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Death of ISD? |
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Training asks whether ISD is obsolete because
As some of us have been saying for years, ISD is too damned slow. “When ISD turns into this elaborate, cumbersome, administrative thing that companies like Motorola and AT&T have installed, you eventually end up with people rejecting training altogether.” “These systems are dinosaurs,” Rummler concludes. “That approach was cumbersome and out of step even in the industrial days. It barely worked back then.” No there there. Among the most elaborate ISD systems ever created was AT&T’s Training Development Standards (TDS), adopted in the 1970s. “In three huge volumes of material,” says Fred Nickols, “TDS didn’t have a single criterion for what constituted good training. It just had criteria for how you ought to go about developing good training …. The real purpose of what you’re doing is to make something happen out there. So what is that something?” Produces bad solutions. “There was no consideration of beginning with some business purpose in mind, some kind of impact or result that would occur because you delivered a training course. There was no mention of any expectations that some customer might have. They just drew a line around an area that they called ISD. Inside the line everything was about rules of classroom effectiveness, and four kinds of people with four different learning styles, and so on.” Misguided worldview. “The whole ISD model is based on the assumption of stupid learners and superior experts,” says Thiagi. The ISD model assumes that a job is a known quantity. It assumes the presence of a master performer who knows how to do the job in the best possible way. It assumes we can derive a set of best-practice procedures from that master performer and then teach them to everybody else. But in the reinvention sweepstakes, jobs and procedures are up in the air. There often are no master performers and no best practices. |