Serendipity and Learning

 The previous post did not have any reference to Artificial Intelligence or Metaverse or AR or Gaming. Why? Because much of behaviour change is about focused skill building. And you can get the bells and whistles via Gaming or metaverse or AR. But you need an assessor, who is giving you real time feedback when you practice those skills with "Conscious competence". As far I know it there is no AI assessor that can do it - but this is a space an AI skills coach can be useful - who understands the candidate and works with the candidate to give very specific feedback.  Until then, it is back to basics. Practice, apply, learn, unlearn, relearn, apply till you get it somewhat right. 

These are the 4 broad shifts I have seen in the L&D landscape over the last few years (this is a slightly elaborated post from the year end update ). These are not shifts - these are more my learnings and you can classify these as my approach to L&D more than anything else.  The death of inspirational training. A few years ago, this was the norm. Inspiration driven training with quotes, examples, visuals was supposed to move the audience into taking action. I have written about it here . Bordering on motivational talk, it exhorted the audience to "change". Net result - zero. Smiley sheets full marks.  There are still occasions where you might want to use it sparingly, but well not so much. The death of day long trainings. Earlier trainings ran for 4 days like a test match and then came down to 1 day (8 hours). Post pandemic, I have found it useful to keep trainings to 2 hours max. What that also means is cut down on the inspiration talk and all that dive into the topi

  As a facilitator, preparation is very important for me. I create checklists, notes, timings for every work I do. Even if it is something I have done many times, I always ensure I go through it once before we get started.  I never try to wing it. The one time in my career I tried to wing it, it resulted in a not so great experience, so for me it has been a learning. As a consultant (when I was one), we get that one chance in front of the client. And if they have to call us again, we have to get it right every single time, therefore we cannot wing it.  And when I am the client, I see consultants wing it - I dont realise why they dont realise this. Maybe overconfidence, maybe casual, maybe it is not important, but why wing it? Why not give every client the best you have got? Isnt that why they have employed you? 

As I near 500 odd coaching hours, one of the things I am struggling with is the struggle between process and intuition.  As a coach, we have to trust our intuition and stay with the client. But there is also a process we have to follow. I am not arguing that the process is not good or the process is insufficient, but there are times when a process step might be skipped due to the intuition that you have acquired while talking to the client. But I have seen expert coaches be able to do both effortlessly. So, clearly, I am at conscious competence and I need to move to unconscious competence.  Thoughts as I am trying to internalise the coaching process. 

 IRCTC is a monopoly, yet it has irritating ads on its platform. Exactly why? Sure, source of revenue. And oh, the IRCTC captcha I am sure is designed by a teacher. Almost feels like imposition.  And whoever designed the chat interface in IRCTC is a genius. Dilbertian genius.  But on a larger point, monopolies have no incentive to get better. So they continue to live on, as dinosaurs, until a meteor strikes them. 

Why has IVR technology still not gone obsolete? And why is it so painful? Some of the newer companies have invested in chatbots and auto resolution - but these IVRs remain as irritating as ever.  Ok, IVR cannot be changed, can it be made better? At the point when your customer is (most likely), upset do you really want to spam them ads? And irritating music? And make them wait for ever with a mourning tone of "Your call is important to us, yet, all our customer services executives are busy" or something like that? But more importantly, why is this technology still around? Resistance to change? Who cares? Low on priority? 

 Not sure if this is a generalization, but quite a few designers I have worked with have difficulties with English spelling. I have often thought that they are so visual that they have never bothered with getting spelling right at any point in their career. Also doesnt help that most design software doesnt exactly do spellchecks.  But I was reminded of it when yet another designer I was working with made quite a few basic spelling errors.  Strengths and weaknesses, plus these are strengths they hone so well and are used to someone else always come around and correct the spellings!

 I like to write approximately 30-40 posts a year on this blog. Some years are more, but most of the years are in this range. At about December, I realise that I need a few more posts to reach this target and I crank my brain. As the thinking process evolves, as usual, it is difficult initially, but once it begins to move, post ideas start churning out - either via books, organization thoughts, some reflections from work or some observations.  What I have observed is that as the ideas gather momentum the flywheel continues to churn out ideas and hence on the blog, you will usually see a flurry of activity in December and January.  So, in Dec 22, I started writing a few posts and left a few as drafts and in Jan 23, many of those drafts will be published (not this one).  This is true for most ideation process as well, once you overcome the block, there is a flood of ideas.