When I first came into contact with Coverdale as a consultancy company more than 20 years ago, the managing director explained to me that Coverdale had an extraordinary form of experiential learning as the core method behind all its training programmes at the time.
I was very new to the training business then, and had heard about the “experiential learning” method during my training. For me, the term meant that you can try certain things during training to learn from them. I found the method fundamentally exciting but nothing special.
After the first training session I attended, I realised that my expectation of how “experiential learning” works according to the Coverdale method was different. The Coverdale experiential learning method was utterly different from what I had expected. What was exciting for me was that it took some time for me as a trainer to realise the charm of this method fully.
Today, after around 25 years of experience as a trainer, I am attempting to explain our method so that laymen and experts alike can recognise the difference between Coverdale training courses and those offered by other providers.
Coverdale – The Skills Company
Our core expertise as a training company is the development of skills as part of multi-day training programmes. We start every training design by discussing the learning objectives for the programme in detail with our customers. Our most important question is: “What should the participants be able to do at the end of the programme?” Then we co-create the final design together with our clients.
Practical Action
Based on the learning objectives, we developed a design based on joint practical work in small groups. The learning objectives agreed with the customer are broken down by our consultants so that a constructive flow is created, ensuring that the participants achieve the agreed skills associated with the learning objectives at the end of the training.
We refer to the tasks the participants complete together as “neutral assignments”, as they do not need any specialist expertise to complete them. This avoids technical discussions, and the participants quickly get to work. This, in turn, is necessary to develop social and process skills in a concise space of time.
Working with Reviews
Another core competence of our consultants is to work with a particular review technique that enables sustainable skills development.
We start the review with a detailed analysis of the exercise that has just ended.
- Individual analysis:
Each person first reflects on which behaviour of the individual team members helped achieve the goal and which behaviour was rather tricky. This first step is, therefore, about the personal views of the individual team members and not about an assessment of the situation in the sense of a “plus/minus list”. - Sharing the analyses:
In the second step, the coach collects all the participants’ thoughts and compares them non-judgmentally. It can happen that one person has experienced certain behaviours as helpful, and others have experienced the same behaviour as a hindrance. Once all aspects have been visualised for all participants, the group looks at the result together. The aim is to accept individual points of view and scrutinise unclear aspects to gain a common picture of the situation. - The observer’s report:
At least one person acts as an observer in each exercise. After the participants have shared their perspectives, it is the observers’ turn to present their observations. It is important that the observers also focus on “real” observations and do not fall into an evaluation mode. Instead of: “That was good or bad, ” we work with: “Person X said or did X at time Y. This had the following effect on the collaboration process.” These observations usually provide important insights for the group and serve as an aid, not a judgement. - Own insights: At the end of the analysis, the participants record the insights they have gained from the exercise and share them with their colleagues present.
After the detailed analysis, the most essential part of the review takes place, in which the group agrees on what they will consciously do the same next time, consciously do differently or perhaps no longer do before the next exercise begins.
For the coaches, the review is an essential working tool, as many aspects are addressed by the participants in the review that the coaches can use in the following plenary session to initiate the group’s next development step.
Review and impulse for the next iteration
The small groups meet for a joint debriefing at the end of each review, which takes practically the same time as the exercise.
If several small groups were active, the individual groups presented their results and reviews so that all participants had the same level of knowledge. During this phase, the coaches provide support as facilitators and allow questions to be asked of the other groups if participants want to know more about the exercise process in the other teams. In these situations, the coaches help to visualise the underlying principles from the practices experienced.
Once the exchange is over, it’s the coaches’ turn again. The aim is to provide precisely the right impetus for the group to take the next learning step and complete the next exercise, which builds on the first in terms of learning.
The theoretical elements we need for this were partly developed by Ralph Coverdale and Coverdale Consultants in the last years, especially regarding cooperation, or come from profound sources such as the Harvard concept in negotiation settings.
Number of iterations
When Ralph Coverdale developed the Coverdale Method with Bernhard Babington Smith in the 1960s, training sessions often lasted a week or longer. In the meantime, we have professionalised the method to build a specific skill set in two to three training days.
The basic idea of the method:
As part of a training programme, participants can develop successful practices, for example, in collaboration, under laboratory conditions. Practices recognised as successful are repeated, refined, and consolidated into principles with the support of the coaches. It also works in the opposite direction: if successful principles already exist in an organisation, for example, in the context of leadership, the participants develop successful practices under laboratory conditions.
Relevance of the Coverdale methodology for modern personnel development
The Coverdale method was developed in the 1960s and, in my view, is still highly relevant today when clients want to develop the skills of managers and experts. We have since refined the methodology and applied it to many other topics in the context of leadership and collaboration so that we now have a broad portfolio of topics in which we work. The focus remains on the topic of leadership and collaboration.
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