A book for beginner drawing promised easy step-by-step tutorials to guide you in the process of drawing farm animals. There were five steps to create a chicken — beginning with a simple oval and progressively adding steps to create the bird. Steps 1-4 were simple but somehow between steps four and five a host of assumptions were made and the drawing went from a simple collection of lines to a different shape with shading.
I think the bird represents how too many organizations do their training. It starts out slow with step-by-step instructions, but once the person gets a general idea, the training leaps ahead and assumes the student can fill in the blanks. It may be an easy transition for an experienced artist to go from step 4 to step 5, but if it’s the first time you’ve done it, the chasm is large.
Think of this chicken the next time you’re tasked with creating a training program. Add in steps 4a, 4b, 4c, and 4d to help the final result more closely resemble the desired final product.
