I’ve attended ASTD Global before and even presented during the sessions. It is a massive affair with every possible person directly or indirectly in the training business showing up to meet like-minded people, exchange best practices, and in the case of vendors, show their wares and possibly catch the ear and eye of organizational buyers.

It is also a conference that takes a number of key things for granted, in its very approach to its subject matter and themes. This is not a fault of ASTD, the organization behind the conference. Rather, it is driven by the nature of the contemporary business.

My colleague, Terry Dillon, started an interesting dialogue on the ASTD conference LinkedIn website a week ago, asking what people in the community think is the difference between the two pillars of “training” and “development”. The distinction in the name of the organization and conference itself implies some meaningful difference.

Unsurprisingly, the discussion has unfolded around long-standing perceptions and biases – differences that can drive some serious and even acrimonious debates. Put in the broadest terms, “training” is frequently thought to be relatively surface-level work that results in new or improved skills. “Development” is more often linked to changes in behavior or character, a deepening or expansion of one’s capacity, in general. For some, training has a negative association … it hearkens back to an old model of assuming that a trainer has THE answer or right way of doing something, pops open the skull-top of a trainee, and pours in that knowledge.

What’s really going on in differences of opinion about the nature of concepts used in the training industry?

At our firm, we’ve often shied away from describing what we do as “training”. Instead, we talk about education. In many ways, both words create problems. We often use the word “education” to emphasize that there is depth of content and an objective of lasting personal behavior change in our work. Plus, I personally like the word “education” given its Latin root can be literally translated as “to lead out”. Yet, the concept of education often conjures up images of stale and musty academic lecture halls or impractical information. On the other hand, I have nothing against the concept of training, if understood in a certain way. The reason for avoiding the language of training is more because of the disposition among some people to associate training with a rather innocent process of just handing someone a skill. Our work is nothing like that at all.

But training is not really like that anyway. There is no such thing as innocent training. Human beings weren’t truly dangerous to each other, to other life-forms, and potentially to our own planet until we became learners. When my grandfather first took my father out on driving lessons, the first piece of “training” given was the statement to my father that he was taking over control of a lethal instrument. That pretty quickly sobered my dad up about the mystique of driving. That piece of training was passed to me, with the same impact.

Karl Marx famously argued that tools shape consciousness. They do this only because of the training associated with their use. Handing someone a hammer, a sword, a plough, or the Calculus does little to change them until we do the wonderfully magical – and completely human – act of teaching/training them how to use it. This act fundamentally changes people.

Much of the conversation surrounding training, education, and development takes the fangs out of the act of learning, stripping it of its true power and trivializing it. In some ways this isn’t surprising in the corporate world – training and development already have enough challenges without adding to the mix serious risk. Training is often treated as a low-risk and low-reward thing for organizations: a box-checking routine that placates employees that are asking for development opportunities. A little training won’t hurt – not the organization, a person, or the budget.

Well, I would like to re-establish training and development as the truly powerful force that it is. For any organizational leader out there – CEOs, CFOs, government leaders – heed these words!

A good trainer can just as easily screw up your people and organization as help them. Training is risky business.

Poor training typically produces only two results – waste (time, money, effort), and people that grow increasingly dis-enchanted with learning. Good training changes people, by handing them tools and teaching them how to use them. Tools should be understood as broadly as possible – frameworks, concepts, and language are as much human tools as physical instruments.

Good training mobilizes, empowers, sparks thought, and ultimately creates buzz. If it is the right sort of “buzz” and aligned with where you want to go, great. Training can be misaligned and create dis-engagement, particularly if the messages or tools are not culturally appropriate for an organization. A very inspirational and high-impact trainer could, for example, convince everyone in an organization that they have a right to speak whatever is on their mind. In an organization where people are also well-trained at providing clean feedback in appropriate situations, this can be a powerfully additive message. In another organization, it can be held up as an excuse for people to spew nastiness all over one and other without regard to consequences.

Training should be respected, treated with caution, undertaken carefully, and celebrated. It’s what makes us fundamentally human – our capacity to learn and through that learning change ourselves and our environment. Truly spectacular trainers/teachers/educators are, in my experience, just about one of the scarcest talent resources.

I’d love it if we could collapse all the various words in the training industry into the simple notion that we are agents of people-change. The concept of development is probably most suitable for this, but it also is least understood outside the T&D industry. It’s hard to turn to the person next to me on the airplane and say “I’m a developer” given how much potential confusion that creates.

I do think I will experiment a bit with those airplane and elevator conversations – “I’m an artist of change, and my canvas is people”, “I’m a developer of good sense”, “I am teacher, but not the boring kind”. Fundamentally, virtually all distinctions between concepts such as training, education, development, and growth are spurious. When someone learns something it is not complicated; they are a different person than they were before. It can lead to empowerment and joy – a child learning to talk. It can lead to great sadness – learning that someone has lied to you.

Learning can and should be approached with a sort of Promethean spirit of courage, compassion, zeal, and experiment. That is what will differentiate the experience of learning for those we train.

At ASTD, Terry and I will be going “all in” on some training explorations, playing with the concepts of group, relationship, communication, and connection. It will be risky … you might just learn something about yourself.

People, somewhat surprisingly, end up feeling alone, isolated, and starved for real connection. With everyone going to a professional conference with the purpose and intent on “networking”, one of the things that often gets left behind is legitimate human interaction … the sort of connection that is not aimed at any specific transactional goal, but simply curious, engaged, and playful.

Along with two colleagues, I am attending the enormous American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) Global Conference next week in Dallas, Texas. We are going to the conference for the same reasons everyone else is – networking, positioning our firm as a provider, learning. But we are also very intentionally going with a slightly disruptive aim, albeit with very playful intent. We want to do our best to encourage conversations, interactions, learning, and relationships between people, not simply between professionals, cloaked in the mantles of their positions.

There are skills required to break down barriers between real human connection, which is ultimately the most effective conduit for real learning and development. These are the skills at seeing people, and letting them truly see you; hearing people, and expressing oneself with clarity and sensitivity.

We are going to do our very best next week in Dallas to provide opportunities for people to experiment with connection and “being together” in meaningful ways. Our work is always designed to provide specific opportunities, in service of the groups and individuals in our audience(s). We’ve cooked up some exercises to explore connection, in groups, which is what the purpose of the ASTD Global conference is all about. If you are interested in playing with us and other “joiners”, come see us on Monday May 20th at 11:00am – 12:00pm CT.

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