Jonas Akerman
President and CEO, BTS USA

It pays to invest in training - especially when you allow participants to be active rather than simply to listen.

Traditionally, many companies viewed training as a cost they had to bear in order to maintain appropriate levels of knowledge and skills. Now, however, companies are beginning to see training as an investment that promotes growth and productivity.

BTS is a world leader in developing and delivering customized business simulations. The use of simulations is becoming more and more widespread because they effectively engage participants and provide the opportunity to try out actual decisions in a risk-free environment.

BTS helps to train the entire organization to make analyses and take decisions centered on the factors that promote growth and profitability.

Jonas R. Akerman is President and CEO of BTS USA, Inc., a subsidiary of BTS Group, the world's largest provider of business simulations, including customized IT, Web, and board simulations for driving strategic initiatives and business performance.

His firm has 300 clients globally; about 50 of them are Fortune 200 companies, including Applied Materials, Coca-Cola Company, Hewlett-Packard, Liberty Mutual, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, Time Warner, and Xerox.

Akerman holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

He can be reached at: jonas.akerman@bts.com

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Learning into Action

Jonas Akerman
President and CEO
BTS USA

At BTS, our mission is to support our clients in implementing change and improving profitability. We use custom simulations to build knowledge and skills, sharpen business acumen, and - most importantly - to catalyze the successful implementation of strategic change.

To achieve these goals, learning must be transferred and applied. Over the years, we have learned that there are three things that are very critical to drive learning into action.

First, the material must be immediately relevant. One of the key reasons that flight simulators are such powerful learning experiences for pilots is that the context, content, and process (the Holy Trinity of training design) is relevant, realistic, and directly applicable to the job. When using business simulations, especially at the executive level, we strongly recommend a robust customization process to ensure that the learning is accurate and focused on critical, relevant business issues.

Second, participants need the opportunity to do, reflect, and apply. The process begins by allowing participants to learn by doing, from success and failure, by good decisions and mistakes. Data from the simulation experience is presented to the group so that they can reflect on the cause and effect of their decisions and learn how to correct course in the next round. The goals are two: to make sure the participants clearly understand the relationships between their decisions and market changes on the business result, and also to clarify the key learning points.

Third, executive commitment to follow-up is critical. As an example, we had a client in Finland who loved the profitability tree we used in a simulation. We built him a simulation with the actual numbers for each division. Every month thereafter, he followed-up with each division on how they had improved their profitability tree (and thus profitability) and what actions they would take to improve it further. Although they were already profitable to begin with, the company has now consistently improved profitability every quarter since implementing the new process and follow-through.

Ideas Into Action

1. Make the learning relevant. The more tailored you can make the learning, the higher the value. Broad academic or off-the-shelf programs can be very interesting, but people often find it difficult to transfer the learning to their every day work. We have seen a big improvement in application when the experience is relevant to the work of the participants.
   
2. Provide opportunities for learning through action. Research shows that people learn best when they take action and discover the learning for themselves. No one can ever become good at a sport just by listening to a description of how to play. They actually have to try and discover for themselves what works and what doesn't. That is why well-designed simulations are such powerful teaching vehicles.
   
3. Secure executive commitment for follow-up. Sometimes we run awesome programs to which the executives show up. But if they don't follow-up with the participants, then the application of learning often wanders out the door and much of the potential value is lost.

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