Your Best Training Session Ever
March 10th, 2014

My friend Jeff is a trauma surgeon, and he’s pretty good at his job. You can tell because a few years ago, President Obama was visiting town, and Secret Service agents stopped by to inspect Jeff’s operating room — you know, just in case Jeff was needed.

The other day I asked Jeff a simple question: what was the single best, most effective training session he’d ever witnessed?

Here’s his answer:

We were teaching medical students a class in emergency medicine, and instead of lecturing we did something different: we staged an accident.

Class began as normal, then we had somebody barge through the door and yell that there had been a car accident outside — they needed help, now! The students ran out — they could probably tell it was staged, but it was pretty convincing — fake blood, injured “victims” scattered on the ground, piles of debris everywhere. They had to read and react to what they saw — to do triage, to figure out who needed what, under live conditions. We even hid one “injured” person under a pile of debris, to test if they would pay attention enough to find him.

The students went to work treating the injured for about 15 minutes, and we videoed the whole thing from a few angles. Then we all walked back in the classroom, and watched the video, analyzing exactly what they did right and what they did wrong. And then — and this was the powerful thing — we did the whole thing all over again. We re-staged the accident from the start and had the students go out again, to correct their errors and get it right. The whole exercise took two hours, and it was a huge learning experience for everybody.

Isn’t that great? Not just because it’s creative, but also because it vividly shows the gap between conventional learning (a.k.a. passively listening to someone lecture) and actual skill development (doing real things, paying keen attention to your mistakes, then doing those things over again.)

Jeff’s story reminded of my own best training experiences. I was just out of college, and wanted to be a better writer. I invented this method where I would attend baseball games and pretend that I was the sportswriter on deadline. I would watch the game, take notes, and then race back home to write my story by my make-believe deadline. The next day, I would compare my story to the story written by the actual writer, and see where I’d gone wrong, and where I’d gone right. It provided, like Jeff’s make-believe accident, some of the most vivid and powerful training I ever had.

This kind of learning falls under the general heading of LARP — live action role play – and it has a few key features:

1) You’re pretending to be someone you’re not (yet, anyway)
2) You perform in “live” conditions, with real emotional pressure
3) You get vivid, speedy feedback
4) You repeat it over and over
Effective LARP requires something else: a certain immunity to embarrassment. It feels more than a little goofy pretending to be a sportswriter, or pretending to take care of fake victims. I think that’s one reason why LARP tends to be vastly under-used — which, in my opinion, is a missed opportunity.

With that in mind, I’m curious if anyone would like to share their own stories of their best training session ever. It could be LARP, or it could be something else that happened through invention or accident. Please give us a quick description of your session below, and why you think it was effective, and we’ll see what patterns emerge. Thanks!

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