Posts Tagged ‘organizations’
Transformational Learning
Marilyn Herasymowych
Our life is all about learning, how we learn, what we learn, and ultimately what happens to us as a result of learning. While watching a TV series called Addicted to Food, I was struck by how important it is for the clients who are trying to beat their addiction to food to discard their past relationship to food and to learn a different one. This type of learning is called transformational learning, because it transforms you. You are no longer who you were before the transformation. You can no longer do what you did before, because now you are conscious of your behaviour. You can see, and more importantly, feel any behaviour that is incongruent with who you have now become. Once transformed, there is no way back to what you were before. You are different now. And if you’re lucky to experience transformation, even if you fall back to the old way of doing things, you just can’t stay there anymore.
In our work, Emily, Henry, and I have always believed that at the root of every problem, every success, and every question is learning. As long as you work at your life at the level of the problem, the problem never gets solved. It is only managed, and that takes enormous energy and effort. Because the minute you stop managing the problem, it’s back with a vengeance. But, if you look at the learning system that underlies the problem, what you’ll see is how people are learning and what they are learning. Then, the transformation happens. You suddenly see how the learning system is actually nurturing the problem. Understanding the learning system both illuminates why the problem is so persistent as well as the pathway that allows you to learn through the problem to the other side. When this happens, you experience transformation.
Let me explain with a personal example. My first love was not a person, but a subject, and that subject was Chemistry. I’ll never forget the day I saw the Periodic Table and actually understood what this table was trying to say about the elements that make up everything we know about our universe. A moment before this happened for me, the Periodic Table was just another thing I had to learn. Then, I blinked, and in the space of that blink, something changed forever. I saw something very different. I saw the underlying system of the Periodic Table itself; I saw what made it so special. Suddenly, understanding blossomed, and I was in the realm of the magical. Even more amazing to me is that I still remember this moment so clearly. I can see the classroom, the Periodic Table, the teacher talking about the elements, and I can feel the transformation as if I am feeling it for the first time.
This is the kind of learning that interests me. This is the kind of learning that can change the world. Emily, Henry, and I believe this is the only kind of learning that can solve the difficult and persistent problems we are now facing in our personal lives, in our families, in our societies, in our companies, in our governments, and in our world. We simply can’t solve global problems without understanding the learning system that underlies them. The problems are manifestations of the learning that is occurring underneath.
You can see an example of this learning system in the series Addicted To Food. Everybody who comes to this centre to deal with their addiction to food, comes with their own learning system. Their problems with food are manifestations of their deeply embedded learning system. That’s why diets don’t work, because the learning system is not transformed by a diet. With a diet, all that changes is the surface problem of food intake, not the person. The learning system that a person is using is not even touched by a diet. That’s why a fall back to old patterns of behaviour is not only easy to do, it is impossible to avoid. You’ve heard this before, but what you may not have heard is that change has to happen at the level of learning. The more difficult the learning is, the more likely there is transformation on the other side. The difficulty you are experiencing is a direct signal that you are close to understanding your underlying learning system.
In the series Addicted To Food, the therapists deliberately assign the clients activities that are almost impossible for these people to do. For example, a person who constantly talks is asked to not speak at all for one entire week. Another person who has used exercise to keep herself at a low and unhealthy weight is asked to sit and watch other people exercise. These activities are incredibly painful for these people to do. More often than not, these activities actually bring people to a breaking point, critical for them to transform, but not seen as transformational for the person experiencing it. What most of these clients do is start packing. They just want to leave. This is too hard. Their learning system is manifesting in all its glory. The defensive reactions are a sign that the underlying learning system is trying to survive this perceived attack on itself. If the client leaves, the learning system that made their lives what it is, remains intact. But, if they’re fortunate, and they stick around just a while longer, and if the therapists are good at what they do, the clients transform. You can see it on their faces. One minute they’re angry, the next minute they are calm, strong, and confident in what they have just learned. Once transformed, they start learning differently.
There is no question that the journey for these clients in this series Addicted To Food is brutal on them and their underlying learning system. This is tough love at its extreme. Some people figure it out, others don’t. But at its root, it is the learning system that either stays put or transforms. For me, being diagnosed with cancer was not life changing. Yes, it was scary, but all I had to do was get through the treatment to the other side. Like a diet, I just did what I was told to do. The life changing event didn’t happen for me during the chemo either, but it was jump started there. The chemo became my activity, like the one that therapists gave to the person who talked too much. The chemo took away all of my control. Suddenly, I couldn’t do anything that was remotely reminiscent of my past life. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t read. The side effects took me to a place that shocked me to my core, and made me want to run for cover. Suddenly, I was in a place that not even my oncologist could explain
It is only now, two years later, that I can look back and see what this chemo experience taught me about my learning system. It is only now that I can understand the learning system I was operating from as I entered the surreal world of the chemo room. I also see the learning system that underlies my current life. I am different now, in ways that are both contradictory and amorphous. I am still on the road of recovery. But now I know that this road is my life, not just an interlude. The transformation that I am experiencing is not like the Periodic Table. It is not a moment in time. This is much bigger. My whole learning system is under attack by this cancer experience, and I want to know what that means.
Note: If you’d like to know more about Marilyn’s cancer journey, check out her blog at www.cancerbrokeallmypencils.com.
Revving Up Thinking: Learning Styles
If you ask people what the word learning means to them, you will get many responses: school, discipline, restrictions, rules, structure, feelings of panic, stress, competition, boredom, and tests. People tend to equate learning with a myriad of experiences that may have little to do with what learning actually is. The most troubling aspect of these responses is that so many learning experiences seem to have been unrewarding.
As a result, people may harbour negative perceptions toward the word, and ultimately the concept of, learning. It is as if the great wheel of learning has stopped for many people.
Yet learning continuously is vital for today’s workplace. The individuals, teams, and organizations that value learning, and that are willing to learn effectively, are those that are better able to respond to increasing change and complexity. Today, information may be power, but the ability to learn effectively is the key to being successful in the 21st Century.
Solving Real Problems in Real Time: Action Learning
It is an understatement to say that organizations are experiencing more change than ever before. In fact, most of us are finally getting used to the idea that constant change is a part of living and working within organizations. What is less understood is how to work within the uncertainty, instability, confusion, and loss of control that accelerating change creates. To deal with the conditions that change creates, we use all of the skills, knowledge, and experience that we have at our disposal. However, when we try to fix problems, we can make them worse than they were in the first place. Then, we ask ourselves questions to try to make sense of the resulting confusion: “What is going on? What are we doing wrong? Why can’t we make things better? Why do our fixes not work?” Common answers to these questions are even less helpful: “It’s their fault! We didn’t have enough time or resources to do it right! We didn’t get any help! We should have known what to do!”
The reason that we fail to solve these complex problems has little to do with being smart enough to deal with accelerating change. It has more to do with not being smart in a way that works when the degree of complexity is so high. Nothing that we have learned in the past has prepared us to deal with increasing complexity and the change that it creates. Unless we think and act differently, we will continue to struggle with problems we cannot seem to solve.
If we are to match the speed of change, or, perhaps, to slow it down and to change its direction, we need a completely different approach to dealing with complexity. Action learning is such an approach — a way of thinking and acting that enables us to solve real problems in real time, and to create the resilience required to deal with complexity and change.
Navigating Through Complexity: Systems Thinking
Without question, increasing change and complexity are creating a storm that few organizations are able to weather. As the storm gains momentum, it lashes out in unpredictable ways, leaving many complex problems in its wake. You may deal with the resulting problems by trying to control what you can. You may use tried-and-true methods to cope with the problems and opportunities that the storm brings, only to find that your efforts create little or no change in the situation, and may, in fact, make things worse. You may notice that almost every tack you take works less and less well, making you feel less effective. As change accelerates, it creates even more complexity, thus further eroding your sense of competency.
When you start feeling out of control, you can easily become a victim of forces that you do not understand. It is a vicious cycle: change and complexity feed off each other to create even more change and complexity! The end result can be an exhausted workforce, unable to deal with the overwhelming problems that change and complexity bring.
People are tired of dealing with the constant storm of complexity and its after-effects. This tiredness is a symptom of complexity overload. The symptoms of complexity overload can be found in every corner of the organization ¾ it is only a question of degree. To cope with complexity overload, people navigate through the storm by using current skills and knowledge, which may help them to reach the eye of the storm, but not to clear the storm altogether. Systems thinking is an effective way to navigate out of the storm, and to be prepared for other storms.
Surfing the Waves of Change: Systemic Storytelling
As individuals, people are complex ¾ a mixture of genetic personality traits, influenced by an environment full of experiences. Put several people together in a group, and complexity increases. Put several groups together into a community, such as an organization, and complexity increases even more dramatically. In fact, every time you add another person to a group, another group to a community, complexity increases substantially.
Add to this equation ferocious competition, globalization, technology, and speed, and suddenly you have complexity beyond anything that people can comprehend. Because complexity is also unpredictable, we can only guess at what is happening, thus increasing uncertainty. This can leave us feeling overwhelmed and hopeless, grasping at anything that might help to ease the situation. To deal with this increase in complexity, we often run even faster, trying to compress time, until we have no time at all!
Who believes they have the time to slow down to think about a complex situation, to gather data, analyze the data, and understand what the data tells us? Even when we know we should take the time to think things through, we do not believe we have enough time. And yet, we have enough time to make mistakes over and over again. We have enough time to be overwhelmed, to be frustrated, and to feel out of control. We even have enough time to put up with mediocre performance, and to settle for less. We are caught in the tidal wave of complexity and change, and we so often act as if we have to run faster and faster before it sweeps us under.
We’re a leading-edge research and development company that focuses on building your organization’s capacity to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. We work with you to produce measurable results, so that you can learn at the speed of change. We research, field-test, and evaluate a variety of thinking and learning processes to identify which ones produce high performance.