Controversy FAQ Interview Question 23

Do you think that a large number of people have had what they would call a negative experience in an ACCD training?

Maybe 3% at the most. Probably less than that. It would be challenging to find 100 people that would say they had a negative experience. And that's out of over 15,000.

In any education enterprise, no one bats 1,000. Our commitment is to produce as much value as possible with and for every person that we come in contact with in our trainings. If we find out that we missed it with someone--in other words, they went through the training and they found it was not a valuable experience for them--we do everything we can to learn from that experience by hearing what they have to say. We're completely open in supporting them in any way possible after the fact to be able to walk out whatever needs to be walked out, because we really believe that God's called us to be reconciled with people. So if there's someone who has an offense or a negative experience, without exception--it's organizational policy-we walk it out with them. Through the years we've learned how to do our work more and more effectively. As we've developed, we've learned by some of our mistakes and we've learned how to more effectively be with people when they've had concerns. We've tried to account for what needed to be accounted for. We take responsibility for what we've missed with people, because obviously we did miss something if they're still disgruntled, and we want to take account for that and to learn from it.

There are different standards that can be used when thinking about positive versus negative experiences in any environment-training, conference, church service, et cetera. Once a pastor asked us this question about participants having a negative experience in the training. We asked him, "How many times has your church been sued?" He said three. I said, "Well, we've never been sued." You go to CRI, one of our detractors, and they've been embroiled in lawsuits from disgruntled people who worked for them for many years. Many of the lawsuits were concerned with plagiarism and other things because the organization stole other people's intellectual property. We've had some upsets and they get published on the internet, high profile, but out of the 15,000 graduates of our trainings, the percentage of people who have been disgruntled has been a very low percentage.

Some people might say the training was destructive, but then again very quickly we could put together a thousand people who'll tell you it's in the top three experiences of their life. It's not that we don't make mistakes but that we learn from them. We're dedicated to people when they're upset, and we follow through in ways that those who are concerned about us have never even employed in their own realm. We've pursued those out there that come up on the internet and say that they're disgruntled, for the purpose of reconciliation. We've called them, talked to them, and have often been turned down…they refused to talk to us or be reconciled. The challenge, in our experience, has been actually getting someone who publishes upset about us on the internet to sit down and talk about it.

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