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ATD Blog

Letter to the Community June 2014: Intuitive Answers

Tuesday, June 17, 2014
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This month in SciLearn, there are some pretty exciting nuggets of info for you—ranging from research-based topics on creativity to collaboration, to a study on virtual instructor-led training. Hopefully there is something for pretty much everyone, but if there is anything we should be covering that we are missing, let me know. And of course, follow along on Twitter to get updates and stories from journals and mainstream news sources.

The body of knowledge of how we learn, lead, and manage ourselves and others has been growing for a while. Neuroscience might be generating a lot of buzz, and rightfully so, but the field of psychology, with all its specialties, has been leading the research charge for decades. Look no further than the work of people such as Daniel Kahneman for some of the best insight into what we know about how we think and learn. Here is a clip from his brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow that hits home. He is discussing his years at the University of Jerusalem and collaborating with his good friend Amos Tversky:

…We quickly adopted a practice that we maintained for many years. Our research was a conversation, in which we invented questions and jointly examined our intuitive answers. Each question was a small experiment, and we carried out many experiments in a single day…Our aim was to identify and analyze the intuitive answer, the first one that came to mind, the one we were tempted to make even when we knew it to be wrong. We believed—correctly, it happened—that any intuition that the two of us shared would be shared by many other people as well…

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The reason I like this piece so much is that the author starts with this idea of research based in conversation. Kahneman and many others have built their careers on first asking “what if,” and then experimenting with their theories and questions until they are capable of telling the whole story.

So what conversations have you begun? As a follower of this community, you might be observing these kinds of conversations all the time—in the studies you read, and maybe even in the work you do each day. In getting the SciLearn Community off the ground we are looking for the stories, the what ifs and intuitive answers, and the member experiences testing established theories on L&D processes. What have you learned? Share your case studies with the SciLearn community and let’s start the conversation together.

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