DIS: Three years on

Abstract

In 1971, through the pages of this journal, a group of psychologists and trainers, which included Morgan and Rackham, presented to the training world an account of ideas and techniques which they had evolved through two and a half years of research and development work. What they described, with ill‐concealed enthusiasm and excitement, were approaches to training managers and supervisors in the skills of dealing with others which, in the context of available alternatives, seemed to constitute a major breakthrough in both concept and method. It was expected that there would be widespread interest in the approaches — and this has been amply confirmed. However, the interest has been rather less widely translated into application — partly, we suspect, because of the high level trainer skills required to run this kind of training, which take time to acquire, and even more because of the resources needed to mount the training. These resources are beyond small, and most medium sized, companies. Three years on, we are unable to bring glad tidings that things are any different in these respects: if anything, we are more than ever conscious of the skills and resources demanded by interactive skills training if it is to be effective. But if you are a trainer in a small or medium company, please do not stop reading at this point. One of the purposes of this article is to describe the course that the Air Transport and Travel ITB now runs which makes this kind of training available to the managers and supervisors of companies who are unable, for one reason or another, to mount it for themselves.

Citation

MORGAN, T., RACKHAM, N. and HUDSON, H. (1974), "DIS: Three years on", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 6 No. 6, pp. 248-257. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb003397