A great “Aha!” in the history of psychotherapy came with the recognition (roughly 50 years ago) that the “lifting” or resolution of emotional disturbance did not mean a necessary turn toward emotional well-being. The effect of the original disturbance had blocked learning. If well-being was to be achieved, productive and healthy experiential learning was essential.

Since that time, the expanding range of “learning how” has been the cross-disciplinary problem before us all. The first step is a receptivity to learning. Here again, the psychotherapeutic example is instructive. The necessary effort for the suffering individual to manage emotional disturbance had required the building of a rigid system for coping that prevented learning about the world beyond .

Not unlike the conceptual silos we all employ to organize our interpretations of the world, these defensive structures also shaped incoming information about the world to a form acceptable under idiosyncratic conditions of emotional impairment. What happens? We pre-select what we think we know.

Often, what we think we know is only a small subset of our real knowledge capability. The question becomes: how do we access what we know? How do we leverage knowledge to expand our horizons?

Sometimes, it’s a simple matter of social interaction. For example, I question a seminar of young managers about differences between leaders and managers. The group’s silent consensus might suggest that they haven’t thought about the question. But perhaps the silence reflects something else: a social norm. Perhaps the silence is the simple result of nobody taking the risk to suggest an imperfect answer. Perhaps its easier to wait for the professor’s lecture.

Shifting gears, I suggest a project requiring small group interaction. I task each group with the generation of ten personality traits defining leadership. The results are incredible: my silent seminar generates a list of adjectives that closely mirrors the characteristics reflected in the academic literature on leadership!!

What happened?  My hunch is that the larger seminar structure presented an opportunity for people to hide what they know. Further, because of its size, it heightened the possibility of humiliation if an uncertain contribution was not met with general approval.

The simple movements (1) to small groups and (2) from question requiring answer to an intellectual challenge to be achieved generated a very different result. The change in form itself allowed people to share what they knew and to build jointly upon individual experience. The previously unseen but powerfully operative defensive silo— presented by the very structure of the original seminar— disinclined participants to productive shared thinking.

The first step in “learning how” is in finding a comfort zone that allows readiness to learn. Not only must this allow readiness to receive incoming information from the outside. But also, and equally crucial: it must allow our internal readiness to loosen our defensive habits in order for that incoming information to be transformed into useful learning.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Bridging Disciplines
• » Learning from Our Reflections on Thought

• BROWSE / IN Boundaries Creativity Emotion Organizational Consultation process consultation Relationships Self-Knowledge self-presentation Teams
• « Bridging Disciplines
• » Composing a Language

• RELATED / YOU MIGHT FIND THESE INTERESTING
• No related posts