Over the past couple years, I've traveled to India three times, and visited three different Indian states. Now, that's far from a large amount of experience with India - it's paltry when you consider there's coaches and trainers that are here several times a year for weeks at a time. But, at least through my limited experience, I've been able to form some limited observations and I've learned a lot. As I write this post, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Chennai, on India's East coast.
My teaching style tends to involve a lot of feedback loops - I'm teaching Agile after all - so I like to introspect, retrospect, and modify my content as I go. Every class is a little different. Some are a LOT different. It's a matter of who the people are that are taking the class, their organizations, and learning styles. And I always try to add something new and interesting each time I teach - as much for the benefit of the class as for my own.
The point of mentioning this feedback mechanism is this: It doesn't work very well here. I tend to ask things like "Does that make sense?" or "What do you think?" Those questions are very often met with a deafening silence when training with Indian teams. Up til recently I didn't understand why. I often even took it personally; I thought that I either wasn't being effective, or that the classes didn't like me.
Lately, though, I've had the opportunity to watch a colleague of mine present training as well. The breakthrough came when he asked the same questions and was met with the same silence. I thought, then, that perhaps it wasn't my fault - or at least not entirely. I should also mention that my colleague (who I will give credit to, if he agrees) is Indian - he was born here, but now is a permanent US resident.
In my quest to learn what I was doing wrong, and more about Indian culture in general, I began to read. The first book that I started with (and I'm still reading - but I was so impressed by the message that I decided to write about it already) is Speaking Of India by Craig Storti. This book, as you might infer from the title, deals with communication - specifically, communication between Indians and Westerners, as well as between Indian folks themselves.
Here's what I found interesting....the answers to my feedback failure were clearly laid out almost immediately. I had known some of this before, but only informally - but now, here was the detail and the reason.
A cultural difference between Indians and Westerners is the way that we give what could be perceived as negative feedback - or, in this case, the fact that Indians don't. Indians do not like to give negative feedback at all - it constitutes a loss of face and embarrassment to the recipient. Indians are far more empathetic than their Western counterparts - they care much more about how others feel. So they avoid hurting the feelings of others by giving negative feedback.
Ok. So no negative feedback. But why would that interfere with retrospective training feedback?
The missing piece was this; By saying that they didn't understand a particular piece of training, the Indian trainees would, in effect, be giving negative feedback about the instructor. By their misunderstanding, it reflected negatively on the teaching skills of the instructor. Wow - I never thought of it that way. I, as a trainer, would never be upset or disappointed if someone told me they didn't understand - It's just a cue that I need to explain it differently.
On a side note, it's pretty interesting to find people who care so deeply for the feelings of others that they will not give negative feedback even though it could affect them negatively.
So, all this is interesting stuff, but utterly useless - unless we do something about it. So, how can we address it? I think a big part of it is sticking to our Agile roots and frequently pausing to evaluate our progress - by breaking the training into small pieces and allowing time for questions, we can easily redirect the session's path. Here's the difference: Questions, especially when asked individually, are not tantamount to negative feedback. It allows the trainee to indirectly give feedback, which is not considered an affront to the instructor. So - we stick to small iterations.
The next thing that seemed to work well was to ask for acceptance of the training topics - just like we would ask for acceptance of a user story at the conclusion of a Sprint. This is yet another time for students to ask questions, or place items in the parking lot.
And finally, I've found that holding a daily retrospective during multi-day training sessions is important. That way, even negative feedback can be given by the students that will redirect the session for the next day, or help us to adjust our instructional style.
It all comes down to being indirect. That's the biggest thing. Allow for indirect feedback through frequent question sessions, acceptance, and retrospection.
Last week I wrote about a parallel of Agile in medicine - this just highlights another one - Education. A good educator, and indeed a good training program, would do well to be as Agile as possible. Education truly must be a customer focused business. They're the ones paying the bill - adapt to their feedback and provide the best possible experience by employing iterative, Agile methods. That works everywhere - not just India.
Farewell from Chennai!
