Walk past your expensive car (or bicycle) and scratch the side. When you return tomorrow the scratch is still there, as it will be in a year (unless you have someone fix it).
Yet, scratch your arm, knee or leg and the process of healing immediately starts. The body responds to the new information with instant reactions and processes reconstructing the tissue and closing the wound.
Healing is incredibly special, yet we take so much of it for granted.
The scar tissue from this wound does not remain only on the skin or surface, we also construct the memory of the scar in our minds. The process of constant adaptation, integration and restoration is a lifelong quality of our bodies and minds.
The scarring changes our body, and our behaviour. Next time we’ll be more cautious around that rose and potentially the smell of roses will heighten our awareness of the thorns. This is learning at a biological level.
Recent studies have shown that through epigenetics this awareness of the roses and their thorns can even be passed on to our next generations.
Epigenetics has been called the molecular machinery that deals with the deposition and removal of epigenetic marks, and how these marks can be manipulated to regulate memory formation.
Learning is literally written into the core operating system and fabric of our body. It’s the healing process that kicks in when our settled state of mind bumps into something sharp and unexpected. The process of adaptation and internalisation forms new pathways and structures in the brain, not dissimilar from scar tissue.
Corporeal Corporations
If we view the organisation as a single body, we can apply and adopt many of the same principles for organisational change. Organisational transformation truly is a full-body contact sport.
For this reason, it is a missed opportunity that most consultants still see organisational transformation as a process of streamlining org charts and transforming money into PowerPoint slides.
This approach to organisational transformation and team learning is based on a false assumption:
the idea that learning is about the transfer of information.
It’s easy to see why they make this mistake. Most of us think about our school and university days as a series of exams and tests. If we played back the information taught to us as written in the textbooks, we passed the exams.
By extension, if people understand their job descriptions and parrot the company line, the restructure is viewed as a success.
Training and teambuilding retreats become an exercise of slicing and dicing the information to make it as digestible as required by the employees. It’s seen as a one-way process. Shoving and pushing that job description or strategy paper into an employee’s head.
It is useful to remember that the root of the word “educate” in Latin is ‘ducere’ - the same as ‘duct’ i.e. to lead along a channel. This implies an outside-in approach, whereby the ‘student’ has to be coaxed, formed and ‘trained’ according to an external schema.
No wonder that traditional education design focuses on the curriculum (the external framework or path) and not the student. And that organisational transformation strategies fail to promote learning.
The corporate “body” is seen as a receptacle into which information must be pushed, rather than a vital, inherently learning and living organism.
Corporate epigenetics
In redesigning the learning framework for Microsoft’s digital media academy in 2013, I was struck by a completely different insight. Learning is not about the transfer of information at all, it’s about behaviour change.
Behavioural adaptation as the situation and society demands.
Your peers and the context reinforce the importance and relevance of new behaviours, be they the ability to read and count or the development of complex philosophical constructs. Social and environmental feedback mechanisms anchor the momentum and persistence of memories and adaptation (learning).
We learn and grow according to the questions and challenges we have to master in our environment. If all your peers think reading is not cool, it won’t be something you invest in.
There have been numerous experiments where schools tried to improve the grades of underperforming classes by shifting better-performing students to that cohort. The result was that the top student’s grades soon dropped as they normed their behaviour to the context.
The emotional context is just as important as the physical context for learning. Having the right books and learning materials does not compensate for fear, apathy, and a lack of relevance.
You have to set the ‘epigenetic markers’ that signal learning behaviours and reinforce the learning experience at an emotional level.
Peer to Peer Mastery
Bloom’s hierarchy of learning outcomes provides a great framework for not only making learning overt but also, used correctly, turning a learning system into a regenerative process. These layers can become a kind of ‘corporate learning’ epigenetics.
Most people view the hierarchy as different types of testing methods. You start off with basic comprehension tests and multiple-choice quizzes and end up with PhD’s developing a thesis to “add to the body of knowledge.”
I see its real power as a behavioural and relational map.
If you view the learning journey as a behaviour change construct, you open up a whole different perspective of the resources, system and context you have at your disposal.
Who can remember what we’re supposed to do? Who understands the new process? Has anyone tried to apply this contract for this context?
Seeking answers from other people is the most natural way for us to learn and improve. It also cements learning in an emotional context.
At ReDI school we quickly noticed that student attendance and performance were directly related to the relations in the peer group and the social bonds of peer to peer learning.
Online learning platforms providing the same courses are lucky if 10% of their students finish the course (compared to our near 100%). They might have all the videos, support materials and FAQ’s their budget can produce, but they cannot replicate the emotional and embodied knowledge relationship.
Plus, they cannot solve the most vexing challenge in education design: the half-life of facts.
Circular mastery
Most learning materials constantly need to be updated as facts change. Solutions and case studies often lose relevance before the teaching materials have been produced.
For Microsoft, I designed a system of knowledge stewardship, whereby people demonstrated their competence by serving a function in the learning organisation.
In an information-centric learning model such as most universities, the stewardship role is a stepladder. If we look at ancient learning contexts however we see that the masters pay disproportionate attention to the entrants.
By having your most advanced learners introduce novices to a subject, you create a regenerative dynamic whereby the masters are constantly refreshed and inspired by new energy.
The sharing schedule we designed, and the case-based group discussions meant that the body of knowledge was constantly evolving and adapting. This was essential in a field such as digital media technology where the players and strategies change almost on a monthly basis.
The experts at the top of the pyramid attained that status by creating new learning experiences for the rest of the organisation. They were rewarded for how they made the rest of the team smarter.
Peer review and supervision partnerships in the middle section meant that people were for example sharpening their analytical skills by teaching others to apply the knowledge. You quickly build a deeper appreciation of the core concepts and relationships when you watch someone mess up the application of those concepts.
This is vastly different from the extractive education model of most universities, where a professor delegates teaching duties to the junior staff. Slides are recycled for decades without updates.
The faculty of one
If we understand that learning happens inside us, if we realise that just like healing, it is a cognitive adaptation to a disruption, we’ll begin to respond very differently to the discomfort and tension we feel when we are confronted by a contrarian view, or a new way of looking at things.
Our body’s faculties are our teaching faculty. They teach us through the rich flood of new sensations, stimuli, and feedback we receive. If we align people with the depth of skills and abilities we aspire to, we can design a dynamic set of regenerative learning relationships.
The flipside of this relational model is that you only get better by making others better. Learning relationships run up and down the skills ladder. If you neglect those who are newer to the field or come from a different frame of mind, you are cutting yourself off from the most valuable sources of intellectual renewal.
Set and measure your learning markers and know who can help you remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create knowledge, or better yet, wisdom.
Embrace the scratch, and make sure to stop and smell the roses, with all your faculties. Let’s make learning a full-body sport again. For ourselves, and our organisations.
Let’s take that leap!
Three key take-outs:
* Doing is learningOur bodies are hardcoded to build ‘muscle memory’ around what we DO. We remember something better for example when we have engaged the action of writing it down. Build innovative and relevant actions around your learning journey.
* Bodies of knowledgeWhat is your organisations social learning strategy? Have you built an environment of trust where people can openly ask for help and advice? By asking and explaining we deepen the organisational muscle memory. Playbooks, training videos and online quizzes are scalable but not relatable.
* MasteryAre you ‘subject matter experts’ defined by the thesis they wrote at university or the contribution they are making to the team’s collective, growing, intelligence? Are you creating and promoting forums for sharing new knowledge? Do the most junior people in the organisation benefit from the invisible wisdom of experience?
