Play Along
OK, here’s a game I’d like you to play along with.
Imagine, if you will, that it’s a beautiful sunny day and you’re going to visit friends a few hours away.
The roads are unusually empty. No-one knows why and the reason’s not important for the story. It just means the journey in your car, still under warranty, with new tyres and brakes, is going to be really pleasurable.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: All the traffic officers in the country are on strike, and all the speed cameras are out of action.
So, knowing that you can drive at any speed you like, and no-one is going to stop you, how fast will you drive?
Before you go any further, stop, and think about your answer. Seriously, how fast do you think you’d be driving in these ideal conditions? Perhaps write it down. (Use a pencil; you can rub it out afterwards.)
The Review
What’s the speed limit in your country?
Were you going over or below this limit?
I’ve been running this test for many years and, whilst I’ve seen a gradual decline in the numbers, the majority usually say they’d have been speeding.
So, what has this got to do with learning and development?
Let me explain.
I remember, when I started on my journey to becoming a professional trainer, an early tutor telling our group that ‘we don’t try and change beliefs, only behaviours’.
And here’s why that’s the wrong approach.
If we don’t work on beliefs, then we are always going to rely on regulation, supervision, monitoring and micromanagement to ensure we get the behaviours we want.
Think about it. If, in the scenario I painted early, you’d have been speeding, why would you have been speeding?
Beliefs Matter
The answer is beliefs. Your beliefs told you that you (and presumably others) would have been safe even if you were driving faster than the law permitted. You believed you had the competence to avoid an accident and to safely respond to whatever the journey threw at you.
Beliefs matter. They drive behaviours. And if we don’t work on beliefs, the best we can hope for from our learning and development interventions is that people do what they’ve been told to, even if they don’t believe in it.
A great example of this is EDI training. Too often, this has focused entirely on ‘rules’ and the ‘law’. And too often this has resulted in, at best, compliance.
In this case, rules or standards have simply painted a shiny veneer over prejudices without actually doing anything to change them.
Yes, rules and standards are important. But the problem with relying on them is this: When people feel it’s safe to do so, they revert to behaviours driven by beliefs – as we saw recently in the undercover investigation for Panorama. So, if the underlying beliefs that caused the problem in the first place haven’t been addressed through education and learning, you’re probably only hiding the problem. And possibly only temporarily.
Beliefs matter, and we ignore them at our peril.
That’s why, when developing materials for
Trainers’ Library®, we don’t shy away from discussing and challenging beliefs and the impact they have.
Until next time…