Category: Learning

How do we learn? What’s happening when we learn from experience? And what does the comedian Emo Phillips have to say about it?

9/2/2015

One of my favourite comedians, Emo Phillips, tells his audiences that he learned about women the hard way - from books.

In a recent conference session about learning, we split into small groups of three and were asked to each share a story of a time we had recently learned something, preferably as a consultant and preferably from a project with a client.

After we told our stories, which definitely came from direct experience, not from books, we then discussed what constituted the learning. Were there elements in common that might suggest a definition?

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The Mistakes Myth | Paul

10/4/2014

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Have you heard the Mistakes Myth? It’s in two parts. First this myth says we can't learn without mistakes; then it adds that we should embrace our mistakes. Well up to a point…

The first part is plain wrong – or, as one might call it, “a mistake”. It seems obvious that it is possible in theory at least that you can learn any process by following it correctly without mistakes. Whether it’s tying a shoelace, playing a sonata on the piano, or even assembling flat-pack shelving. You probably won't get it right first time, but you just might. And in order to do it a second time, you definitely need to do it a first time. If it did happen to go right first time, and your memory was functioning well, you could be said to have learned how to do it – and would prove that to be the case by getting it right on each subsequent occasion.

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How we learn to learn in organisations | Paul

11/2/2013

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'What is learning?' When this question was posed at a recent Organisational Development network meeting, several people's thoughts went straight back to school. In classrooms, they said, particularly during the early years, they were dragged through a fixed process with little decision or choice. Later, they and their colleagues chose to learn - some of them, at least.

When learning, we can distinguish between learning facts and learning how to do things. Repeating facts is rather different from knowing how to do something. In organisations, we are often more interested in people learning to do things, often tasks that can be defined and in many cases measured. We call these ‘skills’ when they are desirable or useful.

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How do we learn? What’s happening when we learn from experience? And what does the comedian Emo Phillips have to say about it?

The Mistakes Myth | Paul

How we learn to learn in organisations | Paul

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