One of the things I set out to do during my Fellowship is to find the link between learning and dialogue. Is dialogue a necessity in learning?
Last February I met an Economics Professor at Chulalongkorn University, a very senior lady who used to be a Director at World Bank. She absolutely think dialogue is a necessary part of learning, and applies it in her classes. In her words, dialogue “increases the absorption capacity”. It also is the process where the learner really internalize the knowledge, and to really understand how to use the knowledge. It’s the teacher’s job to evoke a curiosity, and help the students ask the right questions.
In Knowledge Management, you need to understand what “sense-making” means, in individuals and organizations. There are already research on this, something called the single-loop and double-loop learning, the latter being a deeper, more capable of application than the former. In an organization, for example, a piece of learning need to be coded (say, to a document or to a system), pushed to the people (policy to study the company learning system), then discussed among groups to internalize learning (we can do this by design by setting up communities of practice, for example).
On an individual level, the coding-pushing-discussing process also happens (a more formal process of this is called the SECI Knowledge Flow, by Nonaka & Takeuchi).
My point here is: if everyone understand that dialogue is a required step in learning, a lot of what we think is chit-chat would be better appreciated. Everyone need to run through their process to really understand something – it isn’t fair to supply information and expect people to apply it, if we don’t want to spend the time to discuss the information. Of course, that’s just it, there’s time. Managers don’t have time nor inclination to “guide the newbies, they need to learn for themselves.” It hurts a bit to see the natural learning process being considered a bad use of time, but it happens. Also – isn’t that what we hire them for? All of these staff have a degree, don’t they? Can’t they understand this piece of paper?
You see, there’s a difference between comprehension and internalization. I may be smart enough to understand the formula on my own, but if it doesn’t make “sense” to me, I still wouldn’t really “get” or “do” it. Until we get over that hurdle of “making sense”, we’d never really learn or able to activate the knowledge.
And that is what we mean by “adaptive challenge”. It’s something that we can comprehend, but there is something still stopping us from fully internalizing it. My fellowship talked about adaptive challenge in context of being a leader, but it actually comes from the learning process.
How, then, do we overcome an adaptive challenge? How do we make “sense” of things, so that we can actually do something? What kind of dialogue is needed? How can the system (school, companies, professors, manager) support the process? These are the questions that will become more important in the coming years.
Tika Anindya 