You’re Not Lost Until You Can’t Find Your Map

Every journey should start with a clear beginning, and a clear destination

I remember delivering a course over a 3 week period to a group of programmers in the Middle East. The topic was hard, the lab exercises challenging but being the amazing trainer I believe myself to be it would be a breeze.

But as days passed I noticed fatigue signs showing on my trainees faces. It resembled them getting physically sick, some of them got drowsy while others drifted off. And I couldn’t figure out what was different about this group.

Then it hit me, we had gone from novice to expert in less than 12 business days, and these people were crying out for help. They were lost and couldn’t figure out how we got where we were, even with the 48 lab case studies we’d conducted.

Once I started drawing a small road map of technologies that made up the topic at hand, my trainees started to come back to life. While I didn’t immediately figure it out, they had been too consumed with trying to tie it all together, they couldn’t focus on what I was saying leading to mental and physical exhaustion.

So from that point on, I started adopting a technique to draw out, in a near RSAnimate approach the map I planned on taking my trainees on from day one. I can proudly say we haven’t gotten lost since.