What Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovell can teach us about training assessment

Going somewhere in the car the other day, I started to listen to “First, break all the rules – what the worlds great managers do differently”

It started out with the story of Sir Cloudsley Shovell.

In 1707 the British Navy lost almost an entire fleet when Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovell miscalculated his position and his ship smashed into rocks off the Scilly Isles, just off the Cornish coast.

The rest of the fleet followed blindly onto the rocks with almost 2000 lives lost.

All of this can’t be blamed on Cloudsley Shovell…

The idea of latitude & longitude had been around since 100 BC.

However, measuring latitude was easy enough but there was no accurate way of measuring longitude. No one was ever certain, how far east or west they had travelled.

Even professional sailors had to estimate how far they had travelled by guessing average speed or dropping a log over the side and measuring how long it took to go past it.

In these days of gps and always connected, such methods seem basic and primitive but at the time they were cutting edge.

Sir Cloudsley Shovell cannot therefore be blamed.

The real problem is the he was unable to measure something which he new to be vitally important. (In this case longitude).

This not only applies to retaining talented employees but also to measuring training and learning development.

Do you still use happy sheets?

They are the 21st Century equivalent of dropping a log over the side of the boat…

Training and developing your staff is an essential function of any business. In these troubled economic times, it makes sound business sense to have robust business measures to measure training activity.

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