Confucius
Whether it’s soft skills or compliance training, there are very few people in the finance sector who don’t have to attend a training session at some point in their careers. And training games may well be part of the programme. The question of whether training games are effective or not is a challenging one. Every single person has their own preferred learning style and a different motivation for being in a training session. Do training games work for you? That I can’t answer, but I can recount some of my own experiences.
In training and development you reach many different audiences, but the company I used to work for had a huge number of clients in the financial and insurance sector. I attended training (helping facilitate, never actually training) and events (at networking evenings such as Women in Banking and Finance). One of the key tools used by the trainers I worked with was a game called Colourblind®.
The Colourblind game requires your delegates to be blindfolded. They are then presented with a series of unusual shaped pieces of different coloured plastic. With very basic instruction from the facilitator, the group are then left to organise the shapes into sets.
The group has to rely completely on verbal communication and the outcomes are always stimulating and engaging – watching who takes the lead, the different language used and the communication skills of everyone involved. It was sometimes hectic, sometimes quite emotional, but always interesting (for the observer if not always the delegates).
RSVP Design, who developed the game, say it takes about 40 minutes for a group of 8-10. The very first time I saw it was with a group of 12 and, astonishingly, they took just 17 minutes to complete the task. A ‘natural leader’ took charge and, with a clear lead, the patterns were established and the sets made up quickly. It was a mixed group – an open programme with delegates from several different companies and industry sectors. A completely new ‘team’ that had never met, let alone worked together, yet they still hold the record in my experience.
Conversely, the trainer said their worst experience with the game he had ever had was when it had to be abandoned after nearly three hours. The record holders for the longest (and uncompleted) test were, interestingly enough, the senior team of a major financial company.
Some of the feedback from the first team (the speedy mixed team) was ‘fun, exciting, learned a lot’, whilst the senior team reported ‘frustration, pointless, difficult’. The key of course is not in the composition of the teams, but in the communication skills of the members of those teams. Perhaps the motivation was not right? The mixed team were there for a day that they had volunteered to attend, the senior team were being ‘sent’. But both outcomes resulted in serious learning for each group.
By using training games you can stimulate new experiences in a group who may think they already ‘communicate well’. Exercise can comfortably show where communication skills may be lacking and also highlight strengths. The object is often to teach new strategies, in the context of what is learned through the game. By being interactive, cynics and the ‘untouchables’ (who think they are right anyway) can find out exactly how effective their techniques and strategies are in a very simple simulation.
There are more complex games on the market and there are many simple training exercises that require no props whatsoever. The most important element is an effective facilitator or trainer and a clearly set objective. Playing a ‘game’ without having clearly defined learning outcomes would be self-defeating.
People learn in different ways, but by using activities that get delegates ‘doing’ instead of listening (or not), you will be able to develop training programmes that ‘stick’.
(C) Carolyn Sheppard 2008
NB: This article was written in 2008 for a financial website. It has disappeared into their archives now, so I have also put it up here for easy reference.
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