Allowing people to make discoveries for themselves
Transcript of this video:
I was talking with my friend, Rob Poynton, this morning, and we’ve both been engaged in some writing projects, and I was sharing that I’d come up with a few new ideas around which to structure some of my thinking about my unhurried project.
And I said I was excited about them, but I was feeling a bit cautious about sharing them.
And to try and explain why I say, well it’s a little bit like if you’re in nature, in a field, and you discover a beautiful butterfly, you have that moment of breathtaking discovery, and then you think, I’m gonna share this with other people, say, you grab the butterfly and you dip it in preservative and you pin it in a frame and you show them, look, look at this wonderful butterfly.
But what you’ve inadvertently done, is taken away from them the most exciting part of the experience which is the surprise and the insight that you had when you first discovered it.
And in sharing, you’ve actually given them a slightly dead version of the real thing. And the neuroscientist David Rock talks about this.
He says that it’s quite a tricky business teaching people things because the way the human brain works is so complex that it’s hard to know what will actually create a moment of insight or discovery for someone. But it’s in that moment of surprise that the learning gets really imprinted.
And I think it’s very easy, and I think there are commercial reasons why, we’re tempted to present training as a series of pinned butterflies in frames.
But what excites me more is: how do I create the experience of walking in the field where those discoveries can happen more serendipitously?
Photo by Ana Martinuzzi on Unsplash
