simple lists can bypass the experience we need to learn
Transcript of this video:
In one of my first jobs
after uni, I had to produce a sales conference for Calor Gas,
which was a fairly alpha male environment.
It was a room made up of 95% men, I would say,
and you might be able to imagine the kind
of motivational speaker such a group would choose.
And he arrived in an immaculately expensive
pinstriped three piece suit.
Even now, years later, I remember my visceral sense
of him looking at me as if I was there to be killed
and eaten without me saying a word.
Anyway, his motivational speech was built
around an acronym, which I still remember: LACPAAC,
L-A-C-P-A, A C.
And it was to do with how to deal
with objections when you are selling your
propane tanks to people.
And the L was for listing the objections,
and then it involved making sure you’ve got all the
objections from the customer worked out.
And then you came to , P the the fulcrum of this process,
the pre-close, where you had to say something like,
“So if I could solve all these objections, would you commit
to buying 68,000 tons of Calor Gas?”
I don’t know about you,
but if anybody said something like that to me these days,
I’d have a pretty immediate sense that I was being techniques
and I would discover an urgent need
to find some paint drawing somewhere else in the world,
anywhere else in the world.
I also remember that he completed his presentation
by rolling up a newspaper
and using it to bash the overhead projector he’d been using
to emphasise the importance of being very motivated.
This seemed to go down quite well
with the people in the room, and it
didn’t land very well with me.
And
although of course I’m sure these training processes are
often delivered these days a bit more subtly than that,
nevertheless, this story just reminds me of
the dangers I think, of simplifying experience
and trying to teach or develop people using these acronyms,
which there’s something sort of inadvertently, perhaps,
but inevitably dehumanizing about them,
that they’re a simplification of the human experience.
I think even the ones that I’ve created myself over time,
I realise often there attempts to compress
what I’ve learned the hard way into simple things
and apparently streamline the learning process,
but actually shortchange people of the experience
that allows them to make meaning for themselves, which is,
I think, the kind that I’m kind
of most interested in encouraging in people.
So in my experimental practice groups, um,
I think you can be pretty sure there are going to be few
or no acronyms allowed
and hopefully a more humane experience of discovery
and participation.
Photo by Piotr Łaskawski on Unsplash
