40% Without Preparation

“I am not here to teach or lecture, I am here to facilitate.” That is one clause almost all the lecturers facilitators make clear in their first class. It is a concept that I was not familiar with and did not initially appreciate. But it was quickly clear to me – this is a fundamental concept in the learning process for the Lagos Business School Executive MBA programme.

Facilitate, not lecture or teach! It is such an important point to understand when undergoing the programme at Lagos Business School and I suppose it is similar for some of the school’s other programmes and indeed for most business schools.

The facilitators have designed the curricula, selected the cases and learning materials that are expected to enable the desired learning outcome and are in class to foster engagement, collaborative reasoning and studied criticisms amongst the class participants. Participants are encouraged to express differing perspectives, criticize and disagree as the class iterates towards the ideas that optimize the object of the discussion, problem or business objective. But it is generally understood and as a Professor on a course I took online once succinctly mentioned, “there are no wrong answers, but some answers are better than others.”

It did not take long for me to realize the central role preparation plays in this process. To have a constructive answer, a reasoned opinion or studied point of view, you must be prepared, very well prepared. Just as Alexander Graham Bell rightly observed, “before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” This is true in many walks of life, perhaps more so for the classes as participants can neither be effective nor efficient without prior preparation. I especially found the words of Emanuel James Rohn, an American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker, to ring true, “you cannot speak that which you do not know. You cannot share that which you do not feel. You cannot translate that which you do not have. And you cannot give that which you do not possess. To give it and to share it, and for it to be effective, you first need to have it.”

There is no substitute for preparation. And you cannot ‘wing it’, you cannot fool everyone, all the time, to think that you have done the work which needed to be done but was undone. And even if you could fool people, to what end? You would in the end only have fooled yourself. To paraphrase the actor, Richard Gere, “I find that you can use an acting technique when the thing isn’t working, not that you make the technique the end result of your work… It’s a way of fooling yourself….”

One might wonder then, how do I quantify the benefit of preparation or lack of it? Well, that may be a tall order, but as one of our facilitators surmised, “without preparation you maybe garner 40% of the intended learning outcome. You need to thoroughly prepare in order to maximize the learning outcome. Our aim is for you to obtain more than 100% if possible.” He may as well have quoted Amelia Mary Earhart, the American aviation pioneer and writer, when she remarked, “preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture.”