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Scenario-Based Training

Featured Author:

Kevin Dwyer

Is a pragmatic change management advisor and founder of Change Factory. He comes from an old school that experienced and led change first and learned the theory later. Kevin has since managed small companies as CEO, founding Change Factory in 2004.

Change Factory’s mission is to help organizations that do not like their business outcomes get better business outcomes through changing people’s behavior. The Change Factory view of what is generally missing in sales development can be summed up by the phrase “Training is not enough”. Visit Kevin’s website: www.changefactory.com.au

More articles from this author:

• "A" Is for Customer Service
• The 10 Worst Employee Failures
• Managing Micro-Changes in the Sales World

The world that people live and work in is complex. The behaviors and skills required to solve a simple problem are always multi-dimensional. And yet much, or indeed most, training developed and executed in corporate training programmes are linear in nature.

This mismatch between the real world and the training world makes certain that many organizations are wasting their training dollar.

Even at the simplest level of required knowledge acquisition, the old fashioned “chalk and talk”, where a trainer interacts with the audience in one direction with a frightening array of slides, the content of which is the same as the words spoken, is useless.

Adults learn nothing at all when subjected to this kind of training.

They may be stimulated by the presentation, engaged by the graphics and motivated by the speaker, but the chance of them remembering what is being taught is very slight.

So what should be included in a training programme for adults?

The elements of a training program that help adults to learn include:

• Making connections between the learning and items already in long term memory to aid processing items being learnt from short term memory into long term memory


• Making training immediately of use to get high levels of acceptance


• Making training experiential, allowing for periods of reflection

Many models exist which help articulate how humans learn. Kolb described, with Fry, a model where humans go through a four step process of learning:

1. Concrete experience
2. Observation and reflection
3. Formation of abstract concepts
4. Testing in new situations

They further went on to describe Kolb’s four learning styles.

Other learning models reflect similar patterns of activities in a linear or circular series.

The problem with the manner in which these models have been applied to training, though, is that the training is still delivered in a linear fashion, following the model slavishly.

Real life, however, is complex. Stimulation of thought comes from many different directions causing us to make judgements on different planes and skipping steps to resolve issues that challenge us.