Imagine this scenario: your company is facing a critical deficiency in leadership. You bring in your most trusted L&D consultant who tells you there is a surefire way to solve the problem: it will take 3 hours. You’re elated. You saved the day. It can be done.
Then suddenly a new thought creeps into your mind: Can we do it faster..?
The consultant says no. That kind of social transformation simply can’t happen any more quickly.
Imagine another scenario. Imagine a second consultant says "Yeah! that’s good, in fact we can do it in 90 minutes, and with the technology advancement in 3 years from now we can do it in 45."
Which of the two would you go with?
Increasingly the second consultant reigns supreme. Doing more with less has become the dominant theme in today's corporate world.
The second consultant gets that. The second consultant is adapting.
But what are the real implications of this choice? Are we really comfortable with what is happening? A “fun and quick” approach applies to a lot of stuff. Fun and quick makes sense. This is part of a global trend towards instant gratification: instant entertainment, instant meals, instant shopping, instant intimacy.
Instant learning would seem to follow. Or at least the trend is there.
We want to believe that it’s possible to learn in the same way we scroll through the newsfeed of our devices; to retain the millions of notions we google every day.
Yet the most essential things we learn in life don’t come out of a 90 minute lesson. They come from layers of interactions and experiences that build one after another. Without that foundation our capacity for retention is compromised.
Real learning is a slow process . Real learning takes real time.
It’s one thing to feel information crash over you. It’s another thing to internalize information to change mindset, to change behavior, to change the trajectory of a life.
