WIIFM: Connecting with the Participants!

For the first time, I heard this term WIIFM, was in September 2008 when I was undergoing the ‘Instructor Development Programme’ being organized by a team of master trainers from USA. I have been using this phrase in different sessions with diverse group of audience be it Law Enforcement Officers, Peacekeepers or with my Humanitarian colleagues.

Before I move on to this phrase, let us understand that – it is one thing to teach and entirely different thing to learn. And not necessarily both of them move together. As trainers; our job is to facilitate learning and to do that we need to remind each participant, what they are going to gain from that learning session. Since the days of early 1970’s, Malcom Knowles’s assumptions of Andragogy or ‘the art and science of teaching adults’ – has changed our thinking and practices about Adult Learning, often called ‘facilitated learning’.

One of the principles of Adult Learning is – ‘Personal Benefit’. Every adult learner wishes to see her/his personal benefit from what s/he is learning. So in WIIFM – every learner asks herself/himself– what’s (there) in it for me? Why should I be a willing party to this learning process? Will this session help me in solving or avoiding a problem? Will it make me more confident to deal with an issue? Will it lead to my professional growth?

Last month, while conducting a Pre-Deployment training of an UNPOL contingent (going to Juba, UNMISS); I was facilitating a session on Public Order Management (POM). I started my presentation with the first slide (see picture on the left).

 And then followed by the second slide on WIIFM (see picture on the right).

First I let them understand the importance of this topic - as entire duty station is looking forward to them as experts in crowd management and expecting they will be handling a demonstration or violent crowd in most professional manner and further elaborating – what is (there) in this session for each one of them. So that they remain focused and willingly participate in the learning activity.

I found this approach rather interesting and has many advantages. Since, it helps to immediately draw the participants’ attention to the importance of the topic. Secondly, it assists in creating a conducive environment for learning; as they realise that – each of them will be benefited from this session as this is an issue that they are going to experience soon. And above all, you can connect it with your learning objectives as well. And finally at the end of the session, I again flash back the first slide, thus try to breed in the importance of the learning experience.

In 2000, Hargreaves suggested that learning professionals need to continuously reflect on what they do, why, how to do it better etc. He further propagated four stages of development for a professional. To him, having reflective discourse is as important as gaining technical skill/knowledge.

 Somnath Tewari, CPP has more than nine years of firsthand progressive experience facilitating training and capacity building activities to diverse audience inside and outside of his country. He is looking forward for your feedback on this.