If you ask me, learning is pretty damn sexy. I am attracted to intelligence. The ability to learn in a myriad of ways is what makes us truly human. However, having spoken to numerous management consultants and C-suite executives, I have had to learn the hard way that there is still a terrible stigma attached to learning. Thousands of years of authoritarian teachers, the military origins of Prussian schools, and the industrialized, standardized production of…
Read More
Groups learn with and from one another. During the Napoleonic Wars, Europe learned that Napoleon could only be defeated by collaborating – until he met his match in the Anglo-Prussian armies at Waterloo. Or take cars. Since Karl Benz invented the internal combustion engine in 1886, Germans have refined and dominated the market. With fossil fuels in decline, Chinese carmakers have quickly learned how to leapfrog electric car production to fill the innovation vacuum left…
Read More
The fading out of the German social market economy The German social market economy (Alfred Müller-Armack, Ludwig Erhard) is based on the premise that the economically strong show solidarity with the economically weak and disadvantaged. The social market economy is thus based on a social contract that guarantees social peace in our democracy and constitutional state. This model worked very well in the post-WWII decades, as Germany’s reconstruction was, above all, a joint effort, supported…
Read More
My field is learning design – applied educational science. There are many valid explanations to the above question, ranging from lobbyism, the disempowerment of individual consumers versus producers, to group egoism, to the defense of privilege, and many more. From the perspective of conventional learning processes, our underlying model of expectations looks like this: (1) We rationally explain to a person the consequences of ‘continuing as is’. (2) The person is ideally insightful, understands everything…
Read More
A Sobering Moment in a House of Cards It was a sobering moment. During a workshop with German school principals based on Timothy R. Clark’s four-stage model of psychological safety, we arrived at the level of challengers’ safety. We discussed a situation in which a sophisticated and innovative proposal by a highly motivated team of school principals was shot down fairly badly by the local school board. What were the effects on the four levels…
Read More
They have always been eventful times. My fun-loving aunt’s birthday card says, ‘Age is like wine, it has to be a good vintage.’ Mine is 63.In August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous speech ‘I Have a Dream’. It was also the year JFK visited Berlin and was shot. George Harrison encouraged Decca Records to sign a new band he had discovered, The Rolling Stones. Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman…
Read More
Initially, I was quite enthusiastic when GPT was able to generate new workshop structures for me within seconds, given the appropriate prompt. My students were also highly successful in creating prompts for generating creative learning methods that could be used in the classroom. Funky, cool stuff, although – since GPT is a black box – we’ll never know how the idea was generated or if it actually works in practice. However, when it came to…
Read More
The term Empathic-organisational co-creation is a working term that I have chosen for my field because it best describes the inner attitude and self-conception of learning designers and learning & development coaches concerning our daily work. The concept of an empathic-organisational design of social spaces refers to two fundamental competencies of our work that are inseparable from each other: (a) the competence of empowering people and (b) the competence of system design. The Pragmatic Component:…
Read More
Process, Goal, Method, Motivation, Context… quite often I get bored when simple semantics fail to describe the phenomena that drive our world. While we are easily distracted by monocausal comfort, the more intriguing drivers of history hide in plain sight. We start a good story by reaching out to others: Come on board. Be with us! We believe that people should reach their full potential. Let’s call this intrinsic belief the Montessori Light Cones, based on…
Read More
This is my first English blog article for a long time. So, my friends, where shall we start? Taking a deep breath as too much has happened The world at large seems to have turned into a dystopian nightmare. From George Floyd to Covid, from Covid to the Russian-Ukrainian war, from the war to the ill decisions of the American Supreme Court that tear America apart, with the grim prospect of worldwide hunger lurking due…
Read More
Joana Stella Kompa 
You must be logged in to post a comment.