I attended a short training session this morning on Blue Ocean Leadership. I am not going to comment about the quality of the training and the topic, but rather on the mode of delivery.

It was just a two hour session. The most engaging parts of the session was when videos were played. There were a couple of rather interesting videos. But I could have watched them on Youtube, I presume.

Halfway through the session, one of the participants starting raising questions, and did this quite a bit. Her issue was how to convince her leadership to adopt this Blue Ocean Leadership concept. After a while, I had to intervene that the issue she has is a dysfunctional leadership, and that this is not the topic of this workshop.

There were quite a number of questions coming from the participants, which is a credit to the trainer and also the topic. However most people just jumped in whenever they had something to ask or to say, and the loudest voice would prevail.

I also saw a fellow who kept trying to put his hand up, and never got his turn. We are talking about a rather small group of about a dozen people.

I could not help comparing this to the discussion boards which we use in our eLearning environment. I would not have to spend time reading the questions and exchanges with the instructor which were not related to the topic and of no interest to me. Also, every single participant can ask any number of questions, and each time, he/she would be just as loud as everyone else.

It took me 40 minutes to drive to the location, a bit of a struggle to look for a car park. All in all, it took me 4 hours to attend a 2 hour training session.