Stories to support your learning, behaviour and change

Volume 1

Alan E Drummond

Welcome to Volume 1!

Consider these two questions:

How do people learn? How can people change their behaviour?

And then realise that any and all answers to these questions are largely irrelevant, as irrelevant as these throwaway questions often are.

Consider these two questions:

How do people learn deeply? How can people change their behaviour sustainably?

And then realise that the answers to these questions are absolutely fundamental, as fundamental as these questions should be.

The difference between these two sets of questions is huge and yet most learning, self-management and change programs ‘answer’ the first set assuming it is the same as the second set. Look around you – there is a plethora of programs and yet a paucity of progress.

We can and must do better!

Maybe, just maybe, there are better ways, sophisticated, systemic and elegant ways that seriously address the second set of questions. Ways that are not based on marketing slogans and shallow jargon but reflect an appreciation of the complexity of the challenge and a defensible, explicit learning, self-management and change model.

For you, RED DUCK/SAME POEM might be one of those ways; I use ‘might’ for the value and meaning of RED DUCK/SAME POEM relies almost entirely on you, not me or them or others. This is already a radical departure from the norm in which others impose their understanding and demands on learners and changers through exhortation and passive presentations.

RED DUCK is the ‘What’ and SAME POEM is the ‘How’. Combined, RED DUCK/SAME POEM enable you to provide your ‘Why’.

RED DUCK/SAME POEM’s value does not rely on my creativity, insights and writing ability but on the effort, connections and further explorations you make. There is no way other than your own way.

Thus the essence of RED DUCK/SAME POEM is ‘Find Your Own Way’ and I sincerely hope this first volume of stories helps you do exactly that.

Find your own way.

Find it.

RED DUCK is a deep, dense pattern maker. That is a description, not an explanation.

Description is often confused with explanation – if a person describes something, this is often seen as an explanation. But there is a huge difference between describing and explaining!

In many areas of life, this difference is readily apparent. Most people can describe aspects of history, law, geography, physics, chemistry and other disciplines without being able to explain them. They would happily acknowledge that they are not historians, lawyers or physicists. We describe superficially, they explain deeply for explanations are available and being expanded daily.

We describe, they explain.

But experiential learning, self-management and behavioural change are exceptions that proves this ‘rule’.

In experiential learning, self-management and behavioural change, this is what happens:

Everybody describes, only you can explain.

But you cannot explain in words, you must demonstrate explanation through your actions. And these actions need to demonstrate the benefits of effort, engagement and experience. If they don’t, your ‘explanations’ are weak or non-existent. Your own learning, self-management and change endeavours will be restricted to shallow, ineffective and inefficient descriptions; it is as though you are a spectator observing your life from a distance, watching yourself go through the motions without passion or purpose.

If you think about and beyond these words, the gap between learning and learning deeply, changing behaviour and changing behaviour sustainably becomes ever clearer.

RED DUCK/SAME POEM was created to enable you to create your own explanations for your learning, your self-management and your behavioural change:

We start with a DUCK, a Deep Understanding of Content Knowledge. And the DUCK is RED, for the way to gain understanding is through Reflection, Exploration and Discussion.

The need for RED DUCK to be a deep, dense pattern maker as a means to gain a robust, durable understanding can be found in the way people actually behave:

Our default position is distortion.

Our brain ‘sees’ what it expects to see rather than necessarily what is actually present. We can be surprisingly and significantly oblivious to the physical and mental world around us, particularly the obvious changes that occur. How can you see the best way to proceed when you may not see many of the possible ‘ways’?

Our memories can be revised upon each retrieval (a Save As rather than Save process), which means that memories of our past behaviour can be at the mercy of our present circumstances. How do you learn from your past behaviour if you keep changing it?

Our reasoning and decision making can be riddled with a large number of different bias effects and shortcuts (heuristics) that may be perceived as efficient and adaptive but can actually be self-serving, highly biased, maladaptive and large sources of error. We perceive ourselves to be the centre of the world around us and endeavour to have it conform to our wishes.

Our behaviour is strategic, sometimes thoughtless but never unthinking.

Pretending complexity, variability, idiosyncrasy, egocentrism and distortion do not exist and that we are logical, rational, predictable and reasonable information processors who have direct links between deduction and action are the key reasons why learning and behavioural change programs fail.

There are many excuses to become a passive recipient of education and behavioural change programs. It is tempting to just not bother.

Settling for satisfactory is appealing.

There is one fundamental reason to become an active participant in your learning, self-management and behavioural change.

And that reason is within you, not outside you. It cannot be supplied, bought or borrowed. If you do not create this reason through your own efforts, it will not exist.

In ‘Little Gidding’, T S Eliot could have been thinking about the RED DUCK/SAME POEM approach when he wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

We must explore to create deep, dense patterns of understanding – this is further expanded in the next chapter, "Deeper RED DUCK" .

What is the RED DUCK?  RED DUCK is the ‘What’. 

What do you think of the RED DUCK?  What will you do with RED DUCK?