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Scooped by
Becky Willmoth
onto Experiential Learning |
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We all know well-designed practice is a critical for effective training. It’s what differentiates meaningful learning from passive information presentation. But as work becomes more complex and knowledge-based, are the practice activities we design for our formal learning programs (both classroom and e-learning) enough to meet the need for expertise in the modern workplace? A comprehensive body of research on how professional expertise is developed suggests it may not be.
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This article from CCL outlines 8 unexpected benefits of online learning they've seen in leadership training.
Matthew Farmer's insight:
Although in-person learning has now become possible again in most parts of the world following the restrictions of the pandemic, there are still many reasons why virtual experiences will remain popular.
This article from CCL outlines a number of benefits of online learning experiences - particularly live online experiences (where people engage in real time) which they contrast with self-paced online (where most engagement is asynchronous).
It would be a mistake to assume that just because an experience is virtual, it is less impactful. Different modalities offer different benefits and are appropriate in different contexts. Good blended (or hybrid) solutions have the potential to offer 'the best of both worlds'.
We've also experienced these benefits (and others) in our offerings at Emerging World and tailor our experiences to maximise them wherever possible. Where do you experience the most benefit from engaging virtually in a learning experience? And when do you feel that there is no real substitute to engaging in-person?
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Peer Coaching is growing in popularity. It’s a great way for people to support each other in structured and scalable way. At Emerging World, we are increasingly integrating peer coaching approaches into our learning experiences to support positive learning outcomes, drive engagement and increase community and belonging. This is particularly valuable in an increasingly remote working world.
Sally Brownbill's insight:
In this blog, we talk about our peer coaching learning approach to leadership development. The blog gives a flavour of what these types of programmes look like, how they are designed and the outcomes for participants.
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Two McKinsey alumni, Charles Conn and Robert McLean highlight 6 different but mutually reinforcing mindsets for problem-solving during times of high uncertainty.
Matthew Farmer's insight:
With so much change going on and a whole host of new challenges for all of us to navigate and overcome, understanding different problem-solving strategies is very helpful.
In this collection, I'm also interested to note that many of the mindsets require us to behave in different ways to which we may been conditioned in the past such as being humble, being comfortable with ambiguity and imperfection, losing expertness and holding multiple perspectives. They are also grounded in practical action and require us to feel comfortable with failure.
Learning programmes that help us to experience these failures in a safe environment can help us to develop these qualities before we use them on the big problems that matter most.
Matthew
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This paper from Chris Watz of CCL provides some more depth to the idea that people learn and develop best through stretch and challenge - or 'heat' as it's referred to here.
Some important considerations include:
The full paper can be downloaded here
Matthew Farmer's insight:
If you take a moment to look back on your life and consider where you learnt the most, the chances are that it was some kind of challenging experience with a powerful emotional impact.
We learn and grow through processing these kinds of challenges either through how we overcome them or in how we deal with the fact that we haven't.
Creating these kinds of stretch or 'heat' in the workplace is something of a holy grail for those in learning and development. One of the key things is to get the 'heat' to the right level and this paper from CCL explores this.
What we've experienced at Emerging World is that real challenges faced by organizations with a compelling purpose such as 'helping vulnerable children to succeed', or 'creating employment for people with disabilities' provide fantastic heat opportunities for executives. Combine this heat with new perspectives that need to be integrated into executive's thinking and expert sensemaking from experienced coaches and you have a powerful development opportunity that takes participants to a new level in their thinking and being and also creates a positive social impact.
Matthew Farmer
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Amy Nauiokas argues that the traditional framework for brainstorms involves identifying a problem, listing solutions within a set of parameters, and then choosing the best. Via David Hain
Matthew Farmer's insight:
This is an interesting take on a management stalwart - the brainstorm. I'm involved in quite a few brainstorming sessions with different organizations and I'm often interested to see how groups norm around this kind of activity. I was always taught that 'any idea is a good idea' and no evaluation should be made until the 'storming' session is over but not everyone thinks that way.
What I like about this approach, is the acknowledgement of the power of colliding perspectives. Not only do they help us to see and think differently but they also help us learn as well!
Matthew Farmer
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Letting your employees get their hands dirty while practicing a new task means they're much more likely to remember the lesson.
There are a lot of different learning styles out there; not everyone is suited to listening to a lecture, then going off to perform a task or follow a procedure. Employee training is needed not only to establish expectations on tasks but to impart company goals and culture.
Emerging World's insight:
This article sees members of the of Forbes Coaches Council talk about why they favour the use of experiential learning to train employees.
The brief article provides interesting and relevant views on experiential learning, how it can impact employee engagement and change mindsets of participants.
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This piece from Marc Rosenburg describes important considerations for truly building a learning culture inside your organization. According to Rosenburg, "A learning culture is an environment that celebrates and rewards learning, incentivises people to freely share what they know, and helps them to change based on the acquisition of new skills and knowledge. We all like to think we work in a positive learning culture, but that’s not always the case.
There’s no question that learning is likely to fail if it’s poorly designed, the content is weak, or the technology doesn’t work. But learning will absolutely fail if the culture doesn’t support it.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Here are 10 key steps to building a positive learning culture in your organization:
Learning fails when nobody cares"
Matthew Farmer's insight:
In my continuing search for insights in how to move organisations from a training culture to an organisational culture, I came across this piece. As with all 'top 10 things to do" lists, the suggestions are a lot easier said that done but its's good to begin to build an understanding of what needs to be considered...
Matthew
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The skills and capabilities required of corporate leaders today continue to evolve in an increasingly demanding environment. To be effective in supporting leaders to meet these demands organizations need to adopt innovative solutions in leadership development. Increasingly, global corporations are looking to immersive experiences as a way to enable leaders to test and develop abilities in a safe but challenging environment. Cargill is one such global organisation. They have developed ‘Leading Across Boundaries’ (LAB) an immersive experience in which senior leaders from one area of the Cargill business are partnered with another area of the business in a different geography.
Matthew Farmer's insight:
Immersive leadership development interventions such as Cargill's LAB program stretch participants in new and different ways preparing them to take on new challenges. When the context is also aligned with the future development of the company, the return on investment on such program gets even higher as they deliver not just for the participant but also build the capacity of strategically-aligned partner organizations and support the company's longer term market development strategy.
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Successful transformations demand new capabilities. To build them, experiential learning leverages the intimate link between knowledge and experience.
Becky Willmoth's insight:
This McKinsey quarterly article highlights how leading organisations are struggling to keep pace with the changes required by the ever evolving business environment, with research revealing that two-thirds of business transformations do not adequately meet their objectives.
The authors argue that transformational aspirations require a skilled workforce, ready to achieve the change mission. However, whilst organisations are making significant investment in learning and development, very few of these development programs are resulting in behavioural change in the workplace. Experiential learning is identified as the solution to address this.
At Emerging World, we have completed extensive research regarding the impact of a particular type of experiential learning, Corporate International Service Learning (CISL), in which employees travel across international borders and apply their work-based skills to projects that deliver a positive social impact. Using Kirkpatrick’s levels of learning to identify the depth of an individual’s learning, we have identified that CISL experiences result in behaviour changes that are both considerable and enduring, lasting for many years after the experience itself.
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'Apparently there is no evidence that 70:20:10 works'. However, this is myth and new work from Charles Jennings & Laura Overton addressses this myth head-on .
According to their new report due to be published on April 21st, those applying new models of learning such as 70:20:10 are:
You can access the results here. Download 70+20+10=100: The Evidence Behind the Numbers from Towards Maturity.
Other .70:20:10 myths in the firing line include:
Click here to edit the content
Matthew Farmer's insight:
Athough the 70:20:10 framework is not fixed, it's a very helpful paradigm for considering how to structure and organize learning functions and learning programs. It's also interesting to read about impending research that demonstrates its effectiveness.
Matthew
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I’d like to discuss what I see our leaders of tomorrow needing. Leaders of tomorrow will not necessarily be people who rise up through the ranks of an organization, sticking to some long-held hierarchical path to achieve a pinnacle. The pace of our world frankly can’t afford the time for this kind of trajectory.
The ability to see, adapt to, and even seek out change should be in the top 3 criteria for leaders, but how many leadership development and corporate mentoring programs themselves lead with how-to-change coursework?
Emerging World's insight:
Experiential learning programs often require significant change and adaptability from those participating. Individuals are able to test their abilities in an unknown environment, removed from hierarchies and networks, learning to sit comfortably with ambiguity and welcome the opportunity of the unknown.
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Expertise is the result of effortful, progressive practice on authentic tasks accompanied by relevant feedback and support, with self-reflection and correction. The research team have labeled this activity “Deliberate Practice”. Others have called it deep practice and intentional practice. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something.
Becky Willmoth's insight:
In this second blog in a three-part series on Practice and the Development of Expertise, author Tom Gram identifies how the deliberate nature of an experience is important to support learning. He identifies six elements for are necessary for “deliberate” practice:
Having supported individuals and groups through experiential learning programs, many of these elements certainly resonate. In particular, providing a real life challenge that stretches the learner, but with opportunity to reflect, enables them to adapt their behaviour, testing new approaches in a continuous cycle of development. This can provide startling transformation in learners’ abilities, abilities that not only endure but continue to develop in the long term.
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This infographic taken from Jane Hart's book Modern Workplace Learning explains that shows how learning in the modern workplace is not just about training and e-learning but is a mix of both company-organised and personal experiences. L&D departments can no longer design, deliver and manage all learning experiences. Indeed they should not.
Emerging World's insight:
It is very helpful to recognise that so much of learning can come from individually driven work experiences and to support individuals to maximise the learning value so that it sticks. But a few words of caution 1) the power of other humans to help individuals reflect and process should not be underestimated 2) a distinction needs to be made between Learning and Development. While models that seek to break workplace learning down into bite size chunks have value, developmental experiences are longer lasting and more profound and don't necessarily break down in the same way.
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"Senior executives and managers at Qantas are to get out from behind their desks and start working as baggage handlers. The move was announced as part of a contingency program to fill the chronic vacancy gaps the airline is experiencing after it sacked 1600 baggage handlers during lockdown. The execs will be expected to work up to five days a week for the next three months.
It’s not the first time that the airline has asked its leadership team to work on the front line during peak periods. But besides meeting a pressing need, the staffing shift opens an interesting debate about the benefits of leadership teams experiencing the daily life of their employees."
Sally Brownbill's insight:
Through the 2019 CISL Impact Benchmark Study data, we know that experiential learning programmes help participants see things from a different perspective and gain more self awareness. So, it would come as no surprise to me, that by stepping into their 'employees shoes' would create a positive shift in the leadership behaviour of the Qantas senior executives.
I do wonder that if this contingency program was designed with leadership development in mind, it could have an even greater impact.
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In this article the World Economic Forum highlights 4 major trends that it feel will help change the future if higher education. In order to make higher education more effective and inclusive it needs to adopt more active learning approaches, teach skills that will endure in a changing world, and adopting formative assessment.
Matthew Farmer's insight:
It's encouraging to see that the World Economic Forum is emphasizing the importance of adopting more immersive and active learning approaches in making Higher Education more effective and inclusive.
It makes a change from simply highlighting the changing skills that are required in the future which might grab the headlines but doesn't address the core issue of what constitutes effective learning and who can access it. It seems that the pandemic has forced different educational institutions to experiment and discover there are better ways of doing things.
Matthew Farmer
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In this article, Peter Cauwelier explains why Team psychological safety is key to high-performance teams. He also explains a tool he's developed to measure that safety and his experiences in using Action Learning to bring measurable improvements in psychological safety and team performance
Matthew Farmer's insight:
Psychological safety within teams is becoming more valued as more people recognise and experience the effect that it has on performance.
However, a lack of tools to measure psychological safety means that it can be difficult to appraise what kinds of interventions actually work to build greater psychological safety.
Cauwelier's tools show that Action Learning interventions measurably increase psychological safety amongst teams, which is very encouraging. At Emerging World we use Action Learning a great deal in our immersive learning work partly because it's very effective at creating a 'safe space for learning' but also because it brings diverse groups of people together in 'Learning by Doing Approach.'
Matthew Farmer
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"Over recent years, concepts like Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset and Learning Agility have come of age, yet the opportunity to experience rich, immersive learning that stretches us outside our comfort zone eludes many." write Anita Bhasin in this call to action to provide younger people with more access to immersive and experiential learning opportunities.
Matthew Farmer's insight:
If all of our futures depend upon the next generation's capability to navigate this highly complex world, how can we give them the tools to succeed?
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This post looks into what the definition of learning 'culture' is from an anthropologist's perspective and how you can apply this to make your learning programs stronger.
Matthew Farmer's insight:
My good friend and colleague, Kenneth Mikkelsen often refers to himself as 'living in many worlds'. Having multiple specialities brings new ideas to diverse fields of thinking and ultimately supports learning.
This great blog post from Bethany Taylor is a great examples of what happens when you move from one field of study to another. As anthropologist turned instructional designer she is able to bring some interesting perspective to the concept of learning culture.
Matthew Farmer
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The authors of this article ask', "Are we stuck in a rut? An event-based eLearning mindset? A “default to PowerPoint” design paradigm?"
They argue, "the single-eLearning-course approach has helped solidify an event-based learning mindset. Event-based learning generally assumes that you hit me once with your content and then I’ve got it and am ready to go forth into the world.
The reality is people need to go out and try things a few times, mess up, get feedback (if possible), and go back to the books even before they get back on the horse and try again. Building this type of structure and scaffolding into a training program moves you out of an event mindset and more into an apprenticeship model—where you’re taking people on a journey through your content—from novice to mastery.
This article offers a real-life example of doing exactly that.
Matthew Farmer's insight:
Advances in technology should enable us to enhance experiential learning rather than replace it. This case study is great example of making this happen.
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What’s the difference between a “training culture” and a “learning culture”? The answer is, “A great deal.”
As the chart shows, in a training culture, responsibility for employee learning resides with instructors and training managers. In that kind of culture the assumption is that trainers (under the direction of a CLO) drive learning. Whereas in a learning culture, responsibility for learning resides with each employee and each team. In that kind of culture, employees are expected to seek out the knowledge and skills they need, when and where that knowledge and those skills are needed.
In a training culture, the assumption is that the most important learning happens in events, such as workshops, courses, elearning programs, and conferences. In a learning culture, it’s assumed that learning happens all the time, at events but also on-the-job, through coaches and mentors, from action-learning, from smartphones and tablets, socially, and from experiments.
Matthew Farmer's insight:
I'm currently interested in better understanding how to move organizations away from an event-based learning culture to one where learners take more responsibility for applying learning within their work on an ongoing basis.
This article suggests that a good way to view this is as a distinction between a 'training culture' and a 'learning culture' and I quite like the simplicity of the drawing. I'm interested to hear experiences of what approaches actually work in establishing a learning culture. All experiences welcome...
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In this article on Chief Learning Officer, Anita Bhasin lays out the argument for why experiential learning programs in emerging markets are becoming an important leadership tool for companies. -"Making the shift from manager to business leader usually means taking an increasingly external perspective, a longer-term view, and often zooming out from a business focus to how the business fits into the community.
Lots of managers in development struggle with these passages, but adult development literature shows that this transition doesn’t necessarily mean adding skills. It means making a shift in mindset to expand ways of thinking. Corporate international service learning, or CISL, programs are becoming a popular and strategic tool to address this need while delivering value for the corporation — and for global society — by creating positive social impacts in the emerging world."
Emerging World's insight:
International rotational assignments were once the main way in which large global companies developed global leadership skills among talented employees, but many companies are now reconsidering their approach.
Some companies such as thos highlighted in this article (Cargill, GSK, Microsoft and EY) are developing new immersive approaches to global leadership development that not only provide similar kinds of impactful learning to participants but also expose participants to the complex stakeholder relationships and broader issues that tomorrow’s global executives need to if they are to be successful.
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Every major challenge we face, every adversity we bump into, comes with a decision—a fork in the road. These turning points, the moments when we decide which way we will go, can become touchpoints in our lives.
Becky Willmoth's insight:
In this blog piece, Lolly Daskal outlines how it is often the most challenging experiences in our lives that shape who we are both professionally and personally. Lolly’s recommendations to deepen the impact of such experiences really resonate with what we hear from individuals who complete an immersive leadership development experience. Both anecdotal accounts and cross-company research demonstrates how truly transformational learning can result from experiential challenges, creating profound and lasting change.
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Ashridge recently published a study in which senior business leaders were interviewed to understand what kinds of experiences had shaped their leadership practices. The particular focus was on responsible leadership, which has been gaining much more attention in recent years.
Through the interviews, several key themes repeatedly emerged as having been influential in the development of senior leaders' responsible leadership behaviour:
The participants in this research had all taken part in Business in the Community's Seeiing is Believing program - an initiative in which senior leaders learn first-hand about issues such as alcoholism, homelessness, ex-offenders, youth unemployment and the low carbon economy by going out as a group and meeting people who are affected by these issues, subsequently reflecng on the experience and then reporting on the experience and what it means to the Prince of Wales.
Emerging World's insight:
The report highlights how important these immersive kinds of engagement are for the development of responsible leadership, responsible organizations and a responsible and healthy society.
The combination of a high-impact emotionally-engaging experience with people from very different backgrounds combined with elevated sensemaking provided by the visit's facilitators and leaders is very powerful.
Matthew
Ricard Lloria's curator insight,
March 24, 2016 2:47 AM
Real world training always has impact. What does your organisation do here? 
Kevin Watson's curator insight,
March 24, 2016 4:25 AM
The report highlightls how important these immersive kinds of engagement are for the development of responsible leadership, responsible organizations and a responsible and healthy society.
The combination of a high-impact emotionally-engaging experience with people from very different backgrounds combined with elevated sensemaking provided by the visit's facilitators and leaders is very powerful.
Matthew Emerging World 
Jerry Busone's curator insight,
March 24, 2016 8:51 AM
The report highlightls how important these immersive kinds of engagement are for the development of responsible leadership, responsible organizations and a responsible and healthy society.
The combination of a high-impact emotionally-engaging experience with people from very different backgrounds combined with elevated sensemaking provided by the visit's facilitators and leaders is very powerful.
Matthew
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In the modern workplace jobs are more complex and demand greater cognitive skill. This challenges us to consider how we can better support the full novice to expert journey, embed learning and practice in the job, design experience to include practice and reflection, build tacit knowledge, and design rich feedback. Fortunately, we have a number of approaches available to us that align well to the conditions of deliberate practice.
Becky Willmoth's insight:
In this final blog on Practice and the Development of Expertise, author Tom Gram discusses some examples of non-formal or informal learning methods that support the development of expertise. The list includes two methods we use regularly, stretching assignments with coaching and action learning, as well as a number of other interesting suggestions. What all the methods share is a foundation in real experience. Even suggestions such as games or simulations are only advocated if they incorporate real work tasks, rather than abstract case studies. From our experience, it is the ability to test new ideas and approaches within an authentic environment that enables learners to transform their professional performance.
Scoop.it!
We all know well-designed practice is a critical for effective training. It’s what differentiates meaningful learning from passive information presentation. But as work becomes more complex and knowledge-based, are the practice activities we design for our formal learning programs (both classroom and e-learning) enough to meet the need for expertise in the modern workplace? A comprehensive body of research on how professional expertise is developed suggests it may not be.
Becky Willmoth's insight:
This is the first in a three-part blog series on Practice and the Development of Expertise. In part one, author, Tom Gram, outlines how top performing individuals at work, besides being very good at what they do, consistently demonstrate enhanced abilities compared to novices and lower performing individuals. The development of these enhanced abilities, he argues requires more intensive and “deliberate” practice than previously thought. The research he summarises navigates us away from event based formal learning to approaches that could be categorized as informal learning or learning from experience.
The expertise developed by informal, or experiential learning, as described in this article certainly align with the requirements of our increasingly complex and interconnected world. Abilities such as pattern perception, using personal networks more effectively, better self-monitoring all support the agility leaders need to succeed in our ever fluctuating buiness landscape.
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This is the first in a three-part blog series on Practice and the Development of Expertise. In part one, author, Tom Gram, outlines how top performing individuals at work, besides being very good at what they do, consistently demonstrate enhanced abilities compared to novices and lower performing individuals. The development of these enhanced abilities, he argues requires more intensive and “deliberate” practice than previously thought. The research he summarises navigates us away from event based formal learning to approaches that could be categorized as informal learning or learning from experience.
The expertise developed by informal, or experiential learning, as described in this article certainly align with the requirements of our increasingly complex and interconnected world. Abilities such as pattern perception, using personal networks more effectively, better self-monitoring all support the agility leaders need to succeed in our ever fluctuating buiness landscape.