In many parts of the world Friday the 13th is a day of bad luck. I usually say that in training there is no such thing as luck, it is all about the training design. Someone might say, well when I have a class that just doesn’t react or interact with me on the same material other classes always react isn’t that bad luck? My answer to that would be “no”, it was likely that the design wasn’t right for that group and if there had been time for a more thorough needs analysis, the lack of reaction might have been avoided simply by knowing what drove that group.
All that said, sometimes there are great moments of luck in a training that cannot be anticipated. For example in a CPR training class a woman was in the class for her job who the month before had done CPR on her husband (who did not survive). Understandably she was emotional and had some difficulty with taking the class. It could have been a very unlucky circumstance for the instructors, but they treated her very sensitively and used her experience to talk about the emotional impact of CPR. This was not part of the normal curriculum, but everyone remembered that training and it actually impacted training enough that a sensitivity section was added to the training. It could have been bad luck, but the trainers made it into good luck.
I know in training instructors experience many examples of this unexpected element that turns out to make their training really memorable. Would any of you like to share some examples?