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HUMAN LEARNING -
NATURAL DRIFT TO LOOSE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
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PROFESSOR
CONCEDES COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE AS GOLD STANDARD EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT Can leadership really be learned ? Yes... says a business professor...but not from boring text books but from extensive reflection, dialogue and action with credible peers - a Community of Practice - one that the education system is still unfamiliar with but where KM is leading the way. Business professor, Amanda Sinclair, of the Melbourne Business School, Australia has discovered alternative executive teaching methods to the tired, traditional ones. She is becoming a vocal supporter of these alternative methods particularly for 'harder' science areas like Leadership. Leadership attributes can only be truly developed from self-discovery methods rather than second-hand sources like text books and studies she has discovered.
Two Combined Solutions 1. Extensive Self-Reflection
As catalysts to self-examination of leadership scripts, she recommends leadership biographies, preferably from non-business fields like science, arts, activists, novelists, and spiritual leaders. Most business leader books rarely cover the underlying mental pain and obstacles behind the achievements they detail. 2. Group Discovery... [Community of Practice]
Sinclair had five blockbuster experiences to be convinced of the teaching method of Self-and Group experiential learning model of leadership development. 1. Fourth Year political science class, where 'lecturer' absented himself from all class discussion over several class periods. The group discoveries amazed her. 2. Teaching business school students, where students were not contributing appropriately, and a colleague challenging her to reflect on the actual group dynamics and her involvement in it. 3. Harvard Business School sabbatical, where they used 'the class as the case to learn about leadership.' 4. The British Tavistock Institute's track record of 50 years in using experiential methods to explore authority and group relations. 5. Class facilitation on leadership using experiential learning approach, where she has witnessed dramatic changes in students' mindsets. For Sinclair, actually leading classes by this format and letting go of a class plan was a huge challenge. Many student emotions would surface including resistance, fury, hostility and hurt and ugly experiences shared. But she has seen superior changes in student mindsets on leadership than when using traditional didactic methods. |
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Every
person has a unique worldview. We have inevitably inherited from
other people the assumptions about human nature...and these [assumptions,
'scripts', Senge's 'mental models', Covey's 'paradigms'] have gone
unchecked for decades of living. These assumptions have strongly
influenced how we interact with colleagues and family members even
this very day. How much of your behaviour is from proper assumptions
versus the dysfunctional assumptions of your past ? What you believe
has a huge impact in the way you interact with the world. You the
surgeon must examine these mental organs... and do radical surgery
if need be. There is no substitute for SELF-EXAMINATION AND SELF-SURGERY.
Peer-to-Peer
structured, organic learning events. Talking about one's own leadership
experiences/ assumptions and what both the student and their colleagues
can reflect and learn from it. We know this as group experiential
learning... personalised learning that text books, overheads
and case studies just cannot adequately provide.
