Archives For why
If you really want to bring about change in people then you need to appeal their hearts and not to their heads. The sharing of more information or engaging in more rational discourse on its own doesn’t appear to help people to make significant change but an appeal to values, attitudes, and feelings first can motivate people toward making changes.
The two short videos below will clearly demonstrate this point but society still struggles with this notion and as you will see from the next few paragraphs I too will ironically address this first from the cognitive perspective. Why? Well…Isn’t that what good educators do?
Educational psychologist, learning theorists, instructional designers, educators and many more learning professionals refer to Blooms Taxonomy of Learning which looks at learning from three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.
These domains are also commonly presented in the following relationship:
Cognitive = Head/Knowing
Affective = Heart/Feeling
Psychomotor = Hands/Heard
Bloom intended the taxonomy to be holistic and assumed that all three domains would be included when we develop learning environments. Unfortunately, this often isn’t the case in our educational systems and most other sectors of our society.
The head, is often overemphasized and rational thinkers are held in high esteem, the heart is relegated to artists, musicians or the irrational and those who work with their hands are necessary but are limited to building and keeping our infrastructure running. It only seems rational that if you want to bring about effective change then you just need to appeal to the head–or at least this is what those oriented toward the rational would argue.
But experience doesn’t always confirm this notion. The science community is beginning to recognize the importance of the affective domain. For example the scientists within the Geoscience program at Carlton University recognize that including the affective domain in their teaching can significantly enhance learning or if ignored can hinder or prevent learning. To promote the use of the affective domain they have developed a useful site called The Affective Domain in the Classroom that points to and annotates a wide assortment useful resources and research.
Source: http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/affective/index.html
This illustration of the two domains provides a good visual starting point for considering how the affective domain can be used in a scientific setting.
Enough of the head talk and onto the heart…
How to Change People Who Don’t Want to Change | The Behavioral Science Guys
I trust you will enjoy the irony of this TED talk that argues that TED talks don’t change peoples behavior.
Why TED Talks don’t change people’s behaviors: Tom Asacker at TEDxCambridge 2014
This past Wednesday, I had the honour and privilege of working with the dedicated faculty from the BSN program in the BCIT School of Health Sciences. We spent the morning exploring and discussing the following topics as we worked to prepare for the upcoming curriculum redesign that the BSN program is undertaking this fall:
Start with Why – Download PDF of slide deck SoHS Why
Videos used in the session:
John Kotter – Heart of change
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action
Creating Significant Learning Environment – Download PDF of slidedeck CSLE-SoHS
Blog post Significant Learning Environments supporting the session.
Connecting the dots vs collecting the dots – Download PDF of slidedeck Connecting Dots
Video used in the session:
Seth Godin – Stop stealing dreams
Blog post Experts connect dots not just collect dots supporting the session.
Mindset for change Download PDF of slidedeck Mindset for Change
Video used in session:
Blog post Fixed Vs Growth Mindset = Print Vs Digital Information Age supporting the session.
When a clear vision, what I will refer to as the “Why”, is missing people easily lose sight of their primary responsibility and get caught up in pushing priorities that may be important but when placed in context of the bigger picture result in a completely different focus. Let me explain…
My priority as an Instructional Development Consultant is to help faculty create the most effective learning environment. Therefore, I look for ways to use technology as a tool to enhance learning and create a more engaging environment. When I run into challenges, obstacles and the day to day bureaucracy of higher education I deal with those challenges or obstacles in such a way that they don’t hinder the faculty from creating significant learning environments and look for ways to ensure that we are still effectively serving our learner.
In contrast, if a person doesn’t have a clear understanding of Why we do what we do then they are left to focus on their own priorities and that usually means getting caught up in the details and minutia of their job. Institutions like BCIT have a FOIPOP policy and generally the purpose of these types of policies are to:
– Ensure compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection and Privacy Act
– Define the roles of employees and contractors in complying with the Act
– Reduce the institutions liability and risk of litigation due to inappropriate handling of information
– Protect the institutions reputation
These are all admirably and necessary purposes and it is good that we have a policy and office which is concerned with these issues. Depending on your Why, something like a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPOP) can be dealt with in two different ways.
First way
Without a bigger Why the people tasked with ensuring that these purposes are upheld make these purposes the top priority and all activities are weighed against these priorities. The best example of this in higher education is the debate of using the cloud, social media and other collaborative and distributed resources which the institution does not control. If a person’s Why is to enforce the policy then free software that is based in the cloud, social media tools and other resources cannot be used because these tools contravene the policy. If people are adamant about using these tools then explicit hoops must be jumped through or the institution will create its own cloud based tools that they can control. The first and most common response is to abstain or restrict for fear of the consequences. Fear becomes the driving force. Fear is the factor that is preventing all of higher education from moving to Google Docs or Office 365 and providing their students access to the most widely used collaborative tool, not to mention saving millions of dollars each year.
Second way
In contrast, if an institution and all members hold that their Why is much bigger than a policy and the top priority is to create the most effective learning environment for its students, when they come up against a policy like FOIPOP the response will not be reactive and based on fear. It will be proactive and creativity will be used to explore how can we use these engaging collaborative tools and still adhere responsibility to FOIPOP. With the right Why, people are automatically looking for ways to use these tools and still satisfy the FOIPOP requirements. More importantly the right Why can motivate people to explore creative solutions like revisiting the legislation to see if the interpretation that is being made is really the best interpretation that will help us to insure that we are creating significant learning environments.
IF everyone in an organization from the housekeeping staff on up to the President all hold the same Why—something like:
We are committed to creating significant learning environments that will help prepare our learners to face an uncertain future and enable them to learn how to learn and ultimately solve problems that don’t even exist.
then FOIPOP and other bureaucratic obstacles are not dealt with reactively in fear but are proactively managed in such a way that they do not hinder the bigger Why.
The change of perspective that a clearly defined and well communicated Why can move an organization from being fearful and reactive to being creative and proactive, assuming an organization has the leadership wisdom to value proactive workers (see my post The Paradox of Being Proactive.
Does your institutions have a clear and well communicated Why? If it doesn’t what can you do about it?
