UNSTOPPABLE lEARNERS

Learning and development is organizationally part of HR (Human Resources), or we can say it is a subset of HR and it is commonly referred as training and development which is used to improve a person or a group personality and skills.

NUGGET: See over-reaction as a sign that your shadow is trying to take over.

We know what we should do, but do we always do it?  For example, “I should pick up my own trash, wear a mask, prepare for the meeting.  But I have a problem with authority in general.  This problem may originate in my relationship with my parents.  And this transfers to all authority: as soon as I realize what YOU want, I am conditioned to do the opposite.  So in spite of what is in the larger and even my own best interest, I will go in another direction.   In the meantime, you begin to treat me like your big brother treated you.  You get impatient, tell me what to do, and with an anger that is not really warranted by the situation, you warn me about the consequences (behaviors you were NOT taught in leadership training!).  I treat you as the problem, and you react to me as the problem.  The deeper dynamics, in the meantime, are being orchestrated by our shadows!

Shadow boxing due to our undeveloped relationship with our own and others’ power occurs frequently in and around work.  It stifles productivity, ruins relationships, and turns businesses and governments into villains and ogres in newspapers and on TV.  It also ruins or at least stagnates life and learning, and leads to painful remorse and regret when, too old to change things, everyone involved looks back and thinks, “what if…”

Today it is more important than ever to face into the shadow side of power.  All of us have a shadow – parts of us that are denied and stowed away because they don’t fit our conscious view of ourselves in the world.  Also, This is a very important topic for our time, for rather than face into our shadows, it is all too common to deny and demonize them.  We see this happening in our tendency to polarize – shareholder/environment, management/labor, Republican/Democrat, Islam/Christianity, East/West, we the virtuous/they are the terrorists.  While polarization has a positive role to play, a hardening of opposition can only have terrible outcomes for individuals, organizations, and society as a whole.

The first step is awareness: noticing when our reactions and emotions are out of proportion to the situation – when we are defending, justifying, rejecting without first really understanding.  It’s a tall order, yet we are part of a consciousness revolution that will increasingly require more awareness, personal growth, and self-control,self improvement.  The result: a proud legacy, a clean conscience, and trusting relationships where we interact with each other without our shadows getting in the way!.

NUGGET: See over-reaction as a sign that your shadow is trying to take over.

Learn more about the shadow in my book, The Shadow Side of Power: Lessons for Leaders.

NUGGET: People’s belief in (and your telling them) the value of a change does NOT guarantee that a change will be implemented – in fact, it may make the change harder to implement! Don’t just sell a change, make sure the people affected help customize it for your organization and environment.

It’s a pretty widely accepted fact that 60% or so of change projects don’t deliver intended results. There’s lots of room for improvement! What can you do about this?Let’s set aside change programs that shouldn’t have been started in the first place (and there are many of those) and focus on change initiatives that have the potential to add real value and even have lots of industry success stories. These are the changes that Maria Gondo and John Amis focus on in a fascinating paper that appeared in a recent peer-reviewed article.*Let me put you into a typical change scenario. You want to bring in a new process or program. It’s something that has worked in other places. In fact, it may even be fashionable – a “best practice.” Being a savvy change leader, you and others in your organization have carefully selected the change.You bring it in with lots of communication showing what it is, how it works, how it has helped other organizations and why it is important to adopt it in your business.  You survey people who will implement the change and find out that they think it is a good idea and you engage them in refining the goals and implementation plan.  In academic jargon, it you have created “high acceptance.”  Good, a great start.But, as Gondo and Amis point out, this acceptance could be the downfall of your change.  WHAT?? How can this be true?  Their answer: because when people accept a change at face value, they are often less likely to pay critical and reflective attention to the unique challenges of their OWN implementation.  This is especially true when they are accepting it because it has worked elsewhere and they believe in the overall “idea” or abstract concept (for example, the idea of “teamwork” or “honest communication” or “statistical process control”).    In other words, their belief in the change (it has high face validity for them) may doom implementation.When they are first conceived, changes are often scrappy experiments in which both leaders and implementers struggle to solve a problem or bring a big idea to the complexities of their own world.  This struggle causes the people involved to be super-conscious, to reflect, to do trial and error – to be engaged mentally and emotionally with the change – thus shaping it for success while they work in their own context.   However, when the changes begin to prove themselves and spread to other organizations (think Total Quality Management, diversity programs, step by step change management programs), they become concepts and routines that have face validity but are easily pasted onto current practices.  “Yes, we are good at teamwork” becomes the way to adopt the language but not necessarily the essence.  This has happened with many worthy changes.The authors conclude that “acceptance” and “implementation” can actually be at odds with each other…. Unless, while they are implementing and until the change becomes a new routine, the people involved consciously reflect and adapt the concepts to their reality.  This requires a delicate balancing act.  For change to happen, people must see how they and their organization are similar to others who are implementing something new.  This gives them the confidence that the new thing will actually work.  However, for long-term adoption to occur, they must recognize how they are different and thus must adjust the generic practices so that they work in their own context.  There is probably a fine line between actually implementing a change and co-opting it such that things change on the surface but really stay the same (e.g., I can say that I am following the steps, being better at teamwork, when in reality, I have just renamed actions I would have taken anyway).NUGGET:  People’s belief in (and your telling them) the value of a change does NOT guarantee that a change will be implemented – in fact, it may make the change harder to implement!  Don’t just sell a change, make sure the people affected help customize it for your organization and (

learning and development

)environment.*“Variations in Practice Adoption: The Roles of Conscious Reflection and Discourse,”  Academy of Management Review (2013, Vol 38, No. 2, 229-247). source:

What do YOU, the user, do about fake news? About manipulated and made up information, even slightly biased information, wherever it comes from?! This is a critical question to answer today. Our democracy is under attack and virus fears are weakening our defenses. Meanwhile, renegade propaganda is on the loose and exponentially spreading in social media and cable.

The media and big social platforms are asking themselves what to do about it – how and if to report what comes from one side or the other regardless of the facts. It is a media and Facebook or Twitter challenge, yes. But it is a challenge to us as USERS of information. The old Pogo retort applies: “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”

We can and must demand that all the institutional messaging parties – Republican, Democrat, media, platforms — share responsibility for educating, not polluting, the public – us. But we have to take it further – and look into our own gullibility. In the end, we are the consumers. We are the customers. And often, we are the vectors – the spreaders. Just as we demand product quality, so we must demand better information quality – and know it when we see (and don’t) see it.

Sadly, as advertisers know, information consumers are more likely to notice and remember information that activates the emotional parts of our brains. Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, says that messages of care or harm, fairness or cheating, loyalty or betrayal, authority or subversion, sanctity or degradation, liberty or oppression resonate at deep and shadowy levels in us.  These emotion-arousing messages hack our brains in ways that facts don’t.

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel prize in economics (Thinking, Fast and Slow), exposes how irrational our decisions usually are. Linguists like George Lakoff (Don’t Think of An Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate) show us how our brains are captured by emotional appeals and emotion-tinted ways of presenting information. And brain scientists are discovering – through fMRI lenses – what our brains are doing when we are riled up, hooked, fed information in various distorted ways. There is a lot of activity, a lot of addictive-chemical release.

Researchers even have a name for the deliberate distortion of information in order to get what they want: behavior design, or persuasive technologies. It was formerly called “captology” by its originator B. J. Fogg, founder and director of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab (he has also written and warned about the ethics of its use).

Information selectivity and distortion are predictable, and because information is always filtered in some way, inevitable. But deliberate manipulation is becoming more common as politicians, advertisers and others continue to realize its huge benefits. To reap their rewards, they benefit from us being sheep-like, feeling that we are victims, being uninformed. Is that who you want to be and how you want to live?

It’s up to us to sharpen our ability to detect what’s fake – whether it is selective information, misinformation, disinformation, or full blown propaganda (listed in order of least to most flagrant distortion).  Here’s what you can do NOW:

Want to know the truth

Find out where information comes from – the source

Notice when your own biases are putting a halo or horns on something (your body will tell you: you’ll feel that jolt of dopamine that says you are being hooked). Then try to see things more objectively (not an easy task).

Stop for a moment before you click any send button – asking yourself, “What is my intention here? Can I stand behind this information?”

Then, take some time developing yourself — updating your information processing and learning skills to match these fast-changing times. Artificial intelligence will soon bring even more message tailoring (behavior design; captology) to your virtual world. Upgrade your learning prowess now so you can find information you need, sort the wheat from the chaff, and turn what you are learning into something to better in your work and life. Prepare yourself to confidently face overload and attempts to hack your mind. Old school learning methods are not adequate in today’s information environment.

This is all about taking on your power and seeing through what is presented to you. It’s not easy, for it means pulling yourself off automatic, working through fears and various messaging allures, and turning on your conscious brain. It means questioning, challenging, and demanding something different from those who control the various information “bully pulpits” around you.

Information is increasingly the most sought after currency of power. We must all learn how to evaluate and use it. Otherwise we risk losing one of our most precious freedoms: our freedom of thought.

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Why don’t we use the processes, procedures, checklists, guidelines we know can make our lives easier and our decisions more effective and widely supported?

Here are some of the reasons I’ve observed:

Many managers and technical people are primarily action-focused. It is easier (and perhaps more fun) to fix problems than it is to anticipate and prevent them (something that good process is often designed to do)

It is easier to be conceptually lazy. It takes effort and planning to haul out a process, introduce it and get people aligned to use it, and then to actually use it.

Some processes are just too detail oriented and constraining. They become the ends rather than the means.  We spend more time and energy “doing it right” than doing the right thing.

Nobody wants to take on the process facilitator/leader role. Of course, this role can shift among members of a group.  But I think individuals are reluctant to take on process leadership for fear of being viewed as authoritarian or rigid.  They are not clear about the difference between dominating conversation and ensuring that there is a working process.

People are not skilled enough to use the process as a road to higher-level outcomes. The skills underlying important processes go beyond understanding the steps and tools.  Real success often requires higher level thinking and interaction skills.  After all, processes and procedures are often supposed to free people from the routine (and dangerous) so that they can be more creative and thoughtful.

Related to the previous point, there is a misunderstanding about process and procedures. We often adopt them hoping that they will now do the work for us.   The reality is that, while processes do “automate” our approaches, it is a big mistake to think that it stops there.  Any process or procedure we put in place must receive continual energy to keep it alive.  Processes, checklists, procedures can very quickly go into a kind of rigor mortis.  Instead of unleashing higher thinking and creativity, they often have the opposite effect, lulling us into automatic behavior.  We become less rather than more effective.  This has happened with countless performance management systems, budget processes, meeting procedures.  We follow the form without the benefit of the function.

What to do?  Here is a Checklist:

Don’t implement a process that you are not willing to forever infuse energy into. Among other things, it means that leaders must themselves use it, expect excellence in implementation, keep refining it, and be willing to sunset it when the appropriate time comes.

Keep the process at the highest effective level of abstraction with the least amount of paperwork or process tool guidance. People will use judgment anyway.  Don’t try to control every little behavior unless doing so is important for safety or other critical reasons.

Be sure everybody knows the reasons and the personal/organizational benefits of using the process or checklist (etc.). Process rigor mortis, including playing games to get the most personal advantage, will set in when people are disconnected from the “why”   (think about people setting low goals in performance management so they can get an “exceeds” rating at review time).

Develop higher order skills – conceptual thinking, communication and collaboration skills, decision making, emotional intelligence. These transfer across all important processes and ensure that people stay in charge of processes vs. the other way around.

Process has gotten a bad rap, but let’s not throw the good out with the bad.  Today’s organizations need software, guidelines, and routines that build in best practices and that everyone uses to accomplish more together than they could individually. There is a secret to good process:  it has to add value, be continually energized, and not become calcified. It has to unleash thinking and communication rather than replace it. And it has to be something that everyone uses and has the skills and information to use.

NUGGET: Processes can add immense value for the enterprise. But it still takes people to make them work.  It matters how you implement and sustain them

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It’s pretty clear that today’s is a rapidly changing (and quite challenging) world of work.  The question I would like to explore is, what does it mean for you as a  leader and participant, or as someone who influences others in those roles?

I believe that the changes going on are occurring at a deeper level that is often not well explored; that it is vitally important to step back, think about, and really take a look at what the changes around us mean and how we can and will respond.  It’s difficult to do this because things are moving so fast and all of us seem to be drowning in uncertainty, information, and crises.  But these are the very reasons why it is important to step out of the fray, dip below the surface, and think about what we are really dealing with and creating.

So, I am launching this blog series in order to explore some of the deeper challenges of change and our power in change with colleagues like you – people who see that we are living on the cusp of big shifts in the world and want to play an active part in what happens next.  My assumption is that you want to make a difference as a formal or informal leader or as a consultant, educator, and advisor to people in the changing world of work.

Bad ConnectionTech FailureSkype/Zoom Connection IssuesOnline Teaching is Not Real TeachingStudent Easily DistractedNo Group Work

The only real benefit of online learning is convenience. It’s convenient for both student and teacher. Nobody has to leave their house. They can just login into Skype or join Zoom meeting and wait for the class to begin. There is no dress code. So, effectively, the student and teacher can take the class in their pajamas.

Benefits:

The main goal of the class is to learn how to learn, and there are multiple benefits of online learning:

1. Convenience

2. Use of a shared screen

3. Record and replay

4. Easily affordable

5. Teacher is available from anywhere in the world

Disadvantages

But when we take a look at the disadvantages of online teaching, there are also no less in number.

Some common disadvantage includes:

1. Skype/Zoom connection issues

2. Bad Internet connection

3. Student easily distracted

4. Tech failure

5. No understanding of the student

6. No group or teamwork

7. No colleagues

8. Online teaching is not real teaching

9. Teacher-student connections

10. The student doesn’t feel part of the class

Let’s try to look at each one in detail.

You could be halfway through explaining some important part of your lesson when you notice that nothing is moving for the last five seconds.

Yes, you can get reconnected. But it isn’t easy to carry on from where you left off. It’s time-consuming and irritating.

Another problem that you may encounter is a tech issue. It could be with your computer, the student’s computer or the software that the online school uses.

Skype and Zoom don’t always work correctly as there are some places where the connection with these apps can be very sketchy. You can lose connection here easily.

Online learning is merely facilitating. It can never replace real teaching. It sounds perfect especially in the times of pandemic. But it can never be a substitute of actual, live teaching.

There is no sense of real belonging, and as a result of a loss of connection, the student becomes easily distracted. If other students are also there in the online class, the soon teacher talks to any other student, the rest of students feels disconnected from the class.

There is no sense of group work in online teaching, and the purpose of learn how to learn is not fulfilled.

With exams coming closer, your friends, family, and people around you tell tips and techniques of learning how to learn and how not to learn. They suggest a lot of study techniques like do not use your phone, study for long hours, a study in the morning or study at night, make a plan, take breaks, try group study and much more. Few of them may work, and few of them may not. Then how can we learn how to learn.

So, we are sharing here six best scientific tips that will actually work and will help you in learning faster and better.

Try avoiding studying at night

It has been scientifically proven that studying late at night or sleep deprivation causes less working memory, reduced ability to execute functions and also lowers your physical reaction time. Lack of sleep causes tiredness which eventually lowers your brain functionality. So, you should study during day time as much as possible and have a peaceful sleep at night.

Study in small chunks

It has been scientifically proven that studying late at night or sleep deprivation causes less working memory, reduced ability to execute functions, and lowers physical reaction time. Lack of sleep causes tiredness, which eventually lowers your brain functionality. You should study during the daytime as much as possible and have a peaceful sleep at night.

Make a plan and keep a goal

Keep small but meaningful goals for yourself. Study one topic at a time and make sure that you should be able to understand that topic and teach that concept to others. If you have one target, then you can focus more and better.

Try to study in groups and teach your friends

If you teach a topic to someone else, your brain trains itself more coherently, so try to study in groups or teach your friends that is a more logical and consistent way.

Study Table

Fix a spot for yourself and design your table. Organize everything and keep everything near that you will need sooner or later so that there will be no distraction. Make sure to lighten the room enough.

Practice

Practice everything you learn. The more you try it again and again, the more it will be easy for your brain to remember it.

People say that wisdom comes with age, but indeed it comes with LEARNING. Currently, thanks to digital progression as learning has become opportune for everyone. Each person who faces the issues in traditional education can enjoy the perks of online courses because these courses are accessible with no trouble.

Providentially, digital learning is an astounding way to enhance expertise by spending minimum cost. Precisely, online education is the best way to revolutionize learning. There is a famous saying by Lailah Gifty Akita that the more you learn, the more you want to learn. So, learning never stops in life, and fortuitously, digital learning has made it much easier to become skilled at something without any complicatedness.

“The Most Important Need Is the Need to Learn (GEORGE LUCAS EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION)”

Nearly all the adults consider traditional learning methodology tedious, and it's accurate because, with the conformist approach, they can never kick into the high gear in this modern world. It's the perfect time to beat the clock and learn something beneficial for the successful future. Accept the fact that technology is getting smarter, and we all are at the risk of becoming slow-witted. So, learning is the optimum way to be on the crest of a wave.

Learn About anything and whatever you like

You must not fear failure but rather fear not trying. Learning is an enduring process, and it requires you to keep dreaming. Most of the time, people quit the learning process due to certain unfavorable conditions, but digital learning and online courses are an excellent opportunity to meet your desires. Grab this opportunity and study anything that triggers your inquisitiveness.

If you are enthusiastic about learning how to learn faster, then work on the following tips to learn online.

1-    Comprehend online learning practices

2-    Ensure reliable internet access

3-    Categorize the learning aspirations and objectives  

4-    Build-up a realistic study plan

5-    Review, revise and repeat