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Learning is a Social Activity

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As I reflect on the last three years and consider the year ahead, what I recognise as being the most valuable, in fact the single most critical facet of my learning, is that is has been done through communing with others

As many would know, I’ve been on a learning journey (or ‘adventure’ as I prefer to call it) over the past three years in a quest to learn more about people and how we make decisions and judgments about risk. This ‘adventure’ has taken me in many directions, there’s been more than 150 books, countless articles and research papers, formal university activities, essays and conference presentations, all of which I am grateful for and have found valuable.

However, as I reflect on the last three years and consider the year ahead, what I recognise as being the most valuable, in fact the single most critical facet of my learning, is that is has been done through communing with others.

I’ve come to realise that if we are to better understand what it means to learn and understand ‘why’, our attention needs to shift away from focusing on how we gather and process information and data (‘techniques’), to recognise that learning is a social activity. That is, one that is most effective when we share, discover and search for the truth together with others. Humans are communal creatures and learning is a communal (social) activity.

I’m interested in understanding how we can ‘search for the truth’ through communing in risk and safety. I wonder is these questions might be useful for us to consider?

  • What cues can we look and listen out for that might demonstrate the ‘myth of the individual’ as we observe and converse in our organisations? What can we do about this?
  • How do we create forums where we can commune and ‘search for the truth’ through reasonable argument, rather than demonstrate and fester the ‘one-upmanship’ that is so rife in existing forums such as LinkedIn?
  • What can we do to support others to realise the essential nature of communality in understanding learning as a social activity?

We’d love to hear your thoughts, experiences and comments.

READ THE FULL POST FIRST PUBLISHED HERE

Please Don’t Try to Fix Me – I’m Not a Machine

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It may be that instead of giving us a friendly world that would never challenge us and therefore never make us strong, God gave us a world that would inevitably break our hearts, and compensated for that by planting in our souls the gift of resilience.  (Kushner 2007, p.55)*

My good friend Brian is a ‘tinkerer’, a very good one. If there’s work to be done on a machine Brian is your ‘go to man’. He can analyse, adjust, maintain or fix most things mechanical. For example, I recently bought a second hand lawnmower that wasn’t quite running right. After a few hours with Brian that machine was humming like a new one. Brian sure is talented.

I appreciate having Brian around to help me fix machines when they break, but I would never want, or expect, Brian try to ‘fix’ me at times when I’m not quite running right. Why?

I’m human and need to experience pain and failure in order to learn. I also have feelings and emotions (unlike machines) that at times I don’t understand myself until I take time out to reflect.

If you were to ever feel that I’m not quite running right, I’d appreciate your time, compassion, empathy and conversation but, ‘Please Don’t Try to Fix Me – I’m Not a Machine’. People aren’t objects to be fixed and tinkered with like lawnmowers; we’re ‘beings’ to be understood and ‘meet’.

Challengingly in our modern world, and in particularly in risk and safety, it can be tempting to want to fix people when things are not quite running right. We can struggle to deal with pain and suffering as part of a normal life as we constantly hear messages focused on ‘fixing’, ‘helping’ and ‘preventing’, all of which have their place. But so too do pain, suffering and grief.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE FIRST PUBLISHED HERE

 

* Kushner, H. S. (2007)  Overcoming Life’s Disappointments; Learning from Moses How to Cope with Frustration. Anchor Books. New York. United States