Some time ago, one of my clients challenged me to record the 20 most important lessons I’ve learned. After a great deal of reflection, I eventually came up with 25. This is one.
As I was just beginning to build my consulting practice, I learned a lesson that has stuck with me ever since, and shaped much of the training programs, videos and articles that I have produced. It may make a difference in the trajectory of your personal growth and development, and it can be a powerful force for the development of a team.
Here’s the story. I read the books on how to build a consulting practice and they all said, ‘give seminars.” So, I did, eventually making arrangements with a local business college to create and present a number of seminars for the local business community. I would create the seminar. The college would promote it and handle the money. I would present it in their facilities, and we would split the profits. A win/win for everyone.
For every seminar, I always used an extensive evaluation form that I’d ask every seminar participant to complete. One of the questions, regardless of the content was this: “What was the most important thing you got out of this seminar?”
I was shocked! Typically, one out of 20 or so people would write down something that was not a part of the seminar! How could they have gotten that from it, when it was not in any of the content?
As I studied this recurring phenomenon, I realized what was happening. They had some issue or problem on their mind – maybe even subconsciously, they would hear something – maybe from me, but maybe from someone else at the break or in our discussions – and that would click on an idea, and that would click on the thing they were looking for. They then celebrated the answer because they had received in the webinar. But it was two or three clicks away from what was said. They recognized the answer but didn’t notice that it was a couple of clicks away from what was being presented.
The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that it was a good thing. The atmosphere of the seminar – the congenial attitude, the interest in learning — had opened the door to my participant to find the answer he was looking for, even though it wasn’t the answer that the seminar provided. I began to realize that it wasn’t so much about me and my content, as it was about the participants and their need to find a solution or learn something that fit their needs.
I came to a conclusion which has informed my content creating ever since –something I call Serendipity learning. I didn’t care what they learned, I only cared that they learned.
Serendipity learning differs from focused learning in that it is driven by the interests and issues of the learners, not the trainer. In focused learning, the trainer decides what the learners should know. In Serendipity learning, the learners decide.
I didn’t care what they learned, I only cared that they learned.
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One of the issues with traditional, focused learning is motivating the learners to spend the time and energy necessary to learn the new thing. Serendipity learning makes that a moot issue. The learners decide what good ideas they can implement, based on their needs and interests. They are intrinsically motivated to learn what they want to learn.
While there is a place for focused training, the idea of Serendipity learning has its own particularly valuable applications. For adults on the job, much of their development can be supercharged by replacing focused learning with Serendipity learning.
Eventually, I built an entire learning system — our Menta-Morphosis® Learning System – upon the practices and processes that evolved out of it. That realization provided the intellectual underpinning for many of my presentations, keynotes, training programs, etc.
In the learning system, participants are encouraged to identify “good ideas” from a learning experience. A learning experience can be a webinar, seminar, presentation, video, book, etc.—or any situation in which the learner is presented with new ideas, new insights, or new reminders of strategies and tactics and habits which had been neglected.
We have some criteria for what constitutes a ‘good idea.” Following that, they are guided through a series of processes which ultimately ends up with their commitment to take some positive action, based on the good ideas they created.
While the applications are almost unlimited, we most commonly provided the system as a way for sales managers to facilitate powerful, learning-focused sales meetings. I would ask a sales manager, “When was the last time you held a sales meeting, and ended with every salesperson making a written and verbal commitment to some powerful self-improvement action?” We all know the answer – Never! With the learning system, it can happen every time.
It’s not that any action, regardless of the subject or application, is OK. Typically, we can create a border around the thinking and the possible ideas by selecting the content. So, for example, in a sales meeting, you might have an hour-long presentation of some new product. Using Menta-Morphosis®, every salesperson will make a commitment to some positive action – but, because the subject was the new product, it will probably hoover around the new product. In another example, if your learning experience is a book on asking better questions, we would expect the good ideas to develop out of that content. Maybe a better, more accurate statement would be: “I don’t care what they learn, I only care that they learn, within certain boundaries.”
This approach turns the fundamental trainer-learner equation upside down. Now, instead of it being the trainer’s responsibility to train the participants, it is the participant’s responsibility to learn. The trainer becomes facilitator of the process. Over a period of time, it unleashes the learner’s latent desire to learn and grow by giving affirmation to the quest and providing a system to easily and predictably turn that motivation in changed behavior.
And that is the building block of personal and corporate development. That’s why this is one of the 25 most important lessons I’ve learned.
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