Doing by Learning by David Erixon

It seems that we keep coming back to a paradigm shift that is happening in the way we produce,consume and communicate — and equally, how we destroy and unsustain the world we all are sharing. The human condition makes change hard for us to accept while institutional forces make any disruption arising from change hard to maintain. We have to continuously create and learn not to stay still. This is a challenge for traditional educational systems — and organisational models built on a factory mentality — since they seem to leave us ill equipped to handle disruption while the ‘war stories’ of success taught in business schools reinforce a sense that there is a singular endgame rather than an ever changing journey.

This text is not about the future what of business. It is however about how we might get there. As creators (and in equal terms destroyers; such is the dynamics of business), we are inevitably faced with the necessity to re-think and re-do the way we create customers and grow new markets as the old ways are no longer serving us, or simply not working. Not only do we need to let go of the current platform from which we operate, which in itself is difficult; so much of our modus operandi is habitual and incremental and this is a comfort zone from which we operate most of the time; we also need to create and jump to an entirely new one. In many ways this is a jump into an unformed unknown. Learning, I would argue, done in the right way, is the key for doing this successfully. Learning as the way to transform how we do business.

Experimenting with learning-by-doing and experiential learning at Hyper Island

Hyper Island, a tertiary-level school I co-founded in 1995, has become somewhat synonymous with learning-by-doing, a type of learning process focused on experiencing as a way for participants to acquire and expand knowledge, skills and even identity (how we are being in relation to what we know and do), in order to get ahead with professional, as well as personal, challenges of disruption caused by digital technology and The Internet ; rendering entirely new patterns in how we think and behave in our everyday lives.

When Hyper Island was founded back in 1995, our quest was how to teach people about things we yet didn’t know anything about. We had to find both a practice, and a metaphysical concept of learning, that would allow us to create an education for, and from, the future.

It wasn’t enough for us to teach someone how to fish (to paraphrase an old English proverb), we wanted to teach people how to learn in an accelerated way.

Learning-by-doing is a learning process derived from the concept of pragmatism, an experiential, or experience-based, approach to learning. Most people mistakenly think that learning-by-doing is a ‘trial and error’ activity, almost mechanical, focused on a certain practice of an individual — do, do and do again, until you get it right — and that it is merely used for learning in a causal container of “if-then”, a test environment for inferred mental or physical schemes. It would mean that we can only test things that have already been proven, and therefore, we can only learn what is already known. It would be a terrible methodology for venturing into the unknown; it would simply not know how to deal with it, apart from trying to fit things into an existing scheme that can actually never fully incorporate it.

Nothing could be further from the essence of learning-by-doing.

Learning-by-doing is a term that would perhaps be better explained by “learning through reflection on doing”. At the heart of learning-by-doing sits experience. Experience is both the process of experiencing and the result of the process. It’s in the experience (the actual transactions between subjects and their environments), that difficulties emerge, and it is with experience that problems and opportunities are resolved or explored through questing and inquiry. Critical and reflective thinking is key to this process (although some people unfortunately decouple “critical” from “thinking”), and so is playful and imaginative thinking. In other words, learning-by-doing doesn’t separate thinking from doing, in fact it brings the two

together, and it contains the anticipatory inquiry into “what-if”; It is inherently trying out the unknown, using the whole person (sensing, thinking, feeling, intuiting, imagining, acting, etc.), preferably within a larger collective context where ideas can be multidimensionalised and used to allow new patterns to emerge.

At Hyper Island we refer to this on-going process as the learning spiral. It’s an adaptation of David Kolb’s Learning Cycle:

but it also includes the subject(s) and its environments;

The Life World (a combination of the whole person — body, mind, self, life history, etc.), the context of learning (why, how, what, and who with we are learning), as well as the awareness of the changes that take place. As we move through this spiral we memorise changes and we are deliberate about experiencing and affirming our own experience , which includes growth and change). Or to put it differently: you cannot take the human(s) out of the learning equation.

The Self is a rich instrument, which is why self-awareness is key. You have to include yourself fully in the learning process if you want to create from another level of consciousness (outside the habitual patterns). Repeat, refer and review are levels of learning that require very little personal responsibility. The level of learning we aim for is reflection (which is where meaning is originated) and for that The Self has to be included (an open exploration of beliefs, actions, feelings, identity, etc.), in order to bring home learning fully.

Different types of learning challenges requires different types of learning methods

Most learning that takes place in our everyday lives is assimilative . It means that we have an existing pattern of the world (and everything in it, including practices) that is firmly established and all we are doing-while-learning is adding to that pattern — usually with small, incremental changes or refinements. We are learning-by-adding to that that already exists. This is usually what happens in a classroom — or a board room — where a subject is built up by means of constant additions to what has already been learned.

If the world was changing incrementally, assimilative learning methods would be relevant as a way to cope with that change (and so would incremental innovation as a way to make what is there a little bit better). Those practices that are occupied with entirely new patterns are described as accommodative or transcendent. This type of learning contains the destruction of existing patterns how to un-learn, how to deconstruct and ultimately destroy no longer productive beliefs) and the transformation of mental, sometimes even physical, schemes.

You have to both relinquish and reconstruct the world, and this can be experienced as very demanding, sometimes even painful. Most patterns, schemes or paradigms also include ideas of our own identity. When the pattern changes, so does our own idea of the self. This is why some learning experience has to be transformational of the self, of our being, both profound and extensive at the same time.

Learning-by-doing staged and facilitated in the right way, enables these transformations to happen, both faster and easier for the individual to cope with. It’s a myth that change has to be painful (this is just a belief). Through learning-by-doing participants are constantly working with their own experiences, and they are given the tools to explore it, be aware of it, look at it without judgement, and play with options. What-if?

A learning environment, a collective pursuit

Another aspect of learning-by-doing is the emphasis it puts on the environment and the social context of the learning. This includes the importance of communities of practice (a term coined by Etienne Wenger, a Swiss educational theorist and practitioner) to describe the role of communities in learning (including meaning and identity ); how the social context of our role impacts our ability to learn (in Wenger’s research of communities of practice he showed that most learning does not take place with the expert, it takes place among the apprentices, i.e. learning is a social technology within a community of practitioners, of daily practice ).

At Hyper Island, we place more emphasis on generating and supporting the right environment for accommodative learning to emerge within a group of participants, than time spent with particular individuals within that group (this is also why we care more about facilitation than The Teacher or The Master in the classroom). Culture is a powerful thing. Effective membership (including such human phenomena as belonging and inclusion), mutuality, shared purpose, shared values, cooperation and peer-to-peer support, are far greater levers for delivering powerful learning experiences, than just the “inner environment” of an individual. Compare this with a traditional classroom where most work are individual and where individuals are “shielded” from the group, premiering individual achievements, creating competition within the classroom through a Bell curve distribution of grades and rewards. This is also how most workplaces are organised and led.

Now, think of your own workplace and how it’s set up to learn from the future. Then ask yourself how to support people on their transformational learning quests. Would you send someone on a course, or would you change the environment which the person works in. Perhaps both? I think a good analogy would be a sick fish in a toxic fish tank — would you give the fish some drugs, or would you change the water in the tank? (Again, perhaps both, there is a short term and a long term aspect to it.)

Mindset and language

The final aspect of learning-by-doing is the importance of identifying the form that is being transformed. Metaphorically it’s about establishing your starting point, the current paradigm or pattern that you are locked-in to. It’s what Mezirow referred to as Frame of Reference.

This process is closely related to language. Transformational learning is always to some extent an epistemological change rather than merely a change in behavioural repertoire or an increase in the quantity or fund of knowledge. In other words, the learning process needs to support the creation of new language in order to reflect new ideas.

It is the creation of memes we’re dealing with here. Knowledge as strings of thought, punctuating existing notions, becoming part of the foundation of new ones; shaping our future experiences. Or as Wittgenstein put it: “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”.

This is, in my experience, the trickiest part of the learning process. The production of language requires some specific talents which takes great effort to acquire (or skills by a facilitator to unleash). Language is perhaps the most powerful tool of creation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1).

Doing-by-learning vs Learning-by-doing

This brings me to the title of this essay: Doing by learning, a subtle remark up to this point, but an important one hereafter.

Most education seems to be putting “learning” as the end to a means. We go to school to learn and even at Hyper Island, we talk about learning-by-doing as if doing was just another way in which to learn, instead of the other way around. It’s kind of paradoxical since Hyper Island was started because we wanted to CREATE an entirely new way to learn. The purpose was creation, learning only our way to get there.

Here is where I think the future of learning lies — and even so the future of learning-by-doing . It’s already reflected in cultural phenomena such as the makers’ movement, various platforms for co-creation, manifested in participatory events such as burns. Audacious dreams and visions, followed by energetic exploration — and learning — in the pursuit of making those dreams a reality. The act of manifesting creation becomes the event which fuels the spiral of learning.

Perhaps this is the real problem of business today, and why, perhaps, it has not already been re-invented. It seems as if business leaders has lost the ability to envision an alternative future. Lost the ability to create. And that’s why we, simply put, haven’t learnt more.

So I leave you with these question: What do you really want to create? And what do you not want to destroy?

The rest is actually just doing-by-learning.

David Erixon is founder of Hyper Island and David Erixon Ltd. This is part of the “Teacher” section of our new series of Hacker, Maker, Teacher, Thief essays. You can buy the book that inspired the series, Hacker, Maker, Teacher, Thief: Advertising’s Next Generation, here.