The greatest thing you can ever do is make mistakes. I hear people say to me all the time… if only I could erase my past mistakes then I would be free. That, is a misunderstanding of epidemic proportions. If you erased your mistakes you would erase a great percentage of what you know and the information you have already got in your possession. Why would you want to do that? Because of how much it hurts.

The pain we feel we make drastic mistakes is terrible. When I failed in business for the second time I was devastated. I spent about a month in a complete daze because my whole world and all of my dreams came crashing down with it. To say that I was ruined would be an understatement. Then after a period of time I began to realise I know a few things about failing in business I could teach others. I began to share my stories of failure with people at the university where I work. The students gained genuine insight in what NOT to do. As a result of that my reputation as a not-so-bad teacher increased dramatically. The fruit of that was people following me into other courses and a great wrap from my boss.

When I was sharing with people the mistakes I had made I realised that one of the most important things for me to do is milk them for all their worth. It would be a tremendous shame if you simply let them slip through your fingers. What amazed me about this losing experience was that it has become leverage to me. Now, I can see others making similar mistakes and I can warn them about it. They often come back and thank me later. Now, I am still not physically rich but I am rich in knowledge and this I would argue is of much greater value.

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My ideas about things are not the same as yours. As a matter of fact, what you have learned in your life up to this point may be entirely different to what I have learned. For the sake of simplicity, whatever you know about anything (your knowledge) is called you set of ideas. The set of ideas you have about things is very different to the set of ideas I have about things. If you are like me, you came from a background that is ‘working class’ which means the ideas I have about the world are largely shaped by those kinds of values. On the other hand you may be from a background where you had access to resources that were less than mine and you view things very differently to the way I do. The output of your ideas is your actions – that is what you think is what you do. Your thoughts are intrinsically linked to your actions. When you create new thoughts about something, in your mind you have already worked out how you are going to approach it. This is automatic.
For a moment stop and think of a problem you currently have. Write in the space below in one sentence what the problem is.

“…”

Now that you have done that, study the sentence above. What happens when you consider this problem? Did you automatically think of certain kinds of solutions? This is because you have been educated to think this way. Here is an example:

“The problem is my wife hates my guts.”

Some may say, “What have you done wrong? Do you need counselling? Are you getting divorced?” This is because when we are faced with a problem we automatically come up with solutions or an educated guess as to what the answer is likely to be. We have learned nothing! A guess is just that… a guess. Now this is not all bad news, this skill comes in very handy as well shall see later in this book.

As each new thought comes into your mind it gets filters through you’re your set of ideas about the world. Your view of the world will determine how you take action in the world. For example, if you have low self-esteem burrowing it’s way deep into your mind your actions, thoughts and reactions to the world outside will filter itself that perception of low self esteem. When your teacher at school said to you, “you will never amount to anything,” you took that idea and buried it in your mind. I am not a psychologist but I can tell you this – the bible tells us that as a man/woman thinks in their heart so are they. Say for example you are a young go getter looking for a way to improve your standing at work and go for a promotion. If you have confidence and faith in your abilities you are likely to create actions and take initiatives that will give you those kinds of opportunities. If on the other hand you lack confidence despite your abilities you will actively build that kind of reality around you. The people you associate with will support your low self esteem most likely, the job you take will agree with it, the way you interact with others will agree with it and so on. Your mindset of low self-esteem will build a reality around you that is entirely consistent with your thoughts. Another example of how our view of the world affects us is found in the words of our mouth.
Here is an exercise you can do to assess your view of the world, what comes out of your mouth. It is positive? When trouble comes, as to all of us it does, how do you respond verbally? Do you say: “that’s just my luck,” or something like, “Why does it always rain on me”. Why did you say that? You have not learned anything else. The way we see the world through our perceptions of it (deeply built into our subconscious) will negatively or positively affect the image we create. That picture we build of the world are deeply held assumptions about how it operates, what people are like and so on. Here are some examples:

“She’ll be right, mate.”
“What goes around comes around”
“What goes up must come down”
“You will never amount to anything”
“You’re just like your father”
“Everything happens for a reason”

Each one of these points of view holds behind a deeply held assumption about what the person who said it thinks. I would like to call these things ‘imaginations’ . These phrases are things people have built into their mind and are being expressed from their mind as words. An imagination is what I would call a micro view of the world that is held or bound to a certain way of thinking. For example the term, “you are just like your father,” automatically has a negative imagining attached to it. Why is it that being like your father is a bad thing? Maybe your father is a good person and that’s a compliment. This however, is very unlikely given the nature of people to use words to bring people ‘down’ to a certain perception of how they should think or act. The media are especially adept at this because they feed us imaginations all the time to engage with. What news we get, is given to us so we can form an imagination about it and turn it around in our mind. How often do we see a dodgy business on TV and instantly feelings of hatred and judgments immediately made. That imagination has now been built in you and you in turn build it into others by becoming an evangelist for your TV show. You spread the word by going to work and saying: “Did you see that business on TV – what a dodgy operation.”

That particular viewpoint expressed on television now creates a way of thinking about that place. There have been several classic examples of them getting it wrong and almost ruining businesses only to offer a brief apology as a way of operating in damage control. Too bad if it already has cost that business thousands. Why do they do it? They are trying to get you to build an imagination so you can engage with them and agree “what a terrible thing this is.” Every now and then they offer us imaginations to build our thinking on because most of us unfortunately have undeveloped viewpoints about things. That is, we have not learned anything except how to be spoon fed regular doses of whatever we are told. Our view of things is directly related to how we learn because what we do is build what we think on our imaginations of things.

Next time you watch the news ask yourself this question: “What is the news trying to get me imagine?” These things you begin to imagine will become part of the way you begin to view the world. If you grew up with racist parents, the chances are your parents built racism into your view of the world. You may think you aren’t racist but go and walk amongst those of another culture and see what comes out of your mind. You may not walk up to them uttering racist sentiment but in your mind there are ideas floating around that may convince you otherwise. Not that is real learning, breaking the conditions we have been led to believe and getting the experience to challenge our underlying assumptions.

We evaluate things through our view of the world and this gives us the toolkit for building learning skills into our life. How we view things will tell us how things can be learned. If you grew up loving science, you will take a scientific approach to life and usually rely on all things scientific to give you answers. You may use phrases like, “there is a system to everything”. This is an expression of how you think things work. We will call these kind of people “scientific people”. If you are given to this style of learning you will struggle with life because sometimes the answers are not as cut and dry. For example, Henry Ford was a great pioneer but time has shown that his management style is nothing short of abhorrent. Why? Because he saw people as “resources” and not as living beings with a mind, will and emotions. He approached management as a science, when it is more like an unstructured art. Modern works have even urged us to think of our spirit in the workplace which would make poor Henry do flips in his grave. People are not numbers, they are living beings with real families and real personalities. On one hand people are the greatest thing about a business but on the other the biggest enemy.

If your view of the world is less scientific and more open to other views you might be what I call “unscientific” and given to large bouts of intuition. If you are a ‘free’ thinker then you will evaluate everything that comes your way and form your opinions based on what you think is right and perhaps a feeling you have about it. You might be someone who questions everything, especially science and never stop learning. The unscientific approach to management would use techniques found in Semler’s Seven-Day Weekend :

Organizations rarely believe they’re to blame when an employee under performs. But if the organization doesn’t provide the opportunity for success, then people falter. At Semco we accept that every individual wants and needs a worthwhile pursuit in life. It’s up to us to provide the environment and opportunity for their gratification.

This kind of approach to building a workplace is different as the human resources are allowed to be more human. It’s a well-documented success story but it started by breaking the mold and breaking established business rules. The rule breakers are always learning and never accepting common ill-conceived points of view.

We will never land on the moon. What really? Never? People that make these kinds of statements about learning are scientific and evaluate everything objectively in their world view. That world view will only take knowledge from those that know and they will eventually have a head full of other people’s ideas. Every pattern, every notion and every single last idea will fall into what somebody else came up with unscientifically. Learning is unscientific because it takes that which is unknown and tries to make it known. Scientists who were pioneers where the most unscientific of them all. They used faith in every endeavour and relied on personal intuition and vision as well as there academic abilities.

When we learn we are applying the single most unique and profound ability we have – the ability to gain new insights and gain fresh information. If our view of the world tells us we can learn then we can. If we are willing to question the way things are and build for ourselves new mindsets about things (despite the cost) then we can learn. Everyone can learn. As a lecturer in a business school I have found quite often that my students do not want to learn, they want to collect facts, but they don’t want to learn. So often I get smart questions like, “What’s on the exam?” My response to this usually is to tell them precisely what’s on the exam – lots of questions about the things I wanted you to learn. Invariably almost nobody gets what I mean by that.

What knowledge do you need to build upon to get through life? That depends on what you plan to do with it. The primary skill you need to make it is learning. A friend of mine once told me this story about learning:

My boss told me to do a job and I told him I couldn’t do it and he said to me, “Oh well I guess your going to have tell the customer that we can’t complete the job and they won’t get what they have paid for. I said to him that I would go back and try. When I did try I found a way to make it work.”

The problem is we are no longer willing to try and learn what we need to make it in life. Our view of the world tells us we can’t but in fact we can. Students often ask me for answers, I only give them more questions. After a while they stop coming to see me, because they don’t realize or cannot understand that the things I am teaching to them can only be learned by them. If the courses I teach are going to be valuable to them at all then they need to learn the stuff for themselves. I could offer them a standard response and tell them the answer but what have they gained. Where was the struggle for new concepts, the trial and error process? What happened to that? When the objective of learning is to gain an answer, that person has lost the reason they set out to gain insights in the first place. Learning is the gaining of new information about something that you didn’t know before. However, learning comes from and goes to somewhere it’s not purely self-perpetuating. Your learning accumulates.

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Learning is a core skill that forms the foundation of all kinds of personal and non-personal growth. Broadly speaking there are three main types of learning we need to be aware of (I am aware of many more but I shall concentrate on three). The first is Learning by Rote or put simply learning through study and gaining knowledge through the repetitious memorizations of ‘facts’ found in text books. I personally call this kind of learning ‘surface-level’. For example, when I was school they made us memorize our times tables by heart. Two times two is four, four times four is eight and so on. That is, learning this way is so easy it really only scratches the surface of what learning should be all about. It fails to engage with the deep issues of topic and scraps the surface superficially. My pet Chihuahua can learn things by rote like ‘sit’ by treating them with a reward. The Chihuahua is less than likely to turn to me and ask ‘Why do you tell me to sit?’ certainly not when I have a piece of meat in my hand. It will do it because it will be rewarded for pulling up surface level learning from its brain: “When I sit I get meat”.

Aristotle for example, developed systems of logic that we all know and use in our mathematical induction and reasoning. This kind of knowledge generation or learning is based around the idea that all of our learning capacity as human beings takes place in a logical fashion or by rote. In this case, if one is to trace the history of philosophy (something done better in many different texts on this subject ) there is a clear pattern of embedding logical learning patterns into rote forms. To put it simply, this kind of learning requires you to find the pattern, follow the rules and everything will be alright. If we are learning to screw in a light bulb – technically there is only one way this is going to get done. Screw it in by following the pattern. Such a technical issue requires no textbook exploration or real world conjecture to make it work. Put it in. If the light bulb was fine and you screwed it in ok and it still doesn’t work then there is something electrically wrong with the light bulb. A deeper level of learning is now required.

Conditional Learning

I now need to find someone who knows something about electricity. There is a complex electrical wiring system in the roof that took some planning and understanding to install. If you go into the roof without any knowledge or experience on how that works then you are going to be in trouble. Moving on from this I need some conditional learning that I can use to fix this problem. Now this kind of learning requires me to be able to learn what I am taught and apply to my problem. Returning to our electrician example, I can apply my knowledge to fixing your electrical systems because I have been conditioned that way through teaching.

When I learned what I needed I asked my instructor questions, I tried knew things and eventually learned how electrical systems work. Each wire, I placed in the ceiling I did so according to what I have learned from my training and the experience (rich or poor) that I have at this stage. When your light bulb won’t switch on, there goes your rote learning experience, your problem now has presented with you with a bit more complexity than before. I, as an electrician for example, might climb into your roof and examine the cause of the problem. I am now applying both what I was conditioned to learn (at electrician school) and what I have learned from being an electrician. In short I can fix the problem because I submitted myself to training that allowed me to become an electrician. The same thing is taking place inside universities. You want to be an accountant you have to submit yourself to the conditions that make that possible in order to become that accountant. Conditional learning gives me theories to test out and apply so I can become something predefined. In essence at university you don’t learn something mystical or new, you get fed what they think you need to know. This is predefined by academics who think they know what you need.

I am not being conspiratorial by saying this but you are being conditioned to doctrine. Why? You have exams to pass, a degree to obtain and more than likely a job to get. You had better condition yourself to the theory or else you may never become a professional! Such learning requires an understanding of concepts rather than just memorization. You need to explore ideas a bit here and move within certain boundaries of thought. To put it simply you are gaining theoretical knowledge which is predetermined by the teacher for you to learn. Learn that, and you will do well. Move outside the acceptable boundaries for your conditional learning and you will be in trouble.

An example of conditional learning in Business Schools is the idea that all students must learn statistics in their first year. It’s taken as given that most students need to know statistics because they are going into a world of cold hard facts. This may be true by why make it mandatory? Why condition students to make excellent regression equations when in reality unless they are really, really interested they are more than likely never going to use it. That’s conditional learning. I had the misfortune of teaching statistics for a while at a college and invariably the poor students (those that were there would remember my ineptitude suffered greatly) asked me why are we doing this? After a while I ran out of lies to tell them my standard response was, ‘well you have to’. Why? It’s deemed important by those who run the business school being the “objective” world of business and all. Conditional learning asks no questions tells no lies. Conditional forms of learning, given to us traditionally through our educational systems are largely based on a simplified version of life. Such learning is good when gaining understanding in the basic skills of life but is unfortunately lacking in broader context of the real world where the rules change constantly and very little actually stays the same.

Experiential Learning

A third type of learning that can help us, is learning by experience. Typically this kind of experiential learning relies on the ability to gain new insights into situations through the application of knowledge based on experience. Graham Hancock writes about a harsh experiential lesson in relationship to poverty:
In was in such a fashion, through guilt, that Europeans at a particular moment in history, came to see foreign aid as a vehicle of restitution, of righting past wrongs, of buying pardon.

At some point they had realized, what they did was inhumane – so as the author theorizes – they tried to fix a past wrong. Surface level rote learning never questions why things are the way they are, neither does conditional learning. You don’t see electricians reinventing electrical systems everyday. They don’t have to reinvent systems like that to make it work properly; they just have to apply their learning. Granted conditional learning requires a lot more thinking and is much more subjective (open to opinion and different forms that rote learning) but it’s still limited. Experiential learning on the other hand is simultaneously the most dangerous form of learning and the most interesting.

To learn by experience, requires three key things to work properly. The first is a person with an open mind. Learning only ever takes place when the person learning is willing to open their mind to understanding the thing they are studying. We can learn what they call ‘general knowledge’ by reading and rote learning. If the learner closes their mind when they are trying to gain insights into something they are interested in learning about they will not learn a thing. On the contrary, they will learn what they have preconditioned themselves to learn. A closed mind sees the end from the beginning and does not rest in the process of learning.

The point of learning is to gain new insights into something of interest so how can new insights be gained you already know what you are going to find? Learning by experience shapes the understanding of a situation as a potter shapes the clay because the learner is the one gaining not losing in this situation. With an open mind, the learner can explore the answers and form ideas of what works on the way to finding the knowledge they seek.

Having an open mind

Having an open mind allows the learner to see the possibilities and they will try things the close minded won’t. How many people are told you ‘can’t’ or ‘don’t’ by close minded individuals. Having an open mind automatically gives the learner the opportunity to learn even before anything has started and it gives the learning process a head start. This is because when you want to know how something works, you have to understand it by not only having the theories about it in your mind but also you need to understand the way in which it can be used. A failure to use knowledge in this way produces acceptance of concepts with no ‘proof’. The open minded learner is going to see what works or what doesn’t not blindly but by building on an established set of ideas. What closes our mind is our ideas about certain things and our worldview. This is because it makes us think certain things and contains hidden assumptions that can poison our learning experience. That is another post for another day!

Technorati Tags: Learning, Conditional learning, learning by experience, experiential learning, Having an open mind, worldview

‘For the first six months we were apart I enjoyed all the things I’d missed. I went to see only movies I wanted to see-not one war picture. I went to the gym when it was most convenient for me. I had a manicure when I wanted a manicure I did what I wanted when I wanted to. I saw all the children constantly. Eventually, I even dated a little. I realized I could get along just fine on my own, the question was, did I want to? Other men left me cold. They all had their routines down pat-every guy had his own personal schtick. At least Jerry had his hair.’ Judge Judy Scheindlin Beauty Fades but Dumb is Forever.

The popular TV Judge provides an interesting example of what I call ‘real world’ learning. After twelve years of marriage the Judge and her husband divorced and she began to see other men. After six months she had realized that she didn’t really want that kind of life, even though we can see above she enjoyed it initially. Over time her learning pointed towards the fact that there was something intangible about her ex-husband that she was attracted to (her words) which drew her back to him. By going through the experience the Judge was able to learn what she really wanted and at the end she knew what it was. Granted there are better ways to learn such lessons but it’s still a key example of how learning in the real world sense is coupled with experience.

Learning is a key skill in solving life problems that forms the cornerstone for all the others. It’s not only the foundation but without it nothing can grow. By definition learning is the ability to acquire new knowledge, through a process or experience. The key point here is that to gain new knowledge, when we are learning, there needs to be the experience of learning. This is the key skill required to build a successful life skill set in individuals. As an education professional I have noticed this skill is something that a majority of business schools tend to shy away from. Indeed academia at large seems more concerned now with standardization that with imparting the principles of learning. Yet we are sending these students out into a workforce that calls for, above everything else, the ability to be able to learn. Why do we continue to do this? So what is learning?

What is learning?

Typically most lifelong learning books refer to learning as the gaining of new qualifications, experience and changing one’s personal education as required. While this kind of definition suits an academic approach to life, it is not entirely consistent with the capability of learning required to make hard and fast changes in the troublesome real world. We do not all have access to the higher levels of education required but all of us can learn. So how do we learn new things? What are the principles that are developed in us as children that shape the way we learn and help us to understand things? In order to understanding how to learn over the length of a life, a basic understanding in learning is required.

In the world of our actions and reactions we learn by applying our knowledge both conscious and subconscious to the situations of concern in our lives. An example of this might be the question: How do I get promoted? There are several answers to this question. First, I might be a political person and make strategic alliances with certain people and perform certain duties for them in order to gain their favour. This is a path of learning I have now set for myself to achieve; I need to know the boss to get promoted. However, what if my boss doesn’t take to me and ignores my actions? What if my politicizing results in me getting fired? I initiated a track of learning, it did not work for me, I now take what I have learned and tell everyone about it. I tell my colleagues “Don’t go being friendly to the boss that will get you nowhere.” The truth is that it didn’t in that case, but if I used the right kind of political muscle it might have worked. Here is the first barrier to learning (discussed in the next learning chapter), logic traps. Whenever I tell myself I cannot learn my mind will think exactly that. Even though my brain helps me to learn it also stops me from doing so.

Learning takes place when I gain new information, knowledge or experience about something I had previously learned about. To learn, I read, I experience and most importantly I gain insights from the world around me. As a learner I want to add to what I know so I can more effectively use it in the world I face around me. This means I have to be actively looking for ways to gain new insights into my surrounds by trying to understand it. So how do I do that? What do I go through to get to that place where I can add new things to what I know? Where does learning begin? You will have to read part 2 to find out!

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