Stepping up

British corporate change expert David Bovis wrote in a discussion on LinkedIn, "Neurologically / psychologically, we are 'designed' to learn from mistakes, and we learn quicker from environments that provide positive reinforcement, forgiveness & understanding following mistakes."  He goes on to give the (wonderfully vivid) example of how we encourage babies learning to walk. No one ever says, "You little idiot, you'll never walk.  Why even try again?"  And yet our feedback and evaluation systems tend to focus on what we've done wrong, in a punitive way.


That reminds me of Marshall Goldsmith's wonderful Feedforward exercise, which we've used with a number of different groups:  clients, our religious community, and even just between Dan and me.  Instead of focusing on the past (which we can't change, anyway), feedforward encourages us to consider ways that we can do better as we move ahead.  


If you haven't tried it, I urge you to check it out.  Marshall's clever format helps stop our usual resistant brain-chatter and opens us up to true listening and real possibility.  People report feeling truly cared for after the exercise and tend to come away with a few good ideas for improving their lives.  One baby step at a time.

Two to tango, four to square dance

Excellent article in Slate that looks at creativity in partnerships and takes on the pervasive cultural myth of the lone genius.  Joshua Wolf Shenk even takes on the whole notion of a separate "self" - an idea that's been questioned by such paths as Buddhism and Advaita.  
Do we really exist outside of relationships?

I've always been annoyed by the phrase, "We're born alone, and we die alone."  I can't speak about the death part of it, but having given birth, I can say most emphatically that we're not born alone!  Some woman (and likely a whole bunch of other people) are on the scene and working very hard to make that birth happen.  And, as the article points out, babies are interrelating right from the start.

We Americans seem to be especially in love with what Shenk calls "the atomized person."  I can't help thinking that this notion is partly responsible for the polarization of the country today, and the apparent loss of the sense of the collective good.  If we saw harming our neighbor as actually harming ourselves, we might have a different view.  In the piece, John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago says:  "We're ready for a Copernican revolution in psychology." 

Which sets me to thinking about how what aspects of learning design may be based, unknowingly, on this underlying belief in individualism.  Are there ways to do it better?

At Workplace, we adore collaboration.  From the basic pair who run the company (Dan and Beverly Feldt, who are husband and wife); to our fabulous interactors; to our clients, whose great ideas are always incorporated in our "flight simulators"; to our focus groups and participants, whose grappling with the situations we present creates the learning - it's all glorious groups.  Could we be the wave of the future?

Yummy food for thought.  Maybe I'll go talk to Dan about it...

Good words

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success. – Thomas J. Watson

Holiday reading

Just started Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers. I love it already. He aims to explode our idea that individuals succeed solely because of their own personal qualities, like talent, brains and moxie. Gladwell feels that "we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with." Sometimes it seems like we ignore the community to focus on the person - sort of like attributing a substance's qualities just to its electrons rather than to its atoms (or molecules, more likely). Corporate culture, anyone?

Just in case you somehow missed them, I strongly recommend Gladwell's other books, The Tipping Point and Blink. He's got a wonderful way of twisting the common wisdom and helping us look at the world - and our minds - in a fresh way that nevertheless resonates with experience. Gladwell's blog is fun, too. Check it out - and have a happy and enlightening New Year!

Pic via Swiss Miss

Frogs and ears

Not much to do with workplace learning, but I loved this story about how pure research can lead to useful things -- in this case, the discovery of a frog's ability to block out extraneous sounds while listening for a mating call, and what it might mean for hearing aids of the future.

(By the way, the image comes from an online store called Frog Nirvana, which sells an unimaginable variety of merchandise featuring frogs: rugs, wind chimes, staplers, birdbaths, music boxes...and, of course, earrings.)

Cyberspace -- you gotta love it.

Blog crawl

Some interesting stuff on blogs:

How sleep, practice and testing consolidate memory on Sharp Brains.

More on power naps from the Boston Globe.

Everyone wants leadership development, but what are leaders without followers? Harvard Business School's blog reviews the new book Followership by Barbara Kellerman.

And the wonderful Jonah Lehrer in "Grape Expectations: What wine can tell us about the nature of reality":

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects.

Enjoy!