Adventures in India

Experience is the greatest teacher. We remember best what we experience. We understand best what we identify with. We learn best by doing.

Behaviour follows patterns that we create as we come across new situations and deal with them. Our solutions may not be the best possible, but they are what we have done before and are comfortable with. These patterns dictate our default approaches, methods and attitudes.

For example:A careless person at home is unlikely to be careful with important documents at work.A person who resists change in his social life may take time to be comfortable with change at his workplace.A creative person is also likely to come up with interesting options when tickets to the movie he wanted to see are unavailable.

Most of the time, this is an unconscious process. Experience has taught us to prefer certain actors more than others. We learn to be careful of our belongings. We trust new acquaintances who have mannerisms we have noticed before in trustworthy people. These behaviors are triggered by previous experiences that we automatically take a reference from.

Experiential learning is increasing our reserve of reliable experiences that can help us adapt to any challenging situation we come across. When attempting to learn through experience, we first have to have a concrete experience of a scale such that it is brief enough to be analysed in detail, contains enough detail to draw learnings from and has meaning for the group analysing it.

Experiential training programmes provide such experience through mock targets, adventure activities, specific tasks and improvised play-acting. This creates a uniform experience and highlights varied perspectives, methodoligies, and areas of strength or weakness in the group and provides for meaningful comparisons and options for consideration.

When we learn to actively apply these processes to our experiences, we can derive much more information from even seemingly mundane events. For example:

When I miss an important meeting at work, I learn that I should be more careful. If I think of the causes and solutions, I immediately see that I need a planner, or that the alarm o­n my mobile phone could have been used to avoid a situation like that; or that I should have planned for the meeting o­n the day before. I could also decide that I should schedule such things for a particular time of the day when possible.

On the other hand I may even decide to agree o­nly to really important meetings. The actual result may vary from person to person and in different situations, but the options for solutions are typicall increased when thought processes become more associative.

A person who misinterprets an important brief, if trained to analyse situations, could find a pattern of carelessness and identify situations when he is more likely to be hasty and be extra careful in those times.

People in a team can learn to watch out for each other, share resources to minimise repititions o­n effort, complement each other better, convey information more effectively, implement instructions more intuitively and perform as a well knit unit, when they learn to process the subtle 'feedback' from previous experiences to avoid undesirable results and recreate desirable o­nes.

Experiential learning works to increase our knowledge of self and the situations we find ourselves in. It means expanding o­n and verifying our spontaneous learnings. It is learning to see a situation from different perspectives to add insight and creativity. This helps us apply learnings from o­ne kind of experience to increase productivity in an unrelated situation.

Article by Vidyut Kale