Why Us?

Since starting his career, David recognised that training and coaching tended to suffer from one of the following deadly diseases, often carried over from school days:

1. Cookie-Cutter-itis: Designing and delivering training that has been designed to be ‘good enough’ for everyone, with no flexibility around learning styles
2. Forgettableness: Over 67% of forgetting happens within the first day. Most training doesn’t even bother to try and solve this problem
3. Witchdoctorism (or ‘mumbo-jumbo’): Looking particularly at many coaching methodologies (e.g. NLP), a lot of training and coaching is not based on any scientific rigour – it isn’t based on peer reviewed research and at the very least, controlled quasi-experimentation from the designer
4. Distrustfulness: Treating learners like unruly children who don’t want to be in the classroom and don’t have the maturity to learn, or the willingness to do so
5. Fun-o-phobia: Sucking the fun out of a day, because just in case the first four diseases somehow haven’t had the effect of putting someone off learning, this one will always finish them off

Based on a background of studying both Psychology (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Management (Queen’s University Belfast) at postgraduate level, as well as experience at each of the the UK’s leading defence contractor and management consultancy, David Lurie founded Setsights in January 2010, with the aim of designing training and coaching programmes that didn’t suffer from any of these problems.

Since founding, Setsights has worked with a wide range of organisations in the public sector (e.g. Lancaster University, Kings College London) and the private sector (e.g. Integrated Resources Ltd, Oxbridge Applications) designing training courses for other companies, and facilitating both train the trainer and direct-to-user training, as well as providing executive coaching to professionals.

For more information about the Director and Lead Designer, David Lurie, an up-to-date CV can be found here.