Profound Learning

The only path to profound learning is through personal STRUGGLE!

 

Think of a serious incident that you have experienced.  If you are familiar with Failsafe’s approach to Root Cause Analysis (called Latent Cause Analysis), you know that all the people involved in the incident (the “stakeholders”) are required to admit, in front of other stakeholders:

 

What is it about the way I am that contributed to this incident?

Let’s consider a typical example, where a stakeholder might admit:

“I tend to ignore small warning signs, and I know this led to the incident.”

Any of this type of meaningful admission only comes through significant personal struggle.  The stages of the kind of struggle that must occur are similar to the “5 stages of grief:” denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.  Think about the struggle involved in each of these stages, and the resultant profound change of the person who endures them.

Intellectual, emotional, and spiritual struggle must precede profound personal learning. 

Profound personal learning is almost automatic as we live our natural lives, and normally occurs one-person-at-a-time.  The problem we face in our unnatural industries, businesses, and even societies is in spreading this profound learning from those who have personally experienced it to those who have not.  The spreading of this profound learning MUST occur if we are to avoid industrial and societal catastrophe.  We simply cannot wait for everyone to learn, one-person-at-a-time.

Think, again, of that same serious incident you have experienced and consider the people who were not directly involved.  Are any of the personal learning’s of the direct stakeholders applicable to other people?  For example, does anyone else (asides from the direct stakeholders) “tend to ignore small warning signs?”  The answer is, of course, yes!  All human beings are subject to the same tendencies, to varying degrees.

Whatever is presently true for these direct stakeholders is most assuredly true for many others.

Think about it – a select group of people learns a lot about themselves as individuals, and also as a group, and agonizes over how to spread this learning to people not involved in the incident.  The feeling is almost akin to a religious experience or conviction – an epiphany that is staggeringly important to the individual but who is typically at a loss of how to effectively share it with others.

Most, if not all the time the sharing of this type of profound learning is never considered as part of an investigation.  Consequentially most, if not all the time large organizations experience catastrophic events in different business units, but caused by the same underlying tendencies.

Therefore, isn’t it important, even VITAL for a group of direct stakeholders to answer the following question?

What have we learned that we think others ought to learn so that they can avoid the pain we have experienced?

Are we willing to take the time and expend the energy to answer this question, or will we instead accept the consequences of one-person-at-a-time learning?

If you see the value in the above question, answer it as clearly and bluntly as possible -- in one short sentence.  Break your stakeholders into groups of 5, asking each group to submit one sentence.  Then bring all their suggestions to the front of the room for discussion.  Finally, vote on the one that best captures the profound learning.

But answering this question is not enough!

Merely sending out a mass e-mail, or publishing a large report, or making a business-wide announcement would be like adding a drip of honey into a cesspool.   Therefore, the direct stakeholders must determine how transmit this message to the remainder of the organization in a way that will result in STRUGGLE – agonizing, emotion-filled, gut wrenching STRUGGLE.  Remember the point of this article:

Intellectual, emotional, and spiritual struggle MUST precede profound personal learning.

The more daring the stakeholders are willing to be in the translation of their learning, the more effective the dissemination will be.  One author, relating a similar thought about his book-writing process, stated it in these words:

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible in the attempt to increase the sum of what is possible to think.  Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over – when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not artistically dared….. Salman Rushdie

Paraphrasing Rushdie’s quote to fit this article, “the real risks for any group of stakeholders are taken in attempting to push their learning’s to the limits of what is possible in an attempt to affect the most people.  Learning from things that go wrong becomes a most valuable endeavor of life when the learners go to this edge and risk falling over – when it endangers the learners by reason of what they have, or had not courageously dared to communicate what they have learned to others.”

It is a travesty of the ultimate proportions when personal, profound learning is not effectively shared.