On misrepresenting the facts

I'm a keen follower of comedy and try to see as many live stand-up gigs as possible, with Cardiff as my nearest large city I probably manage to see around 8-10 shows a year. I also download loads of comedy podcasts which help to pass the time when I'm travelling between training venues, so I was interested to read the series of articles that The Guardian have been producing in advance of this years Edinburgh Fringe Festival on comedy and comedians.

One in particular seems to have proved to be particularly controversial. This article by Brian Logan presents a picture of the modern comedy scene in a way that many comedians have challenged, in particular many feel that the comedian Richard Herring has been grossly misrepresented and that his words have been taken out of context to present a misleading vision of his show and of his personal views. The responses to the article from Richard Herring himself and Dave Gorman explain why they disagree with the perspective of the article.

This set me thinking about the nature of misrepresentation and then how easy it can be in a training environment to introduce groups to theories or ideas that are out of context for the group and therefore potentially misleading or (when viewed from a distorted context) just plain wrong.

For instance, in my early years as a trainer I must have explained the Mehrabian communication ratios (Body Language 55%: Tone of Voice 38%: Words 7%) to hundreds of groups as a hard fact about communication. This was what I had been taught and I saw the same data presented and reproduced in many other training sessions and publications. It was only five or six years ago that I was presented with more information about Dr Mehrabian's study which gave me the proper context of it. I've written previously about this here.

However I still come across training sessions, publications and websites that continue to produce the data without the proper context. This is a rather good video from Creativityworks that goes some way towards explaining the issue.



As training professionals we have a responsibility to ensure that we are not only delivering information that is factual but that we ensure that the groups that are attending our programmes have sufficient context to make proper use of the training.

The saying "A little learning is a dangerous thing" become particularly apt when the people leaving our courses have been given tools to use but not the safe and proper instructions on how to use them.
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