Don't Touch That Stove! It's Hot!

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For 25+ years now, we have been a knowledge economy; yet we use training methodologies designed for the industrial age. Much of what we attempt to accomplish in workplace training requires thinking, reasoning, and decision-making skills.

When we teach soft-skills we are teaching reasoning and decision making. When we teach financial management we are teaching thinking and reasoning skills. When we teach how to operate a piece of equipment we are teaching thinking and decision-making skills.

There really is no skill - hard or soft- addressed by workplace training, that does not include the underpinnings of reasoning, decision making and thinking. Yet most training is fixated on the "what" and "how to," and does not include the "why," "when," or "what if?"

For true learning to occur, people need to experience the content in some way. This is often a difficult task when you are teaching a concept and not a physical skill AND it is not easy to achieve in a short time period (8 hours or 4 hours or absolutely NOT in a 20 minute eLearning "course").T

he onus is on us (trainers) to create learning environments which maximize the experiential aspect of how individuals learn. A perfect example is teaching your child to stay away from a hot stove. We've all given the "instruction" (and been the recipient of same) -

• Don't touch! It's hot!

• Stay away, you'll get burned!

• Be careful! That's dangerous!

And yet, inevitably, every one of us does touch the stove; and THAT is when reasoning and decision making kick in. Although we understand the concepts of "dangerous" and "hurt," the actual experience of touching the stove is the time when all of those words and concepts gel together and create meaning. From that point on, we are fully capable of assessing the dangers of a hot kitchen appliance and changing our behavior accordingly (AND we can extrapolate it to other appliances like a grill or a teapot)

.In the workplace, these same types of outcomes need to be achieved through creating learning experiences that enable the reasoning and decision-making skills of our participants to kick in. As stated earlier, this is not easy to achieve and it is usually never quick; however it is always the longest-lasting of lessons.

If you'd like to brainstorm or discuss with us the methodologies behind enhancing learning through experiential learning, give us a call or download our whitepaper on thinking skills.