Is Learning Dependent on Environment?

I'll start this post with a blatant advert - due to cancellations, I have one remaining place on each of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner in Spain this September. If you're interested, or you know someone who's interested, see www.nenlp.com for all the details.

Now, I mention this because one of the most important aspects of the training in Spain is that it takes place in a wonderful environment. Peaceful, relaxing, beautiful, and a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of daily life.

You roll out of bed, have breakfast on the patio and join the training, all in the glorious Andalusian sunshine. Previous participants have said that the environment is a great place to learn, but does it really make a difference? The course content is the same, regardless of whether it's delivered in the foot hills of the Sierra de las Nieves or in a meeting room at the Holiday Inn just off junction 25 of the M1. And at the Holiday Inn, you don't have to make your own coffee, it's provided for you in thermos flasks conveniently located outside the training room. Also, you get proper flip charts and fluorescent lighting for those dull autumn afternoons.

Intuitively, you're probably thinking that you'd rather work in the sunshine. Doesn't it evoke memories of primary school, and being allowed to work outside on the sunniest of afternoons? And doesn't it make your manager think that you're skiving, not working?

My experience is that taking people away from their daily routine for long enough that they actually forget their routine is what 'works', rather than the specific environment. Going to a hotel function room for life-changing training is exactly like going for a team meeting or health and safety training. The associations that we make probably include boring, waste of time, mandatory, irrelevant and so on, whereas the associations that we make with travelling to a villa in Spain are the opposite - exciting, valuable, free choice.

'Alternative' meeting venues are popular for corporate training, team meetings and team building events, and superficially these offer a good alternative to hotel rooms, except for one big problem - in order to cater to what they think the corporate market wants, they provide... meeting rooms with flipcharts, projectors, bowls of sweets, coffee on demand, cheap biscuits in individual packets. So as soon as you're past the lovely landscape, or the museum displays, or the fun stuff, you're right back where you started - in the hotel meeting room.

In Spain, we'll be putting lining paper on entire walls to work out language structures, and we'll be using all of the outdoor space as a 'breakout area', and as soon as I call it a breakout area it sounds boring. There will be no flipcharts. Outdoor and indoor activities, demonstrations, practice sessions and group discussions will be broken up with videos and other media. None of this is any different to how a course would run in the UK. The difference is the whole set of associations that students make before they even arrive.

So, does environment make a difference to learning? Absolutely, yes. But it's the anticipation of the environment that makes the biggest difference of all.

Oi! Learning Style! Noooo!

I recently saw this post on LinkedIn, from a well known UK recruitment and training company:

Your learning style is your personal ‘comfort zone’ for learning. Individuals, educators, and organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the advantage in catering to learning styles. Download our free guide to learn more:

Each person has a unique way to absorb and process experiences and information. Using Kolb's learning style inventory you can:

Maximise learning potential of yourself and others
Support training design
Analyse and develop team effectiveness
Develope communication and manage conflict

I replied:

Learning cycle yes. Learning styles no, no, no.

Allow me to explain (Thanks Victor!) Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory is a valid and readily observable summary of the natural process that we all go through when we have a new experience and integrate that experience into decisions about future behaviour - a process that we call 'learning'.

We all learn in all ways. However, as soon as we turn a process into a set of categories, we get stuck in a labelling system which is restrictive and doesn't actually support the learning process. So why create the categories? So that a profiling tool can be created and licensed and protected, and training can be sold alongside it.

The commercialisation of Intellectual Property kills it, prevents it from evolving. The only way that this kind of IP evolves is to be killed by a younger, more relevant successor. Witness the heavy handed IP protection of SPIN selling, only for it now to be usurped by The Challenger Sale.

Training and associated companies are under pressure to produce content - ebooks, buyer's guides, website content and of course, training course content. They simply can't create all of this content from scratch, and why would they? The problem comes when their content writers - or any of us - start to believe that, just because something's on the internet, it must be true. Learning Styles must be true, because they have a Wikipedia page and have been around for ages.

Learning theories and models are regularly peddled by anyone wanting to make a quick bit of cash from profiling tests. High volume, low price, and the promise to increase ROI on training budgets, what could go wrong? Honestly, how often do you refer to or think about all those psychometrics you've completed over the years? You probably spend more time on tests that tell you which Star Wars character you are.

We must always remember that learning, and knowledge, are living, evolving, changing, moving processes that are innate to us all. Arbitrary categories are not.