“No matter how often we send our people to training classes, they don’t seem to be able to apply what they’ve been trained on to other situations.” When I hear this, it always makes me think about the difference between ‘training’ and ‘teaching’. When my dog, Karma, was a puppy, we took him to ‘training’ classes. He learned to respond to a given command the same way every single time. Because he was ‘trained’ to do so, six years later, when we say “Sit”, he does! In the complex world we live and work in, however, things rarely stay the same; so, if we want to satisfy customers what we really need to do is to ‘teach people how to think’. When they learn how to think, they aren’t restricted to one response only: instead they can analyze, understand and create the solutions each of our customers wants.
I agree. We need to stress critical thinking instead of individual tasks.