…you could do a lot worse than listen to Desert Island Discs. One of the BBC’s longest running programmes, celebrating 70 years of broadcasting this month.

The format is pretty simple, guests, who are normally famous or highly regarded in their field, chose 8 pieces of music, one book and one luxury they would take with them if stranded on a desert island. Previously presented by Michael Parkinson and Sue Lawley, it is now hosted by Kirsty Young (r).

While the music is played in full, the real interest comes in the conversation between Young and the guest as she probes into their past lives, gently but without shying away from revealing questions. Since by definition they guests have all be successful, it provides a fascinating insight into how they got where they did. If success and successful people interest you, it’s well worth a listen.

If you want to give it a go, it’s on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday at 11:15 and repeated on Friday at 09:00, or you can get it as a podcast.

North East of Australia are the islands of Melanesia. New Guinea and Vanuatu are probably the best known of them, conjuring up images of blue seas, white beaches, palm trees and cloudless skies. However, in the years following the Second World War, some very strange goings on took place in this tropical paradise.

The islands were of strategic importance to both the Allies and the Japanese as a launch pad for both aircraft and ships patrolling the Pacific Ocean. At different times, both side set up bases on the islands and with them brought many of the accoutrements of Western civilisation. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons and other goods arrived in vast quantities for the soldiers, who often shared some of it with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. Such luxuries were previously unheard of and had a significant impact on the quality of life of the Melanesians.

With the end of hostilities in the Pacific theatre, the military shut up shot and the soldiers, sailors and airmen headed home. Gradually the remains of the supplies they had brought dwindled until nothing was left.

With little understanding of the events that had brought the cargo into the islands in the first place, some of the islanders began mimicking the activities and clothes of soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden rifles.

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In the last month we’ve had three groups of apprentices through our Personal Learning and Thinking Skills course, challenging themselves and thinking hard about learning in the beautiful surroundings of Snowdonia. With more groups taking on the course in the coming months we asked one cohort to come up with some advice for those that followed in their footsteps. With no prompting from our Development Guides, this is what they produced;

[Click for full size]

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It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem -G. K. Chesterton 

There are a number of systematic ways of solving problems. Some are useful in very specific situations, while others are powerful but very complicated. One of the ways we teach people to solve problems at Totem is using the 5 eyed method.

IDENTIFY what success looks like

You can only really solve a problem when you know exactly what outcome you are after.  When the problem is solved, what situation will you be in. Step one is to sort out what it is you are trying to achieve.

ISOLATE the real problem

If you have ‘flu which has given you a headache, you can stop the headache with an aspirin but while it might make you feel better, you will still have the ‘flu. You have tackled the symptom not the cause. The key to problem solving is to be able to look at all the symptoms and decide what the underlying problem that is causing them is.

INNOVATE multiple solutions to the problem

Once you have isolated the problem, you should come up with multiple solutions to the problem. It is unlikely that your first idea will be the best so produce as many as you feel necessary before committing to one course of action. This is known as ‘divergent thinking‘

IMPLEMENT the chosen solution

You then must chose a solution from the many that you came up with. Consider the merits of each and the drawbacks, eliminate one at a time if you need to until you have your chosen path of action. This process is known as ‘convergent thinking‘.

Once you have chosen a solution you must implement it to the best of your abilities.

INVESTIGATE whether the solution solves the problem

Finally, it’s important not to assume that because you chose the best solution from the ones you thought up, it will automatically work. Put a system in place for investigating whether your problem has really been solved. Make sure that all of the symptoms have gone away and the underlying issue has really been resolved.

In a moving video, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the world. He talks through the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube, and unveils the first 2 minutes of his new work, “Sleep,” with a video choir of 2,052.

Sleep

Via TED

We frequently make use of music on our courses, to inspire, to calm, to motivate, to represent, to tell stories. It’s one of the tools for what the NLP community call state change.

Music can also change our perceptions of what we are looking at. Here is a great example of that, YouTube user Mscharosch has edited some BBC Life footage to Lux Æterna from Requiem For a Dream and the result is, well…..epic. It is worth putting on full screen and turning your sound up.

Epic Frog

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.”

-Galileo Galilei

Experiential learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience.

Traditional education expects participants to learn about the topic from books, lectures, tutorials and worksheets.

Experiential education places them in situations that provide similar challenges to those they might face and evokes similar emotions, and that require similar skills and behaviours to overcome.

By using an adventurous environment such as the outdoors, we can provide a ‘laboratory’ in which facilitators can create challenging and demanding situations and in which apprentices can experiment with different behaviours, without that behaviour having a negative effect in the workplace.

An Experiential Learning Cycle

This is one of many learning cycles that helps us to conceptualise and understand the complicated, messy process of learning.  (For other cycles, see this great article by Roger Greenaway)

In order to learn through experience, it is not only necessary to ‘do something’. After we have performed an Action, three further things take place before that action alters how we act in the future.

First, we Reflect on the action we just took and the experience it generated. This is looking back and thinking about what happened and the feelings it generated, in ourselves and others and the effect it had on the environment we are in.

Then we conceptualise, that is, think about the reasons that it had those effects and understand those reasons. This leads to Learning.

Learning on its own is no use if we don’t then do anything with it, so we then have to Plan. This is about applying that learning next time you undertake that action and, importantly, similar actions in the future.

We all go round this cycle as we learn from experience, sometimes it takes a few seconds to complete a circuit and sometimes it might take us years. Typically, the more intense and complicated the experience, the longer it takes us to go round the cycle.

Different people favour different parts of the cycle, Peter Honey and Alan Mumford have a system for working out which area you prefer to spend your time in, which we occasionaly use on Totem courses.

There is of course, much more to experiential learning that these basic concepts, but they underlie much of what we do. Space to experiment, reflective practice and onward planning are at the core of Totem’s work.

We rarely use trust falls, they come with significant risk and, while they can be fun, the benefits aren’t really clear, except maybe as a metaphor for trust within a team. As usual Scott Adams has his own particular take on on them…

via Brian

Most courses evolve. They start as either a client brief, or from an idea by our staff and then move through various conversations and revisions, being changed even as they are being delivered. Looking through my file from a leadership course back in March, I found this piece of paper. It was the outcome of 30 minutes discussion between two of us and it became a very successful “Looking at Leadership” course that finished with the participants rowing the length of Windermere.

The fact that you can read it means the handwriting isn’t mine but I love the fact that, for one course at least, it is possible to pinpoint when all the ideas came together. [Click for a larger version]