When learning isn’t working, but you work at learning the results can be highly rewarding.
There are primarily two extremes of learning: procedural, you’re told what to do, and conceptual in which you figure it out.
There’s a a weighted conceptual point to hit between these two poles. It can be infuriating at first for receivers but highly rewarding later.
Universities by and large live by slide decks informing cohorts what to do, but often the incentive to follow a narrative can be thwarted by any number of things, not least the mind straying as you struggle to understand what’s going on.
I run labs.
I might often start the start-up lab with a series of games. There are two reasons behind this; frame of mind is one of them. Secretly, analogous thinking is another.
To participate in linked learning, receivers need to be in the mood or otherwise be incentivised about the journey they’re taking. That’s not easy if you’ve spent a life time being taught what to do.
Hence a trainer has to earn the trust of their cohorts. Those games look like fun, but they’re doing two things. The first biologically is making you receptive for neural connections via your happy state. The other is how, if you think out loud, you’re connecting dots that may aid you further down the line. The game actually faciltates problem-solving.
“The thingy game” is one of my best. It takes an innocuous object and asks you to reimagine it as a utility far removed from its original purpose. Generally, people struggle because cognitively they’re trying to bring the object back to the familiar. A piece of paper will most likely serve functions that align with paper, or you might fold it to be an envelope.
A student from another culture may have analogous thoughts of turning the paper into any number of 3d objects — Origami. But even outside of that knowledge what else?
The solution is to become comfortable as a verbal saccadic. Blurt those ideas out, don’t contain them. For every idea that might not land, some will — adjacent ideas collide to produce new ones, but you have to externalise.
I’ll tell one of many stories. Remember the one how a village hall was ablaze and the villagers kept throwing water over the fire. Then one person shouted stop and quickly assembled three rows of people behind each other in a circle, and on her command, asked them to throw the water together, step back and then the next group on her command did the same.
It’s just a story, but if the cohorts make the connection when they’re in trouble trying to solve a problem the next session, they might suggest they all contribute an idea, then another, then another — however silly the idea might be.
There’s an obvious tension to observe when the solution is in sight, but can’t be viewed. Cohorts might express frustration, but the framework is to encourage them to continue, without giving too many hints. There are cultural prisms too to consider. Copying is plagiarism, but for some tech start-ups copying is how they built their arsenal.
Yesterday, I left one of my cohorts with an issue. I sense they may be challenged. Not to worry. Cognitively, they’ll do what they have to do. They might even be defeated. But that pain point becomes pleasurable, when the previous day’s stories are mapped out and analogies become obvious. In science we called it the “aha moment”. The moment when you’ve figured out the connections. It’s such a wonderful sight to behold
