Poetic Respectful Workplace Training? 4 Great Tips

Training + Poetry = Engagement
Yesterday I found myself reflecting again on a piece I read in The Opinion Pages of The New York Times on December 2, 2012, Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination, by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone. I was left thinking once more about the benefits of taking an intentionally poetic approach to the content and delivery of Respectful Workplace Training.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not advocating that you make your Respectful Workplace Training "touchy-feely". We've written elsewhere about the need to ensure that Respectful Workplace Programs are practical, effective, and focused on achieving specific business outcomes; we firmly believe that both the content and delivery of associated training sessions must reflect this approach. (See our previous posts, Keys to Effective Organizational Training for a Respectful Workplace; 5 Reasons for "Respectful Workplaces": Optimizing for Growth; 4 Best Practice Tips: Respectful Workplace Programs)  

I'm not even suggesting that you include actual verse in the content. 

Instead I'm suggesting that you evaluate your Respectful Workplace Training content and delivery through the lens of poetry, in order to achieve maximum uptake and retention by participants.

From our perspective, the intent of Respectful Workplace Training is to support specific behavior change outcomes in the organization, and these outcomes can only be achieved when participants engage with, digest and internalize the training content, converting it from ideas into action.

In order for this process of engagement, digestion and internalization to occur, the presenter must first translate the essential ideas of the training content into words, images and constructs that are both accessible and meaningful to the participants -- each of them.

As Lepore and Stone say,

"part of what makes language artistic is that we have to explore it actively in order to appreciate it.  We may have to look beneath the surface, and think harder about what images the author has used, who the author purports to be, and even how the language is organized.  These efforts can lead to new insights, new perspectives and new experiences."

So, the "lens of poetry" suggests that we should pay attention to the words and delivery of Respectful Workplace Training, to evoke new insights, new perspectives, and new experiences for participants.

The challenge in all this is apparent when you consider that Respectful Workplace Training must be delivered to a population of diverse individuals in any organization. What is accessible and meaningful to some will not necessarily be so to others.

Here's where the importance of poetry comes in: In each training session, facilitators of Respectful Workplace Training sessions must build on the key messages of the Respectful Workplace Program, while weaving a poetic experience that captures the heart and mind of each individual participant.

Why do I use the word, "poetic" in this context? Because I want to capture the essence of what Lepore and Stone allude to in their article, when they point to the Craigslist’s “Missed Connections” posts that The New York Times reporter Alan Feuer presents as "found poetry". As Lepore and Stone say,

The poems are original ads, “printed verbatim, with only line and stanza breaks added; their titles are the subject headings.” There’s something frivolous and impertinent about this project.  Poems are no accident: true poets hone their craft over decades and struggle to perfect the execution of each piece.  But, of course, Feuer has selected examples from countless others that do not work as poems.  It is this act of curation that makes the column a celebration of the poetic imagination.

They then give a wonderful example of Feure's “Missed Connections” poetry, from a column that was published in January, 2012:

Drunk Irish Guy to the Girl in the Red Tights on the Subway to Queens

drunk irish guy
to the girl in the red tights
on the subway to queens

i really hope
I did not creep you out…
I was so drunk
and you were so hot…

I wish I could have met you
at a different moment
and a different place.

Lepore and Stone observe that,

In short, a poem — and artistic language more generally — is open to whatever we find in it.  Whenever we notice that an unexpected formal feature amplifies our experience of a poem in a novel way, we add to our understanding.  All the same, we can still say what makes these interpretive efforts poetic.  They do not concern the ordinary significance of form in language.  When we approach language prosaically, our focus is on arbitrary conventions that link words to things in the world and to the contents of thought.  These links allow us to raise questions about what’s true, and to coordinate our investigations to find answers.  But poetry exists because we are just as interested in discovering ourselves, and one another, in what we say.  Poetry evokes a special kind of thinking — where we interpret ordinary links between language and world and mind as a kind of diagram of the possibilities of experience.

For the ProActive ReSolutions team, this simply emphasizes the link between poetic language and experiential learning in relation to Respectful Workplace Training.

When we are at our best as trainers, we are facilitating a learning experience that engages individual participants -- through words, constructs and images -- in a process of reflective interaction with critical ideas, with the ultimate objective of helping participants to shift their understanding of themselves and their world through deep reflection on their experiences.

Clearly, emotion and feelings have a significant potential role in such learning. Of course Respectful Workplace Training sessions must assert and validate the moral, legal and business reasons that participants have to behave in certain ways in the workplace. Beyond that, however, the facilitator's conscious employment of poetic elements in the design and delivery of Respectful Workplace Training content, in order to strategically elicit interest, excitement, pleasure -- and even discomfort, annoyance and frustration -- allows for a qualitatively different learning experience for participants. Hopefully, the experience will be one that changes their respective worlds.

Metaphor, Imagery and Stories. You want people to take this stuff seriously? Be ready to make it real, bring it to life. Work with the structures of drama, comedy, tragedy to provoke, confront, raise questions and ponder aloud.  Cadence, Tone, Pacing and Volume. Lead their affect with your voice: find your passion in the message, and give voice to it. Deliver your message in a way that makes them hear your conviction in the value and importance of what you are saying.Kinetic Energy. Use your body to energize and dance with their attention -- get close, edge away, move your hands, shift your weight. Alternately grab them and lull them with the movement of your hands, the tilt of your head.Respect the Individual. It's not just about individual learning styles -- it's about individual world views, which will be informed by different cultures, different backgrounds, different biologies, and different life experiences, among other things. Some people resonate with drama, some with humor, some with tragedy. Be ready to say the same thing many different ways, to make it relevant to each person in the room.

Some of it's about content, some about delivery -- and it's all about finding the poetry, and creating the poetic experience, to move hearts and engage minds towards positive action.

View the original article here