Convene colleague Ken Stewart noted this recently after watching a company’s workers successively fail at backing up their company trailer:
One of the most overlooked and easily dismissed elements of business process improvement and employee development falls squarely in this space: We fail to give our people the proper education and training needed to succeed.
Agreed.
It’s also a reminder that we have often solved similar things in the past but forget about them or discard them because they are not “new.”
For training, “Training Within Industry” or TWI is one of may favorite “forgotten” examples.
In the United States during World War II, many of the factory and other industrial workers were sent to the war zones. This left huge numbers of jobs open that were still critical to the war effort and needed to increase, not decrease, to supply allied war needs (ironically, supplies and equipment so those who vacated the jobs would be able to fight).
The problem: how to rapidly train and make productive people (mostly women) who were willing but usually had no background in the work whatsoever. Enter TWI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry as an example summary with some extracts below).
The program was structured based on the needs of every supervisor involved in training:
- Knowledge of the Work
- Knowledge of Responsibility
- Skill in Instructing
- Skill in Improving Methods
- Skill in Leading.
“Each program was based on Charles Allen’s 4-point method of Preparation, Presentation, Application, and Testing” … similar to the “Apprentice Method” process Ken included in his post:
I do. You watch. We talk.
I do. You help. We talk.
You do. I help. We talk.
You do. I watch. We talk.
You do. Someone else watches… (the learning process continues)
The training was usually done in the workplace … not in some classroom, other than for maybe introductory information. This is still largely ignored, and why the $100 billion invested in organizational “training and development” in the U.S. is largely wasted.
Also, workers were taught to “objectively evaluate the efficiency of their jobs and to methodically evaluate and suggest improvements” … i.e, the people who did the work were expected to be a primary source of improving the work. That should sound familiar to those in lean, agile, and related circles today.
Another key TWI aspect was that workers were to be treated as individuals … also ignored today when policies and procedures treat workers more like machine parts.
Where did TWI survive after the war? Japan … and incorporated into lean approaches and industry-specific examples like the Toyota Production System. The lean community still has a subset of folks who keep the TWI tradition and relevancy alive elsewhere, but TWI is rarely a topic you hear in discussions outside those areas.
Don’t have a good new supervisor training program? TWI is one place to start if you develop your own.
It’s also one of the aspects of our training programs, and why our programs can show ROI and pay for themselves. Let us show you how.
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