Experiential
Chapter 3 - Experiential Growth Method®
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Welcome to the Experiential (thinking &) doing page
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Experiential is the first concept of the "Experiential Growth Method®".
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| Nature never betters one characteristic. It enhances the whole. In business, optimisation of the individual (with productivity as a goal) should be replaced by improving the team, the department, and the entire organisation. |
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Core ideas
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Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely our intuitive models of the world. Scientists speculate that modelling is a common mechanism for perception and understanding language, remembering, imagining, dreaming, etc. One general process describes them all.
Experiential is a general term for the intended active use of memory, knowledge, thinking and imagination to compass primary feelings to create a model of a foreseeable future.
- Pasteur once put it, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind,” and this is why we need to learn how to be surprised.
- Galileo never amused himself by throwing objects from the Tower of Pisa. Instead, he reflected that if a heavy object fell faster than a light one, then when the two objects are tied together we would face a paradox: The lighter object should slow down the heavier one, but together they should fall faster since their total weight is greater than that of the heavier object on its own. Galileo, surprised by this simple mental fact, came to the fundamental conclusion that the only possibility is that these two objects had to fall at the same speed and then, generalizing it, that all objects fall at the same speed.
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| Constructivist thinking | Your first impuls | Essentialist thinking |
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| It only feels right, so I have to invest in more rational thinking | The feeling of knowing | It feels right, so it has to be right |
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Experiential is not past experience
| Those who rely on traditional strategic thinking—an approach one roundtableexecutive described as "linear and deterministic"—will be less attuned to emergent factors to which they must respond.
"LEADERS WILL BE BLINDSIDED IF THEY RELY ONLY ON THEIR PAST EXPERIENCE OR EXPERTISE WHEN MAKING DECISIONS." Leaders must be comfortable moving forward with ambiguous and incomplete information about what’shappening around them and the potential impact of their actions. They must learn to see their decisionsand actions as working hypotheses that they can only validate by collecting feedback on their impact asexpeditiously as possible. Leaders will be blindsided if they rely only on their past experience or expertise when making decisions. Even with more data and analytics, executives we talked to said that leaders still need to adopt holistic thinking and stay open to the unexpected. They must learn to stretch their "own imagination and creativity" to envision what the future could be for the company and its stakeholders, anticipate possible scenarios, and prepare to adapt to whatever unfolds. It is important for leaders to think and act with an outside-in perspective, cultivating a 360-degree viewof the dynamics within their organizations as well as of those of the ecosystems in which they operate. It’s about inviting employees to share in decision-making and creating a culture that makes people feel safe enough to take risks and act on behalf of organizational interests. It’s also about earning trust from and offering trust to increasingly diverse stakeholders outside of the organization and collaborating with them in new and uncharted ways.(1) |
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Experiential is not expert
| The team noticed that the players did get better over time. This certainly suggests that performing well on this game requires some skill, which might in theory be trained by good advice. The players then wrote down some advice for future participants, and also rated the quality of their own advice, and how helpful they expected it to be.
The analysis showed that the best performers believed that they had given the best advice. However, when pieces of advice were then given to a fresh group of players, this turned out not to be the case: players who were given advice from the best performers didn’t improve at the game any more than players given advice from from other performers. The researchers also report a fascinating extra finding from this study: the second group of players rated advice that had come from the top performers as being the best — even though they had no knowledge of these people’s performance. In a fresh study, the team considered some possible explanations for this. Perhaps the top performers gave more articulate or more authoritative advice, for example. In fact, they found that it was the number of independent suggestions that mattered — and top performers offered more. “In short, advice from the best performers was not better. It just sounded better because there was more of it.” (2) |
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The metaphors we live by
| Orientational metaphors give a concept a spatial orientation; for example, HAPPY IS UP. The fact that the concept HAPPY is oriented UP leads to English expressions like "I'm feeling up today." Such metaphorical orientations are not arbitrary. They have a basis in our physical and cultural experience. Though the polar oppositions up-down, in-out, etc., are physical in nature, the orientational metaphors based on them can vary from culture to culture. For example, in some cultures the future is in front of us, whereas in others it is in back. (3) |
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| Content sources | |
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| (1) | Curiosity, Not Coding: 6 Skills Leaders Needin the Digital Age - Linda A. Hill, - HBS - 2022 |
| (2) | Tips From the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice? - D. Levari - Psychological Science - 2022 |
| (3) | Metaphors we live by - George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen - 2003 |
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Deep dive
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Learning
Learning is,
- in the first place, biological (based on needs)
- and social (based on obligations),
- creating meaning in the persons' mind (based on narratives).
Language shapes our thinking which in his turn shapes the person. When people come together and start interacting and telling stories to each other, the most crucial part is the story not told. This requires live and changing interaction and a healthy level of ambiguity between virtue and vice.
Learning, education, stems from ex-ducere, meaning to lead someone out into the world.
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DEI as an example
What does science say?
Avoiding bias and prejudice simply by 'being aware of DEI' does not work. On the contrary, after training aimed at raising awareness of biases, the biases weigh even more heavily (Kahneman et al., 2011).
By emphasizing the following, leaders can facilitate and promote inclusion in teams (Homan, 2018; Kearney et al., 2009):
- Team members are more open to colleagues who are different if they see the value of that diversity, for example because they realize that the customers they have to serve are also very different. Or because they experience how rich the advice of a project group becomes when the problem is viewed from many different lenses. Uniqueness becomes an asset.
- Being very different from each other is also experienced as less difficult when there is an important, shared goal.
- “In sameness we connect, in differences we grow” (Virginia Satir): by looking for what we do have in common, group cohesion grows.
| Content source |
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| Kathleen Vangronsvelt - Antwerp Management School |
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