Chris, thanks for the thoughtful response. Sharing pretty much the same approach, though I tend to do tech-mediated, and yours seem more F2F, and both can and should be blended.

Suzanne, exactly the way; get them focused on what learners need to be able to *do*, and the experience that will get them there.

I also noticed when studying everyday folks world-building in Second Life, that their learning experiences were part and parcel of their own desires to create, express, belong, share. They might spend 5 hours learning a new set of building skills while creating a greeting card to give to a friend. This wasn’t time spent “learning,” but time spent making the greeting card. One result was that “making greeting cards” became easier.

Taking an experiential approach to learning design makes a lot of sense to me. :)

Here is a bit more to consider. Part of what we are fighting against is a deeply ingrained but incorrect view about learning. Typically we think of learning as the process of acquiring new information, models, beliefs, ideas etc., all for the sake of gaining understanding as understanding is seen as the end state of learning. The false assumption being that if one understands the necessity to take a new action that they will naturally do so. This is the foundation on which the event model of learning is built.

We started years ago working with athletes and soldiers and quickly found that while we could easily generate understanding, new behaviors were an entirely different matter. The best way to summarize what we found was that while the mind understands and understanding can indeed occur in an instant, in the end it is the body that learns and the body only learns through practice and practice takes time. If you think about anything that you are really good at you didn’t get good by reading a book, sitting in a seminar, or going through an e-learning course. All of those are great for introducing you to a new domain that you may want to learn but you got good via practice. The easy arena in which to see this is sports. We can draw plays up on the board and the players will understand them but that has only a minimal impact on their capacity to run them. They get good at running the plays via lots of practice.

The same things is true of managers and leaders in business. To say that we want to develop new competence means that the participant will have a new capacity for action – action that was unavailable to them prior to the learning experience. Thus the ‘formula’ that we have developed and used successfully looks like this.

We start with an off-site session that is largely experiential. The purpose is to shift their historical mood (which in most organizations is some combination of cynicism, resignation, arrogance, distrust, and complacency) and get them hooked into a new view of what is possible and how an authentic learning process unfolds. We then deploy a series of short conferences with coaching interactions at regular intervals between the conferences. In this way we have hooked the emotions, provided them with new distinctions and practices, and then ensured the utilization of the new practices with the ongoing coaching.

The end result is what we refer to as embodied competence. Embodied means you can take the new action without having to stop, think about it, or look it up in a manual. It is now part of your ‘ready at hand’ responses to the world. Competence is simply the capacity to consistently produce the desired result.

The challenge we all face is that everyone is looking for a short cut to this process and there simply isn’t one as you are contending with biology – what it means to learn and how it actually happens. In its infancy e-learning was next to useless as all it did was take text from paper and put it on line. Now that the technology has advanced the challenge is not so much how to create transformative events but how to build systems and structures that drive the utilization of new practices.

Food for thought – thanks for listening.

Chris Majer
CEO
The Human Potential Project

Steve, yep, the long game. Slow learning, drip irrigation model of development, not flood. More closely aligns to how our brains actually work!

Coming to terms with what folks ACTUALLY do, not the lab perfect projection of our objectives is the crux of what L&D should be about. I’m lucky to work in a place that values all of the pieces of the performance pie — even if that place is buried within our training organization.

Behavior is about more than individuals. The stuff that leads to consistently positive outcomes is almost exclusively a complex set of inputs, paths, decisions, supports, and resources. These outcomes deserve and demand more than a simple one-off event. The long-game matters. Culture matters. Networks matter. The overarching experience in a broad sense… it matters.

Thanks!

When I taught interaction design at UCLA, one of the main exercises for my students was to answer this question: imagine you put a tracking and recording surveillance device on your learners/users (creepy idea, but useful thought experiment). What do you see them do? What do they say to other people? What is the real result? How do people LOOK at them differently as a result? Given that this was pre-Twitter/Facebook/blogs, I might now ask, “in what way would the comments they get in social media *change*?

I had a tough time (ultimately failing) convincing Sun (RIP) that their course objectives were useless. That nobody cared what they learner WOULD be able to now do. All that mattered is what they ACTUALLY now did. Not could do, but actually do. And that suddenly requires that all those things we’ll like to keep out of our courses — like emotions, inspiration, motivation, and follow-up coaching — MUST be a core part of the experience.

If everything about the person essentially stays the same, then why are we even wasting their time? :)