Pattern Making, Pattern Breaking

Using Past Experience and New Behaviour in Training, Education and Change Management

Ann Alder

• Publisher: Gower
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317083078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Rapid changes in technology, the nature of organisations, non-traditional career progression, globalisation and 'virtual worlds' mean that we need to become ever more effective learners in order to keep pace with the demands placed upon us. Our patterns of understanding, the ways in which we make sense of our work and our world, hardly become fixed before we are asked to change them and form new ones. The ability to build patterns is fundamental to our ability to learn. Ann Alder's Pattern Making, Pattern Breaking explores the ways in which educators and facilitators can work to help students build those patterns that will be most useful to them. These may be 'technical' patterns of language, number, sequence or process. They may be thinking patterns that support problem-solving, creativity, logical analysis or empathy. They may be patterns of behaviour that demonstrate trust, influence or integrity in relationships. Ann also illustrates how you can teach students to break patterns: to help them move on in the learning process by recognising and rejecting long-held patterns of behaviour or assumptions that are unhelpful or redundant. Formal education and training do not necessarily produce learners who are well-resourced to take advantage of opportunities that arise and to avoid some of the stresses that uncertainty, ambiguity or imposed change place upon them. So, perhaps one of the most important patterns that we can explore and understand as we move forward, in a changing world, is our own pattern of learning. Whether you are a parent, teacher, tutor, trainer, coach or manager, you need to be an effective facilitator of learning and this book is the perfect starting place.

PART I
Pattern Facilitation

1
Why are Patterns so Important in the Facilitation of Learning?

Traditionally, workplace training (rather than the broader field of education) has been an instructional process. Experienced and skilled operators (master craftsmen) passed information, knowledge and technical skill to their apprentices. Knowledge was tested through theoretical examination: physical and technical skill was developed through structured practice and observation and tested in practical demonstration.

Much of this type of learning is still at the heart of modern, professional and vocational training whenever trainers seek to create consistent and automatic responses. Think of examples from the training environment:

• The correct sequence of steps in a manufacturing assembly process.

• The correct procedure to follow in dealing with a customer complaint.

• The features of a selected product that make it best suited for a stated purpose.

• The standard pre-flight checks a pilot learns before aircraft takeoff.

At its most basic, the type of learning that this requires is rote learning: repetition of words, formulae or actions, sometimes without any real understanding of meaning or implications. When my very young son was learning to count he consistently counted: ‘One, two, three, four, five, seven, eight ….’ On one occasion my response was, ‘What happened to six?’, to which he replied confidently, ‘One, two, three, four, five, what happened to six, seven, eight …’. A repeated pattern, yes, but clearly not yet a pattern that is entirely useful!

My experience, and the focus of this book, is in working with adult learners in the context of their professional lives. Having been a learning designer and facilitator for more than 30 years, I have worked with individuals, teams and organisations through periods of change, pressure, reorganisation and achievement. My focus has always been on helping individuals to assess and develop their own skills and behaviour in order to achieve the results they want and need in their professional lives. For me, this is an on-going process of helping people to recognise, evaluate and change patterns: patterns of action, thought and habitual behaviour. This book focuses on the application of these pattern changes in organisational and professional environments although I recognise that there is much overlap in personal or life coaching and even in therapeutic contexts.

Being Clear About the Patterns You Want

In organisational development programmes, despite a much greater understanding of adult learning than we had some years ago, we still encounter training programmes in which learning objectives are published as, ‘Describe the Situational Leadership model’ or ‘Explain the principles of excellent Customer Service’. Can the learners describe or explain? Yes. Can they use the theoretical model to achieve a behavioural result? Not necessarily. Does it matter? Only if you know very clearly what the purpose of your learning intervention is and how you will evaluate success. If the learning is simply to pass an exam by answering multiple-choice questions the knowledge may be enough. If the learning is to improve supervisory leadership skills in action in order to improve organisational productivity, simple knowledge is unlikely to suffice.

The trainer in an instructional and supervisory role is seeking to reinforce an accepted body of knowledge, a set of principles or a learned sequence of steps in order that it can be repeated and applied, many times, without error. Just as a physical skill, for example, a golf-swing or a the ability to manipulate a pair of chopsticks, is learned through observation and practice, so many professional skills are developed through instruction and repetition, until they become automatic. Traditional on-the-job training uses this method: observe someone else carrying out the process, become familiar with the patterns, perform the task under supervision until the pattern is established, then perform it independently.

We experience this physical pattern-making in muscle-memory which demonstrates that the body has begun to groove in a pattern of movement. Compare, for example, the concentration required to co-ordinate two hands when learning to play the piano, or hands and feet when learning to drive, with the unthinking movements of a professional musician or driver. The automatic response only comes after patterns are repeated and refined until the outcome is entirely predictable. We also experience this when we can respond to a question with the correct answer, without any effort, because the answer is firmly embedded in memory. In this type of learning, the instructor retains a high level of control over the outcome. Standards are predetermined, there is a clear, correct answer (the pattern to be acquired) and achievement of that standard is relatively simple to assess.

This is pattern making in action. This form of training can, of course, be delivered well or badly. Even in very technical, instructional training, the skills of the trainer will have a huge impact on the quality of the learner’s experience and the ease with which the pattern is acquired. Good instructors have always recognised the need to involve the learner in the process of recognising and assimilating these patterns. Let me use a story to illustrate this.

A LEARNING STORY …

My elderly uncle and aunt, both in their 80s, decided to enrol on a series of computer skills training classes. They wanted access to new technology to enable them to access the internet, send emails and take, send and print digital photographs. When I asked them how the classes were going, they told me that they were making progress but that they had two instructors, one of whom was ‘great’ and the other ‘useless’. I was interested to know what they experienced as the difference. Their responses were interesting.

The ‘useless’ instructor worked to his own agenda. He told them information they didn’t need, which just confused them. He worked fast, demonstrating long sequences of actions they could not retain. When they failed to understand something, he repeated the words and the instructions he had given them before. He demonstrated his competence – and undermined their confidence in their own.

The ‘great’ instructor worked with them, identifying what they already knew and what new skills they wanted to develop. He asked lots of questions that made them think. The questions they liked were framed to help their understanding:

‘What do you think would happen if you clicked on that icon?’

‘What does this remind you of?’

‘When did you do something similar before? What happened then?’

‘Where do think this fits in to the sequence I showed you before?’

The ‘great’ instructor moved at their pace and gave them confidence in what they did know. He described the computer in terms they understood, avoiding jargon. He drew on their previous experience.

They passed their exams.

This ‘great’ IT trainer understood the need to work with patterns. He recognised that, even in a technical training programme, there needs to be involvement and participation from the learner, in order to allow the learner to recognise the patterns that are already in place (When did you do something similar before?) and to start to create new ones (What do you think might happen if …?).

This trainer, in a technical subject, could be instructor, coach, guide and facilitator. This is the challenge to trainers who want to work in more creative, responsive and learner-centred ways: to design and deliver pattern-making training that ensures that new knowledge and skills are retained and applied. The trainer must become confident in managing the process, rather than merely the content, of the learning.

However, for many trainers, before they can work to develop new patterns, they may need to consider supporting the learner in ‘un-learning’.

In a published article, William Starbuck¹ of New York University said,

Learning often cannot occur until after there has been unlearning. Unlearning is a process that shows people they should no longer rely on their current beliefs and methods.

Trainers, especially those prepared to move into a facilitative learning role, may need to help people to break patterns. I have described some of the positive advantages of learning skills and processes until they become reliable, easy and consistent but this automatic functioning also carries problems. These are particularly significant if we have formed patterns of ineffective or inappropriate behaviour or are making decisions on the basis of incorrect or inappropriate knowledge.

Studying failure and learning from it is a classic way to make unlearning part of everyday experience. Unfortunately, because of the negative emotions of failure, people tend to avoid thinking about the details, deny the facts, and (often) make the same mistakes again later. While negative emotions may grab your attention, moving to a dispassionate, or even positive, perspective is necessary to effective unlearning. Sometimes, trainers need to create striking ways of getting people to see the reality of a situation and the need to change before they can adopt new patterns. Our role is to enable the learner to see the old pattern, understand its effect and consciously break it, replacing it with a new and more effective one.

In many aspects of learning and development, especially those which address values, competence, behaviour, personal styles and skills the trainer necessarily becomes much more facilitative in style. Whilst the learning objectives may be clear – for example, to enable individuals to explore how they can be more effective contributors to a team – the actual content of the achieved learning may not be predictable. Individual learners will have their own insights, personal responses and ideas and these will form the basis of the learning that they retain and apply for themselves.

In this situation the role of the facilitator becomes even more clear: to help the learner to recognise existing patterns, evaluate them, select the ones that achieve the desired results, eliminate redundant patterns, modify or extend others and introduce some entirely new ones.

Creating new patterns can be a painful process. For anyone who has learned and applied skills and behaviours, with success, for many years, asking them to change those patterns can require major shifting of things that are important to them. It can challenge self-esteem, throw people into confusion and create anxiety. Good facilitators recognize this and work with the learner to ensure that the value of the new pattern makes the process worthwhile.

A LEARNING STORY …

Some years ago, I worked with Ambulance Station managers from a rural UK Ambulance Service. It was at a time of significant change in the service, when ambulancemen were increasingly becoming highly-trained paramedics and when senior staff were required to take on extended business, man management and financial skills as they managed in an increasingly commercial environment.

One Ambulance Station manager spoke to me at length about the difficulty he was having in making the necessary changes to his work patterns. Having followed his father into the service, he was an ambulanceman through and through. Approaching retirement after 40 years in the service, he was distressed.

‘How come’, he asked me, ‘after 40 years of doing a great job, in a community where everyone knows and likes me, where we’ve always offered a great service, where I’ve been decorated and promoted, I’m suddenly no good at my job any more? What’s wrong with me?’

This manager had patterns of behaviour that had served him well all of his professional life. What he was struggling to come to terms with was that the patterns around him were changing so his behaviour was no longer seen as successful in the new environment. He needed to be able to separate his feelings about himself from his reactions to the changes he was facing: to maintain his self-belief and personal confidence while he reviewed and made changes in his professional role. This was inevitably a painful process, as the demands that were being made of him were in conflict with many long-held, deep-rooted beliefs and values.

As a facilitator, my job was to enable him to work through this stress to move to fit into the new order to be able to identify those personal patterns he was prepared to change and how far he was prepared to move in order to fit in to the new order.

In this case, I was able to find a way of engaging the manager in a dialogue that began this process. Knowing that he was an enthusiast for steam engines, steam trains and old railways, I asked him to consider what was wrong with the old steam engines he lovingly restored. ‘Are they worthless pieces of junk?’, I asked. ‘Of course not’, he replied. ‘They’re fantastic pieces of precision engineering. They’re functional, beautiful pieces of craftsmanship.’‘So why are they no longer running up and down the railways of Britain?’ ‘Because some ***** changed the gauge of the track.’

He then turned to me and said, ‘I see what you’re saying. There’s not much wrong with me … it’s just that the world is changing around me. I just have to decide what I’m prepared to change to go along with it and what is too important to me to ever change.’

In this type of situation, the trainer’s role is pure facilitation. The root word of facilitating is facile: easy, fluent or flexible. The action word, facilitate, means to promote or make easy. Essentially, then, the act of facilitating is to enable something to happen easily. It is not to do the ‘something’ oneself but to promote the doing of it by others.

In our context, the something done by others is learning or, more precisely, shifting a pattern of knowledge or behaviour to accommodate new insights.

The cloudier and more complex the situation, the more the emphasis is on the facilitator to help learners to recognise, select and create patterns. For managers bogged down by operational problems, recognising patterns in the way they work, communicate and problem-solve may allow them to redesign their systems to achieve more effective results. For an individual struggling to build and maintain working relationships, the recognition of the patterns of behaviour that others perceive as arrogance may be the first step towards improving personal credibility and influence.

How Do We Help to Make and Break Patterns?

In many ways, the traditional model of experiential learning supports this process and is the reason why many facilitators choose to use experience or activity-based learning methods in personal, management and leadership development programmes. The positive advantages of facilitated experiential learning are considerable and all trainers and facilitators should understand the model as it gives significant insights into the way in which adults learn to recognise and manipulate patterns in their own lives.

Again, let me tell you a personal learning story to illustrate the importance of using the principles of effective experiential learning in the design and delivery of training and development programmes.

A LEARNING STORY …

My story is set in Sri Lanka. As a young teacher of English, I had been posted to a teacher training college in Sri Lanka, to work on curriculum development, lecture on educational methodology and improve the quality of written and spoken English for adult students in training as teachers. Part of my responsibility was to supervise the planning and delivery of lessons during teaching practice – a period of classroom teaching in local schools in which the trainees gained experience and during which their performance was monitored and assessed.

My initial approach was straightforward: work with my trainees to identify some best practice teaching methods, select the learning go...