A guide on the side? (Part Two)

Last week, I was talking about the degree to which groups can – or can’t – trust their trainer. In the past, I’ve always joked with groups that you can’t trust a trainer; what I’ve meant by that is that no one in a training session should just take everything I say for granted – they have to think about it, test it against what they already know to be true about the world. One of the best things a group can have is healthy scepticism, by which I mean an openness to learn but the attitude of mind that they question what they learn in order to understand it. My intention, in the training room, is to develop a form of Socratic debate and get the group involved in a two-way discussion about the material, rather than being in a passive, more didactic style session where the trainer teaches the material and the group “learns” it.

In order to create that type of debate, two things must happen and the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether they are – to an extent, at least – mutually exclusive. The first is that the group has to trust that it’s okay or “safe” for them to disagree with the material or, at the very least, to question it. Secondly, for the sake of the argument and in order to stimulate or move the debate forward, I might have to take on positions with which I don’t necessarily agree. So, on the one hand the group has to trust me whilst on the other I might occasionally need to mislead the group.

That tension must, on some level at least, be confusing for groups and could get in the way of the workshop material. I can imagine that, as a delegate, it would be very easy to be suspicious of any question that I ask because, at the back of your mind, there’s always the suspicion of my motives in asking it – am I trying to catch you out? Am I, in other words, not to be trusted?

I don’t have any pat answers to these questions – just a much longer series of questions that they raise in my mind. But I’d love to know what you think about it – what’s your view on what happens in the training room? Do you trust trainers?