Establishing Shot on a Small Town Lawn
I met my least favorite boss one college summer as a landscaper: tough, dismissive, and curt—all things anathema to my touchy-feely nature. Abilene didn’t smile much. When she did, it was just at the work. She liked a beautiful flower bed layout, meticulously executed.
The only time she was chatty was when explaining things about plants and what they needed. I remember her pushing mulch around a tree and explaining just where it should stop so as not to suffocate the tree. She said cheerfully, “remember, Matt, fill kills. Fill… kills.” It was the only time she talked to me that I didn’t feel like I should immediately light myself on fire.
Of course, I had heard about Abilene’s “management-by-yell.” Everybody has stories of everybody else in the Southern New Jersey town where I grew up: population 14,000. However, it wouldn’t be until years later that I learned about the incident that earned Abilene her now infamous sharp edge.
The Case of the Japanese Red Maples
One of Abilene’s rich—well, small-town rich—clients had asked her to install seven Japanese Red Maples around their ranch house as part of a lush and expensive arrangement of beds. These weren’t saplings, they wanted trees that were 5-10 years old, and at the time each one cost $500. The entire project was five figures… in the 1990s!
Abilene obliged, finding the perfect trees from all over the Delaware Valley from different dealers, and devoted her best crew to several days of grading, cutting, planting, filling, adding borders, everything. It wasn’t Abilene’s biggest project, but it was her most lavish and beautiful.
Some 60 days later, after a vague, sheepish call from the client to come “help,” Abilene would be standing trying not to scream as she looked at what had happened to her masterpiece.
It was all dead.
Everything she planted.
Dead.
It turns out that the most important thing to do after trees are transplanted is regular watering—at least until they have thoroughly rooted into their new soil. Although she had left detailed instructions about watering and care, the client had never done it. They said they had “meant to,” but it was obvious that, to them, these weren’t really living things. They were art pieces—curios to show off to their friends.
The client had sloughed off Abilene’s offers to have her company manage the maintenance and watering, saying they would handle it. I’m sure they meant to; they weren’t giving it enough thought to be actually lying. They just didn’t think about it.
They didn’t realize the work of maintenance—the essential, arduous keeping of “upkeep.” All that beautiful work, in which Abilene put something of her soul into the ground, and then nothing.
Clients Buy Training, But Need Performance
Now some 25 years later, that story makes me think of what Abilene’s client must have been thinking. In their minds, they bought a lawn, not a responsibility. They bought a lawn like they would buy small-town rich toys for their small-town rich kids.
Abilene tried to impress upon them the need to water their plants, but somehow, no matter how many times they heard it, it just didn’t stick. In their mind it was… “out of scope.”
I think of how often I deal with a Training Manager who is reaching out because some executive wants “something different” for their upcoming all-team meeting. That Training Manager has a narrow mandate: find someone who can help us “communicate more effectively” or can “do a little teambuilding thing before we really get started.”
When I receive inquiries like that, the Training Manager largely vanishes once they realize I’m someone who actually does this for a living. Then, I design the program with their client, the executive. The executive gets their “fun” training for their all-team meeting, and everyone’s happy, or at least not unhappy.
But nothing actually changed.
They bought a lawn. Not a responsibility.
The Training Manager fulfilled their ask: find the right person. The executive also received what they asked: something fun to start their meeting. So, in their minds, they were done.
But What About the Learners?
Have you ever come into this kind of setting and had a smiling executive say to their group: “I thought we should start things off with something a little different to help us get energized for a great day?”
You invite the participants to join you in a circle, trying to push as much energy as you can through your bright eyes and wide smile. And yet, the team members amble toward you looking much like one does on the way to the dentist’s chair. “Ah… good… fun.”
When we see that kind of slow, resistant saunter from our learners, there’s a reason.For Improv-Based Training, I believe it’s often because they are saying to themselves, “great, we’re going to burn an hour and a half looking stupid, but then nothing will actually change.”
Even if they could never consciously articulate it, learners know in their gut when their manager has bought a lawn and not a responsibility. It reeks in the culture; you can see it in how they cast dull eyes up toward the front of the room as “today’s trainer” is introduced.
You can tell you’re in an organization that likes training as a performance solution, and when that doesn’t work, they just buy more training. You know, like small-town rich toys for their small-town rich kids. Clients sometimes want to buy a lawn, not a responsibility.
Training Is Never Enough to Change Performance
Training is what you may have learned in Logic class as a “necessary, but not sufficient” condition. If you don’t know how to do something, you won’t do it well without a lot of luck (or someone nearby to cheat off.) However, just because you know how to do something, does not mean you will.
Think about the kinds of Improv-Based Training we do. There have certainly been times where I use improv to teach content-heavy sessions, like when I train a sales team in the Features, Applications, and Benefits of a new product or service. But most of the time, I’m teaching something intangible and ethereal: communication, innovation, leadership, etc. I’m teaching people how to be better, but not necessarily something where a boss will look over their shoulder each day and say, “are you being a more improvisational leader today?”
The skills I teach are fleeting, and if not practiced immediately, repeatedly, and consistently, the value I provided is doomed. It is not enough for the Training Manager and the executive sponsor—and even the learners—to just buy the lawn; they must water their plans.
Surprise, Talent Developers: You’re Abilene
Much like the pivotal moment in the movie Fight Club, now is the time to realize that, in this story, you are, in fact, Abilene.
And I’m Abilene. Every trainer who has ever delivered important, transformative learning experiences, only to find out 90 days later that performance slid right back to where it was, is, in fact, Abilene.
Clients must water their plants.
In our metaphor, the plants are those blossoming performance improvements you begin to see right after training happens. New knowledge, skills, and attitudes have been transplanted into the soil of the learners. If not watered (read: supported, praised, incentivized), those new capacities will wither and die.
But the reality is even worse than the analogy. Because where Abilene could just rip out the dead plants and start over again in the same soil, it’s not the same with learners. When something dies in that soil, the rot is poisonous. Trying to get the same things to take root again is even harder the next time. The learners become hardened to it. They tell themselves—and sometimes each other—little quips to excuse not watering their own plants:
“It didn’t work last time, why should we listen this time?”
“Just nod and smile. Eventually the boss will decide something else is ‘top priority.’”
And then, of course, there’s my absolute nightmare statement….
“If The Boss Was Serious, They Wouldn’t Have Used Improv.”
I know that stinged, but you deserve to know that for each learner who says, “yay, improv means this will be fun,” there is one mumbling, “yay, improv means this isn’t that important.”
Good training must do more than cultivate a willingness in the learner to apply the material on the job. It also must inspire the belief that if they do apply their learning, the resulting change will be recognized, welcomed, and supported.
It takes courage to try something you’ve learned. When that courage is met with the reward of acknowledgement, it gets stronger. When it is met with an absence of interest or even disinterest, that muscle of “courage to try” is left weaker for the next planting.
Eight Posts on Improving Learner Performance (Starting With This One)
In my Five Shifts from Improv Coaching to Corporate Training, I explain performance as answering the question: “What’s going to be different on Monday?” My next seven blog posts will continue our focus on this question in a series called Different on Monday: Training for Business Performance.
Their purpose is not just to challenge you to design and deliver trainings that equip learners to demonstrate different, better performance on their next day in the office. These posts focus on how you can collaborate with your clients to ensure these learners are effectively supported and challenged to apply their learning back at work.
These posts will also share with you the means to set your learners up for success back at work with the right tools introduced the right way. When designed and executed well, the Performance Support Tools you’ll learn about can literally make it harder to do things the old, wrong way. Yes, even for soft skills; in this journey we’ll learn how to translate those fundamentally human capacities we are often hired to develop into tangible assets that learners can refer to for months and years after training takes place.
But you cannot do this alone.
So I’ll also discuss what you have to say (and ask) to help clients shift their thinking from buying a lawn—or training—to buying a responsibility—investing time and resources to drive training into performance. That’s when you can leave your training reassured; your clients will water their plants.