PEEL THE ORANGE (PTO) – BENEFITS
The operating rooms in a trauma centre would be useless without the trauma teams being skilled in PTO. Any major airport would be a daily disaster area if pilots and air traffic controllers were unskilled in PTO. No football team could survive a season without highly developed PTO skills.
In ordinary, everyday life there are probably few occasions where an individual needs to be a skilled PTOer and that is a good thing. However, where one gets into leadership roles in high performance scenarios, emergency or dangerous situations or where timing is critical, or in highly competitive business and other environments that PTO becomes a strategic tool that can give the skilled user and/or team that coveted survival advantage’.
In the last DFQ you were asked to list three benefits that are likely to come from the PTO leadership skill.
PEEL THE ORANGE (PTO) – DISADVANTAGES
Today, I want to discuss the possible disadvantages of “Peel the Orange”. There are, of course, pluses and minuses to everything and PTO is no exception. Often, the greater the upside in a situation the greater the potential downside.
So what are the risks, dangers and potential disadvantages of PTO?
DFQ #13:
List three possible disadvantages of PTO as follows:1. For the trainee (you) …
2. For the trainer (Michael)…
3. For the class …
For the trainee: Among the potential dangers for an individual is to become conditioned to accept without thinking, thus inhibiting the ability to examine from certain different perspectives. Included in this would be lose of the ability to conceive of the task itself in a different, and possibility more constructive way, and to doubt and hence not able to recognize when it’s best to cease pursuing a solution.
For the trainer: The danger exists that the trainer, having trainees who simply accept what he says and attempt to do what is asked, might fall into a trap where he no longer has to refine his communication abilities. Furthermore, unless he is very careful, his goal — to train thinking skills — will devolve into producing robot-like humans.
For the class: Just as the possibility of reinforcement exists in a positive way, the danger also exists in a negative one: that the class will reinforce the lack of pursuing certain different perspectives, which has the added potential to diminish enthusiasm, individually and collectively, not only for deal with a specific task, but for the process of improving one’s thinking.
1. For the trainee… not fully developing skills, challenging ideas, moving to a BVS.
2. For the trainer… not creating a culture or stimulating candidates to challenge creative thinking.
3. For the class… not achieving creative thinking targets, no one being challenged.
Disadvantage – trainee – that if creates a negative outcome for me
Disadvantage -the leader – that it creates a negative out one for the project I am leading and creates unintended consequences.
For the class- again unintended consequences of groupthink and negative outcomes of maintaining status quo if we were better off questioning business as usual and finding a new way ie if it kept is in cvs not bvs!
it will mean some individuals needing to learn how to follow instructions, how to read procedures and develop the discipline for effective practice; as a trainer I will have to increase my understanding of how others learn, communicate and behave; the others will also have to spend the time and the energy needed to understand themselves and each other.
All of this will need to be assessed for it’s value relative to the expected and then actual results.
For the trainee I could make a mistake by my decision making.
For the trainer he needs to know the trainee well.
For the class not everyone would aaccept PTO.
The disadvantages of the PTO are:
For me, the trainee: I might really have serious questions about the training and doing it without question might affect my performance.
For the you, the trainor: You might miss out on some insight or observation from the trainee. You might be wrong.
For the class: are we raising a generation of non-thinkers?
A possible disadvantage of PTO
1. for the Trainee – is that they may take instructions slavishly. Many a time a leader has given incorrect/dangerous/ instructions.
2. For the trainer is that they start to believe in some sort of infallibility. IF everyone is PTO’s their instructions, then they must be right?
3. For the class is becoming a part of a herd mentality. What was that experiment where most of the “class” were paid to give the wrong answer, even when obviously wrong, the subject of the experiment ‘went along with’ the wrong answer. The Emperor is often indeed naked.
A possible disadvantage for me is that if PTO techniques become ingrained and automatically applied to ALL situations then I am in danger of ceasing to think about all possible options/courses of action available each time an order/instruction is given. This would be especially true for the same order given on many occasions but where obviously the set of circumstances in which it is given will be different on every occasion and may therefore require a different PTO method to arrive at the same result.
A possible disadvantage for you (Michael) is that there is potential for you to become complacent in determining and thus training when PTO techniques should rightly be applied to a situation and when alternative strategies would be better utilised to deliver the same objective/outcome.
For the class their is also a danger that by adopting PTO techniques to frequently it may stifle creative thinking and teamwork
The three possible disadvantages of PTO are as follows:
1. For the trainee (you) carrying out orders (immediate) leads to consequences, either positive or negative. You should be ready to take the responsibility.
2. For the trainer (Michael). He will be able to see whether it is possible to teach somebody to fulfill orders implicitly.
3. For the class. When the command is given to a group of people (a class), will they run it synchronally or because of someone’s doubts the command will be messed which may be a contributary factor in botching up the whole task.
For me as a trainee, I might get trapped in the PTO.
For the trainer (Michael), might not know the competence level of the trainees.
For the class, lack of team work.