Obstacles in the organization

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Step back and examine your organization
• Understanding factors that works against change
• Give ideas to avoid traps in implementation

Organization Development perspective

Implementing brand new ideas is a struggling process even when the expected outcome is obviously delighting when we look back. Think of the attitude towards new inventions such as the telephone

"People admitted that telephones were ingenious contraptions and wondered just how they worked, but they no more thought of getting one of their own than the average man now thinks of getting an airplane. As a matter of fact, for a long time they were of little use in a home. Since almost nobody had them but brokers, there was no one to talk to.” (New Yorker, 1933) ¹

¹ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/when-the-telephone-was-dangerous/626742/

Before we put on Virtual Reality glasses, we'd better step back and put on another one, the Organizational Developer's (OD) spectaculars. We humans do not like change so much and do a lot to regain the status quo. With careful planning however, a good project team can avoid the most common traps that work against change. That is why we start with the question:

What is your situation?

Are you a teacher in a public school? Or do you work in a private skills center? Here you will find the most frequent situations we met. We tailored the information in this part according to the needs and opportunities we learned from interviews of teachers and directors of private and public schools. We hope that by browsing through the types below you easily find solutions or how to-s to implement your Digital Reality solution.

Situation one: Public Schools

The most common situation in public schools is that modernizing is a struggling process. Resources are limited, there are a lot of students, the structure of the traditional teaching is strong and reluctant to change. There are cases when a school invests in a simulator that ends up in the garage eventually. Unpacked. Our interviews revealed numerous traps slowing down or even preventing a breakthrough.

TRAP 1: DIFFERENT ATTITUDES TOWARDS VR. Some may fear of loosing job, or see too hard or risky to learn new ways in teaching Click here to read more ...

The school staff may have different attitudes towards new solutions. A few enthusiastic teachers may have seen digital reality solutions at a fair, and managed to convince the director to buy one. But what do the other teachers think? The ones who just came to realize right before the beginning of the semester that they have to learn a new skill and on top of that, they must reorganise their good old ways of teaching, risking their efficiency. Who wants that? May the new tool reveal that some parts of their skills are outdated? Or do they have only a few years left until retirement and have no intention to learn new things at all? They may be enthusiastic. Or overwhelmed. Or jealous. Or very skeptical. In short, you must consider the possible attitudes of your colleagues and form a good sales plan for them in advance.

TRAP 2: LACK OF MOTIVATION. Lack of intrinsic motivation may result in bad choices. Who wants you to improve, you or someone else? If an investment is done just because there is money left on the account Click here to read more ...

Government directives, for example, may suggest to invest in new tools. Directors may realize that they have unspent items in the grants for the year so they decide to buy digital boards, a simulator with a VR glass and LEGO robots. But where should they install them in the building? Who will do the programming parts? And where should they put the special tables for the robots? And they should rewire the wall in a classroom to triple the electric sockets available. On what extent the curriculum should be altered and who will rewrite it? Do they need new special expertise? On the top of that, who will sell the changes to the staff?

There is a chance that the smart tables will never be switched on, the LEGO robots will be found in glass boxes at the end of the corridor, and the simulator will be used only in marketing events. The root cause is the lack of motivation. If there was no money granted, nothing would happen. This is not good. Try to seek good and realistic goals that motivate your staff and the decision makers to find money for them and write a good plan to convince them!

TRAP 3: REORGANISATION ISSUES. New tools often require new methods in teaching. What your colleagues will react when facing changes in curriculum? Click here to read more ...

When new tools are introduced in teaching, new questions will arise about organization schemes, timing and logistics. If, for example, a painter class has a brand new simulator, then there will be questions to answer:

how many students can it serve simultaneously?

What should the teacher do with the other students?

How long will it take to restart with a different configuration for the next class or the next student? One hour long class will be okay or shall we allocate double hours ?

Does the simulator have a one size fits all VR glass with adjustable buckles? If yes, should you have multiple glasses to avoid downtimes that comes with the readjusting to fit the next student head? And how to avoid virus infections using the same VR glass? Is the simulator transportable easily? If not, where should they be installed? Does it have infrared sensors?

Will it work in a darkroom only? If this questions are answered in time the chances of a successful implementation will increase significantly. Lack of answers will lead to an unhappy end.

TRAP 4: MAINTENANCE. There are two aspects here: service leve promised (or not) and your own maintenance ability. Click here to read more ...

One is the service level the seller may provide you in terms of costs of support, updates, planned and unplanned availability and spare parts. There are pricing plans that focus on your needs and after initial investments the majority of the support is almost free (software updates for example).

Other pricing plans are the opposite: producers offers solutions for a relatively low price, but the updates and maintenance will cost higher.

The other aspect, however, is your own maintenance ability. This is definitely an organizational issue, and needs considerable effort. You may have received a really good Digital Reality device and everybody was happy. Students love it, you love it. But if you are the only one, who thoroughly reads the manual, and regularly contacts the support guy, then you made a mistake. After a while you realize that you have painted yourself into a corner by accepting that the other teachers have no time or even worse, are not willing to learn the details of the configuration. And when you leave, the goes into a dusty cupboard in the cellar because nobody really knows how to set it up and fix it but you.

To avoid this, you should regularly share your knowledge with your colleagues, invite them to training sessions or make a website with the common faults and their fixes. You may include teaching tips and tricks. Not long after you will realize that your contribution to the community will return in less stress and professional common knowledge.

Situation two: Skill Centers

Skills Centers typically work with small groups and can provide much more flexibility in the way they teach. In our experience, sill centers are very satisfied with Digital Reality solutions, because they can effectively teach new skills on the introductory level. If you work for a skill center, you probably have less issues to solve, but they turn to be more specific.

Skill Centers probably cover wide age groups. Your students may come with greater real life experience and may be skeptical towards Digital Reality solutions. One of the skill centers in a technical university experienced great enthusiasm generally, but also faced strong resistance towards simulators from older welders, because the simulators revealed bad habits in old welders' motor movements that was almost impossible to change. Skill center students may come from rural areas and cities and their background may be very different. Or they show up randomly for very different reasons - family problems, taking seasonal jobs, lack of principle to name a few.

There are big differences in skill centers. One of them focuses only on metal works and is located in a village and its students come from the nearby villages. Another is a new green field investment with huge open spaces for robotics, welding simulations, automotive industry or woodwork. The former competes for the students with other skill centers offering certificates that could be obtained quickly. The latter represents high quality elite education where the students compete to get in.

The strategy should be present in investment decisions. If the goal is to give quick trainings and the training cycle is short, it would be favourable to search solutions with portability, simplicity, with less extras but massive spare parts and headsets, and good quality support with reasonable prices. If the goal is to give a full course there other factors emerge such as different machines for different purposes, capabilities for logging and comparing students performance, capability for learning without assistance to name a few.

Situation three: Singles

There is a specific situation: A jack-of-all-trades. A single teacher who had the opportunity to establish a room or two for several tools in a school. In years, he or she managed to buy a laser engraver, a few 3D printers, Arduino devices, Lego robots, PC-s and simulators. He or she had piled a tremendous amount of materials about using and teaching with these digital solutions. There is only one problem: the empire of one person is vulnerable. Does he have assistance? Did he have time to document the devices and best practices? The same applies here as in "maintenance" above: you should share your knowledge, invite others to training sessions and write documentation with teaching tips and tricks. Do not work alone if possible.

If you are interested in the principles of the instructor 2.0 you read on

Situation four: Manufacturers

In this last situation we step into the corporate world. There is a great interest to use Digital Reality solutions in schools maintained by manufacturers. The reasons are cost effectiveness, using much less raw material and the ability to teach industry specific standards. Caterpillar France, for example, is a large manufacturer company hiring a lot of welders. Some are directly hired by the company, others are coming from subcontractors. The company has several plants around the world and, most of them have a private training centre to train the newcomers and to re-certify the existing welders. They searched for a digital solution, in one of their plants, where 4000 people were working. They have around 130 new welders to train each year. The cost of the raw material for the training of these people was around 55 000 €. The welder spends 3 weeks in the training centre full time.

Every 2 years, the experienced welders must be re-certified. This is a one day session and it costs 10 000 € for 300 welders per year. During this day, the welder was not working in the plant. Caterpillar wanted to reduce its training cost with the same training quality.

They decided a to invest into a Virtual Welding Training system (VWTS) to reduce the training duration and then ensure that the skill of their welders was kept at least on the same level as traditional methods would provide. At the end, they saved :

• 30 000 € of raw material per annum
• 25 000 € of salary (for re-certification mainly)
• The initial training time reduction implies that the welder will be quicker in a working situation. The financial benefit of this is not evaluated yet. This figure is on a yearly basis and so, they saved more than 55 000 € per year thanks to the digital realty solution.
• They also noticed that the trainers have more time available to work on other things while the VWTS solution is taking care of the trainees… In that way, they have free slots to find new investments in robots, develop new training processes, set up new training sessions.

This story is not new. It happened in 2008. Competition in cost effectiveness is a great driver.

This part of the handbook is written by Learn Virtual Europe.