Un-school your employees to unlock their potential

Un-school your employees to unlock their potential

Last month, I had the opportunity to sit in on a learning session with Sugata Mitra, who talked about “un-schooling employees”. It’s an interesting concept and potentially beneficial in leadership development, so I’d like to talk about it further today.

Sugata Mitra is a professor at Newcastle University in England and a winner of the 2013 TED Prize for his “hole in the wall” experiment in India, which helped inspire the popular movie Slumdog Millionaire. He is a truly inspiring advocate of learning in all its forms.

The main topic of his speech was about “The Future of Learning”, in which he asserted that traditional learning environments were built to support a world that no longer exists. Brought up to work on assembly lines, children were taught to memorise and do things without having to think or contemplate much.

To illustrate his point, he pointed to the traditional need to develop soldiers — people who could take orders and could be replaced with each other. We needed to develop people who could sit and take direction and not ask questions, and we needed factory workers who would stand at the same spot and do the same thing over and over again, not being creative. That was the main reason why education systems were originally designed the way they were and somehow managed to prevail from the 16th to 20th centuries.

Today, the situation is different. The world has changed and been transformed tremendously. All the tools we used to have — camera, calculator, mirror, messenger, video and music player and so on — can be found in our mobile phone. What we need now are the skills suited to fast-paced, changeable environments, where creativity and motivation are the keys.

As a result, skills gaps and their associated performance deficits are now the chief concerns of leaders in the field of learning. Whether a conversation or assignment is strategic or tactical in nature, they are discovering that most people are equipped only with obsolete knowledge and skills while lacking the ability to implement or apply what they “know”.

Sugata Mitra has responded to this challenge by discarding traditional learning approaches and structures. He encourages people to learn by doing things themselves, and not just being taught to repeat things.

In other words, he has introduced the concept of “un-school”. The idea is to get rid of conventional learning methods and prepare people to experience development tailored for work in the organisation now. To be precise, Mitra encourages us to prepare learners for learning by giving them the right opportunities — and then to get out of their way.

You might ask why we need to get out of their way. To answer this question, Mitra imparted the theory of “Learning at the Edge of Chaos”. As he explained it: “There is a space in between complete order and complete chaos, where something strange happens, the kind of environment that causes dust devils to form. ... [I]f you create a chaotic environment, learning can emerge as spontaneous order at the edge of chaos, and that is where self-organised learning happens.”

It occurs to me that skills education has changed completely. Students now watch YouTube or search Google to learn how to do things. Modern learning technologies take the power from the facilitator and give it to the learner. Mitra proved how powerful this can be with his “hole in the wall” research, when children when left entirely to their own devices — and a single computer — can engage in very meaningful learning even without prior knowledge of technology or even the English language.

Self-organised learning, it has been shown, is more sustaining and long-lasting; therefore, it should be promoted in both the educational system and business.

Today’s adults will need some reprogramming to be able to adapt to this system, but they can also gain from it. They need to be un-schooled to embrace self-learning as traditional learning environments aren’t fit for today’s world, whether for education or for business.

Last but not least, Mitra stressed that “…what we teach today will be obsolete tomorrow. Teaching a person to keep his feet on the ground doesn’t work. The ground is shifting all the time. Knowing is not the most important thing. To be able to find out is more important than knowing.”

Having used the 70-20-10 learning approach myself, I have always placed high value on informal learning. Thus, I could not agree more with the shift in emphasis from structured learning to allow people to find their own way to learn.

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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisational and People Development Consultancy. For more information, e-mail arinya_t@apm.co.th or visit www.apm.co.th. For daily updates, visit https://www.facebook.com/apmgroupthai

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