Learning With Peers

Computerworld - If you want to grow as a leader or help others to become leaders, it's important to think carefully about the process of learning.

Have you ever been in a great conversation and been surprised by something you said -- whether it was your own insight, your own language or the source of your comment?

These events happen to me every once in a while and are the source of some of my most cherished learning. And the things I learn in these conversations often become the bedrock of my understanding of a range of ideas. They tend to be things that reorder my thinking, make connections between ideas I previously considered discrete or unearth values that are held dear but were previously unarticulated.

Such epiphanies are often followed by a quick reaction. "Who said that?" or "Where did that come from?" or "I didn't know that I believed that."

These conversations are usually followed by exhaustion, satisfaction and reflection. It's almost as if mental energy were converted into the matter of ideas and everyone involved was drained in the process. The Promethean moment passes into admiration of a new thought.

I've noticed a few things about these conversations. Most of them share some common characteristics.

Everyone involved seems to enter a state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has dubbed "flow." Time seems to stand still as everyone loses himself in the challenge of keeping up with the discussion. Everyone feels challenged to think in new ways and to pay attention to the issues at hand.

Ideas take center stage. If the participants brought individual agendas to the conversation, those seem to fade and give way to the excitement of following the flow of ideas. Social posturing drops out.

Many conversations, especially those at work, have subtexts of swagger. People try to establish dominance relationships, prove their superior intelligence or reinforce formal social hierarchies. But in these conversations, pretensions are temporarily put on hold.

And usually these conversations take place within or between groups of peers. I don't remember ever having this sort of experience during a lecture from some expert, whether that was a learned professor, a boss or a sage. Mind-blowing insights usually seem to come from interchanges among fellow explorers, not from the passive reception of information. Even the best personal feedback rarely reorders thinking in this way.

This is the experience of learning with peers -- not from them, but with them. And the opportunities for this are much too rare. Several obstacles seem to get in the way, especially when managers may have to expose weaknesses to learn from them.