Learning and Change--Individual Considerations

This post is a continuation of the post from February 20, 2010 and from an earlier post on February 21, 2010.

Learning and change need to take place on an individual level--even when teams, groups, and organizations want change as well.  Two additional meta-models have been created to explain how individuals respond to the need for change (see slide 2) and what happens to individuals as they build the skills they need to change successfully (see slide 10).

(Click on the picture to see it separately and completely.)

(Click on the picture to see it separately and completely.)

 As stated in an earlier post, learning and change are not easy and are often resisted.  The Shame Affect Decision Model (slide 2) shows how most of us discover the need for change--when something we relied on ceases to produce the positive results we expected.  If we retreat into our pre-existing comfort zone, we have four possible responses:  attack others, attack self, avoid, and withdraw.  If we choose to move to positive change, this is our opportunity to learn.

As we begin to learn, we move through the Personal Performance Change Curve (slide 8). Comfort Zones Mapped to the Performance Change Curve (slide 10) show how our performance level and comfort drop before we begin to integrate the new knowledge and skill we are learning.

The Learning Outcome Grid (slide 7) shows some of the results of learning activity.

(Click on the picture to see it separately and completely.)

Weighing Choices--Making Decisions--Assessing Results

We take these actions from earliest memory. Even babies are weighing choices--"do I do this or do that?"--making decisions--"I'll cry now because ..."--and assessing results--"I cried when I was uncomfortable (wet or hungry) and now I'm dry and full."

As we get older the weighing process becomes more complex as do the decisions and our assessment of results. Sometimes there are delays between our actions and the results we see. Have you ever decided to order something, then been disappointed in it when it arrived?

When we get much older, many of our choices and decisions and results have to do with health. My 94-year-old mother went to the eye doctor today who told her that a shot in her left eye would control the accumulation of blood caused by age-related wet macular degeneration. Mom loves to read and to use her eyes. While she knew the shot is painful (this was the sixth shot she's had over several years) she has already decided that, if something will help her preserve her sight, she'll go through the pain. She had the shot. Age-related macular degeneration doesn't get better. Treatments can at least slow down the vision loss and that was the choice she made today.

How do we weigh our daily choices. There are 168 hours in a week (24 x 7) and we get to choose how we'll use them. Most of us want to sleep some of them away. Some of us know the value of exercise in our lives and devote some of the hours to exercise. All of us want to eat some of the time, so we take time for that as well. Many of us work several hours a day. We want time for recreation--perhaps with our families. Whatever the choices, those are the hours we have to work with in any given week.

We make decisions, then assess the results--are we getting what we want? In some of my eating choices, I have chosen to eat (what or when or how much I eat) that caused me to gain three pounds this week. If I want to get that off, I have to change my eating and exercise choices this week and can check on the results a week from now.

Yesterday I read a newsletter article that talked about looking for work AGR ("after the great recession in 2007"). The author (at http://www.higheredjobs.com) said that we have to have a different approach to looking for work AGR. What we used to do no longer produces the same results that it did before AGR. (See the post about Spenser Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese.)

If you go to http://joelmonty.wikispaces.com/file/view/Meta-Learning-Affect+Models.PDF and go to slide 2, Shame-Affect-Decisions Model. It will give you a picture of some of what I am talking about here.

Social networking sites abound with the hope that people will connect with the right jobs (or dates or spouses or . . .) through their social networks. Some do and some don't.

All of us need to rethink our choices and decisions, the results I am assessing tell me that times have, indeed, changed and I (along with millions of others) need to change to keep up with the change.