How many times do we feel our efforts were not effective enough?
For example, you conducted some activities with your students, employees, or the management team. People loved it. Or at least, that is what they said. And yet, you see the same patterns in their behaviour. No change.
In another example, you had assembled a team for getting user feedback on your software. The team returns with a huge chunk of feedback data. Soon you struggle to find anything useful in it. Something solid that is worth converting into action.
Or your organization wants to help its people grow. You hire an external consultant to design a training program and performance management. Two years into execution, your team can’t figure out why people do not want to be helped, retained or promoted.
No matter what kind of industry you are in, you are always trying to be more effective than you were yesterday. When we find ourselves in the abyss of ineffectiveness, it makes us feel incompetent, unworthy and unsure of our capabilities.
While those feelings are natural, the truth is that all of us are competent. Competent enough to improve over time.
I come across such ineffectiveness in my and other people’s work regularly. One of the things that I have noticed lacking is processing.
Yes, processing. A structured reflection.
In experiential education, processing is an important part. An experience is incomplete, ineffective and subpar in meaning if it is not processed. Especially if the experience was designed to impart a specific set of outcomes.
Processing is an intentional act. To help the learner we have to process what they have gone through. It requires a high degree of preparation and openness. In our case, the learner is a student, a user, a customer, a teammate, or an audience group.
Simply put, if your team gathers a huge chunk of feedback data, but in absence of a processing framework, the data is not going to be much useful to you. In fact, the processing framework would guide the team on what to ask and look for in the first place.
Processing may mean different things for different people. For different fields.
Think of processing in terms of cooking. We have our recipe ready as the means to process raw vegetables and ingredients to prepare our meals. That’s processing. It is intentional. You have to plan out your ingredients and raw material BEFORE you start cooking.
It means unplanned, spontaneous processing is less likely to be effective.
And yet, so many organizations and individuals fail to process their efforts. When we deal with systems comprised of humans, adding more resources isn’t always the right answer. It increases complexity. The relationship between resources and effectiveness is not linear.
Did you spend thousands per head for training your people?
Good. That’s generous.
Did you process different parts of the training with your people?
– How did they feel?
– Was it something they were looking for?
– If they hadn’t asked for it, what made you choose for them?
– What were their personal takeaways from the training?
– Do they feel empowered after the training?
– Which parts bored them to death?
If your mental response to these processing questions was “who is going to tell me the truth, huh!?”, then you have deeper things to be concerned about. For other industries, replace the training example with your own effort example.
The bottom line is this: if you didn’t process it, it doesn’t count.