In today’s changing world where change is a given and at times both dramatic as well as at times traumatic, management needs to discover ways that embrace learning that impacts both the individual and the entire organisation to embrace the rapid change.

Few organisations spend much time investigating the importance of learning. Time spent learning is probably the most valuable investment that an organisation or individual can ever make, since it has the power to shape everything we say and do and deeply effects the quality of our lives.

We, rightly, pay due attention to the education of our children and after 12 years of studying and a few years at university we leave learning and that without ever questioning it. What is learning’s importance, what is learning, how can we change it and what are its intentions?

Taking care of the organisations learning is not HR’s responsibility but the leaders, and to do this they need to shift from being the Boss to being the Coach. Equally as much, taking care of the clients learning is also the coach’s greatest responsibility. One of the attributes of a good coach is his/her mastery in the domain of learning.

Learning is an individual thing and not a communal thing even though it takes place in a group setting. Even in this environment, information and knowledge as education and learning are conveyed on the equivalent of a one-on-one basis. What that means is that the subject being taught can and will be used by each member of the group as compared to skills that relate to group behaviour as in relationships and interactions with each other. Parallel with this is the intention to pass on skills, abilities, learning and knowledge to assist in the development of the individual or organisation for success and for the most part in the arenas of work, career and life.

As I have stated knowledge and learning is transferred to the learner within a tacit epistemological structure and it is assumed that what is being learned is in fact reality or ‘what is’ and this is held objectively. Now from this position management is concerned, as well as the world, more with what we learn than how we learn.

The type of learning we do today is information based and cerebral which in essence is linguistic or as Dr. Maturana would say ‘languaging’. This information, which is loaded on the learner, consists of ideas, theories, concepts, procedures and principles and the tool for imparting this is, as mentioned, language, charts, graphs, videos, visual aids, overheads etc. Look at this type of learning and contrast it with the largely kinaesthetic skills in learning to play, for example, a guitar or learning to be a listener in a coaching conversation involving pain.

Different types of learning are taking place and in many respects we are blind to this.

One of the most difficult things to implement in learning are explanations and if I explained to you how to ride a bicycle or fly a Boeing 747 or get into a swimming pool and do the crawl, I very much doubt that you would be able to put it together. Even if I gave you the manuals to accomplish this it would still be a huge task that in many incidences would not be accomplished.

Now go back o those very popular films of the 80’s, The Karate Kid, Daniel with the Mr. Miyagi, Daniel’s Korean Karate teacher. Daniel who was being bullied was desperate to learn Karate and eventually Mr Miyagi relented and took to teaching him.

There are literally hundreds of books on karate as there is in my hobby which is magic. Again, learning from the explanations in these books are virtually impossible to render i.e. is in both karate and conjuring.

In the film Miyagi demonstrates a learning that supports embodying the information as we do in riding the bicycle or learning to swim. Perhaps you remember, ‘rub it on rub it off, rub it on rub it off,’ in polishing the cars, painting the wooden fence, painting the deck etc.

Management does not take into account that each person in the organisation has a body and brings that body to work each morning. The body is a store house of knowledge and it not only stores our knowledge but we use this biology to cognise.

As humans we are setting intentions, as we do in organisations but very few organisations inform the body or prepare it for the mood needed to be consistent with the goals.

Our bodies like our moods are predispositions for action. All our disappointments, experiences of failure, negative emotions from thwarted intentions are lodged in our bodies and on many occasions are determining our moods, and actions we are going to take or prevent us from taking.

Therefore learning must address not only our heads but also our bodies and our spirit and our soul as Mr Miyagi was teaching Daniel. It needs to balance the conceptual/linguistic on the one hand and the emotional /physical archetypal on the other and openly exclaim the coherences of these levels of experience.

In conclusion learning must lower the accumulation of knowledge for the purpose of producing effective action for a larger goal of producing wisdom for the sake of effective and satisfying living.

About the Author:

Pat Grove is an internationally recognized coach based in Cape Town South Africa


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