Using Reality-Learning for Change Readiness

Empower people with The Reality-Learning Method

With increasing globalization, embracing and engaging turbulent change have become a critical component of the managerial task as managers face increasing “responsibility, autonomy, risk, and uncertainty” and who must work in the turbulent but humane environment “of real human beings”.

Talent developers and human resource management leaders are challenged to ensure that organizational change and transformation is at the core of any training that seeks to prepare human talents for the VUCA marketplace characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. There is a great urgency to incorporate reality into corporate training programs as well as schools and universities curriculum.

What is Reality-Learning?

Reality-learning refers to a learning experience that exposes students to authentic, real world experiences for a classroom-based curriculum. It is a unique variant of experiential learning that focuses on changing the perception of reality. It deploys a constructivist, andragogical approach to bring about actual changes in behavior made sustainable by the perceptions of a fresh social reality. Reality-learning comprises of the following characteristics:

· Constructive. Learning results from reflecting on the experience of an activity as well as the circumferential and environmental observations, and attempting to interpret them in order to create meaning and make sense of the learning experience.

· Social. Effective learning is social action-oriented. When students actively try to achieve a learning goal they have articulated, they would think and learn more. Articulating their own learning goals and monitoring their progress are critical components for experiencing meaningful learning.

· Real. Ideas and thinking depend on the contexts in which they occur in order to have meaning. Merely presenting facts as in case study and simulation that are stripped from their contextual variables separate knowledge from reality. Learning is impactful, better understood and more likely to change behaviors that are better aligned to new situations when it occurs by engaging emotionally with real-life problems in all their natural peculiarities and complexities.

· Active. Students are engaged with the actual socio-economic and psychographic environment of the world of business. They conduct open-ended interviews, design and conduct surveys to collect real data, organise and analyse to discover the relevant information within the data and map the effects of their evaluation for a feasible Blue Ocean Strategy.

· Cooperative. In the real world, we live, work and learn in communities, naturally seeking ideas and assistance from each other, and negotiating problems and how to solve them. In this context, students learn by discovering the numerous ways to view the world and a variety of possible solutions to most issues. Reality-learning therefore requires teams, conversations and group experiences.

The goal of Reality-Learning is to “achieve deep understanding of ideas, knowledge and skills in authentic real-world contexts to prepare and embolden readiness to drive and empower change actions”.

Reality-Learning Fundamentals

Reality-learning is based on sound learning theory that places learning in an authentic and realistic context by linking the workplace and academia. Grounded in adult learning (andragogy) theories, it combines self-directed learning, reflective practice and integrate school and potential work life experiences with life transformational impact.

The fundamental essence of reality education is experiential learning. Reality-learning is a form of experiential education where learning occurs through a cycle of action and reflection. It combines real-life experience with learning objectives as the project activities drive the social construction of a more relevant reality through a “sensemaking” process.

The learner is an active participant in the sense-making process, working on rather than simply responding to inputs from the reality space of his outside world. The sense-making process occurs naturally in the social context and is located in the interaction between the person and the social environment.

Learning is fundamentally a social activity. People construct their knowledge, not merely from direct personal experience, but also from being told by others and by being shaped through social experience and interaction. The construction of knowledge is therefore not effected in social isolation, but is co-constructivist in essence within the reality of the social and cultural space.

Experience by itself is not learning. Learning requires reflections and “making sense” in relation to some referents. The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is constructed through an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs. Sensemaking has been defined as “how people make sense out of their experience in the world”. What is most important about any event or phenomenon is not what happened, but what it means.

Experience is the key active element in the learning process. Learning is essentially the determination of meaning out of an experiential encounter with real situations. The meaning derived would be the result of the interplay between what the person brings to the experiential situation and what actually happens there. The person works on every new experience to “make sense” of it. He uses the knowledge or meaning derived from previous experience to work on the new experience so as to make sense of it.

We make sense of life around us, particularly new experiences after we have participated in activities. Then, through discussion with others and subsequent explanations, we construct the meanings for our experiences. Sensemaking is however not synonymous with interpretation because sensemaking also implies the creation of “new” realities.

Learning is essentially a “sensemaking” process.

The interplay of thinking, learning and development, in its socio-historical context, shapes the student’s cognition and cognitive development. The body of knowledge on learning generally affirms that one learns best through one’s own activity; that sensory experience is basic to learning; and that effective learning is holistic, interdisciplinary, and specific.

Cognition is part and parcel of the process of thinking. According to Resnick (1987), there are key distinctions between thinking practices in school classroom settings and those in the everyday world: individual cognition in school vs. shared cognition outside; pure mentation in school vs. tool manipulation outside; and generalized learning in school vs. situation-specific competencies outside.

The following sensemaking elements explain how we obtain conscious reality-learning as “to know what I think when I see what I say”:

1. Identity: About who I am as indicated by discovery of how, what I think and why.

2. Retrospect: To learn what I think, I look back over what I said earlier.

3. Enactment: To create the “object” to be seen and inspected when I say or do something.

4. Social: Knowing what I say, single out and conclude are determined by who socialized me and how I was socialized, as well as by the classmates and teachers who audit the conclusions I reach.

5. Ongoing: As the activity is spread across time, I compete for attention with other ongoing projects, which means my interests may evolve or changed during the period.

6. Extracted cues: The “what” information that I reach out for and reported as the content of my grasping of the social reality is only a small portion of the utterance that becomes salient because of context and personal dispositions.

7. Plausibility: Discovering that I need to know enough about what I think to get on with my projects, but no more, which means sufficiency and plausibility, will and must take precedence over accuracy.

Sensemaking involves everything from creativity, comprehension, curiosity, mental modeling, explanation and situational awareness in a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections in order to anticipate the nature and direction of their consequences so as to pro-act or react effectively.

Sensemaking defines the hyphen in reality-learning. A reality-learning curriculum seeks to bring the authentic reality into the training program and classroom.

References

Beckhard (eds.), (1997). The organization of the future. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bruner, J. (1975). Beyond the information given. New York: Basic Books.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier.

Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Resnick, L. (1987). Education and learning to think. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. Mind in society. (1978). (M. Cole, translated.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Weick, K. E. (1993). “The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 628–652.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.

Please enjoy my recent Articles.

You can also subscribe to my stories and social media posts via your email.

Enjoy more interesting Articles by signing up to Medium here: https://thefuturistoracle.medium.com/membership