Carol A. Word

Reviews the book 'The Community Activist's Handbook,' by John Huenefeld.

THE COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS HANDBOOK Book

Every industry, every company, and every project has its own vocabulary. As humans, we make judgments based on the words people choose. We decide to trust the plumber because he knows the name of the “thing-a-ma-jig” that needs to be replaced. When we say that someone sounds like she knows what she’s talking about (or not), we’re reacting to her ability to use her vocabulary—both the depth and the breadth.Academics who are experts at linguistics use a concept called a “discourse community.” Fundamentally, a discourse community is a group of people who have developed ways of communicating with each other to get things done. The older members of the community need to teach the language to the newer members of the community. Doesn’t this description sound like a typical workplace?Neuroscience research via brain scans has discovered that different areas of the brain light up when one is learning new words. There are approximately 1,000,000 words in the English language. With the “kernel lexicon” of 2,400 words, it is possible for one to understand approximately 75 percent of what is read. The average vocabulary ranges from 10,000 to 25,000 words, depending upon experience and education.Adults learn language differently from children. Children learn language by listening, listening, listening—and then they start speaking. Then they are taught their letters so they can learn to read and write. Adults, however, are more likely to listen and read, then write, and then speak. Only when he is comfortable with a word or phrase and its appropriate usage and context will an adult start using his new words in speech. Passive vocabulary—the words we know for reading and listening—is significantly larger than the active vocabulary used for speaking and writing.The principles associated with learning English tell us that people need multiple repetitions over time via different neural pathways and in different contexts to learn words and phrases and the concepts that they represent. Let’s dissect this sentence and identify the steps.Seven to 20 repetitionsMultiple contextsReading, speaking, writing, and listening (active plus passive input)Tense, construction, and usage (variations of meaning and significance)This is how people pick up words on their own over time. It sounds logical. However, there is a very important snag in all this lace.According to university-sponsored research, when we don’t know a word, we either make up a meaning or ignore the word. Academics knowingly talk about how to infer meaning based on context, word formation, and more. But research is showing us something else: In the real world, the brain might just fill in a meaning. Maybe it will figure out a correct meaning, but maybe not.It’s the second action, however, that is more disconcerting—when the word is simply ignored. It’s not that the person wasn’t paying attention; rather, the brain simply glided over the word in the written material. In a conversation, confident people ask for meaning. “Huh?” has been identified as a universal word indicating, “I just missed what you said.” But there is no way for someone to immediately convey that she missed the meaning of a written word. And when it comes to the special language of your company, if there’s no glossary, then the best hope is that a knowledgeable co-worker happens to be nearby.Stay tuned next week for Part Two of this series, The Language of the Workplace.

How Do We Learn New Words in the Workplace?

I sometimes like to think of the training profession as going through an evolution similar to the path taken by the medical science more than 300 years ago.Before we knew about microbes and viruses, we knew that certain diseases affected the human body. Through trial and error, we discovered things that alleviated symptoms or even appeared to cure certain diseases. One day, scientists like Robert Hooke started using a new device, the microscope, to investigate the way tiny microbes behaved and affected larger organisms like the human body. Almost overnight, our understanding of disease and our power to cure it exploded.We are going through a similar transformation with neuroscience. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other imaging techniques, we can now study the structures and functions of the brain in real time. These new views give us deeper insights into how we learn, what obstacles prevent or hamper learning, and how we can restore brain function when something goes wrong.Once we understood microbes, it wasn’t long before the first vaccines were developed. Today, our emerging understanding of the brain has led to the discovery of the growth mindset—a powerful tool to help your employees become better learners.What is the growth mindset?In her book, Mindset, Dr. Carol Dweck shares her research into the different ways that people think about themselves and how these self-images affect our behavior and our ability to learn and adapt. She explains that there are two basic ways that we can view the world and our place in it.A fixed mindset believes that our talents and abilities are fairly fixed at birth. This means that each of us has a hidden upper limit to what we can accomplish. People who have struggled in school may conclude, for example, that they just aren’t cut out for college. So they end up in a low-paying, non-engaging job that doesn’t stimulate their brain to form new connections. Their belief becomes reality because running that limiting statement over and over again created a very strongly enforced neural pathway, eventually reaching neurons connected to all parts of their lives.On the other hand, an overly perfect “finished” view of oneself can be equally dangerous. This type of thinking establishes pathways that suggest that we are already perfect, so our brains become less adept and recognizing opportunities for improvement. Dweck identifies many CEOs and politicians with this type of thought pattern and it can lead to disastrous results when taken to the extreme.To avoid becoming overly complacent about ourselves, educator Salman Khan recommends that we avoid telling our children how smart and accomplished they are and focus instead on their areas for growth.  A word of caution here, though, this does not mean that we should start telling everyone how stupid or unskilled they are—that would just be another unproductive fixed mindset.A growth mindset, on the other hand, is a belief that we never stop learning and improving. This mindset appears to actually encourage the growth of new neural pathways, forming new connections that weren’t there yesterday, instead of running over the same pathway over and over again. Brains that are programmed to operate with this type of thinking tend to learn new information much faster. More importantly, they seem better able to connect one new thought or insight to another, allowing truly transformational ideas to emerge.Neuroscience and the growth mindsetMuch like the healers of prior days, psychologists used to have to infer how our mind works through observation and try to help us advance through trial and error. Today, we can actually test a theory like Dweck’s against what we know about Neuroscience and see that it holds up. The brain is constantly creating and destroying neural pathways, forming the thought and behavior patterns our brain uses to make decisions, choose actions and present us to the outside world. The pathways that are used get stronger; those that are under-used grow weak and eventually replaced.When reviewed through this lens, Dweck’s explanation of fixed vs. growth mindsets makes perfect sense—it correlates with hard scientific data. You can actually watch this process in action in this amazing video post from a student at Sheridan College.What does this mean to you?As learning professionals, we have a shared responsibility to help our clients become the best learners possible. Helping employees adopt a growth mindset can make an organization more agile, more resilient, more creative, and even smarter. It is actually possible to use a growth mindset to enhance the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of the individual and, by extension, the organization.The good news is that you have already started to change the way your brain works, just by reading this article. Studies show that mere exposure to the concept initiates the formation of new neural pathways, even if you initially disagree with the premise. Our brains are pre-wired with a bias to learn new things. Somewhere along the way, some of us have actually learned to stop learning and we can unlearn those behaviors with conscious effort and repetition.One simple way to encourage a growth mindset is to insert positive messages about everyone’s capability to learn and change into every training intervention we produce. We can rewrite learning activities to make people fail more often, which is known to stimulate much more neural activity than the successful completion of a new task. Finally, we can partner with leadership to encourage a new way of looking at ourselves and our employees as works in progress, rather than fully defined blocks with “strengths” and “weaknesses.”A friend of mine has a credo that she shares and lives by: Learn something new every day. In a nutshell, that’s a sound plan for growth.

Carol A. Word

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