One of the things I’m fascinated by is our general ignorance of logistics – such a critical success factor to military effectiveness.

“Without supplies no army is brave.” said Frederick the Great (as you might tell, I’ve been reading some military history And trainers have very often not been brave, not at all.

The reason? Logistics.

They haven’t set up enough supply lines to the real world, they’ve relied on book knowledge rather than direct observation or real-life data, they haven’t got their hands dirty in business.

I think there’s a circularity to what training depts have done. Somebody observes a problem, then another, then another. A training guy identifies this ‘group’ of problems as being a close fit to some nebulous concept like ‘leadership’. Then they go away and read all about leadership and build a course. Then the effectiveness of the course is measured against the ‘learning objectives’. And so on.

As soon as the training people bundle up the ‘problems’ into something with a stupid name, they fall victim to logic which is entirely circular.

They’ve shut off their supply lines to the individual problems and real-life, and stranded themselves. They become cowards.

Hope that wasn’t too much of a tangent (since when has that stopped me…) and it makes some kind of sense.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by marcopolis: Group-centric work and training http://j.mp/28fnQH...