Learning by Doing

I've recently been to Siwa as part of a charity caravan managed by volunteers from Resala. The aid caravan consisted of 245 volunteers. The caravan lasted for four days and nights.

The caravan was headed by one volunteer who had a number of assistants. Each of the 7 busses had a leader. Each of the several hotels in which the volunteers were accommodated also had a leader from among the volunteers.

The interesting thing is that such volunteer leaders had not received any kind of training in how to manage other volunteers, how to organize or any kind of leadership training to prepare them for shouldering such responsibilities. There only credentials were participating in previous caravans with Resala even as regular volunteers.

One of the volunteers who was with me in the bus, but was not the leader of the bus, was a regular volunteer until he was assigned to become the leader of the hotel in which I was staying. He was younger than me, a college student still. He was responsible for collecting our national IDs, communicating with the hotel front office staff, waking us up at times of prayers, meals (Iftar and Sohour since it was Ramadan) and work (our volunteering work, the main aim of the caravan). He was also responsible for handling any issues that came up and managing the flow of volunteers in the hotel he was assigned to manage.

I observed this 'regular' volunteer shoulder his new responsibilities and become gradually more capable of handling them. By the end of the 4-day caravan he was acting like a capable manager handling things with confidence. It was like a practical hand-on leadership crash course.

A second observation I had was on our way back from Siwa. The other volunteer who was responsible for the bus I was in on our way to Siwa was also responsible for the same bus on our way back. I was not in close contact with him, except in brief occasions, during the actual days of the caravan, for he stayed at a different hotel. On our way back, I noticed a dramatic positive change in the way he was handling the bus and dealing with volunteers. He behaved is a highly confident experienced leader as if he had been through many years of leadership experience. The observation was so clear to me that I marveled at how a few condensed hands-on throw-me-in-the-water kind of 'training' would produce such amazing results that many an expensive leadership workshop cannot even get near.

I am not saying that formal training, workshops and regular training sessions are useless, indeed they could act as a good start to introduce new would-be leaders to the necessary skills they would need when they are assigned with their new responsibilities. Yet there is no equal in terms of the strength of the effect nor the briefness of time to learning by actually doing. I see Resala, the volunteer organization handling the caravan, as leadership incubator in which regular volunteers enter and become veteran leaders in so short a time and without any kind of formal training.

Overflow Training

I have recently gone through a revealing experience that dramatically shook some of the fundamental assumptions I had about characteristics of effective training. I used to believe that any effective training method had to rely on delivering training in small easily digestible portions intercepted with enough time for digestion. The experience I recently went through shattered this assumption of mine completely.

A few months ago, I spent four days and nights at small farm at Wadi El Naturn. I had never before stayed overnight at a farm. The goal of the visit was for me to get a feel of what it could be like to live in a farm and to learn how stuff really works there after I had long read about it yet never experienced it first hand.

The owner of the small farm, a young man who originally lived in Cairo, was by all means a terrible trainer. He had terrible communication skills and assumed that I should understand all the terminology and how everything worked with zero explanation from on his side! I was thrown into a sea of information with no time whatsoever to digest such enormous amount of knowledge that was pouring into me at every moment. I was also forced to learn things by doing again given zero instruction on how to do it. Miraculously and despite my resistance and initial fear I watched myself perform quite well accomplishing one task after the other with minimal or no instruction at all! Despite that fact that I was given almost no time to digest this enormous amount of knowledge, I managed nevertheless to absorb quite a good amount of it and acquire it into my system. Some of my views about life, and for sure my views about training, changed drastically after this intense experience during this short trip.

I started questioning my assumptions about training methods. I came to realize that delivering training in small packets using a lucid easy to digest approach was not the only effective way to deliver training. I also came to realize that learning by doing with minimal instruction, rather than giving them very detailed and clear step-by-step instructions, can force learners to improvise, gain confidence in their abilities and learn in an extremely rapid manner.

After going through such experience and thinking it out to arrive at the previously mentioned conclusions I guess what is left is for me to try and test such new assumptions in the real world. Perhaps I could gradually try using such methods in part of my training and see how well it would work out. Experimentation in training delivery is a wonderful thing and keeps one improving all the time. Observing the results and making changes accordingly can dramatically help improve the performance of learners in current and future training courses.