Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

ecommendation that should be followed everywhere. It requires from trainer to be cautious and
present examples of good or bad practices as illustrations of good or bad thinking out the
matters, not as good or bad patterns for copying or denying.
9.5 CASES. The ‘cases’ for discussion in a course of training are among most powerful and
dangerous tools of trainer. When given an irrelevant example, participants just lose some
minutes of time and a bit of respect to trainer. When asking to do exercises with irrelevant
cases, spending hours for discussing situations looking idiotic for them, they may became very
angry. Irrelevance of the case to the current legislation, economic situation, culture or any
specific local circumstances, would allow to some participants not to take the case seriously,
while others would try to do so. Even if the conflict would not happen, the results would hardly
be very encouraging.
The much better outcomes may be reached when generating all cases from original
environment of participants, forcing them to solve exclusively the problems they face in their
practice. It works very well and provides a great incentive to implement the solutions found in a
training course. That produce a multiply effect demonstrating the practical impact of training,
making attitude to the ideas given by trainer much more serious, rising trust to trainer and
readiness to learn more. However, some conditions should be meet.
First – trainee who raises the case should be ready to be very open and provide all relevant
information to the group, which would make possible to find realistic solution. It is not always
easy. Once we had a group in which some participants were from the same city, but not all of
them from local administration. In one of the sub-groups the Chief Executive of this city had
proposed a problem for discussion, they have started to do it, but the sub-group was very
unsuccessful and after a day of hopeless efforts became almost frustrated, while other subgroup
went well. Finally, it became clear, there were some circumstances, which Chief
Executive cannot disclose for the wider audience, and it is impossible to find realistic solution
without taking in account these circumstances. The group had to choose another problem and
was quite successful in solving it.
Second – the problem should really exist as a problem. Sometimes one of participants may try
do design artificial case and propose to discuss it as a problem. It is senseless, because then
he should design a lot of necessary circumstances, and would always fail to do it. In other
cases, participants try to propose for discussion the problem, which was already solved
somehow in their local governments. In theory, it is possible to discuss such cases. However, it
is always more complicated, since the decision that was actually made influences minding.
Sometimes it is risky, because the decision, which was found at the training course and based
on the partial information, may be used as an argument to make pressure on others when
coming back to the office. Moreover, it is always not so effective, because the result of training
event would not be actually useful for the practice and could not pretend to be implemented.
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