I would like to share this 'Note from the Publisher' of a Women Magazine which best describes today's highly competitive work environment. I sincerely hope that it will also be a form of teaching for us all, so as to better improve our working life for the benefits of all........
In the humdrum of our daily work, we are often confronted with issues, concerns, problems and challenges. In many ways these are learning opportunities. We go through many experiences in our work life, and no two experiences are exactly the same.
However, you often find people making the same mistake twice even though the first experience would well have taught them and wised them up in preparation for the future. The difficulty is that, not all of us have learnt to learn, particularly from experiences. Learning to learn is becoming a critical skill in today's highly competitive work environment. Having a lot of experiences in itself is not a guarantee of having a lot of knowledge or wisdom. You may possibly have a person with 10 years experience, yet fairs much poorer as a performer than someone with less.
In my experience, there are certain not-so-desirable habits that Malaysians have when it comes to learning from experience:
Firstly, we have a tendency to focus only on the content of an experience rather than derive principles or insights from it, for example, focus on what and who rather than why. If something goes wrong, we tend to find out what and who were responsible, and then we stop at that. The "why's" are not asked at all, and hence, no real learning occurs. In post mortem meetings of events (if at all carried out), people focus on what happened rather than why it happened and how to ensure it does not happen again.
The second habit is a tendency to discount other people's experiences as irrelevant or inconsequential to one's own scenario, primarily because the "content" is different. So often, when I present concepts and principles to managers based on certain experiences or cases, the tendency to say "Oh, but we are in a different industry (or country)" is often there, before we can even sufficiently reflect on these experiences to derive learning points.
The third is the tendency to look for the "right answer", ie, what we should do rather than how we arrive at the appropriate action. Perhaps the habit stems from our schooldays when our teachers would ask us a question and we were expected to give tham a "right answer". We are taught to regurgitate rather than to think. In the real world, there may be more than one right answer, or maybe none at all.
In the humdrum of our daily work, we are often confronted with issues, concerns, problems and challenges. In many ways these are learning opportunities. We go through many experiences in our work life, and no two experiences are exactly the same.
However, you often find people making the same mistake twice even though the first experience would well have taught them and wised them up in preparation for the future. The difficulty is that, not all of us have learnt to learn, particularly from experiences. Learning to learn is becoming a critical skill in today's highly competitive work environment. Having a lot of experiences in itself is not a guarantee of having a lot of knowledge or wisdom. You may possibly have a person with 10 years experience, yet fairs much poorer as a performer than someone with less.
In my experience, there are certain not-so-desirable habits that Malaysians have when it comes to learning from experience:
Firstly, we have a tendency to focus only on the content of an experience rather than derive principles or insights from it, for example, focus on what and who rather than why. If something goes wrong, we tend to find out what and who were responsible, and then we stop at that. The "why's" are not asked at all, and hence, no real learning occurs. In post mortem meetings of events (if at all carried out), people focus on what happened rather than why it happened and how to ensure it does not happen again.
The second habit is a tendency to discount other people's experiences as irrelevant or inconsequential to one's own scenario, primarily because the "content" is different. So often, when I present concepts and principles to managers based on certain experiences or cases, the tendency to say "Oh, but we are in a different industry (or country)" is often there, before we can even sufficiently reflect on these experiences to derive learning points.
The third is the tendency to look for the "right answer", ie, what we should do rather than how we arrive at the appropriate action. Perhaps the habit stems from our schooldays when our teachers would ask us a question and we were expected to give tham a "right answer". We are taught to regurgitate rather than to think. In the real world, there may be more than one right answer, or maybe none at all.
"The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn"
~ Alvin Toffler ~
~ Alvin Toffler ~
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