Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability.
This webcast shows JW Wilson’s presentation, The Neuroscience of Deming, at the 2012 Annual Deming Conference. In a previous post I wrote about this presentation which included a couple clips from the presentation. Now we have the full presentation on our YouTube channel:
Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.
W. Edwards Deming, in Out of the Crisis.
In the talk JW Wilson says:
Learning is all about accelerating your ability to adapt.
Our education system has fallen into a trap of being guided by what is easy to measure – scores on a test instead of what is important (increasing your understanding of the world that will allow you to adapt – which isn’t so easy to measure).
Experiential learning engages our brain in a way that makes transformation far more possible. Experiential learning is much more engaging with students at the time, but it is much more important that such learning has far more staying power. That learning resonates with how our brain works to help us retain it for the long term and lets us apply the ideas in the future.
The higher the meaning the higher the memory.
This is so important. Memorization for a test has very little meaning and so even those that do memorize well forget it soon after the memory exercise is over. Tie the learning to meaning that matters and people retain the ideas to help them use those ideas in the future. People see how the ideas have meaning that relate to things that matter in their life and are worth remembering, thinking about and using in the future.
Related: Current Neuroscience Understanding Related to Psychology and the Theory of Knowledge – Why Some Things in Education Work… and Others Don’t – Building the Adoption of Management Improvement Ideas in Your Organization – Encouraging Curiosity in Kids