Dave Kahle - What Is Active Learning and Why Is It Important?

Published: Mon, 04/09/18

Teaching Your Organization to Learn

By Dave Kahle

Are things changing rapidly in your business?

Silly question, isn’t it? Of course they are changing. Rapid change is the distinguishing characteristic of our age.

Take that rapid change and add to it growing competition, increasing complexity, consolidations at every level, and increasing demands from customers and you have the recipe for a business climate that will turn anyone’s hair gray.

This rapid change whirling around every company puts great pressure on organizations to change themselves. Not only must the organization as a whole change, but the individuals within each organization must themselves change, learn and grow more rapidly than at any time in the past.

This ability for an organization and its people to change in response to the changing world around them may be the ultimate success skill for the Information Age.

A few years ago, it was good enough to allow learning and change to happen in a hit or miss fashion. Not so today. If your organization and your employees are going to change as rapidly as the environment, they are going to have to get serious, dedicated and systematic about those changes.

That means you must organize and manage an effort to stimulate and support positive personal change. In other words, organizations, including yours, need to develop a new capability – the capability to change rapidly.

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Every organization has a unique set of capabilities. While some of these capabilities are necessary for any successful business, others are unique to that individual concern. For example, every business must be capable of accounting for its money; every business must be capable of generating sales; and every business must be capable of providing the goods or services its customers want. Those are universal and basic capabilities. If your organization cannot do these, you won’t be in business very long.

However, the real strength of the business comes from those capabilities that are unique to it, that differentiate that business from its competitors.

Some businesses have created great research and development capabilities, others are outstanding at customer service, while others emphasize quality throughout. Some are outstanding in sales, other marketing, still others in management.

One way to prepare your organization for the rapidly changing 21st Century is to develop a unique and new capability. That capability is what I call "active learning.”

So what is active learning and why is it important? Let’s start with a definition: Active learning is the process of acquiring new information and/or gaining new insights, and then changing behavior as a result. You’ve experienced it. It’s what happens when you go to a seminar or a conference, gain several new ideas, and then come back and implement them in your organization.

Active learning takes place at a number of different levels within an organization. But they are all dependent on an individual employee changing how he/she behaves. The employee who is adept at active learning regularly absorbs new information and acts in different ways as result. It’s the same process you engage in when you attend a seminar, except that it’s required of every one of your employees, not just you...[Click Here To Read The Entire Article Online]

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