Socratic Arts' Newsletter

A Monthly Newsletter by Roger Schank

Enter Milo

Like most parents, I fought with my sixteen year old daughter about the limits of the newfound freedom that came with her driver’s license. Why did she have to be home by ten even on a weekend? Why couldn’t she drive to a party twenty miles away? Why was I so mean? She promised she would never drink and drive. Why didn’t I trust her?

My daughter and I get along rather well but this dispute keeps coming up. This is somewhat surprising since she is now in her thirties. She would never have done that to a child and she won’t do that to her child. We’ll see, I say. No. This was the worst thing I ever did to her as a child. She says back. (I can’t help but think that this is actually a nice thing to hear her say – but that’s me.)

Last week something interesting happened. I became a grandfather. I couldn’t resist. As she sat there feeding little Milo I gently inquired: Do you think he can stay out until 3 AM when he gets his driver’s license?

No was the simple answer.

Funny how that worked out.

And what does this tell us about learning?

Obviously my daughter learned something within the first few days of the birth of her son. What did she learn? She learned about herself. She learned how it felt to have a child. And, she learned how she felt about potential dangers to that child. (This latter epiphany came from some of the initial worries and trips back and forth to the hospital that are routine for many newborns but were hardly routine in her life.)

In short she learned how she might feel if something were to happen to her son and she can extrapolate sixteen years forward. Of course, as all parents know, she ain’t seen nothin yet.

What kind of learning is this?

It is the learning that comes from powerful emotions. It is also the kind of learning that causes irrevocable change. You would not expect my daughter to change her point of view any time soon. She has undergone a profound experience that has caused deep emotions which in turn cause irrevocable change. If only you could harness this kind of learning in corporate training. If only some emotional experience could cause irrevocable change in employees.

Hmmm…

Why not create powerful emotional experiences in your trainees?

Or, to put this another way: how can you expect trainees to really learn something, I mean really know it in their hearts, if they haven’t had a powerful emotional experience?

What would such experiences look like you ask?

Before we answer that we must think about the domains in which such experiences might be possible. For example, they would not be possible in basic orientation to the company’s policies and procedures. They would not be possible in training in the use of Excel. They would not be possible when teaching people how to prepare a business plan.

Why not?

For the same reason that it was not possible to tell my daughter why my policies were what they were when she was sixteen. You gotta feel it and you aren’t gonna feel all that much about Excel.

So, besides babies, what do we feel powerfully about?

Not policies that’s for sure. Not methods for preparing a report either.

People feel powerfully about human things. About how others perceive them, for example. About their own sense of self worth.

Or to put this another way, what aspects of business are like having a new baby around?

The training that you do that involves people, management training and sales training for example, is a candidate for what I will call powerful-emotion simulation training (PEST.)

How does it feel to lose a key client and cause the company to head towards bankruptcy? Bad? Really bad? So terrible it makes your stomach hurt for days? Do you think you might remember an experience like that? Do you think you might think about what happened and work to never see anything like it happen again?

The issue in simulations is to be a PEST creator. You must knock your trainees for a loop when they make a mistake in a way that causes them never to make that mistake again. Now obviously, you can’t do that all the time. You need to do it when it matters and make it feel real. Also obviously, this is not something you do light-heartedly (or when there might be a law suit.)

So what if you want to be a PEST? What do you do?

You create baby-worrying equivalent experiences. What in business life feels like worrying about a child? Worrying about whether others like you perhaps, or think you are competent? Worrying about how your career will work out? Worrying about if you are infective or if you can improve on things you know you are bad at? Actually people worry about a lot of things besides their own children with great passion. You can be pretty upset if you think your business life is simply not going to work out. And, if you do think that and found there was something you could do about it, you might just work real hard at doing it.

For years in speeches I have pointed out (by giving a test) that people remember nothing of the long winded safety announcements at the beginning of every airplane trip. I suggest that if the airlines wanted you to remember what to do in the case of a crash they would have a simulated crash before every flight. Of course they don’t do this. They also don’t really care all that much.

But, you do.

You need to create situations where people get fired, or lose a client, or get physically attacked by someone they have wronged, or get brow beaten by someone who thinks they screwed up, or actually feel they might die. How do you do this? Be a PEST. Create simulations, live or on a computer, that feel so real they really frighten people.

Crazy?

Maybe.

But people don’t forget really frightening experiences and not forgetting is the same as learning. We don’t forget what we deeply feel.