Which task to teach your team first, and how to choose it

Why can a good training session lead to nothing?

The session goes well. The team joins in, there are a few laughs at a surprising result and everyone leaves keen to try it. The next day each person goes back to their desk and finds the same work waiting. Nobody has a specific task to apply what they learned to, so it waits for a quiet moment. That quiet moment rarely comes.

What is missing is a starting point. When a tool is taught in the abstract, each person has to imagine for themselves where it fits into their job, and that is hard to do just as they slip back into routine. It works better to arrive at the session with the task already chosen.

What makes a good first task?

Five features show up again and again in the tasks that survive after training.

• It happens often. If it turns up regularly in someone's work, they get plenty of chances to practise. A task that appears only now and then is forgotten between one occasion and the next.
• The result is easy to check. An email, a summary or a table can be read and judged in a minute. A strategic analysis takes far more judgement to know whether it is any good.
• It has an owner. One named person does it today and knows what a good result looks like. That person is best placed to say whether the output is worth keeping.
• It is small. A single step of the work is better than a whole process. Once it works, you can widen it.
• It does not depend on data you cannot share. Decide before the session which information can be used and which cannot.

If a task meets all five, it is a strong candidate. If it meets three, it is still better than having none.

Which tasks tend to work well first time?

It depends on the role, but there are everyday examples that make a good starting point:

• Drafting the reply to an enquiry that arrives all the time, with a person checking it before it goes out.
• Summarising a meeting or a long email thread for someone who was not there.
• Preparing the first draft of a report from scattered notes.
• Sorting a list of requests that arrive by email and deciding which are urgent.
• Turning a proposal template into a version adapted for one particular client.

All of these are small, and in each one somebody knows whether the result is right. None of them asks the team to change how it works. You add one step and see whether it helps.

Which tasks should wait?

Anything that starts with sensitive data before there is a decision about how it may be used. If your team handles client information, you need to decide, before beginning, which data can go into the tool and which stays out. That decision is yours, and it is best taken before the session.

Tasks with a result that is hard to judge, such as a sales strategy or a hiring decision, are also a poor start. The tool can help you think them through, but to begin learning you want a task where it is obvious quickly whether it works. And tasks that almost never repeat give little chance to practise.

How do you choose with the team?

There is a simple way to do it, without a long meeting. Ask each person to note down two or three things they do often and find dull. Then run them through the five features. Each role will produce a candidate that meets most of them.

It can help to ask the question differently: what did you do yesterday that someone else could have done with the same result? That tends to bring out more realistic tasks than asking what could be improved with AI.

Before the session, write down for each task who owns it and what it would mean for it to have gone well. For example: "the draft needs fewer corrections than the one I write from scratch today." You do not need to measure it precisely. It is enough to know what you will look at when deciding whether the task stays.

How to get started

Choose one task per person and bring them to the session. Our training is hands-on and uses your team's real processes, so each person leaves with something they have already tried on their own work.

If you would like to see how it would work with your team, get in touch. If what you need is not something we do, we will tell you. You can read about the training itself on the training page.