Hail Earthling! Take Me to your Cognitive Coach
Stephanie Findlay has written a nice piece about how the explosion of educational material on the web is diminishing the need for university classroom teaching (and textbooks). Here is the link. Stephanie directed her attention to university professors. But in my experience, this is doubly true in professional education.
The fact is that these days adults need coaching more than ever. What type of coaching? From people who have already been where we find ourselves at that moment. Call it mentoring, or team support. But it is a relationship building exercise rather than just delivery of information. These types of relationships help us learn from what we do (adding a cognitive dimension to work), and make our experiences more “modular” (fit into larger patterns that multiply value to the community).
Here is an example of what doesn’t really work from Quicksprout — a list of the biggest mistakes that successful serial entrepreneurs have made. This is ok, but it doesn’t match my day-to-day experiences. It is just raw information. But it is interesting in one respect. The most common “big” mistakes these geniuses made are about relationship building. Hmmm … looks like they needed some cognitive coaching as well.