There are quite a lot of people who attended classes, read books, went to seminars, perhaps they even have an MBA of some big university or they have 30 years experience, but when you look at what they do with this gigantic pile of knowledge, they only use very few or none of it, although it might just help them to move forward. Therefore I was triggered by the title of this session "getting employees to use what they already know".
So I went to this session and hoped I would get some answers.
Alan Fine is author of the book "You already know how to be great" and a great performer.
How do we stop kids from learning ?
If you ask a class of 5 year old kids "who is an artist ?" They'll probably all say they are. If you ask them the same question 4 years later, there might be a few artists left and by the time they are 12, there'll probably maximum 1 artist left.
How comes ? In the first years of our lives we discover, we develop our creative skills and we encourage children in their creativeness (all parents cheer when their kid makes a drawing, although we can't figure out what they drew :-) ). This is important and stimulates the kid to do more.
When they go to school at the age of 6, we shift the focus more towards knowledge absorption (how much is 3+5, what are the letters of the alphabet, ...). At this time, the rationale comes in and we shift from creativity towards rationality.
At that moment we start training our kids Outside in.
This is a funny movie how we break down a creative santa on his HO-HO-HO skills
This is what we do with kids. They do something and we train them to do it else wise, because we believe it should be done else wise.
What we do at that moment is break the kids confidence and replace it with (our) knowledge. This is what Alan Fine calls INTERFEARANCE.
We can compare this in sports as well. If you are a tennis player and you struggle with your backhand, and you start focussing on how bad he is and you try and try to improve it, but you get frustrated. You read books, watch a movie, watch somebody else with a great backhand and try to imitate him, you get frustrated and your backhand will get worse.
This brings us to the equation of
PERFORMANCE = CAPACITY - INTERFEARANCE
How comes people learn, but they don't do apply their knowledge ?
The answer is "We focus too much on knowledge" and there is more than that...
Knowledge is important - no doubt about that. But if we want people to apply their knowledge and to perform, we also need to focus on
- building their faith
- helping them to focus
- light up the fire in them
This is what Alan Fine the Performance Wheel
Say what you do and do what you say
most people will say that they do what they say and say what they do. But, if you ask others to judge them, they might say something else.
Why ? Because we are not out own best judges (this can be compared with the blind spot)
So, to improve and to perform better, we need somebody to help us.
GROW & the performance wheel
The principles of GROW have been used during the week by many other speakers in many forms and applied in many situations. GROW is an acronym for Goal - Reality - Options - Way Forward.
Alan Fine integrates both in the model below and correctly states that to get to the point of moving forward, we need the knowledge, faith, focus and fire. All go hand in hand and we need to pay attention to all of them.
The performance wheel and the Inside out approach
The inside out approach aims to bring people in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as "FLOW". Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Everything you do feels natural.
When we learn we'd better be in a state of flow. We need a healthy balance between perceived skills and perceived challenges. If there is too much perceived challenge, but no perceived skills, we will feel anxiety an worry. If on the opposite, we feel ourselves very skilled, but not challenged, we will be bored.
Conclusion
If we are learning or if we training others, we should pay attention to different elements. The learner should feel a healthy balance between skills and challenge. This means he should grow step by step. As a trainer or facilitator, we need to encourage learners, give them faith, light up the fire & passion and give them focus.
As a trainer or teamleader/manager, you can grow people, by helping go through this process. But this means also that you'll have to tell them about blind spots they might have, give them direction, encourage them.
Today we train children at school and employees at work by giving them knowledge. To get more results, we should be focussing on all elements and help learners to grow through their state of flow.
What did I learn from this ?
- Learning is more than gathering knowledge (=teaching). Learning is growing through gathering knowledge + getting inspired/passionated + getting more faith + keeping focus.
- We should be aware that our perception of what we say = what we do is not always correct. Ask people around you what they think about you and how they perceive you. This gives you a better view on your idea about yourself.
- Alan Fine is a great speaker who inspires many others and I can recommend you to attend one of his seminars or read his books. (thank you Allan !)
No comments:
Post a Comment