Tuesday Essay #1: Learning as a process: Beginning, Middle, and End

From our Day One Essay on ‘Ike loa, the Hawaiian value of Learning, and our value for the month of July:

“I will be the first to chime in with the opinion that we should all be lifelong learners, and that as adults, we should define tertiary learning for ourselves.

However first, it may be useful to think of ‘Ike loa as a process in and of itself before you jump into a program for it, whether that program is about Managing with Aloha or something else.”

Let’s start with a very adult concept: What is ‘tertiary learning?’

We can define tertiary learning in two different ways, literally, and very pragmatically. Let’s get the literal definition out of the way first. You’ll find tertiary learning on the page for ‘higher education’ in Wikipedia, where the very first page of the Overview says,

“Post-secondary or tertiary education, also referred to as third-stage, third level education, or higher education, is the non-compulsory educational level following the completion of a school providing a secondary education …”

In plain talk: Tertiary learning is the learning adults choose to do when their parents and schools are no longer doing the choosing for them.

The important part of that to me is non-compulsory, because that means you have to want it badly enough to seek it for yourself, even when you don’t have to. You have to want it, and you have to work toward getting it.

In my experience, the more you have wanted something, the more you value it once you finally get it. The more you have worked at something you’d wanted, the more it grows in its worth to you.

In my coaching business, I teach Managing with Aloha as a managerial sensibility in the delivery of worthwhile work, and my students are adult learners with a ton of other concerns battling for their very limited attention. They must want to learn pretty badly, for their translation of ‘non-compulsory’ usually means “Great! One less thing I have to do.”

I also think that tertiary learning does something very effectively for those who own a business: It creates this identifiable dividing line between those who are lifelong learners and those who are not. If you are a savvy business owner, you are a lifelong learner, you hire lifelong learners and get into partnerships with them, and you associate yourself with lifelong learners in virtually everything that is connected to making your business successful.

As a management and leadership coach in business, my stance with their employers is this:

You are responsible for nurturing, fulfilling, and then rewarding that desire your employees have for tertiary education. If they’ve never heard the term before, be the one to teach it to them, and get them to want it. Give them ample tastes of it, and get them to hunger for more.

I think it is part of the responsibility of leadership. Without learning there is no growth, and without growth toward a vision, a leader doesn’t have much of a case for leading in the first place.

We’re all adults here

Sounds like a valid assumption for the workplace, doesn’t it?

“We’re all adults here” has to be a valid workplace assumption in both theory and in practice; adults should be treated as adults. The reasons are pretty obvious, and so I’m not going into them: I think most of you reading will agree that the world of work is an adult place, and the more it functions like one (with healthy doses of play and joy mixed in), the better.

Learning in an adult place, is the combination of tertiary learning and the collection of life-relevant knowledge and information. School may be over, but learning will never end for us; it is the way we successfully navigate through the adult years of our lives.

The value of ‘Ike loa, and of learning within Managing with Aloha, is focused on workplace context, and our adult workplace rules of engagement. Now that said, MWA also makes a bold, nonnegotiable assertion:

Work is personal

Managing with Aloha is a philosophy built on some pretty strong beliefs about work and workplaces. It is helpful to keep one particular belief in mind when it comes to understanding where learning processes intersect with Managing with Aloha, and that foundational belief is this:

IF learning this (whatever the “this” may be) will be good for me within my work,
THEN learning it can also be good for me within the rest of my life.

Then, with that assumption locked and loaded, the next question becomes, “How so?”

And then, “How shall I use it?” meaning, “How shall I use this learning at work, at home, at play, at all of my life? What will get it to be most meaningful and useful for me?”

Those should be the key deliverables of the MWA learning process: Meaningful and Useful.

Otherwise, why bother? I mean really, if learning something is not going to be meaningful and useful to you, why bother with it? In your choosing of tertiary learning, choose to learn something else that will.

First of all, you will enjoy the learning process a whole lot more: You will more actively engage in something that you are interested in, and with a vested interest, not just a healthy curiosity.

Pretty obvious, right? However THIS is the biggie: Whatever you choose to learn, is somehow going to be connected to whatever you grow to BE.

From Managing with Aloha (and our Day One Essay July 1st):

Gaining more knowledge equates to having more confidence and belief in one’s ability and capacity to learn, and having more of that self-belief empowers you, liberates you and releases a creativity you may not have even realized you possessed. You constantly give birth to new possibilities in this creative process; you create your own destiny, your ‘Imi ola [seeking your best possible life].

You are sure to feed your body each day, aren’t you? Well, new knowledge is the food for mind, heart and soul. Without it, you are not providing nourishment for your overall well-being. We grow as we learn.

We grow into BEING as we learn. That is the pragmatic part of Tertiary Learning.

How’s this for some great tertiary learning?
8:30am Paddleboard Calisthenics in Uleweuweu Bay

Where workplace training falters

The central assumption, that good for me at work should be good for me with everything else, is where a ton of really good-intentioned teaching initiatives fail miserably in the workplace: Whoever is designing and presenting the learning curriculum, whatever it may be about, has not answered WIIFM, the “what’s in this for me?” question. WIIFM has a somewhat negative connotation to it, when in fact, it is extremely relevant to learning, and to the MWA assumption we have already mentioned here: Work is personal.

If the work you do is not personal for you, it is simply earning a livelihood. That’s fine if that’s what you want, and that IS all some people want— they prefer to keep their life and work in separate camps. However non-personal work is not Ho‘ohana work, and when we are talking about learning within Managing with Aloha, we are talking about creating Ho‘ohana work for EVERYONE involved with a business, and maintaining an organizational work culture where that mission-critical Ho‘ohana will thrive, and thrive very productively and profitably.

To quickly review Ho‘ohana:

Ho‘ohana is the value of worthwhile work. When you ho‘ohana, you are working with passion, with full intention and with definitive purpose. You work to bring meaning to the life you lead.
~ Ho‘ohana! Everything you need, you have.

In other words, we have now added a 3rd key deliverable:

The key deliverables of the MWA learning process are Meaning, Usefulness and Ho‘ohana.

The next time you find yourself dragging your heels to another company-mandated training session, commit to getting these three things out of it with this very simple strategy:

1. Grab a sheet of plain white printer paper, and turn it to the landscape orientation.
2. Across the top, write what your ho‘ohana is in just one concise sentence (this is about you, and so you know what you mean and can read between the lines: Write one trigger-type sentence, not an essay.)
3. Now fold the paper into 3 columns, and at the top of each column, write "Meaning for me," "Usefulness to me," and "My ho‘ohana how?"
4. Take it to the training session, and pay attention within the new ‘Ike loa/ Tertiary learning context you have now constructed for yourself. Take notes, but whatever notes you take goes into one of those 3 columns. The rest is filler which might make the class interesting (or boring), and is filler you probably need not retain.

If you don’t have a training session coming up soon, you may want to try the exercise this week with a reading of one of my essays here: Even if you have read it before, this time, read it as a student of the MUH University of MWA Tertiary Learning, imagining that I’m in the front of the room teaching it to you.

My essay recommendation would be this one: The Role of the Manager in Managing with Aloha: The case for a better way to work.

Learning as a Process: Beginning, Middle, End.

What I’ve essentially presented to you thus far, is that ‘lifelong learning’ is not just a cliché; successful people are those who think of it as the real deal of life, and the whole enchilada with how our growth as adults continues to happen.

‘Continuous learning’ however, can be just too nebulous: Practically speaking, we find it so much easier to containerize our learning somewhat, putting it into course segments like we did in school. The calendar, or semesters, gave us a beginning, a middle, and an end that we could get our arms around, and channel our attentions to. What is this beginning, middle, and end in the workplace?

Another way to put it is this: We have established that learning should be a workplace constant. Now how shall we break it down into some manageable, and measurable chunks?

That my friends, will be your homework this week.

Homework is a good MWAC habit to have!

If I gave you all the answers, you would not be learning, would you.

What I have done today, is give you context for the assignment. In the coming week, you need to be the one to define your beginnings, your middles, and your ends as best for your workplace. I’ll give you an easy example that most of you will have in common in just about any traditional workplace environment: Hiring, and the placement of someone in a job that is new to them.

• Will your beginning be the interview process, new hire orientation, or both?
• Will your middle be the probationary period, the first six months on the job, or the first year?
• What will your end be? When someone changes positions, transfers, or earlier, say, when they begin to write their own strategic plans?

The reality of our workplaces is that we have several contextual beginnings, middles, and ends, don’t we. Besides hiring, there are project teams of all sorts.

Before next week you are going to choose just one to work with for the rest of the month’s time during which we learn more about ‘Ike loa and how to apply it. Do it once, and then you can repeat the self-coaching with all your other contexts. Sound like a plan? Great.

1. Articulate your beginning, middle, and end as best you can – get it on paper. Consider the training class note-taking scenario I gave you earlier: Will associating meaning, usefulness, and Ho‘ohana help you define your beginning, middle, and end? They should...

2. Second, think about the “MWA beliefs” and assumptions I have shared with you here, for they are “normal” to MWA, but they may not be normal to your workplace, or to the person newly joining you. If you need to make some new agreements that will help these assumptions materialize, what will those agreements be? You may not have time to tackle them right now or in the foreseeable short term, but going through the planning exercise for them will give you a more realistic framework for what we tackle with your learning of ‘Ike loa through the rest of this month.

I’ll see you back here next Tuesday. In learning more about ‘Ike loa we will Ho‘ohana together.
~ Rosa

Comments

[Marilyn Bohn]

Just your picture along was peaceful and calming. And just reading your beautiful Hawaiian words gave me a lift. I love the simplicity of the 3 steps in the learning process and by keeping each in perspective and concentrating on them one at a time it brings simplicity into our lives and we don't run faster than we can run.

[Marilyn Bohn]

Oh dear, I should have pushed preview, I mean your picture alone--not along (of the people in the water) was peaceful and calming.

[Rosa Say]

Aloha Marilyn, not to worry, I appreciate the comment!