Does One Train To Shoot Billy The Kid?

 

As anyone who has attended a PM-themed seminar or symposium can readily attest, training is a popular way to monetize PM expertise. There’s training for scheduling or cost performance software, training for risk management (NIC), training for PMP® Certification, and on, and on. I have also noticed that, when reviewing lessons learned or incident reporting documents, part of the get-well plan will involve some form of an enhanced training program a majority of the time (that, and updating procedures). But I have to ask: is training the most appropriate way of ensuring something bad that the organization has endured never happens again?

Meanwhile, Back In 1881…

To help illustrate my point I want to transport GTIM Nation to the years 1878 to 1881, in New Mexico Territory on the American frontier. One of the most notorious outlaws from that conflict (if not the most) was Billy the Kid, who was credibly accused of killing eight men, one of whom was a deputy sheriff. Pat Garret had arrested Billy once, but Billy managed to escape from that jail, killing three men in the process. Garret then re-initiated the manhunt for Billy, and, after hearing that he might have returned to the Fort Sumner area, went to see his old friend and employer Pete Maxwell on July 14, 1881. Garret and Maxwell were talking in a darkened room at around midnight when Billy himself unexpectedly walked in. At first, Billy didn’t see Garret, but upon realizing a third person was in the room started asking “Quien es? Quien es?” (“Who’s that?”) Garret, recognizing Billy’s voice, drew his gun and fired twice. The first bullet fatally hit Billy in the chest, the second one missed.

One of the things I find remarkable about this story is that Garret had no training in police work or constabulary. He hadn’t even been in the military[i]. Indeed, the first police training facility wouldn’t open for another twenty-seven years[ii]. Nevertheless, Garret tracked down an escaped outlaw – who had already been convicted of murder – on a first hunch, and shot him fatally on the first attempt, in a room so dark that Billy couldn’t make out Garret’s features in time to recognize him. Quite a feat of law enforcement in a difficult and hostile environment for somebody who had had zero training, no?

According to the Peak Performance Center website (https://thepeakperformancecenter.com/educational-learning/learning/principles-of-learning/learning-pyramid/retention-rates/), the National Training Laboratory’s Learning Pyramid quantifies learning retention by method of instruction so:

• 5% Lecture,
• 10% Reading,
• 20% Audio-Visual,
• 30% Demonstration,
• 50% Discussion,
• 75% Practice Doing, and
• 90% Teaching Others.

Virtually without exception, the PM-themed training offered today is never more advanced than the Audio-Visual category from this pyramid, and even that level assumes that a well-done slide deck can be considered to be “Audio-Visual,” as opposed to an enhanced “Lecture.” This fact, taken together with the previous observation that Incident Reporting/Lessons Learned documents often lean heavily on enhanced training as the go-to remedy for preventing accidents or problems analogous to the one that’s being reviewed, and we have a management scenario where the go-to remedy for even our biggest problems has no more than a 20% effectiveness rate. And, before GTIM Nation reminds me that I also pointed out that procedure modification is another oft-used tactic, I would like to preemptively highlight that procedures are documents. Documents are read (theoretically). And the Reading component of the Learning Pyramid has an even lower learning retention rate than the slide deck-enhanced Lecture.

I would like to propose that the preceding paragraphs have presented us with two extremes of the same scale: Pat Garret experienced improbable success with virtually no training at one end, with the assertion that using a training program as the first line of defense against the recurrence of large-scaled problems is probably flawed at the other end. In-between these two extremes lies the place where the use of training is an appropriate way of advancing an organization’s capability maturity. Note, however, that, away from this suitable range, training per se becomes either irrelevant, or ineffective.

Don’t misunderstand – I’m not knocking training, unless, of course, it’s training in risk management (NIC), among other trendy but ultimately useless management topics. I’m just urging GTIM Nation to be clear-eyed about its efficacy. Far from a universal panacea, it could be little more than a shot in the dark.

[i] Wikipedia contributors. (2021, October 10). Pat Garrett. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:46, October 18, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pat_Garrett&oldid=1049124810

[ii] Bykov, Olga, Police Academy Training: An Evaluation of the Strengths and Weaknesses of Police Academies, Themis – Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science, Spring 2014.