• Members Only
    • Login

Canadian Association for the Club of Rome

Live differently - it's your choice!

  • Home
  • About
    • About the Club
    • Meet our Directors and Members
    • CACOR Groups
  • Articles
    • Climate
    • CACOR Groups
    • Quotes
    • Trending
    • CACOR Writers
    • What are you doing
    • Solutions
    • CACOR YouTube
  • Events & Resources
    • Luncheon Events
    • CACOR Forum
    • Presentations
    • Resources
    • Announcements
  • Contact Us
  • Join Us
    • Apply for Membership

November 30, 2017

Mastering the Learning Pyramid

The static world of skills – We’re focusing on the wrong thing. Focusing on skills betrays a static view of the world.

The assumption is that if we acquire certain skills, we will be protected from the onslaught of the robots and the rapidly changing world around us. It ignores the fact that the average half-life of a skill is now about five years and continuing to shrink.

Our media and conversations are consumed by concerns over the spread of AI and what it will mean for jobs. I’ve noticed that the discussion quickly turns to what skills we will need to continue to be employable in the future, especially when the participants have children who are trying to prepare themselves for the world ahead.

It’s precisely that static view of the world that is our biggest barrier. We need to find ways to prepare ourselves for a world where learning is a lifetime endeavor. The question then becomes: what will help us to learn faster so that we can quickly acquire whatever skills are required in the moment?

The learning pyramid

In that context, we would all benefit by expanding our horizons and exploring the learning pyramid outlined below that can ultimately become the key to sustained and accelerated learning for all of us. Skills are at the top of the pyramid – they are ultimately what helps us to achieve impact and create value in a specific context.

Capabilities that drive learning

That leads to the third level of the learning pyramid – capabilities. Supporting the development of skills and a deeper understanding of our contexts are more fundamental capabilities. These capabilities can take many different forms but, in my mind, the core capabilities are curiosity, imagination, creativity, critical thinking and social and emotional intelligence. If we cultivate these capabilities, we’ll be able to quickly understand the evolving contexts we live in and acquire the skills that will help us to operate successfully in very specific contexts.

Re-thinking our institutions

At a broader societal level, the learning pyramid can help us to understand how our institutions will need to evolve to support life-long learning. If I’m right about the learning pyramid, our educational system will need to be re-thought and re-designed from the ground up. Rather than focusing on transmitting broad-based knowledge and building skills, our schools will need to shift their focus to cultivating capabilities and drawing out and nurturing the passion that is latent within all of us. Rather than giving out certificates verifying that specific knowledge or skills have been acquired, schools will need to expand their horizons and become life-long learning coaches that get to know each of us individually at a very deep level and can help and challenge us to learn even faster throughout our lives by building deep and long-term trust-based relationships.

ut, it doesn’t stop with our educational system. As I’ve written about elsewhere, all of our institutions will need to be re-imagined. Rather than thinking about learning as something that occurs in the occasional training programs that support a scalable efficiency operation, we’ll need to re-imagine our work environments in ways that can support scalable learning, learning that occurs day to day, on the job, in the work environment. If we’re serious about scalable learning, we’ll need to find ways to cultivate and amplify the passion of everyone who participates in our institutions.

Read the entire article here

 

Article posted by John Verdon / Articles, CACOR Values / Accelerating Change, Future of Learning, Future of Work, Institutional Innovation, Scaling Learning, Value, values Leave a Comment

Read more articles like this. Sign up for our latest updates.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Stay informed …

Upcoming Events

  1. CAPTURE CARBON NOW

    April 27 @ 10:00 am - 5:30 pm

View All Events ...

Recent Articles

  • Climate of The Holocene, From the End of the Ice Age (11750 years ago) to The Present as Derived From Ice Cores; Recent Sudden Changes and Those of the Past. David Fisher
  • Path to Zero Carbon: Navigating the urban energy transformation
  • You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’til its Gone

Topics

Monthly Archives

Connect with us

  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 

Membership

Apply for membership.
 

Apply

Donate

CACOR is a registered charity.

Donate

Details

  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • FAQ
  • Sitemap

© 2018 · Canadian Association for the Club of Rome · Built by Creative Integration Web Design · Contact Us