Wide and shallow or deep and narrow?

I remember once someone - possibly my mum - telling me that cupboards should be wide and shallow, never deep and narrow.

Good advice for cupboards, and I've had it in mind about training recently, while Hannah has been here too.

Back in the day when I started WMYP, I wanted to provide as many women as I could with opportunities to learn, work and earn. I had an idea that we could run a tiny factory with lots of women doing very short shifts of work a few hours a week. I liked the idea of a lot of women getting a little bit of something - spreading the impact around. I liked the idea of a lot of women learning a lot.

Within a year it was plain that that idea was a lot insane.

What builds skill - and makes good, saleable pants that pay the wages, is practice. Practice, practice practice. And that needs to be a regular, frequent thing. (It's been astonishing recently to see our productivity per hour leap during the half days through Ramadan - there seems to have been something about the team working four days instead of the usual three. It's genuinely been 'triple check it on the calculator' amazing)

So the idea shifted and WMYP has become about giving a small number of women a bigger opportunity.

Within that, I wanted to train everyone to do everything - not only did I think that would give each team member the most to be proud of, but it avoids putting all our eggs in one basket - it build a strong and resilient team that can cope if someone is off sick. I thought of this being wide and deep training.

Within a year I learned that that idea was wildly ambitious and optimistic.

Varying levels of English mean that we don't have a full shared language in the factory, There is a lot of translation and sometimes, if the translator thinks they have, but actually hasn't understood, someone can think they know what they are doing, and, as has happened, 'fix' a machine to the extent that it needs a mechanic to come in on a service visit.

So. The plan for the last few years has been a deep and narrow one. Lots of training and expertise poured into one person, our Supervisor. Only our Supervisor threaded, oiled and maintained machines. Only our Supervisor hands out pre cut pieces to sew up. You may be noticing that this is very much 'all our eggs are in the Supervisor basket' and yes - too risky.

So, this time, while Hannah was here and we had time and room, Hannah has delivered some deeper training to everyone. Everyone can thread the machines. Everyone can identify various features of fabrics that inform which way we lay the patterns on them. Everyone can spot if this has been done wrongly as it goes round. And we have developed and learned some shared words and phrases to use that we all understand.

Training like this takes time but - I thin - is very robust, very resilient. It's strong. It's also expensive as we 'bought out' fully half of the time Hannah was with us to training rather than live production. But we think it's worth it. We're working towards out training being wide and deep. It may still be mostly deep and narrow today - but it's opening up nicely.