Are you someone that is consistently embracing change? Feels that it is ok to be wrong because it forces us to explore? From an early age, we are taught it’s bad to make mistakes and they need to be avoided … otherwise, there can be unpleasant consequences. However, as we will discuss in this article, embracing change from our mistakes is key to improving continuous learning.
Being right keeps us in place. Being wrong forces us to explore. -Steven Johnson
The truth, however, is that failure and making mistakes is a necessary part of success and it cannot be avoided.
Related: Why Questioning is Critical to Learning and Problem Solving
It can only be avoided if you decide to “play it safe” for the rest of your life and if you are happy to remain in your comfort zone and stop expanding and enjoying the exhilarating feeling of continuous growth and development.
But, that’s not really what you want, right?
The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. EVERY TWO YEARS. The top 10 jobs that were in demand in 2013 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that don’t yet exist.
All this in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. Scary, isn’t it?
For students starting a 4 year technical or college degree, one half of what they will learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. We are clearly living in exponential times, aren’t we?
For more background see Shift Happens 2013.
So we hope you note and appreciate the amount of change going on in the world and the rate of change acceleration. The implication of the rapidity of change means everything we learn has an extremely short shelf life. Big implications here for the future of learning.
So what is your choice for the top learning issue of the day? Continuous learning is our choice. Taught in schools? We have not found many that are changing their learning and education strategy based on this environment. In fact, most seem to be hunkering down even more into the past. We were very surprised by this finding.
Here are some thoughts on how to improve learning in this type of environment:
Compete and collaborate
Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Once you have found some interesting connections who share like goals, try a collaboration project or two. Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.
If we as learners embrace the new paradigm of active learning, curiosity, and imagination, we could offer a spark to others around us and may even build a new movement.
Always utilize a feedback loop
You need to continuously reflect on what you have learned, both from successes and failures. A feedback loop is a necessity and it doesn’t happen on its own. Plan ways to see what is working and what is not.
Learn from everyone
By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection of what we observe, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Increase your ability to ‘connect the dots’ around you. Take notes and revisit them often.
Embrace the mess of complex learning. In this new world of continuous learning, we are all teachers as well as learners. We realize learning is often an ugly task. Accept that the process of trial and error is an acceptable learning process. And watch carefully what others are learning all around you in both the business and personal environment.
Over develop curiosity
Continually think about what you don’t know, don’t be afraid of confusing our learning and evoking tough questions. You can develop curiosity. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning. Curiosity must come first.
Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build your skill of curiosity … it is a necessity for good learning.
Build a gaming disposition
Never stop at eureka. We believe iterative sessions are the best approach. With a gaming disposition, measuring results to improve performance is continuous.
Love embracing change
You must be someone who loves change and sees it as opportunity. You can’t worry about failure, because most things don’t work the first time, do they?
Find things that drive your passion
Lots of time you will know what drives your passion. Other times you won’t. But you must be willing to try lots of new things.
Learn to tinker and tweak
Creative tinkering is the best way to speed up the gathering of new ideas and gets your entire team as owners of the process. Remember, like anything else you are learning, there is no substitute for practical experience.
Be one that loves to play
In tinkering and tweaking, find ways to play and have fun. Nothing is better at improving your learning.
Experiment often
To get a good and long list of ideas, unusual ideas are welcomed. They can be generated by looking from new perspectives, experimenting, and suspending assumptions.
Expect failure and learn
We need to be learners that ask hard questions and explore what might work and what won’t. As a learner, we need to accept failure so we can use the oftentimes messy trial and error. Make failures and mistakes as learning sources (and the mistakes and failures need not be yours).
The bottom line
Since as much as 90% of what we learned in a life-time always come to us via visual cues, we should constantly enhance our perceptual sensitivity to the environment, according to information scientists. So, more than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was right when he said, use all our senses, especially our sense of sight.
Our power of observation and imagination depends on it. Productive thoughts often have their origins in the combinatorial play and dynamics of sensory inputs from environmental cues. In my view, our thinking cap is often governed by how far we can stretch our power of vision and imagination.
