Training is not learning
Understanding and memorizing a protocol, a procedure or a recipe is not learning. It is training.
We are trained, and we need to be trained, when it comes to applying a set of steps and solutions. It makes sense in all those mechanical processes that, in one way or another, a machine, a mechanism or a programme could or will at some point perform.
For example, changing gears in a car, using a certain machine or software, carrying out a mechanical task or inserting ourselves into the procedures of an organization.
Learning is something else. And for the time being, and for a long time to come, exclusively human. An AI does not learn, it is trained to analyse existing procedures, synthesize the result into possible solutions to what is being sought and, in some cases, apply them.
What is learning?
To learn is to gain the kind of understanding that is necessary in order to be able to design ad-hoc a procedure or set of procedures to solve a type of problem.
If in order to apply certain procedures we need to train, in order to solve a family of problems, often on a case-by-case basis, we need to learn their fundamentals and the technique, the art, of solving them.
The outcomes of applying what one is trained on are for the most part predictable while those of an apprenticeship are, to some extent, particular and distinctive. When we have been trained we can apply, when we have learned, we can innovate.
What does ‘cooperativism education’ mean?
To legalize a cooperative is to perform a series of acts that are always the same in a predetermined order. So are some of the activities necessary for a cooperative to comply with the legal framework: payment of taxes, filing of accounts, etc.
So is, or can be, the preparation of some types of reports or the drafting of business proposals. But not the creation of the proposal itself. Selling is an art, not the result of applying a recipe.
Selling is an important example because it reveals a fundamental difference between the kinds of things for which we can train or be trained and the things for which it is necessary to learn and where education involves teaching deeper and more general things.
Selling is not describing a product and its price. It is communicating an offer. Selling is:
- Understanding the legitimate needs of the buyer
- Find out how we can help meet them through what we produce
- Build an offer on the basis of both understandings
- Convey that offer to the buyer as clearly and honestly as possible, not just with the aim of closing the sale, but with the goal being that the buyer be satisfied with the final result
A call center can communicate an offer, but cannot be asked to make a sale. However, telemarketers are trained in a series of protocols and sales techniques for closed or barely customizable products, with the aim of proceduralizing and increasing the scale of sales.
But if we leave the world of physical products and standardized services, sales recipes and techniques have short wings.
Sales protocols only consider the buyer capable of responding in a limited number of ways to the seller. They begin from the assumption that the buyer's needs will be met by the offer or simply that they should not matter to the seller because it is the customer's responsibility to have them be met.
This view, which forces the seller to restrict the relationship with the buyer to very limited levels, is above all an (im)moral perspective. And it is this constraint that often turns sales techniques into forms of coercion and emotional blackmail.
Selling, in reality, is not a protocol, nor is it a decision tree in the style of a call center sales representative protocol; it is the art of understanding whether what we have to offer can be an efficient solution for the prospective buyer and what our organization would have to do to achieve it.
Selling is about listening to the prospective buyer, understanding the needs they perceive, the needs they may not be perceiving, the whys and wherefores of the solutions they are looking for and, on the other hand, also understanding our own organization and what it can offer. And that cannot be reduced to a protocol in which you can train anyone. You learn to do it by doing it, it's a craft, it's art.
Fear and distrust
Underneath the attempt to replace learning with training always lies fear and mistrust. The distrust of the organization in the capabilities of the people it entrusts with something. The fear of those people that they will not be able to do it well.
Reducing everything to procedures and protocols makes everyone feel more secure... because in that way they do not have to face their fears or accept responsibility for overcoming the conditions that underlie them.
Companies are happy not to have to invest in people learning. The workers´ fear of failure will also make it easier to maintain unnecessary hierarchies.
Workers will happily embrace a mechanical procedure that limits their accountability and gives them a way to avoid further commitments and not have to fear their own limitations. When the protocol produces too many mistakes they will already ask for more training.
The prevailing business model is based on fear and mistrust, but if this is not challenged, the solutions will become increasingly inhumane and precarious. And, surprise surprise, they will weaken the company.
Boeing is a good example of how this can be pushed to the limit and become a social danger, but there is no need to go to extremes. We all have in our minds the memory of products that were no longer like they were before when the company that produced them scaled up and became overly process-focused. Some disappeared, others survive, but they are no longer the same.
Cooperative education means overcoming fear
Any manager would tell us that a company's strength lies precisely in being functional on the basis of fear and mistrust, because in this way it can integrate everyone as they are, without the need for them to improve. The idea of a company and a truly human way of working would seem utopian to him because it is labor-intensive and expensive.
Therefore, for a worker cooperative, accepting fear and mistrust as foundations means denaturalizing itself.
Cooperative education means providing the means and the knowledge for everyone to overcome their fears when facing the daily challenges of producing, selling and serving the greater community in which we live. Even if we also have to train and be trained to perform mechanical tasks, cooperative education can only mean collective organization of the learning of everything that really matters.
This means that cooperative education cannot be limited to the transmission of knowledge. It must also incorporate accompaniment, encouragement. It cannot focus exclusively on skills, but on attitudes and above all on the relationship of each individual with themselves, with the working community and with the community around them.
In order to be useful, cooperative education must help us to be better because, in a community context, without being better we cannot do better.