How to Change the World. Clare Feeney

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that indicated its success, along with some theorizing about the importance of regulation and enforcement in contributing to these.4: Policy, regulation and enforcement: a management frameworkThis doesn’t have its own chapter, as, again, you know your legal context and powers better than I do. But it gets an honorable mention in Chapters 1, 2 and 8 and a short analysis in Chapter 4.5: Setting up your environmental training programAn overview of the preliminary scoping you need to do before you invest too much time and money investigating a training program that may not be the solution to your environmental problem, or not right now, anyway.5: Technical guidelines: a performance benchmarkThis doesn’t have its own chapter. You will need to do your own research to develop a technical guideline that works for your environmental issue and desired outcomes. However it gets an honorable mention in various chapters, especially in Step 5 of Chapter 2.6: Measuring successA summary of seven levels of evaluation of the effectiveness of training (I prefer this terminology to the word ‘success’, which to my mind is a rather vague and loaded term). It shows how you can link these outcomes to the environmental and other outcomes of your wider environmental, social and cultural monitoring programs.6: Training and capacity-buildingYes, training does have a chapter of its own – Chapter 7 – but, if you are setting up a new program, development of training materials and delivery comes after a substantial amount of preliminary scoping! If you are already delivering environmental training, then this chapter may help you to stay on the sometimes bumpy path of continuous improvement. Training delivery also has an honorable mention in several other chapters.7: At last! The training itself!Overviews who you will be training, how you will be training them and who will deliver the training. Also looks at potential fishhooks such as sponsorship and who owns the intellectual property.7: Program resourcing and supportThis is such an important – though often overlooked – aspect of a training program that it has a chapter of its own – Chapter 8. And it gets an honorable mention in Chapters 2, 6 and 7.8: Ongoing program supportMore on the the seven steps and fostering partnerships within and beyond your organization, with some helpful logistical suggestions. This chapter also relates to the seventh of the seven steps.9: Beyond successAnother look at research and partnership for navigating complex problems in a complex world. Keep looking out for new partners, research, monitoring data, policy and other methods, technical information and new developments in training. All these will help keep your program vibrant, responsive and proactive.

Helicopter view

      A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.

      C S Lewis

      Stories are the best way to explain the concepts behind the seven steps, so I’ll start by summarising the journey of the Auckland Region’s erosion and sediment control program, of which environmental training is just a small part. I will also give examples from the manufacturing, utility and primary production sectors.

      Then, I’ll go through the core elements of a successful environmental training program and link to an Action Sheet where you’ll have space to do some thinking about each one.

      Finally, I look to the future. Ways of learning are diversifying all the time, and much attention is on learning as the linchpin of the knowledge economy. We are also understanding more and more about the complex ecosystem processes of which we are part. So, in the final chapter, I present some ideas about what these trends may mean for environmental managers in any sector.

      But first – a word about training.

What exactly is training?

      What I hear, I forget, what I see I remember, but what I do, I understand.

      Confucius, circa 500 BCE

      The words ‘training’, ‘learning’, awareness’ and ‘education’ are often used interchangeably. Other terms like ‘professional development’ or ‘training and development’ are also common.

      In this book, I use the term ‘training’ in a very specific way, as shown in the box below.

      Training is the acquisition of work-related knowledge, skills and practices that will improve a specified aspect of on-the-job performance in measurable ways, ideally as defined in a clear statement of performance standards and/ or outcomes. This book focuses on environmental performance in the workplace.

      Throughout this book, the term ‘training’ implies the existence of a measurable performance standard, benchmark or outcomes specified by an appropriate authority such as an environmental regulator, industry or professional association or similar body, in terms that enable the defined environmental practices to be:

      

performed to the required standard by the people who must meet it

      

transparently and consistently assessed against that standard by the specifier or their agents

      

supported by prompts and management systems that allow the new learning to be practiced and improved in the workplace. As we’ll see in later chapters, it’s no use sending staff to training workshops where they are not provided with the encouragement, time, budget and resources they need to put what they have learned to good effect.

      Good training will provide the required workplace competencies and may or may not be supported by other statutory and non-statutory measures to encourage, require or enforce the performance standard. More on that later.

      And yet training can also be so much more than this. The truth of the old adage ‘the best way to learn is to teach’ has been demonstrated by robust research²⁰ describing the contents of the ‘black box’ of student learning and explaining it in the context of the ‘twin black boxes of teacher and student learning’.

      The shift from ‘professional development’ (mere participation) to ‘professional learning’ (a serious engagement with our own learning)²¹ testifies to the transformational power of training. Successful training changes us as trainers and it changes our trainees, turning us all into lifelong learners who have ‘learned to learn – and it’s the holy grail of education’²². This ability, to know how to learn, and how to transfer that ability to applying learning to broader tasks (transferable knowledge), is what enables us to get out there and change the world – in measurable ways.

      With this inspiration in mind, let’s look at the experience of Auckland, New Zealand.

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