“Our true “core competency” today is not manufacturing or services, but the global recruiting and nurturing of the world’s best people and the cultivation in them of an insatiable desire to learn, to stretch and to do things better every day.” -Jack Welch, Former CEO of General Electric
“I never allowed schooling to interfere with my education.” -Mark Twain
I open with two quotes that quite nicely summarize what a corporate university (a really bad name, by the way) should be about – helping people explore and learn as, when and how is best for them.
Out traditional corporate learning functions are all about control. Those in “authority” decide what others need to know, in what order they should learn these things and in what way. While these authorities base what they do on “scientific evidence” and logical thought, it is never very satisfying or convincing. Few of us say we have learned anything from formal education, and the facts actually prove that. As much as 80% of what we know we have acquired outside traditional structures and methods – we have acquired these skills informally by trial and error, practice, reading, questioning and observing.
Our paternalistic education model assumes that learners – no matter their age – are incapable of figuring out what they need to know. It assumes that some pedagogy is required and that if things are learned out of sequence something bad happens. Yet, we all know that life in general and particularly learning are messy affairs. As one learned person said, life is what happens while you are planning other things!
So a modern corporate university needs to get out the way of learning. Good education can be imperfectly compared to farming: farmers do not grow anything. Nature does the growing. Farmers prepare the soil, add water and sometimes a fertilizer, weed out things that are interfering with the primary plants, and harvest the fruits of their work when nature is done.
Good educators do the same. They prepare an environment where ideas and discussion and experimenting can take place, they may add an idea or two to spark thought, they stimulate and try to provide tools to make the discussion or experiment possible. They coach and mentor. They steer and push back.
The goal is to provide choices and not to control what goes on.
What do you think about this? Do you agree with me? What would be your ideal corporate elarning environment?
I’ll discuss some tools and ways to do this in another post soon.
Recent Comments