Your Problem
The art of problem solving requires defining it precisely
Most of our clients come to us with a problem:
- Their staff lack confidence
- Employees are not efficient or effective
- They are combating low morale or teams not working well
- Customers or clients are complaining
- Decisions are not being made or the quality of them is poor
- There is a perceived lack of skills or knowledge
- Output and work product is lacking in quality
- They are going through or anticipating change
- External pressures are creating problems
Whatever your problem may be, we are confident of one thing – training alone is very unlikely to fix it. The addition of a Training Analysis won’t improve the situation nor will a comprehensive, enterprise wide, customised, contextualised program supported by one on one coaching. In our experience problems are solved when attitudes are adjusted. Then behaviour changes.
Over the years we have watched on, as training companies, consultants and internal learning and development functions struggled to understand the results their clients want. In the early years we were participants in this struggle until we realised the issue is that often clients, with all their specialist expertise, don’t really understand what they want in terms of workplace change, they just know what they are currently doing isn’t working. Clients often try to understand their problems in terms of training options and outcomes, rather than defining and quantifying a set of behaviours they want to see in the workplace.
Most clients buy a service rather than an outcome.
At New Intelligence we have spent significant time and resources obtaining and conducting research into the delivery of training and the outcomes associated with it. We have trained over 15000 individuals over the last decade and gathered more than 2000 articles, journals and texts around subjects such as interview, decision making, critical thinking, psychology, neurology, behavioural economics, sociology and human behaviours. A significant portion of this information also relates to how best to deliver change in the workplace through training.
Lists of learning outcomes, learning objectives, course schedules and training needs analysis do not provide the information, guidance or outcomes that you need. The more we examined the research the more obvious it became to us that if training is to provide even a reasonable return on investment it must seek to modify behaviours from the outset rather than increase knowledge or skills. We wanted to focus on understanding and commitment through reduced uncertainty and increased confidence. This then leads to higher potential for elevated retention and attitudinal adjustment which we know inevitably leads to behaviour modification. Essentially, we believe that behaviours are what are observed in the workplace and represent the best indicator of ability and attitudes as well as improvement and development.
Our aim is to reduce the apparent training needs to a few desirable key behaviours that can be more appropriately addressed using our proprietary Behaviours Assessment.
At New Intelligence we have spent significant time and resources obtaining and conducting research into the delivery of training and the outcomes associated with it. We have trained over 15000 individuals over the last decade and gathered more than 2000 articles, journals and texts around subjects such as interview, decision making, critical thinking, psychology, neurology, behavioural economics, sociology and human behaviours. A significant portion of this information also relates to how best to deliver change in the workplace through training.
Lists of learning outcomes, learning objectives, course schedules and training needs analysis do not provide the information, guidance or outcomes that you need. The more we examined the research the more obvious it became to us that if training is to provide even a reasonable return on investment it must seek to modify behaviours from the outset rather than increase knowledge or skills. We wanted to focus on understanding and commitment through reduced uncertainty and increased confidence. This then leads to higher potential for elevated retention and attitudinal adjustment which we know inevitably leads to behaviour modification. Essentially, we believe that behaviours are what are observed in the workplace and represent the best indicator of ability and attitudes as well as improvement and development.
Our aim is to reduce the apparent training needs to a few desirable key behaviours that can be more appropriately addressed using our proprietary Behaviours Assessment.
We know these things about most training courses:
- they can be a waste of time and money
- there is rarely significant change in workplace performance
- tips, tricks and short cuts make good sales tools but poor performance improvers
- people enter the same training courses with differing levels of motivation, knowledge, resistance, skill and commitment
- changing the way people think through training courses is hard
- qualifications from training courses don’t assure capability
- training courses without emotional triggers aren’t very “sticky”
“Recent decades have seen an increasing stress on the need to monitor and manage educators, and hold them to account….while learning outcomes can be valuable if properly used, they have been misappropriated and adopted widely at all levels within the education system to facilitate the managerial process. This has led to distortion. The claim that they can be made precise by being written with a prescribed vocabulary of special descriptors so as to serve as objective, measurable devices for monitoring performance, is fundamentally mistaken, and they may be damaging to education when used in this way. After a brief sketch of the background to the notion of learning outcomes, arguments are presented to show their vacuity and uselessness when misused in this way, and explanations of their inadequacies are offered”.
Trevor Hussey & Patrick Smith
The Trouble with Learning Outcomes (Abstract)
Active Learning in Higher Education V3 Iss 3
We hope you enjoy the experience that we intend for our website. We do not intend for it to be a sales tool. We do not believe it should convince you that we are the answer to your problem. We want it to be somewhere for you to explore and see if we are worth your interest and effort. If you are interested and prepared to expend a small amount of time, contact us and we will come and meet with you. We have the research, the applications, the people and the nerve to help you improve in entirely new ways.
“In the past few decades, researchers have uncovered and road-tested a host of techniques that deepen learning – techniques that remain largely unknown outside scientific circles. These approaches aren’t get-smarter schemes that require computer software, gadgets, or medication. Nor are they based on any grand teaching philosophy intended to lift the performance of entire classrooms (which no-one has done, reliably). On the contrary, they are all small alterations in how we study or practice that we can apply individually, in our own lives, right now. The hardest part in doing so may be trusting that they work. That requires some suspension of disbelief because this research defies everything we been told about how best to learn.”
Benedict Carey
How We Learn – The Surprising Truth about When, Where and Why it Happens
We hope you enjoy the experience that we intend for our website. We do not intend for it to be a sales tool. We do not believe it should convince you that we are the answer to your problem. We want it to be somewhere for you to explore and see if we are worth your interest and effort. If you are interested and prepared to expend a small amount of time, contact us and we will come and meet with you. We have the research, the applications, the people and the nerve to help you improve in entirely new ways.