Bob Morris pointed me toward this article that appeared in Strategy+Business last November:
What’s So Special about Special Ops?
by Andrew Sobel
The article describes how Green Berets, SEALs, and Air Force Special Tactics units learn to do their extraordinary jobs. The story contains invaluable lessons for corporations.
The training that SOF personnel go through is a key to their success in real missions. Their training is in-depth, realistic, and repetitive, and it is run by the most experienced SOF operators — not classroom-schooled educators. This type of training puts true meaning into the overused term total immersion. If you add up the different phases of training that SOF candidates must go through, including specialized courses (such as high-altitude free-fall parachuting) and advanced training in their units, it may take two or three years at minimum to produce a fully developed SOF operator.
Five important aspects of SOF training reveal why it’s so effective, and also why much of the one-off, classroom-based training conducted by private-sector companies is of limited value.
1. Only the best of the best complete the rigorous training. Few candidates are accepted. Many wash out. It’s an honor to make the grade — or even to get part way through.
2. Practice, practice, and practice again. These guys will practice a particular mission hundreds of times. (How many times do you practice a sales presentation?)
3. Make training lifelike. In role play, Green Berets “bleed;” make-up artists make the enemy look like the real thing.
4. Feedback is constant. Instructors, experts, and peers continually assess performance and are blunt in feeding it back.
5. Stress, like staying active for 100 hours, simulates real-life situations. Shared hardships bond participants.
Some special operations training is highly formal. (Of course, like all training, it’s part formal and part informal.)
The author correctly concludes that:
Companies in the United States spend more than US$100 billion on training each year. Much of it is little more than a one-time classroom experience punctuated by PowerPoint presentations. At the same time, it is well established that the skill improvement and behavioral changes that would truly affect on-the-job performance require a sustained program of interventions consistent with the concept of deliberate practice. Corporate training needs to become more realistic and sustained.
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This is a great article. One of the comments seemed to be understated for me: “run by the most experienced SOF operators”. This is a critical piece of the learning that corporations may not realize its importance.
The instructors are master performers with recent experience performing the job. This means that they are removing top performers from their jobs to help train new employees to become proficient in their jobs. This sends a strong message to everyone about the importance of learning and the organizations commitment to this process.
Higher education would be much better if the administration took this approach. Especially, “Only the best of the best complete the rigorous training.” Too often schools higher grad assistants that have no real world experience to teach a class because they are cheap labor. The students are the ones that get screwed because they are being taught by someone who has no real-world experience.