Drawing on modern research into coaching and learning, you can get the very best results from your Conflict Management, Personal Safety, and Restraint training programmes — without changing the system of tactics you teach.
Enhance the design and structure of your training so that your learners gain confidence through real competence — without needing more time or resources.
Upgrade your coaching skills by asking better questions and giving more effective feedback. Engage more with your learners and get better results.
Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks: but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house.
— Henri Poincaré
When I spoke to Prof. Chris Cushion about the “trainer’s trap,” he argued that context is everything.
The Problem with Simplifying Training
Conflict management is a complex whole. It doesn’t happen in a neat sequence — you have to be aware of yourself, aware of others, and apply technique, whether physical or verbal, appropriately to the situation in front of you.
Yet the instinct in most training rooms is to simplify. Break things down. Practice in isolation. Reassemble later.
It sounds intuitive — but it has a serious flaw.
Learning vs. Performance
Complexity gives us learning; simplicity gives us performance.
When you break skills down into simple, bite-sized chunks, you create an environment that favours performance rather than learning. Performance is a temporary change in behaviour — someone can do a technique reasonably well after practice. But that’s not permanent, and it’s not retained.
Learning is different. Learning is a permanent change in knowledge, understanding, or behaviour — something you can retain, use, and apply in different contexts.
⚠️ The trainer’s trap: At the end of a one-day course, if people can perform simplified drills, we assume they’ve learned. But we haven’t tested the learning — and it will likely break down when transferred out of the training room into a real context.
Why Context Matters
To test real learning, you need context. Training must look like what people are actually going to do in practice — so they get repetitions that mimic real situations, not isolated drills.
You also need to test under pressure. Can this person reproduce the skill in context, or only in a controlled exercise? That’s the gap between performance and genuine learning — and closing it is what makes training effective.
When you learn to do things in a simple linear fashion, and then you face something that isn’t simple and linear, you really don’t know what to do — and you’re struggling.
Our approach to training effectiveness is built around this principle: design for context, coach for transfer, and test under pressure.
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