Get the most out of training — build an action plan!

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 | By Dr Peter Honey

As the saying goes, ‘Plans are nothing. Planning is everything’.

Action plans are essential if people are to be adequately equipped for the perilous challenge of transferring learning back to work after undergoing a training course.

But at the end of any training event, have you agonised over how to get people to put together a decent action plan?

Action plans are the equivalent of those tiles on a space shuttle that absorb heat and prevent it burning up as it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. We need to send learners back to work heavily protected so that they survive re-entry to the working atmosphere.

The irony is that, despite our best efforts to encourage people to produce action plans, we so often encounter resistance from the very people we are at pains to protect. The resistance is caused by a number of factors including:

1) The tendency for action planning to happen at the end of a course where psychologically people have already left and/or where the chief concern is to plan their escape route.

2) The tedious business of converting lessons learned and/or laudable intentions into specific plans that are truly achievable so that people can ‘hit the road running’. The need for specificity is a drag and seems to many people, distastefully pedantic.

3) The tendency for people to be lulled into a false sense of security. The esprit de corps generated by the dynamics of the course, the feeling that enthusiasm alone will suffice, combine to dull the memories of problems back at work. People therefore become blasé about the need for protection. Just like someone who puts caution aside and fails to insist on a condom.

In addition, there is a deeper resistance to the whole business of planning. Many people regard it as a futile activity because experience has taught them that plans can rarely be implemented without modification, sometimes substantial modification. The erroneous conclusion they therefore reach, is that it isn’t worth planning the first place. A sounder conclusion would be that it is worth planning in order to have something to modify!

My recipe for helping people to produce sufficiently robust action plans has evolved over a long period and is currently this:

1. Always get people to list their most significant/important lessons learned before action planning. It is preferable that their learning list has been built up over the length of the course rather than compiled in one go at the end.

2. Always give people a checklist of questions to work through that focuses their attention on the working situation they are about to return to. Typically I ask 12 questions including ones about how frantic and disjointed their work tends to be, the extent of time pressures, the extent to which they are ‘empowered’, whether their current boss tends to be supportive or not, whether they have helpful colleagues and so on. These questions don’t solve anything; they just invite a realistic appraisal of the working situation.

3. Always give people guidance on the criteria for robust action plans with a worked-up example. The advice is the usual stuff about plans needing to cover the what’s, whys, when’s, where’s, how’s and measures.

Also plans should meet the L-E-A-R-N criteria.

Limited

Exact

Appropriate

Realistic

Now

4. Always get people to co-counsel, co-coach, co-mentor each other’s action plans.

5. Always get people to share at least one action plan with the whole group. This increases commitment since it seems silly to go public about a plan and then not do it (Weight Watchers use the same technique to make it more likely people will stick to their plans and achieve their targets).

Ultimately, however, it is as former US President Dwight Eisenhower said: ‘Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.’

Planning is vital if objectives are to be achieved. Plans provide a route map with milestones along the way showing what has to be accomplished, in what sequence and by when. 

In a perfect world, everything would go according to plan with no deviations or hitches. In reality plans are in a constant state of flux as circumstances change, deadlines slip and people fail to keep their promises. You need a plan in order to have something to adapt and modify rather than in order to have something to cling rigidly to, come what may. Plans are organic, not static; they demand constant attention all the way on the journey from the origination of the objective to its eventual accomplishment.

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Dr Peter Honey is a leading guru on learning and behaviour and their impact on people’s performance in the workplace. He is a prolific author, consultant and speaker.  Visit www.peterhoney.com