On the return from the hunt for this rather gorgeous man we walked back to the other side of the room and I, quite literally nearly fell over him. In my surprise, I asked rather reticently, if it was OK to park myself next to where he was standing. He said ‘of course’ and waived me in to the piece of wall next to him.

I stood leaning against the wall wondering how I could get to talk without it appearing too ridiculously forward. As I pondered this, I realised I was feeling quite nervous and unsure, so I decided to simply go for broke and face him head on. I turned toward him, looked him in the eye and said ‘hi, what brings you here tonight?’ As it turned out, he was from Sydney, a writer – over here to do a piece on the rugby match that was playing the following night – and … very happily married. Bummer about the married bit but hey, out of all the people in the bar that night, I was bemused by the fact that I had honed in on and met a writer!

I see myself as a writer and told him so. He was great, just what I needed. In no more than fifteen minutes he had given me great words of encouragement, said writing was a way of life second to nothing, full of excitement, travel and ‘fancy getting paid to do something you really love.’ He writes a regular column for an Australian city based newspaper and has had several books published. So how fortuitous was that meeting?

Earlier in the night I had been speaking with another man, responding to the usual ‘so what do you do’ type question. I mentioned I was a writer and he proceeded to tell me how hard that must be and rattled off a synopsis of a book by George Orwell that detailed his life as a down and out un-published writer living on the bones of his arse in Paris, France. He then went on to tell me that in a previous life he worked in the music industry and the number of aspiring artists that would submit CDs of their musical talent only to have them end up in some executives rubbish bin because of the enormity of the task, which must be the same for writers, right? You would be just one of many he asked quizzically with that ‘you’re not really serious are you’ type of tone and look?

I listened politely as I understood he was simply sharing his perspective of life and that a career in writing, along with any type of musical leaning is considered by most, risky.

Many of us choose to play it safe and many more of us choose to listen to people who choose to play it safe and limit ourselves to a life of mediocre ho-hum to please others.

I stood in a crowded bar on a Friday night and fortuitously met a writer who confirmed for me that to pursue your passion is the only way to live your life!

It reminds me of the Humphrey Bogart line in Casablanca “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine. …”

MOJO is a funny thing, you sure as hell know when you have it, but it is really hard to find when you lose it!

Mine is lost; been looking for it for a while now, yet still nothing – *sigh*.

I have just finished facilitating an appreciative inquiry for a bunch of senior managers in a mining company. An appreciative inquiry is a method of getting people to focus on what is working for them in order to build more of that, rather than focus on what is not working, and trying to problem solve. There is a set of assumptions that sit behind an appreciative inquiry as follows: there is always something that works, what we focus on becomes our reality, there are multiple realities and the act of asking questions influences the moment.

The inquiry has four parts to it:

Discover: what is working well?
Dream: what would I like to be, do or have?
Design: how am I going to achieve what I want to be, do or have?
Deliver: what can I influence, what can I do and by when?

It got me thinking that if I preach this stuff, I should be able to live it and apply the assumptions to myself, so I went on a path of discovery to identify what is working for me and I came up with the following list aptly titled:

These are a few of my favourite things

I love I can get out of bed in the morning… that sentence could finish there, but I will continue with… and sit at my computer and write. I write story, I blog, I tweet, I email, I message.

I love that I have i-tunes on my computer and I download songs. I am back in touch with song. I have my guitar; I am remembering chords and can play and sing ‘Bridge over troubled water.’ I first learnt this song on my guitar when I was fifteen.

I love hanging out with my friends. I love doing long lunches, just chatting and enjoying. I love walking and playing with my dogs. I love being connected to friends via text. I love texting, I love hearing the sound of a new text message beep on my phone. I love my family. I love life. I love…

Yep, it works. When you start to realise all the things that are good in your life, you realise how blessed you are, well at least I did.

So ok, I get my life can function without mojo. But imagine the possibilities with mojo? Now there’s a thought, so I think I will keep looking a little longer. Yoohoo, mojo… where are you mojo? Here mojo …

It is the first sign of insanity to keep doing the same thing hoping for a different outcome.

I have just been involved in a two-day workshop geared for world-class presenters and was reminded of the amount of background technique, method, content and context required to truly set participants on fire and ensure learning and behavioural change occurs. Why am I telling you this? Because I don’t believe the average person realises just how much work goes into making a workshop a memorable learning experience and I certainly don’t believe that the majority of the holders of the Certificate IV workplace training qualification get this either?

It seems that in order to provide workplace training of any sorts today, it is obligatory if not mandatory to hold the Certificate IV in Training and Assessment (TAA). So this qualification has become a ‘must have’ in industry and in parallel with this need, the intent of the qualification has become diluted. My colleagues and I talk about this all the time. If we all had a dollar for the amount of times we have heard participants or potential trainers say ‘I just want the piece of paper’ we would all be extremely wealthy. And unfortunately this is exactly what has happened. In the quest to provide the piece of paper, industry is churning out very ordinary trainers, trainers who have no concept of engaging the learner, trainers who have no idea how to structure a piece so that it is clear to the learner what they are learning, trainers who use death by PowerPoint and over load the learner with useless and too much information.

Learning can be overt and learning can be subtle. Sometimes the best learning occurs not by what is being said but by what is not being said. How many trainers know what NOT to say? How many trainers are comfortable with silence? How many trainers provide their learners with an environment that is conducive for them to learn? How many trainers even know how their learners learn?

The Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, the Australian Qualifications Framework and the Australian Quality Training Framework have all been designed to meet a need; a workplace / industry need and workplaces and industries have embraced this framework with gusto – but is it working?

I hang out a lot in the mining sector. This is one industry that has seemingly embraced the framework and sends all their operator trainers on TAA programs. The training departments within most of these mining organisations talk about the AQTF, build their job descriptions, training plans and training matrices around the metalliferous mining competencies and create assessments designed to determine if operators and others within the business are competent to do their jobs: sounds magnificent, feels robust and looks rigorous, but is it?

Mining companies have an added reason to embrace this framework and that is safety. It is legislated within the Mines Safety Inspections Act (MSIA) Regulation 4.13 that all persons working on a mine site will have adequate instruction and training in safety procedures, systems of work and in the tasks required of the employee; they will be assessed before commencing work at the mine; they will be retrained and reassessed whenever systems of work or plant and equipment change; records are made of any instruction, training, retraining, assessment or reassessment and those records will be kept for a minimum of 2 years after the record is made.

So Section 4.13 provides a compelling reason for mining companies to embrace this training and assessment framework and build and support a world class training system. Sadly, this does not happen. Let’s unpack that last sentence; sadly – this – does – not – happen. I am sure by now many reading this blog are feeling quite indignant that I should make such a comment. But that is the point. I so understand that for all intents and purposes it appears that many, if not all companies within industries have what they would feel is a robust training and assessment system. However, this becomes extremely diluted because the same companies focus on the parts that are not truly important. They focus on the paperwork, on the record keeping, on meeting policy and legislative frameworks and audits; they focus on the parts of training that do not affect cultural or behavioural change forgetting that the only reason we train people is to influence the way they do the job aligned to best or world practice.

So given that I have done my hours, given that I have been operating in this field for many years, I feel my opinion is worthy of listening along with industry statistics (workers compensation and the number of injuries and deaths) that suggest whatever the mining industry is doing currently, is not working. So my question is, given we all know it is not working, why then are organisation’s not doing anything different?

It reminds me of that quote:

If we continue to do what we have always done, we will continue to get what we have always got.

So we churn out trainers that have a piece of paper, yet do not have basic understanding of pedagogy. We have trainers that have a piece of paper, yet cannot tell you about the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), because if they could, then they would know that there is really no need for them to have the TAA if they are not issuing a qualification and many, if not most mining organisation’s do not. We have trainers that have a piece of paper that suggest they can assess the competence of others, yet they cannot tell you what the principles of assessment are or the rules of evidence?

If the trainers that hold the qualification understood just these three (3) key principles then I would agree… it would be likely that the organisation would have a robust training and assessment system. But when the fundamentals are missing is it any wonder we have a less than second rate training system that supports the suggestion ‘you got your qualification out of a weetie packet.’

So here is the thing: for learning to occur, for the adult learner to be engaged and fired up about learning, for cultural and behavioural change to occur and people remain safe, we need to go Beyond Cert IV and ensure our trainers get that training is not just an event that our punters show up to and sign appropriate bits of paper, it is about an outcome. It is about visibly seeing a shift in participants after the event and that shift, adds value back to the individual and the business.