I read a fabulous and somewhat confronting quote this week by Zora Neale Hurston who said that “Research is formalised curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
This got me to thinking a little about some of the verbs we use in the learning and development space and whether they have allowed us to play safe with our learning activity.
The word ‘research’, in its contemporary application, certainly isn’t always about curiosity and prying and nor is it always connected to purpose. In fact, I think we’ve dumbed down that version of research to be more about collecting and locating. These are lower order thinking verbs and they serve not to transform but to sustain business growth.
Research just shouldn’t be as simple as Googling or YouTubing a term to find what already exists. It should be about analysis, exploration, hypothesis testing and evaluation of approach. Research should tell us something that we don’t already know, rather than just confirm something we already suspected.
After all, very few people pry into the business of others to find out things they already knew! We really do need something fresh and juicy from that level of investigative effort.
I’d like us commence a “dumbing up” of words like ‘research’ in our teams. Only then will we be able to take pride in it and truly discover something new and gamechanging.
FREE WEBINAR – “Unlearning Learning – Why the ways we learn are wrong … and what we need to do about it.”
It seems that everybody these days is interested in being a learning organisation … which is great. The only issue with this is that we’re going about it all the wrong way.Learning organisations are not simply built on the back of more workshops, better seminars and more polished speeches.Most Australian businesses report a concerning level of time poorness that suggests that adding ‘anything’ might not be a great idea. This webinar, therefore, is not about adding first but only doing so when we’ve subtracted to create the room for great new things.Alvin Toffler perhaps said it best more than 30 years ago when he posited “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read and write – but those who cannot learn, unlearn and then re-learn.” He was onto something!So this webinar’s intention is firstly to help you identify the practices, habits and routines in your learning endeavours that are no longer serving us and no longer engaging our people and teams.
And then … once the decks are cleared … we can get stuck into exactly what should emerge as a transformational feature of your business, through a concerted and intentional focus on contemporary learning.
This webinar is targeted leaders and learning focused managers and leaders across all industries and sectors.
