The Philosophy of Learning

Learning is extremely important, both for the individual and for society.  For the individual, it’s a critical growth enabler, and a key component to our overall motivation and wellbeing.  For society, its literally what can ensure our survival and prepare us for the future.  But as any learning practitioner can tell you, its difficult. Learning is a human process, and similar to any other human processes, its fickle and unpredictable, and you need to understand the human psyche in order to complement that to how learning technology has evolved.

The 2 biggest challenges has always been motivation for learning, and the effectiveness of learning.  

From an analysis into natural human processes, the trigger for learning is all about contact - the interaction between your inner consciousness (assumptions, beliefs, motivations and needs) with the external environment. The theory of learning says that learning can only take place when there are Anxiety/Excitement, Failure and Emotion.  We need to be at our learning edge, an emotional state that can entice us to want to know more.  Often, it’s when what happens differ from our expectations, and you experience excitement, curiosity, anxiety.  The stronger the emotions, the stronger the desire to learn, and the stronger the experience of learning.  Creating the environment that will naturally provoke these emotions will help us increase the motivation for learning.

Many of you would be familiar with the learning approach 10/20/70 created by Centre of Creative Leadership from the 1980s. This is a  useful model which remains valid today. I've seen many organizations using the model to plan their learning interventions, but its often from the perspective of the organization and it is activity focus - attend a training, do a project, change your role etc, and often do not take into consideration the perspective of the individuals.  As a result, these activities becomes a check-box exercise, and the purpose of these activities, along with the effectiveness of the outcome, becomes greatly reduced.  

When we start to look at learning interventions from an individual's perspective, we can be more purpose and outcome driven. The outcome of the 10% or training is to acquire information.   At this point, this is just a data source.  To progress the learning journey, we need the 20% to develop personal insights.  These are the ah-ha moments we have when we are thinking or talking about the contents that we've acquired.  Finally, in the 70%, we practice by incorporating them into our daily work, and embed behaviours.  Embedding behaviour is a critical step because your skills or expertise, is not what resides in your mind, but a visibly demonstrated behavior that others can experienced consistently.  When we start to think of learning from these outcomes, traditional learning becomes less relevant.  We will be able to introduce more flexibility, and drive more personal accountability and focus into what individuals need, thereby improving the overall effectiveness of the learning experience.