Realising more value from face-to-face training

Over the course of my career I have facilitated many face-to-face events covering many different subjects with widely different audiences, but a common observation I have made is that people invariably say that one of the most important things about the event has been the chance to meet people doing similar work, to get to know them and share experiences and knowledge.

And then, at the end of the event, they all go their separate ways. It took me a long time before I realised what an important trick I was missing. Would it be possible to use a face-to-face event to kick start a social learning network, a community of practice? What would I need to do to help to happen?

I realised that one of the distractors was the traditional way we evaluate such things as workshops using a happy sheet and, perhaps, some more or less formal test of learning. This satisfies the usual Kirkpatrick approach to evaluation, reaction and learning, but I had learnt from experience and research into training evaluation methodologies that this is a deeply flawed methodology. From my perspective here, a major weakness is its focus on individual reactions and learning and ignores any impact on the development of interpersonal relationships and social learning. The training world’s obsession with Kirkpatrick was distracting me from something much more potentially valuable.

The need to prepare a Master’s dissertation on social learning systems gave me the opportunity to study this issue more rigorously. I decided to use a technique called social network analysis, where you use questionnaires to find out who within a group communicates with whom and how often. You can use this data to create a ‘sociogram’, a diagram showing the existence and strength of interconnections. I was running a workshop attended by representatives from different NGOs and international organisations working on humanitarian projects in the Middle Eastern region, and at the beginning of the workshop I asked each participant to identify which other participants they knew and how often they communicated with them. I repeated this exercise six months after the workshop to see whether they had been any change in the pattern of relationships.

The two sociograms shown above show the results. From the data collected it is possible to calculate several different numerical measures of how strong a social network is. One of the most significant is the network density, the ratio of the actual number of connections in a network to the theoretical maximum, which provides a measure of the network connectedness. My data showed that the density before was 0.34 and afterwards was 0.33 — in fact a slight reduction, but probably not statistically significant, and hence very little difference. My conclusion was that although the participants had said how useful it was to meet other people working in the same region and professional field, the workshop itself had not contributed to any strengthening of relationships leading to what might be called a social learning network.

It therefore seemed to me that if the greater value of a face-to-face event was to be realised a facilitator would need to be more proactive during the course of the event. What would they need to do?

I followed this exercise up with some research into a series of workshops covering the same subject but delivered in different countries by different facilitators and tried to identify what factors were different and what differences there might be in subsequent networking.

What this showed me was that workshops where people reported a greater level of post-event networking had had a higher level of participatory and collaborative exercises, and that they reported a higher level of trust and confidence in the people they had met during the event. There were also comments that the facilitators had encouraged people to stay in touch after the event.

What can we take from this?

Firstly, we need to accept that learning is not just an individual activity, and so we cannot reliably evaluate the effectiveness of face-to-face learning events by just focusing on individual changes. Rather, we must accept that social learning networks can be a powerful way of promoting knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. We sometimes think of these in terms of ‘communities of practice’, which tend to be somewhat formally constructed and to be aware of their own existence, so that people think of themselves as being within such a community. A social learning network is, in my definition, more loosely constructed: people drift in and out of contact but are aware that there are people they know who may be able to give them answers to questions, but there are no regular meetings or WhatsApp groups bringing people together formally. Nevertheless, they are potentially very useful.

Secondly, my research seems to suggest that if we want to develop the potentially very important extra value from a face-to-face event we need to encourage participants to share contact details and to remain in touch. To help this to happen we need to run events using activities which promote conversation, discussion, dialogue and trust building, and throughout to present the message that the event is just the beginning of an ongoing relationship between participants where they can learn with and from each other. Simply presenting new knowledge and offering opportunities to practice new skills within a face-to-face event may satisfy the requirements of specified learning outcomes but misses potentially extremely important and more valuable opportunities for ongoing learning and relationship building.

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You can find more information on this subject in my book “Learning and performance”, available at https://www.routledge.com/Learning-and-Performance-A-Systemic-Model-for-Analysing-Needs-and-Evaluating/Hopkins/p/book/9781138220690.