Mistakes, marmalade making and me

Photo by Leslie Seaton on Flickr

I submitted my manuscript for Digital Learning in Organisations to my publishers today. It's been half a year in the making, and will be published on April 3, 2019, so it's good to finally complete the writing. I published a brief synopsis of what can be expected last week, and also unveiled the front cover graphics. There will be copy editing, graphics and other work still to be done, but I notice that Amazon is already taking pre-orders of my book on its sites.

So, just to pique your interest (and just in case you're even remotely interested in grabbing a copy for yourself), here is a brief excerpt from the book. It's from the introduction, and focuses on learning, return on investment and the importance of a knowledgeable and skilled workforce:

While at college, I took a summer job working in a fruit canning factory on the outskirts of the market town of Hereford. Herefordshire is in the centre of fruit growing country, so the factory was ideally located. With no training whatsoever, I was allocated to a production line, a moving conveyor belt where I was required to check the quality of the jars and cans of fruit as they slowly passed. This was easy, boring work requiring very little skill. During my second week at the factory, I was asked to do a different job, which involved making marmalade. It was made from pulped Seville oranges, which arrived in large metal cans, directly from Spain.

My new job, which was demonstrated to me by the foreman, was to grab a can of orange pulp, position it on a platform, open it with the blade on a large can opening machine, and then dump the entire contents into a vat. When the vat was full, it was wheeled away to be turned into marmalade, a new vat arrived, and the process began again. ‘Mind your fingers!’ the foreman warned me, and then he was gone.

My ‘training’ complete, I launched into my career as a marmalade maker. Paddington Bear would have been green with envy. In a short while I became quite proficient at grabbing a can, opening it on the machine, and then pouring it into the vat. This went well, and my confidence grew. Then I encountered a can that was considerably lighter than the others. It also seemed to vibrate as I picked it up, and I thought I could hear a faint buzzing sound. Thinking this to be a little strange, I shrugged, and began to open it anyway. To my horror, as the top came off, thousands of fruit flies swarmed out, and buzzed around the factory in a huge, angry black cloud, landing on just about everything. I could see grown men and women screaming as they fled for the exits. I quickly followed them as the entire factory floor was officially evacuated and production ground to a halt.

I’m not sure how much money the factory lost that day but it cost them an entire day of downtime while the factory was fumigated and sanitised. This was a disaster that I wasn’t liable for, because I had not been adequately trained. But that oversight in failing to inform me of all the possible problems of the job I had been allocated, cost the company dearly. It was a poor return on investment.

The point of the story is this: Learning in organisations can be expensive, but lack of training, out of date skills and incomplete knowledge can be much more costly. They can cause loss of motivation among workers, damage an organisation’s reputation, or completely ruin a brand. Good, effective learning is essential if the company aspires to move forward, remain competitive and become a market leader. Cutting the training budget is therefore false economy. Promoting learning that can be applied immediately and authentically to the workplace will benefit everyone within the organisation. It invests in the most important asset any business owns – human intellectual capital.

Mistakes, marmalade making and me by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.