A few days ago I read an article by Paul Bracken, Professor of Management at Yale in Futurist Magazine. In the article he addressed how learning is changing — and leaders need to be much more flexible and adaptive as we head into tumultuous times.
He maintains that the prime learning tool to be used by Leaders or Learners of any kind is Scenario Learning.
His philosophy is simple and elegant: Case studies don’t work because the outcome is already presented. It’s much more taxing, motivating and valuable to take scenarios that “could happen” and strategize around them rather than things that have happened (case studies).
Be Preemptive In Your Process
Now to some, that sounds absurd. “Why would you want to waste any time working on things that will likely never happen?”
To which I would say, hold on a minute. Who’s to say the value is in predicting the future. To me it’s in preventing the future—at least that future that’s full of stress and anxiety because something happened you weren’t ready for.
Rather than waiting until something happens, why can’t you take precaution so it NEVER happens. Can’t you be proactive? Or preemptive? That’s exactly what scenario learning will teach you.
A Sales Example
In our sales training practice, there are a handful of customer encounters that happen all the time that drive you crazy. For example, here’s a common one:
You’re all the way through the sales process and your buyer tells you it’s not going to happen because there’s no money in their budget.
Now that is a scenario you’ve heard before, but are you ready to deal with it? Better yet, did you do anything in the sales process to prevent it? Probably not.
In fact, most sales orgs spend most of their training time talking about how to handle it when it happens—rather than the right thing to do—work on how to prevent it.
By examining “why” that scenario happens, you can aptly take preemptive action so it never happens to you.
Tip: Take the top 20 scenarios that happen to you and have discussion around how to prevent them. If your time has high value (>$500/hour), then you should consider The Sales Playbook, a product I’ve created that has the top 100 scenarios that salespeople face—and how to handle/prevent them. Or you can do it yourself and save the $100.
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You know, I am so happy I saw you write this post today. People need to understand that they need to anticipate and prevent things from happening. Instead of pulling out their fire helmet and fire extinguisher every time a spark causes a forest fire.
This is why I named my site Prevential.
Good thought. It takes some work though to prevent things we hope won’t happen. Thanks for your thought…and ‘fire’ story.