What Does Experiential Learning Offer? Four Insightful Experiences Outlined

Experiential learning offers more than just active participation – it opens up new ways of seeing, thinking, and engaging with the world around us.

The Four Insightful Experiences outlined below introduce experiential learning tools designed to extend perception – helping individuals and groups recognise fresh possibilities for change in both work and study environments.

1. Starting with Insight: Tools to Challenge Assumptions and Shift Perception

In a rapidly changing world we are increasingly prone to make assumptions about what new experiences hold in store for us - it's a perfectly natural coping mechanism. We prepare ourselves by predicting what's about to happen to us and what our preferred reaction will be. However, there is a down side to this - those same assumptions may close us off to the potential to take learning from the new experience. Experiential learning allows us a safe space within which to recognise what those assumptions are, and how they might have affected our ability to respond to unfamiliar situations. Challenging Assumptions and Seeing the Point are two RSVP Design experiential learning tools that allow for a close-focus on this area of learning.

They are both short duration experiences (approx. 30 minutes), that allow multiple groups to work alongside each other - every individual can be actively involved. Used at the start of an event, either activity will sensitise the learners to the benefits of seeing things differently, seeing the familiar in new ways, or seeing what's going on from a different perspective. Simply choosing different debrief questions will target the learners towards different insights and outcomes. We are constantly amazed at how different people, having shared the same experience, will find within it the learning outcomes that are particular to their needs. Both Challenging Assumptions and Seeing the Point are notable in this regard; both are such seemingly simple activities yet both have apparently unlimited potential for learning. As facilitators ourselves, we are always pleased to introduce these exercises to groups as they never fail to provoke rich conversations about how we view the world around us.

2. Speaking the Same Language: How to Create a Lesson in Perspective and Clarity

In every workplace, indeed every social space too, we experience the situation where two people seem to be disagreeing with one another, yet their perspectives are entirely compatible - they simply can't find a way of expressing their opinions that allows them to achieve agreement. This is increasingly the case with remote-working environments where the individuals concerned don't share the same visual references - they are simply seeing the world differently. Colourblind is an activity that steps into this space, taking a team-based challenge and making success dependant on every individual developing the language that allows them to express their own perspective, and share this with others who will have different ways of describing their perceptions.

From a facilitators point of view, Colourblind is endlessly fascinating; watching individuals describe what's obvious to them in ways that may be obscure at best to other members of their group. Over a 30 - 40 minute period we watch as they collectively work to establish agreement on a shared form of language and a shared way of working. This is often a time of false starts and experiments, yet every experiment throws up new insights that make the next plan just that bit more effective until they have something that just works, and takes them to the satisfaction of having out thought what initially seemed too hard. Colourblind is a highly versatile learning tool that sits well in sessions where teambuilding, communication, performance-improvement and teamworking skills development are the objectives. In any experiential learning situation where these are desired learning outcomes, success is likely to be enhanced by giving some time to improving the capacity to establish shared language and understanding, Colourblind is an excellent tool to develop the ability to see the world as others see it.

3. How to Rehearse Working Together Better & Thinking Wider

Few people can say that their work is fully independent of the contribution from others. We live and work in a world that is increasingly interdependent, yet so often we encounter problems that arise from individuals being ill-informed about the way that their contribution fits with the part played by others. If our experience of work becomes too close-focused on what we are required to do, then the bonds that hold together the team and organisation we are part of become increasingly fragile and prone to failure. The essential qualities for working in pressured, and often remote, workplaces are often cited as being an independent thinker, being a self-starter, rapid problem solving etc. Yet behind these qualities are a set of skills that relate to how we see what's going on around us - seeing the big picture, seeing patterns in our operating environment, seeing connections between disparate issues, and, above all, seeing how our contribution fits.

It's these skills that both Simbols and Webmaster seek to develop, engaging team problems within which success depends on each individual recognising how they can best contribute. There's also a strong team learning element which asks the question "how do we, as a team, make it easier for each individual to contribute?" It's this question that, in debrief, can be projected forward into the workplace with the potential for profound changes in attitude and behaviour. Team size varies considerably across different hierarchical levels, sectors and geographies; but with Simbols catering for anything between 6 and 16 people, and Webmaster being adaptable for groups of 2 to 30, both allow for a wide range of applications. In both cases, having multiple groups working in parallel will allow for greater numbers, and highly insightful 'compare and contrast' reviews.

4. From Reflection to Foresight: Improving Future Insights with Voyage Mapping

The volatility and unpredictability of market environments has decreased the confidence we can have in any attempt at forecasting the future - "It's only going to get less predictable" is a phrase we hear more and more often. In this situation it would be wise to draw on every potential insight we can acquire, yet so many organisations seem reluctant to explore one source of insight that is readily available to them - their people. In every organisation there exists the experience, the stories, the patterns of recognition and the 'skin in the game' that could just be the difference in achieving well-informed decision making.

Voyage Mapping creates a learning environment where participants can draw on their experience of the past and reflect on the revealed patterns which have lead them to their present condition. Achieving 20/20 hindsight need not necessarily be wasted effort. Yet Voyage Mapping goes beyond this reflective process, indeed its greatest value may come from considering this looking-back as the precursor to shifting the focus towards the future. Having determined what the past can teach us, we can take this condition of being better-informed and thinking about what's to come. This may be done socially and collectively, or may benefit from an initial phase where individuals build then share their own take on what's to come.