INsight/ Experiential Learning Challenges
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Photo credit UNIVERSITY OF pennsylvania.
Manila, 7 September 2023 — The elements of challenges that change your life.
Story
It happened ten years ago. A woman with an underdog mentality whose parents had immigrated to the US from China and whose father had told her that she was no genius, received the MacArthur Genius Fellowship, a highly sought-after award in the US. Making good use of the new resources at her disposal, she would go on to undertake research on what makes children and adults successful, publish a best-selling book on her research work, show why effort matters more than talent, become a professor of psychology at one of the most widely recognized centers of learning in her field, and then continue deepening her research in the years to follow.
Want to know more about this remarkable woman and her life journey from immigrant’s daughter to management consultant, high-school teacher, founder of an educational nonprofit, and researcher in psychology? Then read Are You Gritty to explore three lessons I learned from Prof. Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania. First, about starting a deliberate practice to grow your gritty attitude. Second, about choosing one goal for your professional career and aligning what you do towards that one top-level goal which is about your passion, and which can turn out to become your calling in life. Third, about engaging supporters to travel with you on your journey and accompany you through the many ups and downs.
It should come as no surprise that I keep following Prof. Duckworth’s work with great interest and regularly comment on it on my blog. That’s because I share her passion for understanding what makes leaders successful, and for discovering how to best facilitate that process through my coaching and training work. In a world where enthusiasm is common at the start of challenges and endurance down the line is rare, the quest of how to grow more leaders effectively—and to scale that with more speed and fun—is what drives me every day. I learned that Grit, which Prof. Duckworth defines as the power of passion and perseverance, is a key ingredient for leaders to successfully reach the finish line of their challenge. And there is more, as she is showing us in her continued research with GritLab, her experiential learning program to help more people achieve success in their endeavors.
Challenge
So what can we learn from Prof. Duckworth’s recent experiments in GritLab? To discover that for yourself, watch her presentation and the following discussion at Carnegie Mellon University here. What I learned from her GritLab research to date is captured in three lessons. The first lesson is that it matters for every challenge to be structured as an experiential learning process. Becoming successful requires much more than receiving the knowledge that answers the what question. As learners and practitioners, we especially need elements to help us explore the how and why questions.
The second lesson is that an effective learning challenge will be designed to bring you into a state of dissonance every week, putting you in a situation where you have to find answers by trial and error and produce results on a regular basis (weekly or monthly) that are then shared with others in the challenge. That’s what engaging in deliberate practice is about. The third lesson is that experiential learning challenges work best when they involve a social element. That means being designed to develop solutions together in small teams, rather than by yourself working individually. As Prof. Duckworth explains in her presentation, she discovered some of the essential ingredients of learning challenges by studying programs that have decades of experience in designing and operating challenges, such as the Outward Bound program.
I was excited to learn about her findings in the GritLab research because it confirmed, to a large degree, the design of leadership challenges that we have been developing over the past years at TransformationFirst.Asia, including the one-to-one Leader in Transition program, and the challenges for small teams (we call them Collabs) in the Grow3Leaders community, including the current LEADyear Challenge to Become a Trusted Leader. When I say confirmed, I mean that we found similar experiences regarding participants who show up with grit and invest in the necessary engagement, and regarding participants who have yet to step up to engage at that level of intensity and focus. In the blunt language of grittiness, this is about either doing the work required or not doing the work. That’s the opportunity that experiential learning challenges offer. A choice has to be made at the beginning and throughout the challenge.
Question
My question for you this week is about reflecting on experiential learning challenges to grow your leadership in the context of what we learned from Prof. Duckworth’s research findings. What made you decide to take on the challenge? How did it feel to be led into a state of dissonance as part of the challenge? And what role did grit play as you struggled to continue participating in the challenge and to successfully reach the finish line?
The feedback we have received to date on our challenge programs suggests that experiential learning can indeed produce high-impact outcomes. Many of the successful finishers describe them as transformational and life-changing. We would love to see that happen for many more leaders we can coach and support to contribute to a more sustainable and peaceful world in which we can all live and thrive together. Moving forward with that vision involves continuous learning on our part, and that’s where individual feedback and frequent testing of our designs against the research conducted by leading psychologists like Prof. Duckworth is both helpful and essential to advance.
If you’re interested in experiencing this for yourself, reach out and let me know. You can sign up for a free strategy call for executive leadership coaching using the link below. For collaborative challenges, our 4th quarter intake plans for the LEADyear Challenge to Become a Trusted Leader in Grow3Leaders will shortly be available for purchase here. Message me if you are interested.
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