The setting was spectacular

Outside the room, giant bowls of munchies promised savories and sweets to match my every craving.

Inside, high-tech seats in clusters promised a warm and inviting experience.

Huge video screens framed the central lecture in a room clearly designed around the needed lighting and audio.

This was training.

The full day workshop resembled a trip with a loved one to dinner and a show. The circumstances were luxurious and various appetites were satisfied. As a whole, the experience was positive and entertaining. But the next day all the participants returned to the daily grind and soldiered on, unchanged.

I felt valued and pampered, like the team considered each of us a VIP.

We started a few minutes late, but people continued to drift in over the first half-hour, and were discreetly seated with a program like latecomers to a play. I had been told the workshop was full, but no one ever sat in almost a third of the seats. The facilitator kicked off the event, and I met my neighbors with a simple icebreaker.

Before long, she began showing slides, many packed with so many words they were hard to read. We didn’t need to read, though, because she did that for us. All of us listened politely, and most of us were appropriately attentive.

From time to time, people would answer their phones and take a call outside, often for long enough to be disoriented upon return. Time dragged, but we had frequent breaks and the lunch spread was really nice.

At one point, an activity required discussion among the six of us in my cluster. More slides followed. By 4 pm we were done for the day. As we left, each scanned the QR code by the door with our phones to get “credit” for the day. I had made a couple of new friends, or at least acquaintances, and said my goodbyes.

The next day, I ran into a couple of the participants in the hallway and we all agreed it was an enjoyable experience. I went back to my office and continued my daily routine of tasks and meetings, forgetting all about it.

I did nothing different because of the training.
Had you asked me about it a month later, I’d have had trouble recalling any of the content.

Training as theatre

Too often, training makes a good impression, but fails to create lasting change. Or any change at all.

My experience that day is better described as going to the theatre than engaging in learning. The full day workshop resembled a trip with a loved one to dinner and a show. The luxurious circumstances and tasty treats satisfied our need to feel special. As a whole, the experience was positive and entertaining. But the next day all the participants returned to the daily grind and soldiered on, unchanged.

Under the surface, a discreet little negotiation may have been happening. The participants who attended forgave the training for failing to help them with practical and applicable experiences because the learning experience felt good, provided a break from the daily grind, and allowed for a certain amount of socializing with peers.

This is training as theatre.

The performance may be more important than the usefulness. The trappings may outweigh the substance. And the audience may return to daily life at work as if they had never attended. Consider the list below. How much experience have you had with the left side versus the right?

Limited audience involvement

Does the experience ask very little of the audience?

One telltale sign of training as theatre is a lack of participation by the audience. If the slides are pretty, and the presenter’s words are slick, but little is required of those absorbing the show, then you may be attending theatre rather than being engaged in learning.

Efforts to “dress up” the experience with amenities, spiffy graphics, and high production values may signal a focus on the trappings of the experience instead of the substance of the experience. Real learning requires involvement beyond sitting back and watching things unfold is if one were watching a show on Netflix.

Telling ain’t training

Are they telling the audience what they need to know but not helping them learn? Telling Ain’t Training is the title This is a title of an “oldie but goodie” book about how to improve training by Harold Stolovitch and Erica Keeps. They make the case for a learner-focused approach rather than a content-focused approach. Their “sticky” title helps people remember that simply presenting facts won’t lead people to integrate what they’re hearing into their behavior. When the learning designer frames content within a “subject” than within the context of completing work tasks, the learner has to figure out for herself how to integrate it into the flow of work. In my personal experience, that’s the number one criticism of training: not practical enough.

Pleasing vs. engaging

Training as theatre has all the elements of learning, just not designed in a way that changes behavior. When a learning team focuses on pleasing the audience over everything else, they’ll likely be successful at nothing else. Pleasing is not the same thing as engaging. The theatrical elements aren’t wrong, per se, but they frequently substitute for a well-designed experience that demands participation, both intellectually and literally, by the reader.

Theatre has value

My theatre friends will be squirming about now.

I’m making theatre sound trivial, and little more than pageantry.

So let’s not give theatre a bad rap. When it works, the experience gets under your skin and can affect your mindset, how you see your environment, and the way you interpret daily events.

In fact, stories are a key way people make sense of their world. Learning through stories goes back thousands of years, since long before “training” was a word. Our minds are predisposed to remember stories, using stories to fuel learning experiences is a valuable way to stimulate the learner.

In this sense, using stories would make the overall experience less like an empty performance and more like real learning.

So the next time you sit down to design a learning experience, you might ask, “Am I asking my learners to be active participants, or are am I just asking them to sit in the audience?”