Streamline Training & Documentation: Lessons from Training Animals

Monday, July 17, 2006

Lessons from Training Animals

In honor of Maggie, a very cute and, I'm sure, highly trainable dog who has just arrived in a colleague's household, let me note a phenomenon in the world of training that I've been monitoring for over three weeks.

Back on June 25, the New York Times published an article by Amy Sutherland that has been among the top 10 accessed on the nytimes.com site ever since. This longevity on the top 10 list is extremely unusual. Typically, articles last only a day or two, certainly not several weeks.

Sutherland writes about how she adapted techniques from exotic animal training to dealing better with habits of her husband Scott that particularly annoy her. She reports:

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't.

... I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

I was using what trainers call 'approximations,' rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. ...

I also began to analyze my husband the way a trainer considers an exotic animal. Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn't. ...

The exotic animal known as Scott is a loner, but an alpha male. So hierarchy matters, but being in a group doesn't so much. He has the balance of a gymnast, but moves slowly, especially when getting dressed. Skiing comes naturally, but being on time does not. He's an omnivore, and what a trainer would call food-driven.

Once I started thinking this way, I couldn't stop. At the [animal training] school in California, I'd be scribbling notes on how to walk an emu or have a wolf accept you as a pack member, but I'd be thinking, "I can't wait to try this on Scott."

And here's the happy ending:

After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love. I used to take his faults personally; his dirty clothes on the floor were an affront, a symbol of how he didn't care enough about me. But thinking of my husband as an exotic species gave me the distance I needed to consider our differences more objectively.

I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors [e.g., having Scott chop parsley at the far end of the kitchen island so he couldn't drive Amy nuts by hovering over her while she worked] and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away.

Amy Sutherland's book on exotic animal training was published in June.

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Labels: Employee performance management, Teaching

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