oiled machine. Needless to say, Portugal was prospering during these periods.

Intermingled throughout its history, however, Portugal has had periods of extreme repression, such as the “re-conquest” of the Moors, the expulsion of the Jews, the Inquisition, the dominance of the Catholic Church and the Salazar dictatorship. During these periods of centralized repression, thousands were killed and imprisoned. As the bad periods became more and more frequent, overshadowing the periods of enlightenment, Portugal soon regressed into a backward and impoverished nation.

This observation got me thinking about how similar traits can exist in leadership today. Companies can certainly be differentiated by whether or not, at any given time, they are relatively more democratic and decentralized in regards to leadership and which ones are more centralized and authoritarian. My observation of these different leadership styles and the impact of them parallel my observation of Portugal.

Those companies that practice openness, education, equality (including income equality), tend to do better than those where corporate repression — a harsh but applicable word here — is the norm.

Put it this way: Would you rather work in an organization where learning to navigate boldly around the world is the norm, like the time period of Henry the Navigator? Or would you like to work in an organization where repression and dictatorship is the norm, like during the Inquisition?

This seems like a stark, but easy comparison.

This entry was posted here. It was reprinted with permission from the author.

William Seidman

4c311959d6f7cdbe5fff2e7abe25e6d8_headshot-wseidman_100-200-cDr. William Seidman is the CEO of Cerebyte, Inc., a company focusing on creating high performing organizational cultures. He has worked as a manager or consultant with many large and small organizations including Hewlett-Packard, Jack in the Box, Intel, Tektronix, CVS Pharmacies, and Sears. He is co-founder and chief executive officer of Cerebyte, Inc., co-author (with Rick Grbavac) of award winning, The Star Factor. Dr. Seidman earned his doctorate at Stanford University.
Dr. Seidman and HRDQ-U are hosting a free webinar on September 2nd at 2pm. Sign up for it now!
14
nov
2

How to Create Effective Training Events That Have a Lasting Effect

Posted by Corporate Team Building Games, Corporate Training Materials, Critical Thinking Training, Experiential Learning, HR Training, Human Resource Training, Learning Style Assessment, Negotiation Skills Training, Negotiation Styles, Team Building ExercisesNo Comments

Yesterday we hosted a free webinar, Guess-Free Selling: Four Building Blocks for Creating Effective Training Programs, with author and sales training expert Scott Messer.  Mr. Messer’s career as a business development professional and entrepreneur has spanned more than 25 years. He has built strategic alliances, co-founded start-ups, overseen mergers and acquisitions, and constructed new business units. He is the founder of Sales Evolution.

Over 200 people registered for the webinar. You may view the archived webinar here.

Here is what some one of the participants had to say about the webinar:

“This webinar was great! As a Learning and Development Professional for almost 8 years, I found Scott Messer’s information both insightful and practical.”

“To get started,” Messer said, “you may be wondering what qualifies a sales coach and trainer to even speak on this topic; that is, say the things that you were dealing with on the HR side of the table. The answer is simple. Getting people to buy into your programming is a sales job. It’s an internal sales job but a sales job nonetheless. Additionally, it’s someone who trains and speaks at dozens of sessions for year. I know the difference in impact that HR can make in turning a program into a good program or having it well, not so good and how to set the stage upfront to make it work.”Picture1

There are four building blocks to effective training.  They are:

  1. Trust
  2. Outcomes
  3. Solution
  4. Value

Without these building blocks, it is very difficult to get buy in from your participants.  Said Messer, “I think most employees want to learn but they hate learning events that they feel are wasting their time. Could it be that your teams really want to improve their skills but they don’t want to learn the way you’re teaching them?”

Messer then described each block and how it impacts training and selling as a whole.  “To oversee a successful training program, keep your discussions with all the stakeholders focused on strengthening each relationship with them within these four building blocks- trust, outcomes, solution and value. These are the drivers for ensuring that each and every one of your programs has the best internal sponsorship, the most enthusiastic participants, and the greatest…and I think this is the most important frankly, the greatest impact post training. Again, it’s not hard to train; that’s easy. Implementation is the key and right now where we see most people falling down is on the post training experience.”

The webinar concluded with, “The best sales calls are good conversation; be it an internal sales conversation, selling up the organization or selling your programs down the organization. It all starts with the conversation centered on trust.”

Want to learn more? You can view the archived webinar here and learn even more. You can watch it as many times as you like and start using the lessons today.

Sign up here to make sure you don’t miss the next free webinar!