TJ - The Publication for Learning and Development

Blockages, barriers and obstacles

By Peter Honey (July 2005 Issue)
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I have spent a significant percentage of my life to date (it’s not over yet!) attempting to persuade organisations to make learning a priority. I’ve just worked it out: 30 years at, say, 20 weeks a year equals 600 weeks which amounts to something like 20 per cent of my time on this earth.

Of course it may be me, but it isn’t easy to persuade organisations to give learning the attention it deserves. The intellectual case is relatively easy to make, but just because people nod their heads to the usual stuff about learning and change and learning being the only sustainable competitive advantage and so on, it doesn’t mean that priorities will actually change. Knowing does not necessarily lead to doing.

In my experience there are at least four reasons why the learning message is difficult to get across. Firstly, it is because other priorities too easily elbow learning to one side – such as the need to achieve ‘stretch’ targets, make a profit, keep shareholders and other stakeholders happy and, of course, the need to keep busy (or, if you are not busy, to pretend that you are!).

Secondly, the learning message tends to fall on deaf ears because of a widespread assumption that learning is natural and therefore ‘just happens’ without requiring any special attention, time or resources. The assumption that we are built to learn is correct of course, but it side-steps the challenge to treat learning as a skill worthy of development and continuous improvement.

Thirdly, too many people are locked into a mindset that says learning equals doing courses of one sort or another via e-learning or classroom attendance. This blinds them to the possibility of having work-based learning explicitly running in parallel with everything else that is going on. The word explicitly is important in the last sentence because unplanned, ‘accidental’ learning inevitably happens all the time – mostly at a tacit, subliminal level. However, organisations that are serious about learning need to supplement this with something more deliberate that lends itself to articulation/sharing and quality assurance.

Finally, I have become convinced that too many of us, too often, dwell on gloomy things that stop us in our tracks. These things are usually referred to as blockages or barriers (B&Bs). And they are everywhere. There are B&Bs making existing business processes immune from improvements; B&Bs preventing customer satisfaction; B&Bs hampering the flow of knowledge around an organisation; B&Bs preventing the development of a change culture; B&Bs stopping us from reaching our preferred future; B&Bs that get in the way of an organisation becoming a learning organisation; B&Bs to more effective personal and/or team performance – and so on.

All very depressing - B&Bs stretching into the distance as far as the eye can see. I quite understand the justification for dwelling on B&Bs. We need to identify them before we are in a position to work out how to overcome them. As Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, said when she launched Adult Learner’s Week, ‘Barriers can be overcome….learning can be for everyone, of all ages and from all backgrounds.’ But B&Bs by their very nature sound decidedly off-putting. Never mind what the dictionary says – it is the image the words conjure up that matters and the effect they have on our motivation. For me blockages are nasty smelly things - best left to the professionals with their high-pressure hoses. Barriers don’t fare much better in my book. They are obdurate - deliberately designed to stop you in your tracks. I once was in a government establishment where a large notice, beside a high fence topped with razor wire, left you in no doubt that you were not allowed to proceed. It read ‘No admittance beyond this point. This is an inflexible rule!’ It left me wondering why there was a notice at all when the fence was clearly insurmountable (and what the flexible rules might look like!).

I don’t wish to split hairs, but I much prefer to think of obstacles rather than B&Bs. Obstacles are enticing, even intriguing. They are virtually asking to be overcome. Very reasonably, we set people the challenge of tackling obstacle courses, not barrier courses, in the full knowledge that they will find a way through and emerge triumphant. I’m convinced that thinking of obstacles is much healthier than thinking of negative B&Bs.

I recently had the pleasure of listening to Anne Owers, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, when she gave the Annual Lecture for Prisoners’ Education Trust.1 Her title was Education in Prison: Barriers and Progress. Sticking admirably to her brief, she described a number of barriers – the serious overcrowding in prisons (24 per cent in public sector prisons and 35 per cent in privately run prisons), the population ‘churn’ (for example Pentonville which receives and discharges around 3,000 prisons a month), the lack of facilities for training, the distorting effects of targets, the pressure to achieve immediate results, the lack of development opportunities for prison officers. A daunting list that almost (but not quite!) made you turn away in despair. To be fair, Anne Owers also cited examples of progress, but, alas, it was the blockages that remained uppermost in my mind. This, I find, is typical of B&Bs – they are giants with the capacity to overwhelm the comparative dwarfs produced by incremental improvements. So, during the question and answer session that followed the lecture, I asked Anne Owers if, in the light of all the depressing barriers we’d just heard about, she was half-full or half-empty when it came to the prospects for a more enlightened approach to learning and education in prisons. Of course, she claimed to be half-full. Nevertheless, I gently suggested that obstacles, not barriers, might make it easier to stay positive.

Reference
1. The full text of Anne Owers’ lecture can be found on the website of Prisoners’ Education Trust: www.prisonerseducation.org.uk

Dr Peter Honey, FRSA, FCIPD, FIMC is a Chartered Psychologist and founder of Peter Honey Publications. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1628 633946, at peterhoney@peterhoney.com or visit www.peterhoney.com

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