Friday, December 4, 2009

White House crashers: a training issue?

Last night on CNN, I heard a Senator talking about the "White House crashers." He said that this training issue would be addressed with the Secret Service. 

I confess to not knowing the ins and outs of this situation (thank goodness I'm not on the Secret Service training team), but I feel that this type of comment illustrates what's wrong with the perception of the training world. It seems that, in this scenario, the security guards knew that they were supposed to check the guest list and identification at the door. Why didn't he do it? If he knew how to check the guest list and identification, then this is not a training issue! It could have been another performance factor that interfered: were the expectations to check every single guest not clear? Was he not motivated to follow proper procedures? Were the procedures too arduous, was the line of guests too overwhelming? Was the process flawed? 

I don't profess to know all the answers, but I'm pretty sure that this was not simply a training issue.