Whether your organization calls the group development “training” or something else entirely, having people on the team who are dedicated to the development of training and support materials will reduce the friction and accelerate your organizational change.  Here, when we’re referring to training, we’re talking about the people in the training department whom you’ll interact with to get training and supporting materials for your rollout.

Good training teams are focused on the kinds of skills you need people to have and the new behaviors you need to encourage.  Training must be built around those skills and behaviors.  Without it, they’ll be stuck.  Consider that you want users to be more innovative.  This isn’t something training can help with directly.  There’s no teachable behavior or skill.  If, instead, you ask training to build an experience that teaches employees how to run an exercise designed to elicit innovative thinking, they may be able to do that.

When working with training departments, it’s good to expect that there will be a backlog of training being requested.  You can help your cause by making the request as early as possible – and by being clear about the skills and behaviors you want.  The training department gets just as frustrated as everyone else when they can’t deliver, and they can’t deliver without clarity.

The other thing to expect from the training department is a lot of questions.  In the lesson 1 exercises, you experienced the kind of detailed, multifaceted analysis that is indicative of what the training department will be doing to get the training right.