Rediscovering the Essence of Learning
By Alan S. Gregerman

Our companies and organizations need every employee to be brilliant to unlock and deliver compelling value for those we serve. They don’t need the CLO and learning department to be average. In fact, they can’t afford it.

They need us to come up with new ideas, products, services, solutions and ways of doing business that will enable our customers to achieve their most critical business objectives. That requires us to get out there and engage the world around us, to set off in search of genius and, in the process, unlock the individual and collective curiosity and brilliance in ourselves.

But at a time when leading companies finally have come to appreciate learning’s critical importance, most are clueless about how to deliver learning that really matters. Instead, most provide learning that sparks incremental thinking and incremental action. They teach skills and hope they stick. And in the name of innovation, they give employees “new” ways to learn — through “state-of-the-art” classroom sessions, video conferences, webinars and many other virtual and customized learning experiences.

Some even drive learning to employees’ hand-held devices, assuming their eyes and their thumbs are strong enough to follow along. And many teach a wider array of essential tools than ever, coupling “hard,” technical knowledge with “softer” skills such as communication, collaboration, leadership and creativity.

It’s all good stuff. But does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Are we really making a difference or just patting ourselves on the back for the wrong job well-done?

This is learning’s real challenge today, and it is the gut issue for learning leaders and professionals. In a world that consistently rewards new thinking, better technologies and greater-quality customer experiences, can we afford anything less than to unlock the hidden genius in ourselves, our colleagues and our organizations? Maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at what it takes to provide learning that matters.

Genius in Chains
To understand the challenge clearly, let’s look at why even our best efforts to inspire brilliance are doomed to fail. Picture this scene, when learning matters most: as your most thoughtful employees are brought together to figure out how to address a pressing business challenge or create an amazing opportunity.

They gather in the finest high-tech training room armed with workbooks, colorful flip charts filled with big ideas and words of inspiration, PowerPoint presentations, an instructor or a facilitator, a sense of urgency and a list of questions quite possibly inspired by Socrates.

Each element is intended to spark their learning and creativity, free them from the powerful grip of everyday thinking and lead them to a breakthrough that will ensure their organization’s survival at a minimum and revolutionize life as we know it at best.

At the epic moment when the late arrivals finally have appeared, the leader of the session begins: “We are together at a critical point,” he or she laments in a serious tone, “when the future of our organization hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking, our backs are to the wall and we must come up with a newer, better, faster, stronger, easier or otherwise more innovative approach.”

In other words, they must build a better mousetrap and maybe even a better mouse.

Then, after a dramatic pause, the facilitator tells the group that the objective of today’s session is to come up with an “outside-the-box” idea. And although one could argue that this should be the objective of most corporate learning, there is now a moment of intense silence — most likely because everyone in the room has unsuccessfully wrestled with this issue before, has no idea why they were chosen for this learning experience, are less than eager to put the first marginal idea on the table or are just plain clueless about what to do.

And even though they are told that “there is no such thing as a bad idea,” those with ideas fear the silent scorn and cleverly crafted smirks that might accompany the floating of some half-baked thought.

After a moment, a spokesperson for the creatively challenged summons the courage to speak.

“Are we talking about totally new ideas here?” he or she wonders aloud. “I mean, things we’ve never thought of before? Or are we just supposed to come up with a better way of doing what we’re already doing?”

(In other words, should we dust off the same tired, old, lame ideas that we’ve always had for solving this problem — and hope the customer thinks it’s at least a semi-quantum leap forward?)

“Some new ideas would be great,” the facilitator replies. “After all, the world and our market are changing faster than we ever imagined.”

Now the cat, cleverly disguised as a culture of plodding incrementalism parading as a deer in the headlights, is out of the bag. That’s a scary picture in any world, let alone one that requires dramatic change and fresh thinking.

“So we need really new ideas,” the facilitator continues. “Breakthrough ideas. Ideas that will shake up the way we do our business. And they need to be implemented by the start of next quarter or before the next total eclipse of our bottom line — whichever comes first.”

And then, the facilitator scans the room in the hope that someone will say, “In that case, I have a bunch of new, creative and totally brilliant ideas to put on the table.” But that rarely happens.

And so, lacking a better alternative, the employees do what any group of self-respecting adults would do: They roll up their sleeves, grab their coffee or soda and get started. And using the latest and greatest creative learning techniques, everyone tries to “brainstorm” as hard as they can, which is no small feat, given the big-time constraints of their collective years of formal education, combined with the time they’ve spent in this or any other similar organization, which has been systematically sucking the creativity right out of them since the day they arrived.

And for a brief moment at the outset, there is some hope the stars will align and the gods of innovation will bring forth from their collective wisdom at least one great and novel idea that will light up the whiteboard, gather momentum and move into the marketplace.

But beyond the retreaded concepts and modest enhancements to existing efforts, magic rarely springs forth from the confines of their home for the day — few breakthroughs happen this way. It’s hard to be brilliant sitting down, no matter how comfortable the chair or perfect the curriculum.

Breakthroughs Require Engagement and Imagination
Breakthroughs occur when we leave our comfortable confines and engage the world around us with our senses turned on full blast, a real spirit of curiosity and a readiness to notice and question everything. They occur when we find new stuff (ideas, insights and things that are remarkable) to stir in the pot, and when we test the bounds of other peoples’ best thinking against the needs of our customers and our industry.

They occur when smart and engaged people are challenged to rediscover the wonder and curiosity of their childhood in a focused and passionate way, by wandering beyond the boundaries of what we already know. Barring this, our best intentions are doomed to fail.

And they typically occur when we build on something that already exists, although not always something that exists in our own industry, marketplace or discipline. The most brilliant ideas always have been inspired by something someone else has done, thought or dreamed — in another organization, another country or culture, another walk of life or on a walk in the woods, across the jungle, along the shore, through a museum or down a bustling city street.

The stickiness of burrs inspired Velcro. The flight of birds inspired planes. A boot maker with small-town values named Leon Leonwood (L.L.) Bean inspired important thinking about the value of guaranteeing customer satisfaction. The idea of eliminating the middleman inspired one of the world’s largest personal computer makers.

It is this kind of inspiration that rarely can be reproduced by simply convening and learning. Like Benjamin Franklin, we have to stand in a storm to truly be inspired (or electrified) by it. But when we do, as individuals and organizations, real learning starts to happen.

They Also Require Us to Be Different
Business and organizational success are all about being different in ways that deliver greater value to our customers. We can do things differently, however, only if we see things differently. Our real task is to find the right ideas and make them “ours” in ways that truly matter to those we serve, and the essential skills we need are an understanding of what is important to our customers, an open mind and a sense of curiosity.

As leading pharmaceutical companies struggle to discover the next generation of blockbuster drugs, most of their people are reading the same scientific journals, attending the same classes, going to the same conferences and talking about the latest insights from the same science.

After all, they have made multibillion-dollar investments in brilliant researchers, world-class laboratories, information technology and learning that enable them to slice through data and possible compounds faster and more efficiently than ever.

But this model is producing fewer and fewer breakthroughs at the same time that the lives of more and more people depend on their genius.

So, a few enlightened pharmaceutical professionals are actually journeying to places filled with very different learning, inspiration and insight — everyday geniuses in companies are traveling around the world and back in time to explore the possibilities of ancient remedies in countries such as China. Because maybe there are lessons to be learned from herbs and treatments that we will never discover in the finest labs, and maybe there are equally important lessons about diet, meditation and exercise that hold some of the keys to success.

Perhaps the adage “better life through chemistry” has kept us from seeing the real answer — the right combination of ancient wisdom and modern technology might just be the right approach. Perhaps we should be focusing our research and learning on a much broader form of curiosity.

And maybe you should too. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t sign up for a webinar to learn about the possibilities of flight. Rather, he wandered around and studied birds. It would take several more centuries for it to happen, but it wasn’t for a lack of thinking differently about the world and the magic of flight.

Thus, if the learning profession is to be relevant, it must commit to teaching people how to cast a wider net, to hang out in places filled with inspiration, to read things they would not normally read, to ask questions they would not routinely ask, to talk to strangers who know nothing about their world but a lot about their own, to walk in someone else’s shoes, to pursue a new hobby or look at the world with different eyes.

Learning professionals should be curious enough to enter the classroom of the world, which surrounds us with a sense of possibilities. This is where real learning occurs. And it is this real learning we must nurture if we are to remain relevant in a world that demands genius. It is our only real competitive advantage as companies and organizations.

Learning matters more than ever before — but it’s a different kind of learning. Are you and your organization up for the challenge

Reprinted from Chief Learning Officer magazine

Dr. Alan S. Gregerman is the author of "Surrounded by Geniuses: Unlocking the Brilliance in Yourself, Your Colleagues, and Your Organization" and the president and chief innovation officer of VENTURE WORKS Inc., a consulting firm based in Silver Spring, Md.