A Tall Story by The Famous Brett Watson, 30-Aug-1998.
Dateline: Sydney, Australia. Corporate training specialist, Greendale Informed Training Services (GITS), is experiencing unprecendented growth in its business thanks to a paradigm shift in their training focus.
"Our company was in a slump," said Arthur Greendale, CEO of GITS. "Training for Microsoft Windows-based products made up the lion's share of our business, and there was no lack of demand for it, but we had a staffing problem. Every time a new Windows-based program was added to our list of courses, or an upgrade of an application or the operating system itself was released, it had a visibly negative impact on our training staff."
The trainers, it seems, were becoming increasingly frustrated with the advancing complexity and retreating reliability of each new generation of software. "I would have quit, myself," said Alex Campbell, a former NT and Unix systems administration trainer, "except that a vacancy arose in the company for network support, so I settled for a transfer. The NT training was just becoming too frustrating. People wanted to know why the software was so complex and unreliable, and there just isn't a good answer. The stress nearly drove me mad."
"The most technically competent trainers were always the first to leave," explained CEO Greendale. "As time went by, we found ourselves in an upward wages spiral with less competent trainers and an increasing level of dissatisfaction amongst our customers. It was a real problem."
The solution? Although training in computer skills was Greendale's largest area of business, it wasn't the only one. "Another area of our training business was starting to show promising growth," CEO Greendale explained. "About six years ago we added some nebulous feel-good courses like 'coping with stress', and such. They've been good cash cows for us with a steady growth in popularity. But one day I thought to myself, 'man, my Windows trainers need to go on the stress-relief course.' Then it hit me -- how much stress is caused by working with modern computer applications? I decided to try out a new course: 'Coping with Windows'."
Greendale's intuition paid off handsomely. Within six months of initially offering the course, it has become more popular than the "coping with stress" course on which it is based. But what material does the course cover to make it so popular? "The key to the success of the course, I believe, has been to change the customer's expectations. On the old Windows courses, people expected to come away with some mastery of Windows, and they were invariably disappointed. The new course takes the approach that Windows is the master, and we should learn to cope with this and not let it stress us out."
Participants in the course learn relaxation exercises and meditation techniques for coping with senseless frustration. It covers such situations as having your computer crash after working on a document for two hours and the autosave file is corrupt, receiving completely unhelpful and inaccurate advice from a help-desk staffer who thinks you're an idiot, and having an IT staffer sneak in while you're not at your desk and upgrade your software to something which is far more memory and power hungry than your obsolete box can handle. In all this, the participants are taught to submit and cope gracefully with the situation rather than attempting to change anything.
"The course works because it's the frustration of not being able to change anything which causes the stress. If you can overcome the desire to change things to the way they 'should' be, suddenly you find the stress is gone," observed Greendale. "The course is also taking on a life of its own. The participants keep telling us stories about how frustrating things happen with computers at work and home. Not only have we introduced a 'sharing time' for people to laugh at each others misfortunes -- a great stress reliever in itself -- but it also gives us an endless supply of new ways to inflict senseless cruelty on the participants. That, combined with the fact that software keeps getting more annoying, means that we have an increasingly popular course which costs us virtually nothing in keeping the trainers up to date."
I spoke with a course participant, Martin Cromwell, to get a first-hand opinion of whether the course works as well as it sounds. "It's truly fantastic," he said. "Before I went on this course, I was tempramental and tense all the time. Computers were a source of perpetual frustration to me. I'm an electrical engineer with fourteen years experience, and they still drove me nuts. But this course has taught me to laugh when things go wrong, and I'm not nearly so tense anymore. It even works with other things, other than computers, I mean. Like, this morning a guy stole the spot I was turning into in the parking lot. Previously I would have ripped his head off, but today I just thought 'isn't life a gas?' and smiled and waved at him. He looked really stunned and that made it even funnier. To cap it all off, I had to park right at the back of the car park and it took me an extra five minutes to walk here! What a hoot! Oh yes, this course is the best. I've booked for a refresher next year already."
In order to get as far away from the course participants as possible, I also contrived to interview Prof. Guy Chappel, a lecturer in economics at the University of Western Sydney, and an expert in the field of technology and training, or so he tells me. "This is not an unexpected trend," he claims. "Technology is becoming increasingly complex, and because it is largely market-driven, it's the 'features list' which gets all the attention. Usability and reliability are dragged along behind, only getting as much attention as is warranted to keep people from hurling it en masse out the window and switching to a different product. It makes sense to address this by increasing people's tolerance to adversity. After all, it creates a booming market in this kind of training and at the same time allows the software companies to maintain obscene profitability. If the software were actually reliable and easy to use, people wouldn't upgrade so often and there would be little demand for training -- a disaster for the whole technology sector, really."
So is this kind of training good for productivity? "Productivity? That's a quaint notion. I suppose it helps to some extent by making the workplace less stressful, but it's fundamentally a bunch of air-headed tree-hugging. One can't expect to increase productivity unless one addresses the root cause: recalcitrant technology and self-interested software vendors. But that's really not the point. It certainly does no harm to productivity, and it's doubtful whether a growing economy can afford the kind of efficiency that good, cheap, reliable software would produce in any case."
Despite the fact that I did not understand the rationale of that last sentence at all, a sixth sense warned me not to inquire any further into the economics of the matter, so I asked about future market trends instead. "This kind of training can only go so far," he said. "I'm fairly sure that we'll start to hit people's tolerance threshhold in another five years or so, given current trends. At that time, the 'Coping with Windows' style of course will begin to hit the same diminishing returns we see in standard 'Using Windows' training today. People will become dissatisfied, and that's unavoidable. The winners next time will be the drug companies. By that time, anti-impotence pills will be old news, only slightly more interesting and profitable than headache tablets. The new market opportunity will be stress-relieving drugs. Granted, this is not a new concept, but next time it will be driven by an unprecedented wave of demand: people who want to maintain their stress-free lifestyle but just can't do it on their own anymore."
Author: The Famous Brett Watson