Can You Learn Without Experiencing?

 Last week when I related my first job experience at WLDS, I made the comment, “Learning is active - we learn from interaction and experiences - not spectating’.

What timing!   I was recently on the phone with an association executive who was lamenting the fact that too many corporate-owned entities weren’t allowing their people to travel to conventions because of cost-cutting.   It’s too bad.  Those corporate executives just don’t get it.

It’s typical of larger corporations, particularly those that are publicly-held:  They tend to be preoccupied with  quarterly numbers instead of long-term success.  Short-term pressures are just too great.   Every time I hear these stories, it makes me glad all my businesses were privately held.  Obviously, they couldn’t have gone public anyway; but, I was glad of it and never lost any sleep over it.

Over the years I’ve owned businesses engaged in newspaper/shopper publishing, direct mail, advertising, equipment leasing, commercial financing, and investment management; and in all those businesses, we had a huge commitment to learning not only in-house, but through our association memberships.  

But, there are different kinds of learning:

• Knowledge  acquisition, and
• Experiential

Not all types of learning work in all formats.  There are two types of skills:  The so-called `hard’ skills and `soft’ skills.

Hard skills example:  Learning a new software application  or anything else you can master through demonstration and knowledge acquisition.    Webinars work well for hard skills.    And, if learning about legislation  and it’s impact on your industry is all you need,  a teleconference will work just fine.  Hard  skills and information gathering are knowledge acquisition exercises and don’t require a physical presence.   Those offering webinars – and those enrolling in them – would do well to understand this basic principle.

Soft skills example:  If you want your people to learn about managing conflicts, building employee engagement, developing trust in the organization and developing high-performance  supervisory, management, and team skills - or real, hands-on, sales skills - then , in my humble opinion, webinars and teleconferences are worse than a substitute for training  – they’re a placebo!    You may think you’ve done training; but, you’re only kidding yourself.

It’s called experiential learning. 

We learn the soft-skills by experience and practice that replicates the real world.  We learn through interaction.  You can’t replicate `situations’ online.   I’ve seen the attempts at virtual role-plays and had numerous vendors try to get our company to put our programs into an on-demand, online format.  … they test knowledge; not people skills.  They don't replicate emotions and attitudes.   It's the 'what' without the 'how' and the practice.   You can't learn people skills by doing a computer situation walk-through with an animated figure.  Sorry.

You don’t get experience by being a spectator. 

At conventions, for example, it’s the interaction with others in structured workshops – as well as between sessions in the halls and at dinner – where often the REAL learning is done.  Speakers like yours truly can provide valuable content and a road map, to be sure; but the real learning is done by doing, not watching.

The hard stuff is easy.  The soft stuff is hard.

If soft-skills could be mastered through knowledge acquisition, all champions in golf, tennis, swimming, and baseball would simply attend lectures online.  The fact is they need practice, drills, and even some kind of physical interaction – whether with the course, an opponent, or an environment – to replicate what they’ll face in competition.

Harold Stolovich wrote Telling Ain’t Training and Training Ain’t Performance.   He was right both times.

If companies truly want to increase skills doing the hard stuff, executives and managers need to remember there’s no substitute for experiential learning.  The extra investment in travel attending your association convention makes far more sense than the false economy of trying to master those people skills via a computer screen.

By the same token, organizations providing programs should avoid ‘hard-skills’ sessions -  where webinars are competitive - and focus experiential programs.  That’s an area where webinars simply can’t compete.

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