Humans are Made for Learning
This week was Learning at work week, what a great range of events there were to choose from. The themes were all centred around the ‘human’ element, which is refreshing when there is so much talk of digital. Human Learning, Human Curiosity and Human Connection. These focus on our human capacity and drive to learn, be curious and connect with others — something that resonated with me, so I was in my element!
There were were lots that grabbed my attention and so first I signed up to ‘Learning — it’s just a matter of style’. This was a thought provoking, interactive session with James Hampton hosting a one off session to look at how we learn, the evolution of the brain and take a closer look at our own preferred learning styles. I learnt some new tools and techniques to help me get in the right headspace to learn and retain new information. You can read more about James Hampton | The Colour Works here. He touched on neuroscience and psychology; the models that make us human beings and how we function.
But how and when to learn something new?
I learn by doing best of all, the thing I struggle most with is making the time to do better, we need to create space to learn something new and this is definitely what I must work on and use focus time assist me. Learning can of course be from a book a lecture, a video, blog, conversation or an actual experience and there are many powerful learning opportunities that include a variety of modalities. It is critical to emphasize the importance of learning something new and pushing your thinking beyond what you currently know or do, not just defending the status quo.
The next event that I really enjoyed was another interactive session run by our own amazing Occupational Development service, this one was ‘Grow your own Coaching’. Again another brilliantly run interactive session where we split into breakout rooms and practiced being the coach, coachee and note taker. We saw The GROW model in action — YouTube which demonstrated the role of the coach effectively. I do sometimes find it difficult not to end people’s sentences (sorry if I’ve ever done that to you!) so this was extremely good practice, and had to adopt the style I use when interviewing users in order to gain their perspectives. I found this really insightful, learnt a lot more about the role of the coach and learnt how to ride that silence!
‘Developing mindsets for the future organisation’ was another really thought provoking discussion where we looked at 7 different mindsets and the characteristics which were based on leadership styles but the traits could be adopted by anyone to assist with embedding the values that Dorset Council advocates and needs to grow and evolve in to the council of the future. The 7 styles were Digital/native, Beginners/adaptive, Networked, Authentic, Data mindful, Prepared and Human centred. We used a padlet to add our ideas of what those mindsets might consider when championing their leadership style.
Lastly was the ‘Learning by Doing’ session which demonstrated learning by doing is all about generating new ideas, trying things out, if they work, that’s great and if they don’t then let’s not waste any more time and try something else! This is done by testing and evaluating — it may be that tweaking the idea might tick the right boxes but if not don’t be afraid to bin it and pick another idea up. Change starts from one idea and that can snowball in to lots of ideas, I’ve just discovered https://www.iamnotmypixels.com/how-to-use-crazy-8s-to-generate-design-ideas/ so this is definitely on my list of things to try out.
The session also looked at the process of focussing down on the right problems to solve in the first place, and coming up with your problems statements and as part of that, the How might we… ‘Investigate ways to reduce the need for paper with a view to becoming paper free?’ was the example. The problem statement is what we want to solve, not the solution. Then test out the assumptions of how that particular problem might be solved.
Lastly we looked at the ‘retrospective’ a tool known as one of the agile ceremonies we use to evaluate the work done in the last ‘time box’ or ‘sprint’. It provides an opportunity to learn and improve; it’s not an opportunity to assign blame more of a platform to encourage discussion, to hear and discuss differing view points and normalise conflict in order to be able to resolve it in the right manner and the important insight that conflict can add to creativity, so don’t be afraid of it.
I’ll leave you with this which links well with retrospectives; The Japanese art of Hansei and as always thank you for reading.
Have a good weekend and try not to get blown away..