This came up in a recent training course. I always ask people what they want to get out of a training programme. To set themselves some learning goals.
But how do you know what you want to get out of a training course before you start?
An alternative, more emergent approach might be to attend the course, be open-minded, and see what you can take from it. By setting goals, aren’t you shutting down possibilities that you hadn’t foreseen?
I think the best course is somewhere in the middle: to set out on the training with some intentions, but to be open to what comes up. This requires us to be iterative in our learning. We need to set goals, take some action, and then see what happens.
We may discover along the way that there is something else that we wanted to learn. Fine — then adjust your goals.
But, as my mentor, Prof Søren Wilert once said to me, if you don’t know where you were trying to get to, you can’t assess the success of your actions.