Andy Janning

As a 13-year-old kid, I heard this a lot from my father, especially when he caught me playing endless games of PacMan on the good ol' Atari 2600.  Most of the time, I would just ignore Dad and his chess game.  At the time, I had fallen totally in love with video games.  In my head, if the game didn’t have an explosion, high score, or joystick attached to it, I didn’t play it.  Besides, playing chess with my dad would have broken the cardinal rule in my world — if a parent likes it, it must be stupid — and we all know that 13-year-old boys do not do anything stupid.  So I rejected chess, and the father that offered it, in favor of bad graphics and cheesy sound effects.

That is, until the day the Atari died.  I was moments away from a new high score in PacMan when BLIP—the entire screen went black and quiet.  No amount of shaking or screaming could revive the dead microchips in my hands.  I was caught.  I knew that the sudden silence in the game room would tell my father one thing—Andy is ready for a new game.  And sure enough, Dad casually strolled into my PacMan funeral chamber with a  chess box under his arm and a smile on his face.  Tired and beaten, I finally agreed to his stupid game, just to get the old man off my back.   

Dad patiently read me the instructions as he set up the chess board.  I, of course, listened halfheartedly.  Yeah, yeah:  move pawns, capture pieces, take the king.  This game will be easy, I thought.  After all, I was VIDEO GAME KING and would lay waste to both my clueless father and his ancient game.  

10 minutes later, my pride was as empty as my side of the chess board as my father checkmated my king.  I was stunned.  I had been beaten, badly outclassed by my father and his stupid game.  I looked into his eyes, my shock clear to him and his bishops and knights.  He never gloated, never rubbed it in, just simply smiled gently, inwardly hoping for another game to continue this time with his son. 

And he got another game, too.  VIDEO GAME KING could not be vanquished again, I thought!  10 minutes later, the same result:  dead king, wounded pride, another game.  As night slowly took over the game room, a strange thing happened: I forgot about PacMan and Atari and focused simply on the challenge before me.  10 games and 10 defeats later, I shocked myself by inviting Dad to play again tomorrow after he got home from work. 

What had started as a game, a father, and time avoided turned into time cherished.  Dad and I would sit for hours examining the board, trying to pry victory from its 64 squares.  We didn’t say much.  We didn’t really have to.  We would occasionally glance at one another, sometimes to compliment a good move, question an unconventional strategy, or simply to smile at the man we finally saw in the other. 

With chess, my Dad taught me how to plan to succeed, not just to react to a temporary crisis.  With chess, my Dad taught me to never to underestimate my opponent, and to understand that the deepest of lessons are taught in the simplest of places.  Most importantly, with chess, my Dad taught me that a true king fights to the death to protect the kingdom, and queen, he loves.  My Dad taught me these and many other lessons with a gentle smile and unyielding patience. 

He's older now, this man who taught me about life through a game he loved.  The challenges of age, injury, and advancing Alzheimers have made chess more of a struggle than in years past.  He still rises every day to provide for both his queen of 43 years and his kingdom, though.  I don't see him as often as I want to now, separated as we are by distance and the daily distractions that conspire to undo the lessons learned on an old chessboard. 

I know, though, that our hearts and minds are drawn back to those days when a lasting bond was forged from plastic and cardboard.  And we both know that somewhere, a chessboard awaits to lead a father and son back home.

Yeah…I should play more chess.

Imagine you’re a soldier hunkered down in a foxhole.  You’ve been on the front lines for what seems like an eternity, battling an endless wave of enemies who are smarter and more aggressive than ever.  You’re out of supplies, undermanned, and in desperate need of guidance and support from HQ. 

Suddenly, the voice of your commanding officer bursts from the radio: “Effective immediately, all soldiers are to stop using foxholes and remain on the front lines until further notice.  HQ is eliminating foxholes."

What?!  You radio back, “Sir, say again?”

“We here at HQ have decided that foxholes are unnecessary for the foreseeable future,” the officer explains gruffly.  “They take too much time to create.  As soon as you make one, your team’s location has changed and you need to dig another one.  And you can only put a few troops in a foxhole at one time.  Wasteful! 

Besides, getting troops from the front lines to the foxhole and back again is an unnecessary expense.  Having you in that foxhole spreads us too thin on the front lines, and it’s certainly not fair to have some of you in one while the others are out fighting.  We need you on the front lines, engaging the enemy...not wasting the army’s time and money in a foxhole.”

You can’t believe what you’re hearing.  What kind of army is this?  “Sir,” you stammer, “we need those foxholes to regroup, develop new tactics, defend ourselves…heck, just to help each of us stay alive long enough to keep fighting.  With all due respect, sir, how are we supposed to do that now?”

“You’ll figure that out, soldier!  You’ll just have to work smarter!” he barks.  Then, he adds ominously, “I hope you’re not questioning this new change of direction.  We don’t have time for naysayers or bad apples.  Remember, we can always get someone else to do your job.  There’s no shortage of people wanting to be in our army.”  A sharp click and smooth silence signals his exit from the conversation…and the end of your commitment to your army. 

Absolutely crazy, right?  No army would do this to their troops.  They’d be crushed in a matter of days.

Now replace “soldier” with “employee.”  “Enemy” with “customer.”  “Army” with “company.” “Foxhole” with “training programs.”  You now have an all-too-common tale that’s being told in thousands of companies who have bought into the lie that a tactic that would destroy an army is supposed to help their company.  It doesn’t make sense. 

Just because your employees aren’t dodging bullets or parachuting behind enemy lines doesn’t mean they still don’t need foxholes – safe places where they can get support and information, a place where they can connect to each other, reconnect to your mission, and stay focused when the battle is at its peak. Those foxholes could be training programs, an all-employee award and recognition day, regular coaching sessions, access to Facebook and Twitter during work, an employee newsletter, even the occasional team lunch or dinner.

All are valuable, all are necessary (you may not agree about Facebook/Twitter; please read this and reconsider), yet all are reduced, forgotten, or eliminated altogether when budgets get tight and times get tough.  That’s when they’re needed the most. 

Take stock of your employee’s foxholes.  Preserve them.  Keep digging the ones that make sense.  Stop ordering your troops out of them because of a perceived short-term gain.  The foxhole you eliminate could be the one that is keeping your best soldiers alive and willing to fight another day. 

So which movie characters would be classified as a trainer?  I'll give you a hint: none of them have ever used PowerPoint.

The list would include the some of the most recognizable characters in movie history:

Their movies have grossed close to $2 billion worldwide and have made household names of the actors who played them.  These characters resonate deep within audiences all over the world.

And those audiences - who will watch these characters for hours on end, talk about them incessantly, draw inspiration from them, and festoon either themselves or a nearby toddler in their costume at Halloween - are filled with millions of folks who probably don't want to spend one extra second in a training program, no matter how chock full o' e-learning or social media or instructional design whizbangery you've packed inside. 

How can these Tinseltown Trainers improve our industry and break down the resistance to what we do and how we do it?  That's the final question I set out to answer over four years ago and will continue to do so for as long as I'm a training professional.  So as a tribute to the memory of Patrick Swayze, I'll start with his most famous and beloved character: bad-boy dancer/trainer Johnny Castle.

Tip 1 - Get over yourself and take a chance on a lost cause: Discussions of this film usually ignore the fact that Johnny originally had no desire to train the inexperienced Frances "Baby" Houseman to dance.  "Dumbest idea I ever heard of," is his blunt summary around 32 minutes into the film.  But with his dance partner Penny sidelined due to a career-threatening, and later life-threatening, pregnancy, and his own job on the line if he misses a performance, Johnny has no choice but to transform Baby into an expert dancer in a matter of weeks. 

True, their relationship turns into the resort's HR Nightmare of the Century.  But it also forces Johnny to alter his training techniques and attitude.  Because for all the ways to overcome a learner's resistance to training, sometimes the trainer's resistance to the learner is the real problem. 

Moreover, how would your approach to training change if you knew the person whose skills you're developing is the last, best hope of a desperate manager/department/company?

Tip 2 - "Nobody puts Baby [or your learner] in a corner.": With apologies for the alteration, it's the cheesiest line in movie history but WOW you remember it, don't you?  It's awe-inspiring to watch someone risk everything to put the needs of another ahead of themselves.

But don't stop there. 

I have yet to find a man who didn't want to be the hero that Johnny was in a that moment or a woman who didn't want to be the heroine he gave wings to. 

That scene taps into the most basic instincts your clients and learners have: to be a hero, to fight for something, to be fought for, to succeed, to soar.  They trust you to help them do all that and more. 

Maybe, just maybe, we trainers need to rethink our obsession over our "place at the table."  Maybe, just maybe, this scene and this movie challenge us to make the learner's place at the table more important than our own.  When we do that, our place will take care of itself. 

Now, go have the time of your life:

I love the recent batch of Sprint TV ads that wonder “What if [insert industry here] ran the world?”  They’re clever, spit-water-onto-your-keyboard funny, and irreverently mash together two seemingly unrelated things to create a whole new way at looking at the ordinary world around us. 

What if we plugged Marketing and Training into this intriguing little Mad Lib?  It’s not that much of a stretch, given that the core function of both is to change the behavior of a defined group of clients/customers.  Here are a few things that might spill out:

(And please, before your “Stupid Ideas Ahead! Smite Them!” instinct grabs hold, please suspend your disbelief and read the following with an open mind…)

Training would be delivered where people are, not where the trainers want them to be: Savvy marketers embed their message at every potential point of customer contact with their product.  They take their message to the customer; they don’t drag the customer to the message or the product.   That would mean that most training rooms would sit empty as this new Marketer/Trainer (MTs) hybrid organism shuttered their training rooms and took their show on the road.

Training would be by permission only: My friend Denise Wymore hammers this point home constantly – with DVRs/TiVos, No Call Lists, home shredders for junk mail, and spam filters, most folks actively resist traditional marketing efforts.  We only let messages from trusted companies climb our high wall of privacy, and even then we don’t let them get comfortable behind our gates.  MTs, then, would be forced to radically rethink what training is really “Mandatory! Required! Learn or Perish!” and what isn’t.  They’d find a way to be invited into the learner’s world, not try to enter it by force like trainers are tempted to do.  If there is no such thing as “mandatory marketing,” then why should there be so much “mandatory training”?

Training would focus exclusively on what you do, not what you know: Marketers know that every dollar they spend is subject to intense scrutiny until they can show meaningful ROI.  Just because someone loves the new ad campaign and can recite the new jingle by heart doesn’t mean they’ll actually buy (or even remember) what you’re selling.  Marketing is only as good as the last product it sold. Training is only as good as the last goal it helped someone hit.  Newly-minted MTs, then, would focus their efforts on changing behavior and measuring results…not just on raising awareness and knowledge.

Just in case you missed the most recent (and the most hilarious, I think) of the Sprint ads, here it is.  Don't be afraid of it - they're lumberjacks, and they're OK:

Question 1 was a firecracker.  A major skirmish in today's culture war has been fought over movies...and I had been on the front lines of that war for a while.

For two years, I spoke for, and helped lead, a national media awareness company called True Lies Youth Talks.  Founded by Phil Chalmers, our True Lies speaking team traveled the country, encouraging teens and parents to make educated and positive life choices in spite of some of the destructive messages found in today's popular movies, music, and video games.

I had the privilege of speaking to amazing people in churches, public schools, and conventions across America.  This meant I needed to know pop culture front to back - to know what Tinseltown was aiming at the hears and minds of teens across the country. 

And not surprisingly, research and experience showed me just how much garbage out there passes for popular entertainment. 

There is a lot of good out there if we look hard enough for it, though.  Positive messages still shine through the dark clouds of sex, violence, drugs, and death and we're drawn to their light. 

It's true that also drawn to the dirty pretty things of this world.  We clutch them tightly in the night and stubbornly refuse to scrape that dirt from under our fingernails when morning comes and our conscience comes calling.  But as good as the dirt feels, my time in True Lies showed me that people love the feeling of clean hands and a bright future just a little bit more. 

Movies blaze that bright trail through the dark and the light.  They let us look at the world around us as it was, is, and could be.  Movies give us a high-definition glimpse into the best and worst parts of our culture and nature.  They make us angry, sorry, guilty, sexy, happy, worthy.  Yes, movies can be vile and cruel and hateful.  They can inspire copycat acts of stupidity and violence, shake our faith and confound our sense of decency. 

They also inspire countless acts of charity and humanity and love.  Roger Ebert, the first critic to win the Pulitzer Prize, stated unequivocally that movies "make us better." (The Great Movies, 2003)  Just like trainers should. 

They force us to ask "what if?" and "what happened?" and remember everything we should and shouldn't be.  Just like trainers should. 

Question 2 - "Which movie characters would be classified as a trainer?" - had one answer: none of them had ever used PowerPoint.

(to be continued...)