We received honest but sometimes puzzling replies to our questions. When we touched the topic of sharing materials, almost all interviewees told us they are reluctant to share training materials with each other.

Someone even admitted: “I don’t even share my training materials with my co-trainers”.

Some others said:  “Maybe I would share my materials, but I don’t think others would”

A board member of an international NGO told us they had to cancel a sharing session at a conference since literally no one showed up to showcase their learning materials.

We felt something is wrong.

If even NGO trainers, who are often less profit-oriented, don’t share then who would?

Why don’t we, trainers, share our knowledge with each other?
Why do we have to work in isolation and reinvent the wheel over and over again?

To regain our faith, we started looking for good examples in different industries, where sharing of knowledges provides benefits for the community and fires innovation.

Wikipedia needs no introduction; hardly anyone argues that open collaboration and sharing has contributed to better access of knowledge and information. Thousands of volunteers spend time and effort every day to share their knowledge with the rest of the world.

Why do they do so?

If you like statistics, 71% of Wikipedia editors contribute because they like the idea of volunteering to share knowledge. 69% believe that information should be freely available, and 63% pointed that contributing is fun.

Some may say though, that Wikipedia editors can be generous with their knowledge since they are not sharing information that makes them stand out in a competitive environment. They have nothing to lose.

Seems like a fair point, let’s look at some examples from professional service industries then!

One of the first industries to embrace and pioneer the sharing of knowledge is the software industry. Professional Q&A sites like Stack Overflow minimize the reason for developers to reinvent the wheel. Services like GitHub help developers to share their code and solve technical challenges through open-sourcing and online collaboration.

Open source software development is on the rise: some forecast suggests that at least half of the world’s software could be open source by 2016. This very blog service, Tumblr uses a plethora of open source software.

Did half of the world (including Tumblr) go mad?

We don’t think so: open sourcing previously proprietary knowledge helps companies and organisations achieve more reliable software, faster, while still having the possibility to monetize their products and services.

Look at engineering for that matter, an industry not so long ago dominated by hand drawn blueprints stored in cabinets. Today online services like GrabCAD revolutionize the way engineers create value by letting them build on top of each others’ designs. Think of it this way: why would anyone need to design nuts and bolts or basic building blocks of constructions over and over again?

It seems engineers are not afraid to share their building blocks for a greater good and saving time. Already tens of thousands of engineers have uploaded over 200,000 design files for the benefit of the community.

Why do engineers do it?

One explanation lies in a study taken not long ago, saying that the reasons driving such initiatives are Challenge, Mastery and Making a Contribution. If you are interested in the detailed research findings on what motivates us, here is a highly interesting animated talk by Dan Pink:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc]

So why don’t we, trainers, share?

What do you think?

In our practice as trainers we have met with two distinct styles of running a training: either a trainer speaks the most (e.g. presents a lot of information), or the trainer facilitates the learning, and makes the participants talk (e.g. doing exercises, creating conversations, etc.). Optimally these two styles should be balanced, yet extremities happens as well. Do you remember those dull lectures from some teachers, who just told what was written in the textbook? Those who presented a lot of boring information, without any engagement?

A training exercise should complement any learning block, by providing hands-on experience to practice a new skill. So we can say that they are a rather important piece in the puzzle. Yet, there is always this typical trap of time – it’s a resource with limits. Exercises needs to be designed, preferably tested and polished, and this is just the preparation. During the training they take even more time: participants should have the space to practice and receive feedback on their performance. Furthermore, there is no point of doing an exercise, if there is no debriefing happening afterwards:

• What happened during the exercise?
• How can this new knowledge be used in your future life?
• How will you change your behavior from now on?

Such questions are not a checklist with the aim to “tick them all”, but they are there to establish a reflective behavior on personal development regarding that skill. Assigning the needed time for exercises and debriefing turns the role of the trainer from less presenting new information and more towards facilitating the learning.

The theory element of a learning block is typically a small amount of knowledge. In the end you likely won’t be able to teach rocket science in a couple of hours (this is nice to be reminded about, because there is always more cool stuff we wish to include into the training…). Learning happens when the skills are practiced and integrated deep into the participants’ minds, not when an overwhelming amount of knowledge is presented. There are always some participants, who know more than the group average and are more interested in those ‘extra bits’, but the more knowledge you try to include, the harder it is to ‘make it stick’ for everybody.

In the end, there is no silver bullet for a good training; it takes a big part of a trainer’s learning curve to balance presentation time with exercise/learning time, and intuitively optimize the different training elements with maintaining interest, debriefing exercises, triggering reflection, or inspiring participants. Sounds like some area of personal learning for many of us? :)

But what is considered preparation? The preparation can include communicating to your clients and/or participants, drafting the training outline, arranging the logistics, creating/updating the training materials, etc. If we take the mentioned formula, for a one day training workshop a good preparation would take 2-3 days. Can all these elements of preparation fit in such a short time?

Recently we conducted an interview with one of the partners of a top management consulting firms in Sweden. A key element in their preparation process is to call all the training participants individually before the training. It provides a valuable input for shaping the training content, building trust with their participants, and in the end the time spent on calls is more than justified.

What are you training practices? What elements of the training you enjoy the most and which ones you wish you could skip? Do you use any special tools, or are post-its, markers and flipcharts your only tool?

Feel free to share your experiences and different approaches to training preparation in the comments below.