The right and wrong way to train

I'm not necessarily talking about form. Or too much. Or too little. Well, too little is definitely an issue. I'm going to be talking about how best intentions aren't always adequate and what is being done wrong so the training winds up being wasted effort.

My mind is always thinking about business continuity in the background (I swear, it isn't on purpose; it's how I'm programmed). This may seem obsessive (to a client's benefit, no doubt!) but it allows me to see things I wouldn't normally see. Take my recent reading of Erik Larson's book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of The Lusitania. It read like an event brief and AAR (after action review) of all the things that conspired to make the crossing a deadly one. Maybe it doesn't read like that to you, but seeing as my Intro to Emergency Management students are currently turning in their presentations on a disaster of their choosing with that format in mind, it reads like that to me. I love Erik Larson's books, btw.

The one aspect I want to focus on is the way the crew trained for using the lifeboats. Having cruised more than five times, I am familiar with the mandatory lifeboat drill prior to getting underway, bringing the lifejacket and going to my muster station, elevator use not permitted. All of the steps I just said did not exist at the time of the Lusitania. The fact the Lusitania was even doing lifeboat drills was the progeny of the Titanic sinking. Here are the issues:

• Only some crew were trained in making the boats ready and launching them.

[and it so happened that those well-trained crew members were all in the lower compartments readying luggage to be off-loaded the next day...and were all killed when the torpedo hit]

• Passengers were not trained on how to put on a life-jacket.

[bodies retrieved from the sea had many with life-jackets put on incorrectly, or in a way they were literally trapped upside down and drowned as a result]

Add to this, passengers were not assigned a specific boat and they were not aware their life-jackets were in their rooms. Some went to the upper decks expecting to find them there.

This is why, after creating a business continuity plan for a client, I like to train the entire staff on why we're doing this at all. I build in why they should care first before any exercise is done. Then I make them ready by conducting an exercise. This is where it gets interesting. Having done workshops where I create mini exercises for a fictious company, in broad strokes, the participants do fairly well. But when it is a actual plan specific to the circumstances, not so much. Why is this?

Spit-balling a generality is much easier to at least get some of it right. Having a tailored, specific plan, specific to your business operations gets you to having most to all of if right. The familiarity when put on the spot isn't there at first. This is new. They miss things. A lot of things. But when they've done it a few times, they get much, much better at it.

Am I splitting hairs or being too harsh?

Some passengers survived the sinking of the Lusitania by spit-balling a general idea of what to do. Had more crew been trained on the lifeboats and passengers knew how to don a life-jacket properly, that number would have been much higher.