Golden Rule LO8611

John O'Neill (jao@cook.dsto.gov.au)
Tue, 23 Jul 96 14:44:24 +1000

Replying to LO8595 --

Roy Lyford-Pike wrote:

Michael raises a very good question. Should we teach people the "Lists"
from which they must operate or should we lead them to understand the
concepts that led to the creation of the lists in the first place? This is
a crucial question for organizational learning, maybe for all learning. In
some cases we cannot afford to wait for the concepts to be understood and
must first start with "lists". In an organizational setting we need to
bring people up to speed quickly so they can contribute effectively to the
purpose of the enterprise.

[snip]

So I believe that yes, a lot of training must start with 'lists" so we
don't have to reinvent the wheel with every inidividual. But it is only
training, technique. True education comes when we get the concepts across,
and for this we must make a continuous effort that leads to individual and
organizational learning.

==[end of quote]==

Great story !!!

The paradox here is whether people can actually "learn" without "doing".
There is a whole group of people in our society who cannot "learn" using
the formal educational model (or the "lists") that you so nicely describe.
These people learn best in environments where they can experience what is
being taught, and learn from their mistakes.

John Dewey would go a step further (I think) and state that we only really
learn when we do experience what we've been formally taught. Until we
experience what we've "learned" we only have sets of "lists" we have no
way of integrating them into our experiences and understanding what these
"lists" mean in the real world.

Roy quite rightly points out that it can be dangerous to rely on this
learning by experience model, but consider what has been learnt in a
military environment. In World War 2, if a pilot survived his first three
sorties, he was quite likely to survive his tour of 30 missions. In
Vietnam, if a new soldier survived a similar number of "missions" he was
quite likely to survive his tour. In both cases the rookie pilot and
soldier had gone through extensive training both formally and in simulated
situations. However, it wasn't until they experienced the "real thing"
that they were able to adequately integrate this education - if they were
lucky.

In Australia, aboriginals quite often drop-out of the formal education
system precisely because in their culture they learn by experience and
being "mentored" by an elder. If we talk in education terms, the
aboriginals "obviously" are not very intelligent. However, anyone who
"goes bush" in Australia for a period of time, and expects to survive,
spends a considerable amount of time learning how to survive from the
aboriginal people.

OTOH we have this lovely picture of science consisting of "a body of
knowledge" upon which we draw from, "stand on the shoulders of giants" and
increment knowledge in some way. In the AI and Cognitive Science
literature there is currently a great debate as to whether these "bodies
of knowledge" actually exist, and if they do, how are they integrated
into people's experiences (you only need to look at your current computer
system to understand how badly "bodies of knowledge" fail to adapt (in
themselves) to the real-world environment).

Roy quite rightly raises the question of how this impacts on
organisational learning - I tend to think that "experience" is more
important than "lists", the challenge is, how do we enable people to
"experience" and learn without the "dangerous" side-effects that Roy
illustrates in his story.

John O'Neill
DSTO C3 Research Centre, Australia
email: John.ONeill@dsto.defence.gov.au

-- 

"John O'Neill" <jao@cook.dsto.gov.au>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>