Rick Dove, Paradigm Shift
International, www.parshift.com, 
Messier and the National Learning Foundation are on a mission to foster the environment that will create and maintain what he calls the life-long Agile Learner, starting from the premise that we all have the raw material to achieve this joy in learning. You can see the characteristics of the Agile Learner and his eight-point brain-based learning model among the Guest Speaker columns.
Carla Hannaford, a neurophysiologist and educator, believes that all people start out as natural born learning machines. Many, however, get their works gummed up in early-life educational activities mismatched to their individual learning styles, and close that part of their minds - often forever. Hanaford’s enlightening and practical book on how this happens and how to change this is called Smart Moves [1995, Great Ocean Publishers].
Echoing Messier, Hannaford explains the neurophysiology of learning as: "Evolving [neuron] patterns become base reference points to understand new information....We continue to elaborate and modify the patterning throughout our lives. The base patterns, 90% of which are acquired in the first five years of life, give us the template on which to attach all future learning."
Both of these people are concerned with the growing amount of knowledge people are required to deal with and the stagnant learning capabilities most people exhibit. I used to think it was the old-dog-new-tricks problem, taking it for granted that learning-laziness was programmed into all of us just like cell death. I know different now.
Learning and innovation are very closely intertwined. "A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or a scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before, and this gives him a sense both of richness and of understanding. The creative mind is a mind that looks for unexpected likeness." [The Creative Process, J. Bronowski, Scientific American, 9/58].
Bronowski, Messier, and Hannaford all place heavy weight upon the human brain’s reliance on metaphor, analogy, and simile as a (if not the) principle learning and creative mechanism. New knowledge is both created and assimilated naturally when it shares some common pattern with old knowledge.
This series of essays since May 97 has been exploring a learning process we call Realsearch, and its ability to create new knowledge at the depth of insight about highly adaptable business practices. The objective is to teach old dogs new tricks, and the methodology makes strong use of metaphor. The methods and success in five 1997 industrial test environments were presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in March ’98 as "Realsearch: A Framework for Knowledge Management and Continuing Education", available on the web site.
This essay is the seventh and last in a series exploring a business practice design toolset and methodology. In these last few months we have applied the methodology to the design of a core competency knowledge management practice. If you look at the Realsearch paper you will see a strong pattern similarity. Little wonder - both deal with many of the same issues and objectives: capturing, renewing, and mobilizing knowledge under conditions of changing knowledge values. Don’t trip past the word mobilizing too quickly - that is the part that transfers explicit knowledge from one head to another - the part that relies on learning techniques most directly.
We close the series by putting the tools and methods exposed over the last few months into a summarized perspective. As in virtually all design efforts, good designs emerge from a spiral pattern
The accompanying table provides the sequence we are employing in the 1998 series of Realsearch workshops - each of which engages mixed groups of people in the design of a critical or strategic business practice. In a three-day workshop exercise there is no time for spiral design, and the objective is generally to learn as much as possible about bold possibilities.
A workshop design activity cannot go as deep as the eventual real design efforts must go - and so workshop techniques are somewhat different. In the workshop the design models are sparsely populated, but generally with rich ideas - ideas that can be employed subsequently by a small dedicated design team.
We need ways to differentiate our businesses, not conformity that eliminates competition.
The essays published
here have hit most of the key process and tool concepts
employed in our field tests last year. Those who have
studied the discourse here may note some loose and
unfinished ends - like we never discussed how to build
performance metric valuations for change issues, nor did
we build a final metaphor model diagram of the knowledge
management practice we spent so much time designing. A
complete and integrated description of this knowledge
management design example is used as an operating manual for
our 1998 workshop series and is required pre-reading for
participants. It is available to the general public
through our web site.
Does the
Realsearch process produce a facility with new knowledge
that has the depth of insight? How long does that take?
Comments from repeat participants in the 1997 Discovery
Workshops say yes.
My observations
are that little is evident after a single workshop, the
light goes on during the second workshop, and something
approaching insight occurs for some in the third and for
many in the fourth exposure. At three days per workshop
that's something like 9-12 days invested in high-leverage
business-related learning with immediate application. Our
sampling experience at this point is too small to make
any strong claims, however.
Though Realsearch
is structured, it is not a recipe driven concept by
design: 1) we need ways to differentiate our businesses,
not conformity that eliminates competition, 2) the nature
of the complexity our businesses deal with requires a
complexity-compatible response, 3) though people are
generally uncomfortable in the hard work of deep thinking
and learning activity, that is what produces insight.
We will continue
to evolve the strategic themes of Realsearch and refine
the application process. We want to find effective ways
to expand to larger groups and deliver insight-generating
Realsearch experiences across the Internet. We are still
learning, but common ground revolves around a focus on
real and interesting problems, mixed participants,
running parallel workshop teams, building local
metaphors, utilizing an issue-focus and principle-base,
and making people think and create new insight patterns.
Directing
business process reengineering projects is one
immediately practical application for Realsearch. Another
is the capture and mobilization of corporate core
competency knowledge. A third important application is in
what we now call continuing education - at all employee
levels.
This year we
expect to refine the Realsearch methodology
further to employ some of the brain/mind/body learning
research findings that promises to revamp education as we
know it. It is our intention to help marry the concepts
of learning and innovation into a simultaneous process
that will serve the needs for continuing education when
there is no time out for learning.
©1998 RKDove - Attributed Copies Permitted