Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On ... - always yours

TEAMWORK AND COLLABORATION TOOLS AND STRATEGIES 169
resources, leadership, follow-through, and vision, again mirroring a
variety of work projects.
WHY EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING WORKS:
12 UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS
1. Equality: It provides a common yet novel experience, where
all participants are equal in their knowledge about the tasks or projects.
One year or 20 years with the organization doesn’t help an
individual solve these problems.
2. Relationships Build Quickly: This is accomplished by
the communication, collaboration, cooperation, and physical effort
needed to solve these exercises. Participants are in close proximity
all day and interacting in new ways. The end result is that they have
to rely and depend on each other in clear and significant ways, which
builds trust in an accelerated manner. People get to know each other
more in a day than they have over the last one to two years.
3. Disequilibrium: Because of the unknown and unfamiliar
quality of the challenges, participants are put into a state of disequilibrium
or disorder. They are stripped of their normal status,
roles, and defenses. Prior experience isn’t relevant here. This creates
a pure learning environment as the group has to self-organize
around the challenge.
4. Projective Technique: In organizing instability or disequilibrium,
the group projects their problem-solving, project management,
and leadership style onto the experience. The experience provides
a “gotcha” where participants are “caught” in doing what they
typically do, in spite of knowing better. The learning is profound,
revealing, and presented in a more meaningful and relevant way
than would come from an organizational assessment. This window
into their process provides unlimited information to shape team
learning. This is one of the prime reasons experiential learning is
an excellent “laboratory.” Other methodologies don’t provide such a
rich projective technique.