by Miles Peacock, 16 April 2021
Since the pandemic struck, trainers and facilitators and their clients have all been working out how to continue to deliver high-quality, engaging learning activities. It’s not always been easy, nor does it feel natural but online learning has been the solution for many. Over a Zoom call, I met up with trainer, international conference speaker and author, Chris Atkinson to learn about his own experiences of moving learning online and to ask him how he sees the future of our profession.
Chris is Managing Director of the UK Division of Strategic Leadership, a company that focuses on transformational change of leaders and strategy creation. Chris has worked worldwide with executive teams across public and private sector organisations. Under Chris’s guidance, Strategic Leadership responded rapidly to the need to move their training and facilitation online. Chris is the author of ‘Corporate Energy: How to Engage and Inspire Audiences’ (2016). One year on from the move to online, I wanted to find out from Chris what he had learned from having to make such a rapid and profound change to the business, and whether the ‘rules for engagement’ have changed. Can we still deliver training in the online world? Chris’s answers are refreshingly optimistic.
Chris, when the pandemic hit, you were one the first people to move your training and facilitation online, and your company, Strategic Leadership was able to continue delivering their services to clients around the world. What were the challenges you encountered in taking things online?
Most trainers come into the business because they love people; they are quite social, they often come in through HR roles, so they have always been connected to people. Technology is not their first love. So, one challenge has been to encourage our team to develop a relationship with technology in general.
There was a lot of resistance in the early stages to just being online. Trainers were saying, “Well, let's just wait; eventually when we get back face to face ….” Everyone was holding out. Gradually an acceptance emerged and trainers began to embrace the technology, and found ways to fulfil that need for connection. I wouldn’t say that people are converted to technology. I'm sure as we return to face-to-face delivery, I think people will still find it a great relief. So, I think the first challenge is we are not necessarily lovers of technology in terms of enjoying learning how to use software and platforms and gadgets and things like that. I don't think that necessarily falls in the trainer facilitator world, but some people do like it and those people have really shown up during this period because this has played right into their strengths.
So, you would you say that some people have embraced it from the start?
Some people have really enjoyed the opportunity to learn. Online learning is not a new thing. It's always been in the background. The pandemic just thrust it into the forefront of everyone's mind. So, I think some people have enjoyed the fiddling, the creating and the trying out and testing new ways of doing stuff. That freshness or newness has been quite enjoyable for some people. For others, I think it's intensely tiring because it is so unfamiliar. It isn't necessarily natural for them. So, I don't know whether it's about embracing it or resisting it. I think some people enjoy the novel.
So, you have two hats; As the Managing Director of Strategic Leadership in the UK, you create, design and deliver programmes yourself, but you also lead a team of trainers that need to develop competence with using technology in order to deliver those programmes to clients, worldwide. Personally, how have you found the experience of moving online?
I've always quite liked technology as a trainer. I'd still rather be in the training room, face-to-face with people because, working online, I find it very hard to read the cues and signals that you need from a group to be able to use your intuition to guide you. But actually, in terms of training design, creating online events is really cool.
The scope of training design online is pretty broad because you can bring in different technologies; different ways of enabling conversations to happen. It has totally fired my creativity in design, even if I'm not the biggest advocate of delivering on an online platform. I actually really enjoy the process of seeing what's out there and putting together training sessions in a completely different way than I have been doing for the previous 10 or 20 years, even.
How much of your time has been taken up with helping your team, and maybe clients too, in getting to grips with technology? It’s not something you would normally have had to do.
In the early stages, a lot of ‘train the trainer’ was not about the content at all. It was about the platform. Now we're at a slightly different point. Most people are more familiar with the key platforms so now it's about functionality too.
If you take Skype, for example, it’s just a standard conferencing platform. There isn't really a lot to do - you dial in, you get a video and you chat and there's a textbox. But the moment you move to Zoom or Adobe Connect or Webex or any of those platforms that have a few more bells and whistles attached to them, or even if you want to integrate other things like Mentimeter or Miro or any of those other guys, then there's a whole host of other factors to learn about.
So how much time does that take to train our trainers? Well, more than I expected, and of course, it actually varies from person to person. That's one of the problems. One of the challenges we found is you actually can't induct an entire team of people into one piece of software, because you have to train people at the point of need. I can train you in how to use Miro now, but if you don't use it for two months when you come back to log on even though you had the training, you won't remember it right? So, the problem is I have almost had to deal with people one by one, which is a very inefficient way of doing it. So, over the last 12 months I have started to record briefing meetings about our key content and platforms which allows each of our trainers to access the information in their own time. This solution has actually proved to be much more effective.
For many people in our profession, we were in ‘react mode’ in April 2020, but what opportunities has moving to online/blended approaches opened up for you?
On the one hand there is all of the logistical part; it’s so much simpler to organise and set up a training session or a meeting in an online environment, and that's simply from the practical sense of I don't need to go anywhere to do it; no travel or hotels required. There's also the fact that you can slice up time more precisely.
Secondly, because typically in traditional training you might have one day or half day chunks, then you've got to build travel time around it. With online delivery it becomes easier to get this in people's diaries. It becomes easier to organise and make it happen, but that's probably the less interesting part of your question, ‘What opportunities does it have to really engage people?’.
It comes back to something I was saying earlier, which is that there's almost an infinite amount of tools available that you can blend into your training now. Whereas if I'm in a room, I suppose I get PowerPoint and a flip chart. Online, there's just a huge array of different ways to facilitate. That’s a big opportunity to keep people engaged. The output produced through all of those tools is saveable and editable, and easier to work with.
So, something I'm noticing is when we worked face-to-face, in a training room, I would often photograph the flip charts and circulate those, but I’m 90% sure that people don't use that information. They might save it in a hard drive somewhere for reference, but I really don't think it was that valuable. But what I do know is because we're creating things in a digital format now, people will download the slide deck we've been working on, or download the whiteboard that we are in. Or, if you're using Miro, they might take their Miro board and carry on working outside of the session.
I feel like what we're producing in the sessions is more transferable. It's more relevant, it's easier for participants to work with and that means that the transfer of learning back into the workplace is more effective. It also reduces duplication of work. You don't have to type up any notes, for example; outputs are saved and stored at the point of creation.
Online delivery also offers the opportunity to work with greater numbers of participants at any one time. I know you have been running workshops with over 70 people, which is not something we typically do in a face-to-face event. What effect does group size have on what you can do online?
A lot of clients were working on the assumption that in an online session we've got capacity to handle more people, and that might offer potential to save cost. In our experience we have found sometimes the opposite is true.
The quality of conversation online is much, much higher when the group size is smaller. So, to some extent, I think one of the economies that companies were hoping to make has turned out not to be the case.
That's one aspect where smaller groups yield better conversations. The other aspect is if you do have larger groups, and as you say, I've created sessions for groups of 70 people, you need an appropriate set of facilitation tools to handle that group, and it's a different set of tools for the smaller group. You wouldn’t do a whiteboard activity with 70 people. It would be absolutely chaotic.
Also, with larger groups you sometimes benefit from having a second facilitator so that somebody can be monitoring the chat while the trainer is doing the presenting. With 70 people there can be quite a lot of dialogue going on in the chat section and it's really hard to be talking to those people while simultaneously delivering content to the whole group. There's a whole second set of skills that are needed to match audience size with the appropriate facilitation tools and then make the judgement about what the right tools are.
So, I wrote my book in 2016 and that book now is having to be updated for the online environment. Part of what I want to establish in the new edition of ‘How to Engage and Inspire Audiences’ is this - if there are different rules or guidelines for working with people online, what are those guidelines?
Based on your experiences over the last year, what advice do you have for trainers and facilitators who are now having to work online for creating engagement?
I'm working on the second edition now – I am in the process of developing my ideas and testing them in training sessions before committing to print. My first observation is that the rules of face-to-face communication don't always apply in an online world.
And the best example of that I can think of is eye contact. I've literally spent 20 years training people in presenting to say look at your audience and the problem is if I make eye contact with you, I'm looking here. [In less than a minute, Chris demonstrates the difference of trainer impact when he is looking at his webcam or his trainer notes.]
I've spent 20 years telling people ‘Look at your audience’. In the online world, I'm going to be saying ‘Look at your webcam’. But for me, actually, as a presenter looking at this dot that I'm looking at now, this is slightly demoralising, in all honesty, because you know it's very hard for me to feel connected to you.
I notice the difference in impact on me, for each of those views you take up. But what is most helpful for me as the student is not necessarily the best one for you in your role as trainer?
Exactly so. I have an external webcam on a tripod and I try, where possible, to drag the window with your face to directly behind the camera, so that I can be looking at you while seemingly looking into the camera. It takes some time to get used to; you have to practise it, but for me this is my profession, so it's worth the time for me to get this right.
Beyond that, the faces might not even be there, partly because people might not even turn their videos on, and partly because when you share a presentation, a lot of the platforms will minimise your face and all the video feeds reduce to thumbnail size, which again is not very helpful. So, I think the 2nd edition of the book will be about trying to answer the question, ‘What are the new rules that apply?’ Which ones are turned on their heads and what do we do instead?
Beyond that I want to give guidance on the guiding principles for selecting one platform/application over another? When would you use a whiteboard? When would you use polling software? When would you use the chat? How do you facilitate using those tools in a seamless way?
There's a lot going on here. As facilitator you are trying to work on a number of different things simultaneously, while making it a smooth experience for participants. It's a totally new skill set. And we're all having to learn a new set of skills pretty quickly.
If I take one example, one of the things I notice when working with groups online, conversations become more sequential; there’s less of that natural to-and-fro that you get in face-to-face group work. If you take an ‘ideas generation’ session for example, how to you create the energy needed for creativity to emerge?
Someone once told me that it's like trying to the spot the silences to speak; to make an intervention at just the right moment. We obviously have a very sophisticated way of doing this in real face-to-face environment. We feel where those moments are, where someone is pausing and I can speak, and I find in the online environment it is very clumsy. We talk over each other. We haven't heard each other or it's very stilted. It's not flowing, the conversation ends up being driven by the facilitator rather than generated by the group.
One technique I use is to ‘box’ activities. Have clear start and end points and slice these activities into smaller sections compared with what I might do when working face-to-face. So, you say something like, ‘Right. That's the end of that conversation. Now let's move on to the next part of the conversation.’ So, you've got this little boxed activity where everyone knows what is happening in that moment.
That's definitely not how we would facilitate normally in a face-to-face environment. You would follow the threads, drill down a bit on certain topics, go off in another direction. That doesn't happen as easily online, but I wouldn't say it's impossible.
Another technique that works quite well in that situation is the affinity diagram type process. Participants generate ideas and the collaborate to cluster those ideas. It is still really effective if not more effective, than using sticky notes. Sticky paper never sticks to things after you've moved them a couple of times. You spend most of your time picking them up off the floor and re-sticking them. In an online environment it’s absolutely perfect for multiple people to move and cluster and make sense of something. I think you can do those types of activities better online and give people a real sense of creating something and making something of value out of their conversation.
From the outset, you decided that Strategic Leadership’s platform of choice for delivery of training was going to be Adobe Connect. What have been your experiences of using that platform?
A programme like Zoom, for example is perfect for events or meetings that need only a simple structure. It's modern, it's well designed, it's relatively simple to use. But in Strategic Leadership we do quite sophisticated training programmes with multinational clients and often with larger organisations. And we're spending whole days sometimes online, so our logic is we need a platform that we can design real training in, you know, in classrooms? How do we build a training session? How do we keep people engaged? I've always had a role in training design and I think it's probably captured in my book in the in the 1st edition, but if not, it's definitely going in the second, which is trying not to repeat a technique. So, if I've done something with sticky notes, don't do anything with sticky notes again in that session.
The problem with some of the more simple platforms, is that lack of functionality leads to a feeling like you end up getting quite repetitive. We chose Adobe Connect because if you are a trainer it works like how you imagine training. Basically, it follows your own design thinking. What do I want to achieve? What do I want for this activity? And it allows you to bring in the elements that you need for that activity, and then it enables you to sequence those things for the next activity. If I decide that I need a different set of elements I can bring those in.
Also, the breakout rooms have exactly the same logic. You can pre-prepare each breakout room that you want to use. What do I want to put in there for the activity? What notes do I want to leave with the group so when they arrive they got all the information they need? It's an incredible piece of technology for what it does.
In my opinion there’s still work that needs to be done to build up their stability of the systems and things like that, but it's got lots of features that you would expect in a more modern platform now, and the promise is excellent.
But my recommendation for most organisations would still be to look at something more like Zoom. For interactive training, and that is our business, if you're a professional training organisation, Adobe Connect is excellent, but really for the average person it is probably overkill.
I’d like to return to something you hinted at earlier. The workload of the online trainer is greater than that for the trainer working face-to-face. What, in your view, are the differences?
If you are working with a small group, with a simple learning design and on a standard platform, like MS Teams, for example, there isn't really a lot I can do. I don't have a lot of functionality aside from sharing a screen, maybe moving people to breakout rooms. One trainer can look after content and manage the technology at the same time.
If I've got a really large audience, it's really hard to keep track of the of the chat, for example. A second person to monitor comments and respond or highlight for me can be very useful. In that instance I wouldn't want someone who's just a Technical Support person. You'd actually want someone who knows something about the subject who can be engaging and add ideas. So, I'd want more like a co-trainer, or someone who's very knowledgeable about presenting. They can sit in the chat and do the texting and that works quite well.
But when working on platforms with more functionality, like Adobe Connect, it’s incredibly helpful to have another person with a technical/logistical perspective to make sure everything is set up and running in the background. Things like assigning people to the breakout rooms and just generally catching things if they break. If someone is saying they are having a problem with their connection I can't be delivering the session and answering that person’s questions at the same time. It really does interfere with the ability to train in an engaging way.
So, coming back to your question, I think it depends on the scope of what you're doing. For the most part, a MS Teams meeting, you will probably be fine on your own, but if you're using one of the more advanced platforms, or if you have a larger group, then a second person, either as a co-facilitator or as a technical person to deal with the logistics is helpful. I'm very anxious going into anything solo these days in case my broadband drops out. I think I am quite fearful now about training solo because I feel like I don't have total control over my world, whereas if I was in a meeting room I can work around the situation. Online, there are so many forces that are out of my control, I get very anxious about it.
Finally, as we emerge from the COVID pandemic, and working life returns to something like normal, what do you think is going to happen to the training model? Will we return to face-to-face, remain online or have some kind of blended/hybrid approach?
Blended learning was going on well before the pandemic. All the pandemic has done is to prove the sceptics wrong. Training online does work. After a year of delivering training online, my own organisation has designed and delivered a pretty wide range of training programmes from leadership to presentation skills to facilitating a Board, to team-building events. All of them have been possible and we made it work. It’s not the same experience as face-to-face; at times it might be less effective but I think we've proven everything can be done online. Even if you argue that it's slightly less effective from the ‘human connection’ aspect, there’s also an enormous amount of benefit in terms of cost savings, travel efficiencies, disruptions to people’s personal lives and so on.
For me, I find I'm finding now I definitely want to get back into a face-to-face environment, but I now have a much more critical attitude around when to use that option. Does it need to be, a 1/2 day workshop in a room where we all have to travel to the same location? Is it really necessary?
To introduce new concepts or theories do we need to come into a room to do that? How else could that ‘theoretical download’ be achieved? Do we need to teach it, or is there a better way for learners to acquire that knowledge?
I can't give you the answer because it's emerging, but if I were to give you an opinion, my opinion would be we start to separate out teaching and training. Blended solutions become something where the ‘teaching’ components happen in an online environment and we have more tools than ever to enable that to happen. Then the training components, or skill development happens in a face-to-face environment, because that's probably going to get us the best results.
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