Rote learning frustrates us because the brain resists meaningless stimuli. When we invoke the brain’s natural capacity to integrate information, however, we can assimilate boundless amounts.

In today’s competitive marketplace, finding better ways to learn will propel organizations forward. Strong minds fuel strong organizations. We must capitalize on our natural styles and then build systems to satisfy the needs that will take us toward our targeted goals.

Simply stated, the law of readiness means we only learn when we are ready to learn. Are the participants ready to learn the material? This question really has two parts: First, are they motivated to learn? If not, what can I do to move them? If they are ready, how can I best encourage that desire? Second, do they have a sufficient background to understand the material?

Nothing succeeds like success. The more success we achieve in learning, the more excited we get about learning. We need to gain pleasure from our learning, and the successful performance of a formerly difficult task is one of life’s greatest pleasures. When we studied freshman English and excelled we enjoyed the class and looked forward to continuing our education. When we struggled it became boring and we lost interest.

In essence, practice makes perfect. This means that hands-on drill is necessary. It also means that the more personally we are involved in learning – that is, the harder we work at it – the more it engages us the more we learn.

• 1. Are the trainees ready to learn the material? This question really has two parts:
  • a) Are they motivated to learn it? If not, what can we do or say to move them? If they are, how can we best encourage that desire and align our material with it?
  • b) Do they have sufficient background to understand and proficiency to perform the new skills? If not, how can we best bring them to the readiness level? If they have sufficient proficiency, how can I present the material so the attendees will be both challenged and able to use the new skills?
• 2. Have I provided sufficient opportunities for the attendees to succeed? Have we created enough feedback mechanisms for them to be able to see their success? Have we created opportunities for constructive failure? Can those failures be transformed effectively into successes?
• 3. Have we built in sufficient practice phases? Is each group given hands-on practice? Is there a practice drill to ensure skill improvement? Have we created enough practice and built enough conceptual bridges to engage and hold their interest?

1. Adults learn only what they are ready to learn.
2. Adults learn best what they actually perform.
3. Adults learn from their mistakes.
4. Adults learn easiest what is familiar to them.
5. People favor different senses for learning.
6. Adults learn methodically.
7. Adults cannot learn what they cannot understand.
8. Adults learn through practice.
9. Adults learn better when they can see progress.
10. Adults respond best when what they are to learn is presented uniquely for them. Each person has different learning patterns.

Adults learn best by making mistakes. Nothing succeeds like success. While success motivates us to learn, it is our errors that we remember and learn to correct. An effective training program must allow for errors and invite challenges.

Training does not take place in a vacuum. No one comes to a session with an empty mind want to be filled. We learn by connecting what we already know with new subject matter and by sharing ideas.

Learning takes place only with understanding. Learning by rote, with no understanding, produces not only inferior learning, but results in a quick loss of memory and skills. On the other hand, if participants understand why they need to learn and the advantages they offer, they will not only remember, but they will use the material.

The Chinese philosopher and teacher, Confucius, summed up adult learning when he stated.

Tell me and I will forget.
Show me and I will remember.
Involve me and I will understand.

Adult leaning must spark new ideas, and this is best accomplished by group discussions. An adult participant offers a wealth of information and readily becomes involved in the session, not only by asking questions but also by being called upon to answer questions. The value of controlled group discussions cannot be over emphasized!

We all know the saying, “practice makes perfect.” Therefore, adult learning should always allow time for some form of practice.

People need to know how they are doing. While it is impossible to learn in a vacuum, testing newly acquired knowledge can create problems. If test anxiety is a problem, it is critical that participants understand that the purpose of the test is not for them to be judged, but for them to evaluate what they have learned and compare it to what they expected to learn. Tests are merely a form of feedback to let the participants know how they are doing.

Individual differences are always a factor in learning. Each person is a unique individual, and each learns differently. Participants come to a training session with different backgrounds, abilities, knowledge, personalities, and expectations. For training sessions to succeed, an instructor needs to recognize and respond positively to each person’s different perceptions, habits, and manners.

At its heart, talent management is simply a matter of anticipating the need for human capital and then setting out a plan to meet it. Current responses to the challenge largely fall into two distinct – and equally ineffective – camps. The first, and by far the most common, is to do nothing: anticipate no needs at all. Make no plans for addressing them (rendering the term “Talent Management” meaningless). This reactive approach relies overwhelming on outside hiring and has faltered now that the surplus of management talent has eroded. The second, common only among large, older companies, relies on complex and bureaucratic models from the 1950’ for forecasting and succession planning – legacy systems that grew up in an era when business was highly predictable and that fail now because they are inaccurate and costly in a more volatile environment.

It’s time for a fundamentally new approach to talent management that takes into account the great uncertainty businesses face today. Fortunately, companies already have such a model, one that has been well honed over decades to anticipate and meet demand in uncertain environments – supply chain management. By borrowing lesson from operations and supply chain research firms can forge a new model of talent management better suited to today’s realities. Before getting into details, let’s look at the context in which talent management has evolved over the past few decades and its current state.

Internal development was the norm back in the 1950s, and every management development practice that seems novel today was commonplace in those years – from executive coaching to 360-degree feedback to job rotation to high-potential programs.

Except at a few very large firms, internal talent development collapsed in the 19070s because it could not address the increasing uncertainties of the marketplace. Business forecasting had failed to predict the economic downturn in that decade, and talent pipelines continued to churn under outdated assumptions of growth. The excess supply of managers, combined with no-layoff policies for white-collar workers, fed corporate bloat. The steep recession of the early 1980s then led to white-collar layoffs and the demise of lifetime employment as restructuring cut layers of hierarchy and eliminated many practices and staffs that developed talent. After all, if the priority was to cut positions, particularly in middle management, why maintain the programs designed to fill the ranks.

The older companies like PesiCo and GE that still invested in development became known as “academy companies”: breeding grounds for talent simply by maintaining some of the practices that nearly all corporations had followed in the past. A number of such companies managed to ride out the restructuring of the 1980s with their programs intact only to succumb to cost-cutting pressures later on.

The problems faced by Unilever’s Indian operations after 2000 are a case in point. Known as a model employer and talent developer since the 1950s, the organization suddenly found it top-heavy and stuck when business declined after the 2001 recession. Its well-oiled pipeline saddled the company with 1,400 well-trained managers in 2004, up 27% from 2000, despite the fact that the demand for managers had fallen. Unilever’s implicit promise to avoid layoffs meant the company had to find places for them in its other international operation or buy them out.

The alternative to traditional development, outside hiring, worked like a charm through the early 1990s, in large measure because organizations were drawing on the big pool of laid-off talent. As the economy continued to grow, however companies increasingly recruited talent away from their competitors, creating retention problems. Watching the fruits of their labors walk out the door, employers backed even further away from investments in development. I remember a conversation with a CEO in the medical device industry about a management development program proposed by his head of human resources. The CEO dismissed proposal by saying, “Why should we develop people when our competitors are willing to do it for us?” By the mid-1990s, virtually every major corporation asserted the goal of getting better at retaining its own talent, a hopeful dream at the individual level, impossibility in the aggregate.

Outside hiring hits its inevitable limit by the end of the 1990s, after the longest economic expansion in U. S. history absorbed the supply of available talent. Companies found they were attracting experience candidates and losing experienced employees to competitors at the same rate. Outside searches became increasingly expensive, particularly when they involved headhunters, and the newcomers blocked prospects for internal promotions, aggravating retention problems. The challenge of attracting and retaining the right people went to the very top of the list of executives’ business concerns, where it remains today.

The good news is that most companies are facing the challenge with a pretty clean slate: Little in the way of talent management is actually going on in them. One recent sturdy, for example, reports that two-thirds of U. S. employers are doing no workforce planning of any kind. The bad news is that the advice companies are getting is to return to the practices of the 1950s and create long-term succession plans that attempt to map out careers years into the future – even though the stable business environment and talent pipelines in which such practices were born no longer exist.

That simply won’t work. Traditional approaches to succession planning assume a multiyear development process, yet during that period, strategies, organization charts, and management teams will certainly change, and the groomed successors may well leave anyway. Then an important vacancy occurs, it’s not unusual for companies to conclude that the candidates indentified by the succession plan no longer meet the needs of the job, and they look outside. Such an outcome is worse in several ways than having no plan. First, the candidates feel betrayed – succession plans create an implicit promise. Second, an investment in developing these candidates is essentially wasted. Third, most companies now have to update their succession plans every year as jobs change and individuals leave, wasting tremendous amounts of time and energy. As a practical matter, how useful is a plan if has to be changed every year?

Talent management is not an end in itself. It is not about developing employees or creating succession plans, nor is it about achieving specific turnover rates or any other tactical outcome. It exists to support the organization’s overall objectives, which in business essentially amounts to making money. Making money requires an understanding of the costs as well as the benefits associates with talent management choices. The costs inherent to the organization-man development model were largely irrelevant in the 1950s because in an era of lifetime employment and a culture in which job-hopping was considered a sign of failure, companies that did not develop talent in-house would not have any at all. Development practices, such as rotational job assignments, were so deeply embedded that their costs were rarely questioned (though internal accounting systems were so poor that it would have been difficult to assess the costs in any case).

That is no longer true. Today’s rapid-fire changes in customer’s demands and competitor’s offerings, executive turnover that can easily run to 10%, and increased pressure to show a financial return for every set of business practices make the develop-from-within approach to slow and risky. And yet the hire-from-without models are too expensive and disruptive to the organization.

Unlike talent development, models of supply chain management have improved radically since the 1950s. No longer do companies own huge warehouses were they stockpile the components needed to assemble year’s worth of products they can sell with confidence because competition is muted and demand eminently predictable. Since the 1980s companies have instituted, and continually refined, just-in-time management processes and other supply chain innovations that allow them to anticipate shifts in demand and adapt products ever more accurately and quickly. What I am proposing it something akin to just-in-time manufacturing for development realm: a talent-on-demand framework. If you consider for a moment, you will see how suited this model might be to talent development.

Forecasting product demand is comparable to forecasting talent needs; estimating the cheapest and fastest ways to manufacture products is the equivalent of cost-effectively developing talent; outsourcing certain aspects of manufacturing processes is like hiring outside; ensuring timely delivery relates to planning for succession events. The issues and challenges in managing an internal talent pipeline – how employees advance through development jobs and experiences – are remarkably similar to how products move through a supply chain: reducing bottlenecks that block advancement, speeding up processing time, improving forecast to avoid mismatches.

The most innovative approaches to managing talent use four particular principles drawn from operations and supply chain management. Two of them address uncertainty on the demand side: how to balance make-versus-buy decisions and how to reduce the risks in forecasting the demand for talent. The other two address uncertainty on the supply side: how to improve the return on investment in development efforts and how to protect that investment by generating internal opportunities that encourage newly trained managers to stick with the firm.