Thoughts: Are You a Chef or a Waiter?
Mar 13, 2009 Implementation, Social Learning SIG, Wiki, collaboration
This morning during our weekly recording of the Social Learning Strategies and Trends Podcast (also available on iTunes), Dave and I were gabbing about designing learning – not just training. And he asked the question (certainly not verbatim), “Are trainers the chef or the waiter?” I loved this!
By Jim O'Connell on Flickr
By PhotoAn.l on Flickr
Now, don’t get me wrong. We need BOTH Chefs and Waiters. But if there are not any true performance chefs at an organization and there are only waiters, or the the wrong people are performance chefs, the outcome will leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
And we all know what that tastes like.
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March 13th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
I was thinking about this after the podcast too. And I think that maybe an even bigger issue is that too many learning professionals try to be both. Unfortunately, almost no one is trained as a “chef.” So what they do instead is microwave some crappy frozen dinner, which in the learning world, we call Articulate and Captivate. And then, because they turned on the microwave for 20 seconds and opened a couple of spice packs, they call themselves a chef with no real meaning of what being a chef entails. It’s the whole pipe / plumber issue. Most of us are the pipe when we should be the plumber.