The current age of disruption could be the most exciting and the most threatening time to be leading a business, as there have never been greater opportunities or bigger threats. Many of the largest companies in the world today were established within the last two or three decades and in industries that didn’t even exist before. At the same time, many household names have simply disappeared.
The speed and scale of change seem to increase exponentially and every business and economy in the world is scrambling to respond.
After establishing the right mindset as previously discussed in my previous article “Living with the Right Mindset”, the next step toward rising above disruption is to understand how to learn in this era.
Now, I’m certain that learning is something we are all too familiar with as it is something we constantly do every day. From the moment we are born until our last breath, learning is endless. At the same time, we also need to continuously unlearn and relearn throughout our lives.
However, in the disruptive era in which nothing stays the same for long, the learning approaches we traditionally have used are not always relevant.
Over the past few years, we have witnessed how the rise of mobile technology, cloud computing and the Internet of Things has digitally disrupted almost every industry, with the learning and human development sector no exception. What is more, disruption has made many skills redundant, creating the need for nearly everyone in the workforce to evolve and be willing to learn new skills continuously.
Here is the tricky part. Most of us, when we were in school or university, assumed that the learning we received then would carry us through the bulk of our career. That, of course, is no longer the case.
Now that I’m writing about this issue, I’m reminded of a learning conference I attended a few years ago. The speaker was Sugata Mitra, a professor at Newcastle University in England and a winner of the 2013 TED Prize. He’s best known for his “hole in the wall” experiment — placing a computer inside a hole in a wall in India to see who would use it and how — which helped inspire the popular movie Slumdog Millionaire. His topic at the session I attended was “The Future of Learning”, in which he emphasised how we needed to un-school our employees.
Traditional learning environments, he told us, were built merely to support a world that no longer exists. Children traditionally were brought up in ways that prepared them to work on an assembly line. They were taught to memorise and do things accordingly without having to think or contemplate much.
He also elaborated that, traditionally, we needed to develop soldiers — people who could take orders and could easily be replaced by others. We needed to develop people who could sit and take direction and not ask questions, and we needed the factory workers to stand in the same spot and do the same thing over and over again, without being creative. That was the main reason why education and learning were originally designed the way they were. It’s a model that endured for four centuries or more.
Now, the situation is different. The world has been transformed tremendously. As a result, we can see a lot of skills gaps and associated performance deficits, a challenge that is at the forefront of most learning leaders’ minds these days. Whether the conversation is strategic or tactical in nature, because most of them are equipped with obsolete knowledge and skills, they lack the ability to implement or apply new ideas. Thus, Prof Mitra encouraged us to learn by doing things, experiencing real-life scenarios and not just being taught to repeat things.
In other words, he introduced us to the concept of “un-schooling”. In short, we were told to get rid of conventional learning methods and to prepare people to receive development guidance tailored for the work they need to do in the organisation now.
It occurs to me that skill education has changed completely. Students now watch YouTube or search Google to learn how to do things. Modern learning technologies have taken the power from the teacher or facilitator and given it to the learner.
Simply stated, digital disruption is here whether we want it or not, and what we need now in order to stay relevant are the skills suited to fast-paced, changeable environments, where creativity and motivation are essential.
Last but not least, Prof Mitra stressed that “…what we teach today will be obsolete tomorrow. Teaching a person to keep his feet on the ground doesn’t work. The ground is shifting all the time. Knowing is not the most important thing. To be able to find out is more important than knowing.”
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Arinya Talerngsri is Chief Capability Officer and Managing Director at SEAC (formerly APMGroup) Southeast Asia's leading executive, leadership and innovation capability development centre. She can be reached by email at arinya_t@seasiacenter.com or www.linkedin.com/in/arinya-talerngsri-53b81aa
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