justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

Something’s gone wrong.

Send them to “training”!

Lead for the 6:00 o’clock news:

“The (add name or organization) is dealing with a huge mistake by (add the name of the person or organization screw up). The company’s spokesperson has responded by stating, ‘We will schedule training to resolve the error to insure it won’t happen again.’”

Sound familiar? Too simplistic? Overly optimistic?

Training is often prescribed for fixing something that’s not working, has gone wrong, or needs to change. As a life-long training professional, I find this often knee-jerk “train ‘em” response to fixing or changing something to border on the ludicrous. And more often than not, there’s little attention to the genuine cost of that magical training, time away from the work at hand, the necessary changes in policy or procedure that helped contribute to the problem, the negative publicity for having screwed up in the first place, just putting in the time, and so on.  

Also, there’s often a universal absence of measurement. That is, whether or not the training does anything to “fix” the problem.

By my estimate, the most expensive expenditure for training took place following an incident in 1991, at an annual event called Tailhook, a reunion of Naval officers in Las Vegas. The sexist and abusive behavior in which the naval personnel engaged, while seen by many as “just boys being boys,” was offensive, repulsive, and even criminal in nature. We might never have known the full extent of the abuse had the media not sounded their alarms at full volume.

As a result of the public outcry, a stand-down was ordered which was the first time this radical action, defined in this case as “…a service-wide "stand-down" so that every officer and enlisted person (in the Navy) can take a full day's training on Navy sexual harassment rules.”  

A full day? That was it? The 1991 reunion was the 35^th annual event and more than 80 female officers were allegedly victimized at the reunion. Surely one day was sufficient to undo the culture within a 35-year event. Too simplistic? Overly optimistic? And what was the cost of having thousands of personnel, vehicles, programs, and any meaningful work stopped? Was there a reduction in harassment as a result of that day’s training? Public outrage continued. It was only after a second full investigation that ranks and careers were affected.

What do you think? Has the gender culture within the military improved since 1991?