Japan’s nuclear crisis and the value of training

The emergency at the Fukushima nuclear reactor which followed the recent tsunami has been devastating for the people of Japan. It has also shown the people of that nation coping with the unprecedented crisis with dignity and resilience.

In this special blog entry, Denis Finnegan, CERTPOINT Systems CLO and Lt. Commander USN retired, reflects on what do such terrible events tell us about the role of training in dealing with emergencies.

I have been thinking about the many stories of the reactor workers, search and rescue teams and scientists who all are currently dealing with the crisis. More than likely they relying on their training and their skills are sorely tested in these times. I am sure they are highly trained and equipped with terrific systems and tools, and because of this the damage that will be caused by a freak disaster will be minimized.

I have been in the training field for 30+ years, combining both military training and financial services training. As I reflect on the difference between these two forms of training the clear distinction that stands out to me is the “crisis element”.

And crisis is something I’ve experienced before.

At 22 years old I was on a submarine, the USS Casimir Pulaski, and was charged with being the Torpedo Room watch. My job was ensuring the safety and security of the torpedo room, which housed both conventional and nuclear weapons. One day the ship was going through some exercises to test the extremes of the submarine’s capabilities, including an emergency surfacing exercise, which involved using very high pressure air to empty the ballast tanks. That was when things began to go wrong.

A flood of water started entering the torpedo room. Clearly, water/flooding in a submarine is a bad situation. I was the senior person in the compartment and had to take action to secure the room and prevent severe damage. My only help was a young sailor (and at 22, I was not so old either). At the time of flood we lost communication with the control room. We were on our own and I had to take action. Fast.

That was when the training kicked in.

I instinctively followed procedure to shut the hatch and secure the ventilation system to combat the flooding, giving orders to my shipmate as I did so. It was as if someone pushed my “play” button. Finally, we reestablished communication with the rest of the submarine. We had rectified the situation.

After the incident when conditions returned to normal, there was a debrief and I had to recall my actions. I had performed the emergency procedures so automatically that I had some trouble recalling my actions, but my shipmate filled in the gaps in my memory. We had performed exactly the required actions. In that moment, I finally saw the benefit of the rigorous training and constant, repetitive drilling. In hindsight I know that my instructors’ approach and the curriculum were designed to stress me and see if I could perform under pressure.

I tell this story to illustrate, in my opinion, that I was well-trained. As a submariner, formal classroom training can be as long as 2 years; this includes submarine simulators and a lengthy on-the-job process on the submarine which culminates in an oral exam by a team that can ask you any question or require you to demonstrate how you would react in a given scenario. Lastly, the captain runs regular unannounced drills of different scenarios like flooding or fire. When the alarm went off you didn’t know if it was a drill or the real thing. Training is a way of life on a submarine.

This training, the regular drilling and the stress/emotional impact is the key differentiator for training programs of a serious nature. I am a fan of training and human performance improvement expert, Dr. Robert F. Mager’s work on learning objectives. During my naval career, I helped develop many curricula and we always had three levels of learning objectives. They included knowledge, skill and attitude, based on those objectives in Mager’s work. In later years most instructional designers have dropped the attitude objective because it is too difficult to quantifiably measure. This may be a mistake. Having an attitude objective in training can shift instructional design significantly. Think back to my story or the workers in Japan: what attitudes can you see? What role did training play in those attitudes?

What does this have to do with e-learning? I had the privilege to be the project manager of a three-year e-learning project for submarine training. It was delivered on videodisc (alas, I am no longer 22 years old) and was the first significant e-learning program sent to sea on submarines.

This program did an excellent job of providing consistent training that included simulations and animations that brought the training to a new level. This included the ability to operate a simulated generator and watch the lights on the panel go through the proper sequence: if you did not follow the correct procedure you would get faults. We also did a complete animation of a nuclear reactor to teach how fission, nuclear fuel, coolant provide the submarine with safe power. The program is still in use (it has been updated).

I do not suggest that in corporate training we face the same crises as on submarines or in Japan, but business people do deal with stressful situations and good training can help employees overcome them.

When dealing with a tough sales situation, an angry customer, a critical decision or even just when a senior executive asks an employee a question, dealing with emotion is a major component of success. I strongly suggest we should examine attitude as a learning objective when we design instruction. There are ideal attitudes for sales, manufacturing, customer service and so on. We should identify those attitudes and build scenarios that test employees’ responses to stress, even if it is simulated.

Think about the last course you built and the behavioral change you wish to instill in the person on the job: What are the attitudes of a person who is successful in that position? How might you train for those attitudes? Knowledge and skill are critical, but attitude enables employees to not only be competent, but confident!

We should be thankful that in our daily working lives we seldom encounter even minor crises, and certainly nothing of the scale that Japan is currently bearing with such fortitude. Our world is a small one and our friends in Japan are in need. I would ask you – however you can – to do what you can to help.

Denis Finnegan

CLO, CERTPOINT Systems