Sunday, February 19, 2012

Het Nieuwe Leren

In een vroeger (engelstalig )Blogartikel , sprak ik over het leren in organisaties en wat daarvoor noodzakelijk is.
Meermaals worden P.Senges "Fifth Disciplines " aangehaald als de 5 noodzakelijke disciplines om leren te leren , en tot heden heb ik nog geen betere richtlijnen gevonden dan deze.

Onlangs sprak ik met leraars uit het onderwijs over die disciplines , en ik was blij verrast dat ze onmiddellijk een nieuwe insteek zagen , hoe ons onderwijs in de toekomst er zou moeten  uitzien .

Tijdens een presentatie op Flanders Creativity , zei de volgende spreker(Dirk De Boe) het volgende  :


Dirk legt  hier duidelijk nadruk op 3 belangrijke veranderingspunten , waaruit ikzelf ( misschien wel niet impliciet) de 5 noodzakelijke disciplines van de lerende organisatie distileer.

- Systeemdenken :
Het onderwijs moet een open systeem vormen , die kan openstaan voor invloeden van buitenuit zoals industrie, samenleving , ander onderwijs , andere gedachten . Het leerpakket is niet meer vast , maar dynamisch en afhankelijk van de nood . 

- Gedeelde Visie:
Leraars moeten bewust worden , dat ook zij deel uitmaken van het systeem en leersysteem.Daar moet een visie zijn dat iedereen van iedereen kan leren , met wederzijds respect en erkenning van de hierarchie in het systeem.

- Mentale modellen :
Het onderwijs zien als een systeem, met een duidelijke doelstelling legt de geest open voor creatief gebruik van tijd , locatie, sfeer , enz..

-Persoonlijke ontwikkeling :
Het leren is ieders verantwoordelijkheid:leraars, leerlingen , ouders, amenleving , overheid.Het gaat niet enkel over aanleren van competentie's , maar ook het leren om mentale modellen te begrijpen en te verruimen .

-Groepswerk
De tijd van de leraar voor de klas is voorbij! De leraar staat tussen de leerlingen en kan een rol spelen als groepsleider en/of groepslid.
Hij heeft nochthans een belangrijke rol in het  bereiken van de doelstelling in de gepaste context.


Een nieuw leren in een nieuw onderwijssysteem is noodzakelijk voor de toekomst van onze kinderen.

Insight in people performances

Each organisation , and as such a team , has to be seen as a open system where the reinforcement and balancing loops between the elements give rise to a emergent property of the system.
This means that not every element has to perform to his maximum in isolation , because as such it can jeopardize the whole property of the system.
 Some people are perform below their individual capability, when operating in a context of a team.
this is not only evident in sport teams , but also in companies.

Let's take the example of a soccerteam ( exp in Uk and Spain):

Exciting games combined with supporter fanaticism result in high attendances, which attracts high media interest, which leads to high revenues for the clubs (and the league association), which allows them to attract the best players for top wages, which eventually leads back to exciting games.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Evaluating Decisions in the longterm perspective

I want you to share this article from  Jim Brumm( july 28th , 2009)

Here are three major considerations that we must keep in mind when we evaluate a decision with a long term perspective.

1.The first is sustainability.

The best plans and ideas, no matter how profitable, or altruistic, or wonderful they may be, are doomed to eventual failure if the processes driving them are not sustainable over time.
Long-term thinking and sustainability inexorably go hand in hand; they are the two sides of the same coin, and it’s the coin we should be using to fund our future. In practice, however, the question of sustainability rarely comes up when making decisions. Governments and elected officials rush into new policies and pass laws that will temporarily please their constituents and earn them some votes, or will give momentary upper hand in some political situation. Often they find that what they put into motion comes back to bite them, as when we trained and armed the Taliban to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, only to find them years later using their training and weapons on us. We typically only question the sustainability of a situation when we realize—too late—that’s it’s not in fact sustainable.

Because of the worldwide Green Movement, sustainability is a concept that has gotten more attention of late. It’s bandied about in all areas of the social and business spectrum, from corporate marketing to political activism. But what, exactly, does “sustainable” mean? My sister, Susan Brumm, a writer who has covered sustainable farming methods in the wine and food industry, provided the best definition I have heard for the word sustainable. It’s very simple and elegant: Able to continue without lessening. I don’t think we can improve on that. It’s something you may find yourself holding up against decisions in your own life. When the decisions we make and the things we do and take for granted are looked at through the filter of this simple phrase, it can be a real eye-opener. Using that definition, the disconcerting fact that much of what we’re doing in today’s world is not sustainable is obvious to anyone who pauses and asks themselves, can this last? Can we keep this up indefinitely? Usually the answer is a big, fat no.

2.The next consideration we need to have at the forefront when making decisions is this: How will what we’re planning affect everything else?

There is a desperate need for whole-system thinking in our world. Naturalist John Muir pointed out that “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Thinking beyond the boundaries of the immediate situation is vital. Like good chess players, we must do our best to think many moves ahead when altering any part of our environment, and try to create room for and ways to mitigate the inevitable cascade of collateral change which will occur. Often we behave like the man in the fable who climbs a tree and begins sawing off the limb on which he’s sitting. A passerby calls up, “If you keep sawing that limb you’re going to fall.” The man in the tree ignores this and continues to saw until he cuts through the limb and falls with a crash, thinking to himself, “That guy must have the gift of prophesy.” As you read this we are blithely sawing away at the limbs which support our entire culture and environment, and it doesn’t take a prophet to tell us that if we keep it up, we’re going to come crashing down. Many of our best ideas have turned out to be huge problems in the long run. A little foresight may have helped a lot to offset much of what we face today.

3.A third consideration is to be sure, when we’re problem solving, that we’re actually solving the problem, not just hiding the symptoms.

We often can see the problems and the bad results we’re getting but instead of trying to fix the root causes of the problems, which would often cost more, take longer, or require deeper thinking, we take the easier, short-term route and chase the symptoms instead. This sort of thinking permeates our society. Commercials on television show people suffering from terrible indigestion from eating poorly, then push antacids to relieve the symptoms, never for a moment suggesting that, I don’t know, maybe less pizza is in order? Insects are eating too many of our crops? Don’t promote biological diversity. Douse them with pesticides. Dissatisfied with your life? Don’t try to discover the underlying cause of your dissatisfaction, buy this new car or this new gadget instead. Can’t cope? Take this drug called COPE. It’ll fix the symptom, at least for a while. Nearly all over-the-counter drugs treat symptoms instead of causes. But, as my sister used to say, you don’t have a headache because of a lack of aspirin. When I was a kid there used to be commercials for a type of detergent that was supposed to be great at cleaning men’s shirt collars. These commercials showed distraught housewives upset and ashamed because their husband had “ring around the collar” and they were so happy to have this new detergent that would end their shame. When these commercials came on, my mother would yell at the TV (really), “Hey lady, try telling your husband to wash his neck!” Now that’s getting to the root of the problem.

Even if we honestly couldn’t have predicted the problems some of our decisions would create in the past, we can at least start now to honestly acknowledge that the problems do in fact exist and take measures to correct them. But too often we have in gotten so deep that fixing the problem seems worse than ignoring it; the cure scares us more than the disease. Many of the worst problems we face today are things that are so deeply intertwined in our economy that even the thought of changing them causes panic. We are so afraid of affecting the economy, of losing jobs, of changing the status quo or the balance of power that we will ignore something that is obviously going to blow up in our face down the road in order to continue to benefit in the short run. We pretend it isn’t happening and just pass it on to the next administration or the next generation. In therapy they call this denial.

Denial has become necessary for us to get up in the morning and go about our business as though everything is going to be okay. Because if we were to face reality, we would be forced to see that there are many, many things that demand our attention, things that are going to bite us badly when they reach the point where we can no longer deny them.
When it comes to facing the fact that we are rapidly approaching peak oil and a post-carbon world, that our environment is degrading faster than it can repair itself, that our obsession on growth and profit is unsustainable, for a long time we have been collectively sticking our fingers in our ears and singing, la, la, la…
In his excellent and funny book, Farewell, My Subaru, Doug Fine called this “the societal equivalent of not thinking about dying.” But our way of doing things is dying, and denying it won’t make it go away. The good news is that if we are willing to stand up together and tackle these problems head-on, we can solve them. We have the intelligence, the know-how, and the technology.

We just need to find the desire and the will.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Improved Learning Model

We know that our mental models or models of how we see the world , are formed by our values, convictions, life experiences and that they influence greatly our learning capabilitie's.
Our learning is still driven by our lineair thinking:
We just look at our personal results, like to be teached or trained by experts, don't share our knowledge, want to have control of our own competencie's, think that the sum of competencies of individuals will give the competencie of the team.....
In my career, and listening to others I know that in our complex world we live in today ,and in the future ,it is not the case .

How we have to go to a "new learning style"?


1. Systems thinking:

It start in our minds and we have to  realize that our world is systemic and that there is a causal relationship in all elements of the chosen system . We have to see , that the reality of events are driven by systems that are composed of elements (subsystems) in interdependence of each other and that the whole will give a emergent property that will be different as the sum of property's of his elements.
So will also the new learning system consist of interdependent elements which will form a reinforcement loop:
- Systems thinking skills
- Adapting mental models
- Communication
- Learning from others
- Personal development skills

2. Adapting mental models

All starts in our brains: by selecting elements of the environment we form our mental models.By seeing the whole instead of his elements, we can ask our self reflecting questions where the answers can open or reshape our mental models and seeing the reality more objective.

3.Communication

It's very important to communicate , what we have learned  and share it with others.We have to learn as a team and to give as much possible feedback. What we have received as answer to our communication will again be filterd and change our mental model .

4. Learning inspired by others

It is important to remember that no one solution is unique. Learning from others is asking for taken a step back and free your ego . It give elements to refine your approach in new elements to enrich or change the mental model.

5. Development skills

By this type of learning you will improve your personal mastery, so can start to see the patterns in behavior which will explain the event , situation of problem. those generic patterns are called in systemsthinking  archetypes, that are used to solve mny types of problems, and also interesting to use as a communication tool with others.

If interested to obtain that skill workshops and trainingmodules are published on
http://academy.ubeon.com/systemsthinking