I have the privilege of flying a very high performance executive/private jet. The company I work for has a motto: “Legendary Service”. We achieve this often. At times it requires large amounts of flexibility, and I’ve just come through one of those times. I’m excited to get a good stretch time off and sink my teeth back into school! Throughout this MALAT program, I’ve found the majority of the work to be engaging and relevant to the other side of my career: as a training manager. The chief frustration I have had is adapting to the challenge of having to step away from it, switch gears mentally, then pick it up hours, days (or in this case weeks) later. I have found that it takes a while to get back into ‘the zone’ and I envy those students who are on campus full time! Fingers crossed, I’ll be able to just focus in on this course for the next couple weeks and get back up to pace. A big part of that will be to arrange the data I have continued to collect while working, and tool it to meet the needs of these activities and assignments.

With regard to the above, it has been very interesting to be very busy in the process of actually working, while keeping an eye on process and process improvement.

The ‘How might we’ question is one I’m very familiar with, but this has typically been while enjoying the luxury of an abundance of time. Without being a historian, it seems to me that the great philosophers all were able to sit still and think! In the moments where I was able to pivot between completing tasks, and evaluating the processes driving those tasks, I have been afforded a very unique perspective; that of the ground level. What has struck me the most dramatically, is the confirmation that ease of implementation is a key, if not the key component to introducing the organization to a video library of training material. I have seen that as we are an organization that needs to respond very rapidly to customer needs (requiring the mobilization of airplanes, pilots, mechanics, flight coordinators, international operations consultants, etc.), little pre-scheduled time is available to arrange groups of managers to discuss training material. This means I will need to not only develop an example of a video training course, but that the tools used to make the course are as packaged, and easy as possible to use for my fellow managers. The trail of breadcrumbs will need to simple, and visible. Since ‘How might we?’ is usually my go-to, I started with that process and came up with the following question:

“How might we shift to in-house, high quality video lessons using available resources?”.

Ive decided to work other techniques into this evolving process to try and avoid tunnel vision. As a result, I’ll end this post with a POV I’m using as a basis for the following unit, driving toward the assignment:

Our department managers need a more coherent and easy to implement method of generating in-house training and distributing it to the employee group because there is a tremendous opportunity to streamline, standardize and centralize our training and increase professional engagement, enjoyment, and regulatory compliance.

It’s wordy (!) but I think it will keep me focussed in as I proceed….plus this is an iterative process, I can always ‘tweak’ it later!

References:

IDEO. (2015). Design Kit – Methods. Retrieved from http://www.designkit.org/methods

Stanford University Institute of Design. (2016). Bootcamp Bootleg.  Retrieved from http://dschool-old.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/METHODCARDS-v3-slim.pdf