Taking lessons back to school… « All of us are smarter than any of us…

I’ve been thinking recently about “Lessons Learned”, and how widely that term is used and abused, both inside and outside KM and Organisational Learning circles. How often in the press do we see Government departments, Football managers, Chief Police Officers et al utter the immortal words: “we will be learning the lessons from this…”?

I wonder what this really means. Is a lesson learned when it is identified by a reflecting practitioner, after a specific experience? Is it learned when it is codified and made available for others, in specific or abstract form? Or is a lesson learned when another individual has applied it, and experimented with it?

That was the basis of Kolb’s learning cycle…

…but I’m not sure that I could point to many examples of organisations where this cycle of organizational learning represents the norm. Not really.

The Centre for Wildfire Lessons puts it nicely:

“A lesson is truly learned when we modify our behavior to reflect what we now know.”

What I do see a lot of is something more like this.

Let’s call it “Collison’s Ignorance Spiral” (I hope the name doesn’t catch on!).

Somehow, the “abstract conceptualisation” bit seems to wear a bit thin – too many motherhood statements in lessons learned reports which fester on electronic shelves. Now it might be that a deliberate abstract conceptualisation step can be short-circuited completely, through storytelling and the rapid exchanges and collaboration available through social media. Perhaps abstract conceptualisation is a personal, subconscious step, rather than a clumsy organisationally imposed process. I need to think more about that one.

But I’m still left with a lingering doubt that we just aren’t very good at designing lessons with a (future) learner in mind. I’ve been in a number of lessons learned reviews where the intent of the meeting seems to be catharsis for the team or compliance with the process, rather than learning for the organisation.

So, just for fun – what does a well designed lesson look like in a school?

Let’s take a primary school lesson as an example (especially as I have a primary teacher conveniently sitting beside me right now!). I am reliably informed that a well designed lesson will have the following components.

Introduction – explain what you want them to learn; clear objectives.
Test past learning, build on the results of past learning.
Provide exemplar expectations – what would “good” look like?
Be accessible to different learning styles (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic).
Be capable of differentiate to multiple levels of capability.
Combination of activity-based learning and theoretical-based learning, individual and group.
Have a list of accessible resources.
Conclude with a plenary to summarise and test what has been learned.

How do the lessons in your organisation measure up to that checklist?
Perhaps I should spend more time in the classroom…

Anecdote Says:

January 21, 2008 at 8:41 pm

The role of a story in lessons learning

After mentioning that she had gained many useful tips and ideas from it she went on to say that she had only just realised we provided consulting services.

… So on reflection it was the story of the original email, told a number of times to differe…

Cory Banks Says:

January 22, 2008 at 11:19 am

Some great commentary in the reality of a good action being undertaken without the full value being realised.

A mantra I use to push the point is:

“You haven’t learnt anything until you change.”

Thanks

Cory

Brad Says:

January 23, 2008 at 2:38 am

The “collision ignorance spiral” is more reflective of an individual’s lack of response to a lessons learned programme. Exactly the same thing happens in any educational environment – if the individual does not want to learn or apply that learning in given situations, then they won’t. Is that the fault of the education or the lessons learned?

Kolb’s learning cycle still provides a very useful framework.

In my view, the individual needs to take personal responsibility for discovering lessons learned (facilitated and supported if necessary) and thus choose to use that discovery in applying the lessons learned to their own actions or thinking. And this includes abstract conceptualisation in thinking about how what is learned could apply to different contexts. I think this also needs to be done throughout a project, akin to the Dave Snowden view of in-action reviews.

one man writes » Recently Read Says:

January 25, 2008 at 4:30 pm

[...] Collison’s Ignorance Spiral After every release cycle has been complete, we undertake a Retrospective, looking back at what went badly and what went well, with the aim of carrying forward the lessons learned into the next release. I think we are pretty good at it but some of what Chris says is interesting: I’ve been in a number of lessons learned reviews where the intent of the meeting seems to be catharsis for the team or compliance with the process, rather than learning for the organisation. [...]

Learning Cycles « Exploratory Says:

January 26, 2008 at 9:21 pm

[...] Pete @ 9:21 pm Chris Collinson has an interesting post on the use and abuse of the concept of lessons Learned. Based on Kolb’s learning cycle, he posits the “ignorance spiral” where the [...]

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