Things That Can't Be Taught
Most people would agree that personality cannot be changed. Children are born with distinct personalities. Mothers often compare their children by saying, "They even behaved differently in the womb!" One child is aggressive while the other is contemplative. One is constantly talking while the other hardly says a word.
The study of personality falls into the realm of psychology, although it's difficult to be very scientific about such things. In psychology, there are five major traits, known as the "Big Five"—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—though most individuals fall somewhere along a continuum, rather than at the extreme ends, of these characteristics.
My point here is to address an issue in education and training that's not well understood: It's not possible to teach or train individuals to do things that are not in line with their personalities. This matters because much of what we try to teach in school and train in the real world is really an attempt to alter personality.
For almost 25 years, I've been building what are now called e-learning systems. One of my least favorite subjects, which comes up frequently, is integrity and compliance. I'm often asked to work on this subject, and usually what's being asked is impossible.
Most e-learning providers simply do what they're asked, without pointing out—if they even know—that what the client wants won't work. Some things cannot be taught. Unfortunately, as my mother would have attested if she were still around, I was born honest to a fault. I cannot build an e-learning system that I know won't work, any more than I was able to keep myself, as a child, from becoming hysterical if my mother walked out of a store and forgot to pay.
Years later I'm still hysterical about fraudulent e-learning, namely those programs that claim to teach subjects how to alter their personality traits. Of course, they don't claim that, but that's what they're doing nonetheless.
Training People to Have Integrity
Recently I was presented an opportunity to teach integrity and compliance to the employees of a large company that bids on RFPs. Bidding is part of a legal process and the company wanted its employees to stay within the guidelines.
Not surprisingly, the guidelines included an array of rules spelled out in a complex document—typically a signed legal contract for potential bidders. One would have to read the contract to know those rules. The company wanted its employees to be trained to carefully read the contract.
Its solution was to put the employees into fictitious situations, such as: Sheila has not read the contract, and unaware, she violates a rule she didn't know existed. In turn this, failure to properly read the contract creates serious problems for the company. (Much of e-learning is presented in this manner.)
Here's another example:
You're the manager of a large project, which needs to finish on time and is over budget. Do you:a. steal money
b. lie about the time you have spent
c. tell the company they can keep their damn project
d. carefully explain to your superior the problems that exist and let him decide.
Can people actually learn from stuff like this? Of course not, but everyone feels better after it's produced. And if this stuff makes the client happy, then build more of it, by all means.
But, if you want to address real issues, we need to discuss personality and how it relates to e-learning.
Picking the Right Answer
I have long insisted that learning has to be experientially-based. Twenty years after I proposed building complex social simulators, the e-learning community has interpreted this as telling people they're in a situation that they may or may not relate to instead of actually putting them in a realistic simulation. The reason for this always comes back to money, with something getting lost in translation.
Suppose I ask you to image yourself as a major league baseball player.
Your team is down by one run with one out in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded. What would you do on the first pitch?a. Take the first pitch,
b. Look for a fast ball,
c. etc.
The problem with this scenario is that there is a right answer, but it depends on many variables. Do you know this pitcher's habits? How have you been hitting today? How fast is the runner on third? Pretending that we can abstract a situation with a simple description and then suggest there is a right answer is absurd. But more importantly, if you've never actually been in that situation—if you've never played baseball—your comprehension of the unmentioned details is likely to be zero. Attempting to teach anything through short situational descriptions followed by multiple choice answers is just dumb.
Why then do e-learning companies continue to build these types of courses? Answer: Because the client wants them to.
What does this have to do with personality traits? Well, I play baseball and my response in that situation would depend on my personality in many ways. It would also depend on making an accurate assessment of my own abilities. What it wouldn't depend upon is deep thought.
Professional athletes do not owe their success to superior cognitive abilities. What they do have is superior physical abilities, and they rely on gut reactions for quick decision-making instead of thinking. They do what they "know." Coaches may try like crazy to get them to think first, but you can easily spot the 20-year veteran player getting chewed out by his coach in the dugout after being asked, "What were you thinking?" Nothing. He wasn't thinking. Correct action is rarely about thought, especially when there is little time to think.
Sliding Scale
How do we teach people to do the right thing especially when the right thing is not in line with their personality?
How do we teach nurturance, neediness, aggression, extroversion, or orderliness? I hope if you've read this far you realize that we can't. People are born with these characteristics—they're not learned. The degree to which we exhibit these traits defines our innate personalities. We need to revise the question into one we can answer.
You'll never teach someone who is fundamentally dishonest to be very honest or vice versa. You'll never teach someone who is very aggressive to be passive. What you can do is make people aware of the consequences of their actions and hope they slide over, at least incrementally, on the personality scale to adjust the attribute you want to change.
How does this help your client? You can suggest hiring people to do jobs that fit their personalities. Hire hostesses who are really nice people and who are really happy to see anyone. Hire chief executives who really like making tough decisions in the face of strong opposition.
Unfortunately this article is not about hiring—it's about training.
Someone who hates details is not a good candidate for being taught how to scrutinize contracts. Someone who loves details is not a great trainee for sales. Being people-oriented is a characteristic that rarely goes hand-in-hand with being detail-oriented. It's not uncommon for companies to deal with the arduous task of training sales people to pay more attention. Telling a client to hire someone else is difficult, since detail-oriented people-persons simply don't exist. It may be a hard pill for HR to swallow, but accountants don't usually relish selling. What to do?
This is where training is needed, but not training in the traditional sense. We need to think about how the mind works, specifically how the unconscious mind learns to make decisions.
Don't Try to Change Me
If you have a strong character trait, you've probably come to grips with its up sides and down sides. Take honesty for example. People appreciate honestly, but not when they want to know if they look like they've put on a few pounds. People dislike dishonesty, unless you're taking clients to a restaurant that they think is impressive (but that you secretly hate), while schmoozing them into closing a business deal. We have mixed feelings about honesty, as we do about most personality characteristics. We like friendly people, but we dislike overly friendly people. As teenagers we often try to be all things to all people, but soon realize we simply have to be ourselves and seek out work and friends that suit us.
Personalities are not conscious. We don't choose which traits to have, and we may not even be aware of how others perceive us. We do what we feel comfortable doing, and we push on... until we meet integrity and compliance officers.
They tell us to read every detail of a contract to make sure we are in compliance. Those who are detail-oriented, fearful of making errors, introverted, and sensitive do it without question, whereas those who are gregarious, confident, and aggressive figure they can get by without it. What's an integrity and compliance officer to do?
Here's what not to do:
- Don't try and tell people who act naturally one way to act differently.
- Don't make an example of the idiot who did it wrong: "See how dumb that guy was? And look what trouble he got into!"
- Don't lecture on the benefits of behaving the way the company wants its employees to behave.
- Don't write a manual with correct behavior that no one will read.
- Don't build an e-learning course with multiple choice answers, one of which is "the right thing to do."
The mind is organized around experiences. We remember our experiences and index them so that we can find them later. No one knows quite how this process works, but cognitive scientists have some ideas. You can't find an experience that was indexed wrong, for example.
Correct indexing involves figuring out the goal related to an experience and the conditions that allowed that goal to be achieved or not. We don't do this consciously. We learn by doing, that is, we learn from experience and from thinking about those experiences. When we have understood our experiences well enough we can (unconsciously) index them, and when we need to draw upon those experiences, we know where to find them. (This is what I call being reminded.) Experiences get labeled when we think about them and not otherwise.
So the real question for an integrity and compliance officer is, "How can we get people to think about integrity and compliance issues?" This thinking needs be done over time in a complex way and voluntarily.
How might we do that?
About the Author
Roger C. Schank is one of the world's leading researchers in AI, learning theory, cognitive science, and the building of virtual learning environments. He is President and CEO of Socratic Arts, a company whose goal is to design and implement low-cost story-based learning by doing curricula in schools, universities, and corporations.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
