The Armageddon Problem

First, this is a post about teaching. So here's a little note about what I mean when I say, "teaching."

Teaching happens almost everywhere and pretty much everywhen. In fact, it is almost as common as learning. Some people are schoolteachers. They do a lot of teaching but they also do a lot of stuff that isn't teaching. They don't have a monopoly on the word 'teaching'.*

And, by extension, any training that teachers (see above) do to help them teach is teacher training. Moving on...

A Big Mistake
A while back, I was putting together a team for a big Learning and Development project. It was a small team working on a change project with frontline workers, the lowest paid and least skilled workers in their organisation. I knew I needed a data/systems person, so I started looking for one of those. I also needed somebody else and the choice I had was simple - a trained teacher or a rookie-teacher but experienced frontline worker.

Obviously, the trained teacher wouldn't know much about the area we were working in, but would be able to design processes and help create environments for learning. And vice versa for our rookie. Which one did I go for?

This, by coincidence, is roughly the central plot device of the 1998 film, Armageddon.

For those of you who haven't seen the film, Armageddon is about an asteroid heading to Earth with potentially catastrophic consequences. NASA decide to send a team of oilmen to land on the asteroid to drill to its core, plant explosives and avert disaster. Although the oilmen are 'the best' at what they do (we're talking Bruce Willis here, people), they're all rookies in astronaut years. Hi-jinks ensue.

Around the time of the film's release, I read an earnest article criticising the film from a Learning & Development perspective (not that the nerdy author realised this). Put simply, they said, it would be easier to train astronauts to drill into an asteroid than it would be to train oilmen to become astronauts. Drilling? It's not exactly rocket science.

To my shame, I actually used the phrase 'Armageddon Problem' during discussions of my hiring dilemma and eventually decided to hire a professional teacher. It was easier to 'skill up' a qualified trainer than to train up an experienced worker. Teaching, unlike drilling, is rocket science, I thought.

Let's revisit the problem and see what I would do now
Note that originally, I went for the 'easiest' option. That was stupid. I had two rational choices. I could've sought to reduce the risk of failure or I to maximise positive outcomes.

Would my rookie have caused the project to fail? Almost certainly not. Teaching's just not that hard. Not if you know what you're talking about and you're committed.

Would my rookie have achieved more? Almost certainly yes. For a start, we'd have given a frontline worker the chance to become a better teacher. And the difference in results between a very very good trainer and an average one aren't that great. Plus, my rookie would have all kinds of insights into the processes and experiences of our learners.

As a minimum, we could reasonably expect:

• Project with professional teacher = success
• Project with rookie = success and an experienced teacher

Why did I make this mistake?
Everybody does this. The example I've given is, I believe, relatively clear cut. But this is exactly the same choice we make every single time we hire a teacher. It's the easy option.

A problem with professional teachers is that they're often baseball players, to use Jeffrey Sonnenfeld's term. They often care more about their profession than they do about the work or the service or the organisation itself. They're like HR people, most CEOs and lawyers in this respect.

Every time you hire a teacher, you rule out any chance of somebody else learning to teach.

Postscript
As somebody's who done a lot of teaching, I also know that appearances can be deceptive. I'd say the chances are it's just as hard to help somebody learn how to drill into rock as it is to train them to be an astronaut. There's something about drilling that involves tacit knowledge and intuition and know-how that I imagine is absent from NASA's shiny machines. (I'm quite willing to be wrong about this. I find the idea of astronauts thumping their control panels like Doctor Who quite appealing.) The point is, I just don't know. My 1998 self says drilling is not rocket science. My 2009 self says rocket science is not drilling.

*There are other words that describe people who teach but who aren't schoolteachers. Like 'trainer', 'coach', 'mentor', 'guru', 'manager' etc. I'm using 'teacher' because it's the one with the most affordance and because this is my blog. I do have an alternative suggestion and I'm in the middle of building a website to showcase it.