Noah Goldstein

Strength. Courage. Determination. Commitment. Selflessness. Some might say that our firefighters should be role models for how we behave both within and outside our organizations. Even though saving lives and rescuing kittens from trees might not be in your work description, learning how firefighters train for their job might just help you become an everyday hero in yours

Behavioral researcher Wendy Joung and her colleagues were interested in examining whether certain types of training programs would be more effective than others at minimizing errors in judgment on the

job. Specifically, they wanted to know whether focusing

focusing the trainee on past errors that others have made would provide better training than focusing the trainee on how others had made good decisions in the past. They thought that training that focused more on others’ errors would be more effective for several reasons, including increased attention to the training and a more memorable training experience.

between two groups of participants. One group learned from case studies that described real-life situations in which other firefighters made poor decisions that led to negative consequences. The other group learned from case studies in which firefighters avoided negative consequences through good decision-making. Joung and her colleagues found that firefighters who underwent the error-based training showed improved judgment and were able to think more adaptively than those who underwent the error-free training

companies typically focus their training exclusively on the positive—in other words, on how to make good decisions—the results of this study suggest that a sizable portion of the training should be devoted to how others have made errors in the past and how those errors could have been (and can be) avoided. Specifically, case studies, videos, illustrations, and personal testimonials of mistakes should be followed by a discussion of what actions would have been appropriate to take in these and similar situations.

Of course

Although many companies

This approach shouldn’t be limited to the corporate classroom. Teachers, tutors, sports coaches, and just about anyone who provides training to others can benefit from such an orientation. That includes parents, of course. For example, when teaching children to stay away from strangers, parents can describe hypothetical scenarios in which a child is tricked by a stranger. By focusing on what the child in the example could have done to get away from the stranger in that specific situation, parents will prepare their children to deal with such scenarios in the future

The success of the Beetle can be largely attributed to the firm’s engineering of one of the greatest ad campaigns in the history of advertising

the history of advertising. This campaign certainly broke with the industry’s conventional wisdom at the time: When promoting the brand, they didn’t emphasize the product’s strengths, such as the fact that it was relatively inexpensive or