Picture a maintenance technician standing in front of a faulted variable frequency drive (VFD) at 2 AM. The production line is down. The plant manager is calling. There is no slide deck on the wall, no instructor in the room, and no procedure that exactly matches what they are seeing on the display. The only thing that will get that motor running again is the ability to reason through the problem.
Most industrial training never teaches that skill. And that is a problem worth talking about.
The model everyone follows
Here is what 95% of industrial training looks like. A manufacturer sends a presenter. The presenter opens a slide deck. Sometimes it is 40 pages. Sometimes it is 80. The audience sits, watches, and takes a few notes. At the end, someone asks a question about pricing. Everyone goes back to the line. That is not training. That is a product demo with a captive audience. The technician walks away with a certificate and a vague memory of a wiring diagram they saw for 12 seconds on slide 47. Then six weeks later, when a drive faults and they need to actually troubleshoot it, they are starting from scratch.
The information was delivered. The skill was not.
A 1973 movie got it right
In The Paper Chase, John Houseman plays Professor Kingsfield, a Harvard Law contract instructor who refuses to lecture. He asks questions. Relentless, probing, uncomfortable questions. He does not give students the answer. He forces them to find it. Houseman won the Academy Award for the role. Watch this clip.
That is the Socratic method. The instructor does not deliver knowledge. The instructor asks structured questions that expose gaps in reasoning and force the student to think through the problem themselves. Every answer leads to another question. Every assumption gets tested. Now replace the law school classroom with a workbench. Replace contract law with a flashing fault code on an ABB drive. The method works exactly the same way.
What this looks like on a training rig
In my advanced VFD class, students work on live drives. Real hardware. Real parameters. When I introduce a concept, I set up a scenario on the rig and start asking questions.
“What is the drive doing right now?” “Why is the motor running at that speed?” “If I change this parameter, what do you expect to happen?”
Then the student makes the change. And we deal with what actually happens, which is usually not what they expected. That gap between expectation and reality is where learning lives. My job is not to close that gap for them. My job is to keep asking the questions that force them to close it themselves. It is uncomfortable at first. Industrial technicians are used to being told what to do and how to do it. The Socratic approach asks them to figure it out, with guidance but without a script. By the second day, something shifts. They stop waiting for the answer. They start reasoning toward it. They start asking each other the same kinds of questions I have been asking them.
That is the moment the method takes hold.
Why nobody else does this
The honest answer is that it is harder. It is harder to design, harder to deliver, and it requires the instructor to have deep enough expertise to follow wherever the student’s reasoning leads, even when it goes somewhere unexpected. Most training is designed around efficiency: get through the material, cover the product catalog, and hand out the certificate. The Socratic method is designed around effectiveness: make sure the student can actually think through a problem when they are standing alone in front of a faulted drive with nobody to call.
That combination of live hardware, Socratic questioning, and PhD-level-lite instruction is something I have not found anywhere else in this industry. Not from manufacturers. Not from training companies. Not from distributors.
The technician at 2 AM
Go back to that technician at 2 AM. The one standing in front of a faulted drive with a production line down and a plant manager on the phone.
The question is not whether they attended a training class. The question is whether that training class taught them how to think or just taught them how to listen.
I do not give you the answer. I make you find it.
*Before the First Fault is live-hardware, Socratic method VFD training built for maintenance and engineering teams.*Schedule a session at waywardleaders.com.
Author: Dr. Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP, Wayward Leaders LLC, waywardleaders.com