The Minimum Intervention
I turn off my wipers the instant it’s not raining any more. Even when it’s just drizzling, I only turn my wipers on enough to keep visibility.
When my hair is short (often), I use the tiniest drop of shampoo because the stuff I use lathers up really fluffily (yes, it’s a word).
I only (ONLY) buy paper towels that can be torn into half-sheets (Bounty is my choice) because it’s rare that I have some catastrophe that warrants a full sheet. *note: I have a clear paper towel issue, apologies.* Really folks, looping paper towels into a big wad to soak up a cup of water? Really?
Related to my paper towel paranoia, I try to use the minimum number of towels in the bathroom. Again…watching folks pull towel after towel *foop, foop, foop, foop, foop*. Aren’t you just drying clean water off your hands? What’s with the moisture fear?
OK, resource paranoia aside, (I’ll unpack that with my therapist, maybe) the point about measurement here is the relationship of the intervention to the outcome. Stick with me for a moment here.
In any intervention (a training program, drying your hands), there is an expected outcome (increased sales, dry hands) that should be the sole driver of the type and intensity of the intervention. In other parlance, this would be called the specification or the spec, or even the operational defintion (one of my favorite terms).
In sales training (as I’ve said before in this blog), you’re targeting some combination of existing/new clients with existing/new products. Logically, your training itself should match that expected outcome. Should you also include content in the training about history of the company, underwater basket weaving? Not unless it maps directly to your specification. Don’t waste the dev effort (dollars) and your sales people’s time (dollars) unless there’s a one-to-one relationship between your expected outcome and the training you build.
Similarly (paranoia aside), if the spec after washing your hands is handshake-worthy hands, then you probably need a higher towel volume. But if you’re just returning to the movie and not (unless you’re targeting a completely different outcome) planning to shake hands with the ticket-taker, you can probably go with a lower volume of towels, knowing that the walk back to your seat will provide sufficient drying that you’ll be moisture-free by the time you sit.
Ranting aside, I think of this as the minimum intervention necessary to get the job done. It’s efficient, cheaper and (also) is the secret behind both Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing. But in order to do it right, you need to know the spec. More on this later.
~Geek~
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Comments
Well ideally there is something recognizable (measurable) between too many towels and stranded and dripping. 
But the first pass at managing to the minimum intervention is the one you call out: If your corporate learning model includes learning opportunities because they’re cool and not because they drive the business forward, then those should be the first to go. The next wave is to map actual learning objectives to organizational objectives. If there are learning objectives (indicating a design for performance) that don’t map to organizational objectives then you’ll have activity that doesn’t map either.
~Geek~
Geek,
Though I suspect you would feel differently about the need for large sheets of paper towels if you had children, I like this model a lot. As the training industry evolves (with much denial and resistance) from a corporate university model, where we train people because there’s lots of cool stuff to learn, and hey, we all think it’s a pretty good idea to keep learning, into an accountable business unit that needs to demonstrate results in much the same way other business units are expected to demonstrate results, this becomes a really useful filter for planning, design, and indeed, measurement: figure out what you’re trying to accomplish, define the indicators that tell let you know you have accomplished that, design some interventions that you believe will lead to success, test, adjust, wash, rinse, repeat. It seems that if you have clarity on goal and indicators, it should be fairly clear if your “minimal” intervention is really enough to accomplish your goal or if you need to dial it up and add additional resources or interventions into the mix. But if one wants to be a minimal intervention purist, is there an elegant way to determine if you’re doing too much? Or do you just keep removing towels until you’re left stranded and dripping wet?