Harnessing "Eureka Power":

A New Source of Leverage for Organizational Transformation

By David Hutchens

Our story of organizational transformation begins not in the walnut-paneled office of a Fortune 500 firm, but in the ancient Greek city of Syracuse. Archimedes had just been tasked with discerning whether the gold in the king's new crown is pure, or mixed with silver alloy by a dishonest goldsmith. How could Archimedes know without actually melting down the crown?

He wrestled intensely with the problem for many days, but had few answers. One evening, still consumed by the puzzle, he filled his bath tub with too much water... and when he stepped inside, water spilled over the edge. Archimedes immediately realized the connection of this simple event to his conundrum. "Eureka!" he cried - literally, "Ah-hah! I have found it!" Based upon his newly discovered principles of density, weight and volume, he designed a simple water displacement experiment that confirmed that the king's crown was indeed tainted.

Now flash forward 2,000 years, to a corporate training room somewhere in Neenah, Wisconsin, where employees of consumer-products behemoth Kimberly-Clark are chattering excitedly about some pretty heady concepts. Lofty abstractions like supply chain optimization and cost shifts, and capacity restraints are being dissected with the enthusiasm usually reserved for Packers games. The room is buzzing, and employees are having a blast.

Organizational leaders are observing the training event, stunned. Just a couple of months ago, this would have been impossible. In fact, despite their best efforts to initiate a dialogue around their Supply Chain program, called "Go To Market," the confusing concept was falling on deaf ears. And now... this. Awareness. Understanding. Excitement. What made this near-miraculous transformation possible?

There are plenty of other organizational leaders who would like to know. (Don't worry; We'll get to that.) Among organizations, the quest for employee-driven change has reached a near-feverish pitch. After all, most organizations have felt the sting of change, as well as the pressure to mobilize, flex, improve, deliver value and innovate. And where else is there to turn in these matters but to the employees? Today, the promise of sustainable change hinges on the human beings who comprise the organization; their knowledge, understanding and learning are the organization's sacred assets. When it comes to breathing life into your strategic initiatives, the employees are the ones who hold the power.

But here's the rub: Creating a "learning organization" to fulfill this need has proven to be devilishly difficult. In both the corporate communications suite as well as the training room, the initial intoxication over technologies like computer-based delivery with streaming video is giving way to a more sober perspective; Sure, such tools are sexy and their economic efficiencies are compelling. But they are, after all, merely tools that offer no magic on their own. They can't generate knowledge, commitment or enthusiasm. For deliverance, corporate agents of change need to begin elsewhere.

Instructivism and The Nurnberg Funnel

Leverage may be found in revisiting our own assumptions about organizational learning and change. In 1990, learning theorist John M. Carroll presented his polemic against contemporary instructional methods in a book called "The Nurnberg Funnel." The title is a reference to the famously ridiculous image of the Funnel of Nurnberg, a nonsensical device that allowed vast amounts of knowledge to be transferred directly to a learner via a funnel inserted into the brain. We may laugh at the absurd image, take a stroll around the corporate communications suite and you'll find the principle is very much alive. Carroll deconstructs learning methods that rely on such activities as listening, recording, memorizing, and regurgitating... but very little personal connection or application. This old world view is called Instructivism, and in his book, Carroll takes a critical look at many of the assumptions of the Nurnberg-ish approach. Specifically, we find that instructivism assumes that:

• everyone learns best by listening, and receiving information. ("Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em... then tell 'em what you just told 'em.")
• people will naturally make the bridge from theory to application. ("Here's a graphic of our four-quadrant model. Hang it up in your office so you'll remember to apply it.")
• knowledge transfer is a passive process, in which new awarenesses are transferred from a teacher to a student. ("Listen up. I'm the expert.")

But the joke is on the corporate world, which still clings to the instructivist myth. Learning theorists established years ago that the approach is flawed. In the 1980s, for example, an experiment was conducted at the IBM Watson Research Center. In it, two groups of participants were tasked to learn how to operate the IBM DisplayWrite system. The first group was given the system's 94-page instruction manual. The second was given a set of 25 cards that contained no step-by-step procedures; Rather, they featured challenges to complete specific tasks by directly manipulating and experimenting with the DisplayWrite system. Further, key parts of those cards were left blank, so that learners would have to fill in the details as they explored the equipment.

The results of the experiment were dramatic. By flipping through the 25 challenge cards (in no particular order, mind you), the second "Guided Exploration" group attained the desired level of proficiency in less than three hours; The "instruction manual group" took more than eight hours. Furthermore, the Guided Exploration group learned many additional aspects of the system that weren't even a part of the assigned task.

See where this is going?

Further, many adult learning theorists and practitioners are quick to redirect leaders and change agents to their own three-year-olds: Watch how they experiment with Lego blocks, Play-doh and other toys. Observe the concentration in their eyes. Notice how they manipulate the parts, trying different configurations, accepting unintended results and building on them, until they create something they find useful. We call this "playing." But, the theorists point out, such playing leads to powerful learning and sustainable change.

And now the epiphanies start coming rapid-fire: People are naturally wired to learn, change, and adapt; People learn through their experiences; No one ever learned to ride a bicycle by sitting through a PowerPoint presentation. People learn by doing.

Eureka.

New Models, New Possibilities

What is being proposed here is a seismic shift in corporate learning and communications from an instructor-centered orientation to one that is learner-centered. And that's the crux of the rapidly evolving body of knowledge that is experiential learning.

It's a sprawling school of thought that emerged, arguably, in the 1960s, with the rise of Constructivist thinking. Philosophers such as Bruner, Knowles and Vygotsky were concerned with the origin of knowledge, and their position was that knowledge is an individually generated phenomenon. You create knowledge, the constructivist says, simply by interacting with your world.

Many theories of learning sprung from this movement. A review of movements such as Activity Theory, Functional Context, Situated Learning, and Discovery Learning is intriguing not so much for their differences, but for their similarities. Today, we recognize that most theorists define at least three distinct phases of experiential learning:

• An experiential phase. In the experiential phase, the learner encounters a new and concrete experience... and then deals with it in terms of observations, feelings and reactions.
• A reflective phase. Based on the experience, the learner considers her own perceptions and reconciles the experience against the memory of her past experiences. The learner asks "what does this mean? What does this connect to? How do I make sense of this?" Some theorists (such as David Kolb) further subdivide this stage into a "Concept Formation" stage, in which sense is made of the experience by tying it to a new model, theory or vocabulary.
• A testing phase. Finally, the learner "tries out" these new awarenesses by engaging in new concrete experiences in hopes of producing new and more desirable results... thus beginning the cycle all over again. (Note that nearly all theorists present experiential learning as a cyclical process. That is, each new awareness in learning creates a new context in which the process is initiated all over again, in an upward spiral of higher and higher understanding and mastery.)

Whenever we build a house out of Lego blocks or go about our daily work tasks, we are learning all along — naturally and intuitively. In fact, much of the time when we are learning, we don't stop to think "hey, I'm learning!" We're simply falling back on the hard wiring of our brains to experience, reflect, connect and test. The challenge, then, is to create an environment for intentional and directed natural discovery — all throughout the organization.

Let's look again at the stages of experiential learning and consider its application in an organizational change context. The experiential phase may be fostered by providing the members with concrete experiences composed of elements that they may manipulate. This may consist of games, simulations, toys, case study materials or any means that physically engages each learner.

The reflective phase (as well as concept formation) may be facilitated by providing learners with new models and new vocabulary to help them make sense of what they just experienced... and create new conceptual "buckets" for categorizing the memories. For this task, there's a lot of power to be leveraged by using metaphor, stories, images and music to help the learner embrace and internalize concepts.

Finally, in the testing phase, we can help the learner identify new contexts -- specifically, within her business reality -- in which the new awarenesses can be applied, thus beginning the learning process all over again.

Most important throughout this process is the idea that teachers don't teach. Rather, learning is propelled by the learner. The role of the change agent is merely to facilitate a context in which people can become safely and un-self-consciously immersed in the process of experiencing, reflecting and testing.

Discovery at Kimberly-Clark

Now let's return to Kimberly-Clark and their supply chain challenge. For its approach, Kimberly-Clark partnered with Tampa-Florida based Paradigm Learning -- an organization that finds its roots in the advertising industry, and helps to educate and energize employees around strategic business issues in large organizations. Leaders at Kimberly-Clark were delighted by the company's wide suite of experiential learning elements which included engaging visuals (such as game boards and wall maps); small-team activities that employ the experience and knowledge of each individual member; simulated situations which mirror some aspect of the learners' reality (safe from real-world consequences); and lots of gaming techniques that include chips, game board pieces, dice, timing devices, playing cards and more. The icing on the cake was a flair for drama, including music, humor and delightful visuals.

Working together, Kimberly-Clark and Paradigm created a blended learning hands-on program that allowed employees to actively experience the lessons, instead of just passively receiving the information. With an engaging gaming element and an online follow-up component, the program was titled "Go to Market."

Central to the Go to Market program is the powerful Discovery Map tool. A Discovery Map captures difficult, often abstract organizational concepts and strategic initiatives in a metaphorical image that is printed on a large (often 4-foot by 6-foot) table poster. Using visual experience as a foundation, Discovery Maps incorporate seeing, hearing, doing and touching -- into a 90-minute training session. Question-and-answer cards plunge people into the imagery, stimulating their minds with rich content as they locate specific answers on the tabletop map. Role playing, team discussions and competitive situations reinforce the message. Just as Archimedes sunk into a tub and discovered principles of density and displacement, learners immerse themselves into the reality of Kimberly-Clark via the metaphors on the map. Most intriguingly, each learner generates different awarenesses and insights, depending on her frame of reference. And in the process, learners form a remarkably complex understanding of the many elements of their business reality, and how those elements are interrelated.

At Kimberly-Clark, it worked. Incredibly well. To date, more 1,500 participants have experienced the Go to Market program and now speak comfortably about such topics as cost shifts, service structure, and capacity restraints. More than 30,000 more employees are looking forward to experiencing the program through this year. Bill Rohrer, Kimberly Clark's Director of Supply Chain Process Excellence, said the program's interactive design and relative simplicity is what makes it effective. The fact that it's easy to deploy also is important. "By using self-facilitated classroom settings, high interactivity and online capabilities, we are able to take advantage of this training resource as often as needed," Rohrer said.

Leaders in other organizations are catching this new vision as well. "Every day in America, a lot of people come to work and don't really understand what their company is or where it's going," said Elyas Musleh, director of organizational development at Borden Foods, which used its own Paradigm-designed Discovery Map to train employees on a team-based organizational system. "Can you imagine coming into a company and sitting down at a game for two hours? It's a great way for employees to learn about things we really need to drive home."

Kimberly-Clark is among a growing list of forward-thinking companies that have used Discovery Maps as an experiential learning tool to make their corporate vision become daily reality. A few examples:

• Anheuser-Busch increased employees' performance and understanding of the "balanced scorecard" process in its wholesale operations division with a map called The Race to First and Best."
• Honda re-emphasized its way of doing business with a map called "The Honda Philosophy." As it celebrated its 20th anniversary in North America, the program helped employees buy into the company's "three joys" – buying, selling and creating.
• American Express showed employees how outside factors such as competition and technology have affected the company's Financial Resource Group. A map called "Transformation for Growth" illustrated how new products and services will preserve their future.

In these cases, it seems that the old axiom is true: A picture is truly worth a thousand words. Not to mention millions of dollars to the bottom line.

The Future of Learning.

The challenge, then, is not "how do we get employees to learn." Rather, it is "how do we create a context in which they can encounter their own powerful and innate abilities to experience, reflect, connect and test." Notice the important difference between the two orientations. Organizational learning ceases to be something we "do to" employees. Instead, trainers become stewards of a latent, collective power that may be harnessed and directed towards our organization's shared goals and aspirations.

The equation is simple. To unlock the power of widespread transformation, simply embrace some new assumptions. Immerse yourself in experience. Welcome mistakes. Keep what works. Apply it to your reality.

And if, in the process, you splash a little water all over your bathroom floor, that's all the better.

end

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Copyright (c) David Hutchens, 2007