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Spotlight on Wyatt Woodsmall

By Mike Levy (February 2005 Issue)
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Has ‘facilitation’ gone too far? According to Dr Wyatt Woodsmall, President of Advanced Behavioural Modeling Inc, sometimes we have to learn from the experts; digging into our own knowledge and experience isn’t enough. ‘A lot of the training and development world don’t believe in experts. All the knowledge is contained in the learning group and their role is to “facilitate the learners”. Much of the training world has been taken over by a model that is anti-intellectual, anti-expertise and doesn’t even like the word “trainer”.’

Woodsmall was in London for the annual NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) conference in November 2004. He is a founder of the International NLP Trainers Association (INLPTA), but his interesting presentation was on modelling the work of Michel Thomas, the highly successful foreign language trainer who has spawned a whole industry of European language tapes and CDs. Woodsmall’s contention is that the best approach to enhance performance is to learn the way the top experts do things. Modelling the very best is a theme that runs through the book he wrote with his wife, Marilyne, entitled People Pattern Power.1

He and his wife are currently writing a book with the nonagenarian Thomas and are huge admirers of the way the language guru gets people to master a foreign tongue in five days. Thomas, a hero of the wartime French resistance and a man of extraordinary courage, tested much of his theory of learning in French and German slave labour and deportation camps. Woodsmall cites Thomas’s approach, which is far from current models of facilitation: ‘Thomas says: “Whatever happens in a learning session is totally my responsibility and the student is never at fault. If the student doesn’t remember a word or can’t formulate a sentence in French or Italian, then it is totally my job to know why and to know what to do about it. Don’t try to take my job away from me”.’

This is trainer-centred learning with a vengeance and it gets results, says Woodsmall. ‘Most of the training I am interested in is performance enhancement. Asking people what they think about their successful strategies won’t do the job. Most people don’t know how they do what they do. Modelling is a way of working out how the experts do things. All too often experts get invited to give courses and talk about their own success. But how often do they help people get as good as they are? That is the real test.’

Being an American, Woodsmall says he is not too familiar with the UK training and development scene. ‘But I do know the HRD community in the USA very well and have been a regular presenter at the annual ASTD conference,’ he adds. His observations probably ring true to most observers of the British scene. ‘I find the training community divided into at least three parts: the keen advocates of computer-based learning and e-learning; those who strongly believe in the role of stand-up training; and the Accelerated Learning lobby.’ Woodsmall displays a certain scepticism regarding this last school: ‘If anyone knows about rapid learning it is Michel, who can teach in five days what it takes a university course three years to deliver. Yet he uses none of the AL methods. It is 180-degrees opposite: totally non-facilitated. This has come out of 62 years of language teaching.’

Woodsmall’s approach is akin to Thomas’s ‘sage on the stage’ methods. But he has concentrated on the techniques of modelling excellence, and a big part of that is how skills and expertise can be transferred from sage to learner. It is not just about demonstration. And, says Woodsmall, it is certainly not facilitation. ‘You have to get results and transfer understanding.’

Woodsmall saves part of his ire for some of the current NLP community. A distinguished NLP master, he believes that many of the new recruits into the discipline are wrong headed. ‘It’s happening worldwide – the largest number coming in are Green, interested in saving the world, solving problems and personal growth.’ It has become well-meaning, touchy-feely – and a focus, he says, for those who don’t value expertise.

‘NLP is losing its sense of identity as it is being combined with so many other things,’ says Woodsmall. ‘NLP is in crisis in the States. It has been reduced to a series of business and life techniques where even the NLP label has been lost.’ People have forgotten its roots in science and don’t understand how NLP works, he adds, saying that NLP has lost its regenerative power: it is fixed in time; it can’t be modified; it can’t grow. ‘There are many HR professionals out there using NLP techniques who don’t even know they are NLP techniques,’ he concludes. Woodsmall is a firm advocate of rooting NLP and modelling in the behavioural sciences and deplores the almost cultish (and for some, supernatural) elements that have crept into Bandler and Grinder’s original hard-headed vision.

As a trainer, Woodsmall is increasingly in demand in the Middle East. He is also continuing to develop his own learning techniques and is building on the 5,000-plus trainers he has trained over the last 19 years. Are they Woodsmall clones? ‘I am not interested in creating clones. I don’t want groupies. I want people who are generative.’ In other words, he wants trainers, not facilitators.

Reference
1. Marilyne Woodsmall and Wyatt Woodsmall, People Pattern Power: The Nine Keys to Business Success, Next Step Press, 1998.

Editor’s note
Since this interview took place Michel Thomas has died. He passed away peacefully at his home in New York on 8 January, 2005.

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