Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Learning Intelligence

The shift from the reactive learning mentality to a proactive learning attitude enables individuals and organizations to look forward and enhance their learning intelligence. 

Learning intelligence refers to a person’s ability to learn with meta-cognition (learning how to learn). We live in the digital era of rapid and relentless change, today’s workforce is knowledge workers, intelligent workers, and hard workers.

Even though each one of us has some “raw” talent, it takes an immense amount of time on learning and hard work that most "naturally talented" people have committed to developing their innate talents into value-added skills and professional competency.


Collaboratively, shaping a digital organization with learning intelligence is about cultivating a culture of learning, creating, and developing talent as a strategic choice to get digital ready.



Meta-cognition: Meta-cognition, or learning how to learn, is a vital element of independent learning in an era of information exponentiality, as well as rapid and relentless change. Technically, meta-cognition is a process that enables understanding, analysis, and control of one’s cognitive processes. A crucial part of metacognition and more importantly, why metacognition is important, is to give the learner an opportunity to be aware of and understand their own strengths and weaknesses so that they can take a scientific approach to learn or adapt their skills and strategies.

Meta-cognition is the process of being open to wonder, gaining conscious awareness, setting time aside to allow an idea, or a problem to incubate. It is in combination with immediate learning to give way to advancing insight. Generally speaking, understanding how we think is the first stage of understanding our cognitive style - how we approach and solve problems and embrace opportunities. Metacognition would be where the individual is aware of reaching the point of "not knowing," and then, developing strategies and methodologies to resolve it to become "knowing," like how to induce, deduce hypotheses, reflect on them, and question them.

“Self-directing” learning: Today, there are continuous technology-led disruptions and overloaded information, and commodity knowledge only a click away, a digital organization is a dynamic, self-regulating and self-adaptive system which is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior based on rich information and collective learning experience for responding to dynamic environment proactively. “Self-directing” learning is the ability for high professionals to keep building new and nonlinear skills and shaping multi-layer, recombinant capabilities for problem-solving and innovation.

Historically, many learners, in all disciplinary domains, built a kind of “dependency” on their teachers/trainers and developed a form of “learned helplessness.” Knowledge is dynamic and multidimensional nowadays, it’s not just spoken or transferred in hard-copy, it’s also transferred visually or virtually and through emotions or feelings. Thus, digital workforce needs to become self-driven, must have the attitude to keep learning, as well as have learning aptitude and intelligence to learn fast and smart, learning knowledge is even not enough, capturing insight is the MUST.

Master the full learning cycle: Today’s digital leaders and professionals with learning intelligence can critically examine their thinking and reflect thoroughly on what attitude or behaviors help them learn, and master the full cycle of “Learning, Delearning, Relearning” effortlessly. With ever-evolving digital new normal, top seasoned leaders and digital professionals become aware when some of the long-acquired knowledge is no longer applicable in certain situations. They have to relearn the updated knowledge for gaining insight into the changing circumstance, become continuous lifelong learners, and adapt more readily to whatever changes life/work throws at them.

Organizations with learning intelligence can create the right environment to grow a natural affinity into a "talent, “ believing in "building talent" discipline in which it would otherwise be underutilized or dormant. In fact, to become learning intelligent, the digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations, become better problem solvers, foster innovation, and drive digital transformation.

Digital learning is multidimensional, dynamic, interactive, informal, and integrated. Driving digital paradigm shift is not a passive activity, but a proactive pursuit. The shift from the reactive learning mentality to a proactive learning attitude enables individuals and organizations to look forward, enhance their learning intelligence, actively position their businesses in the right place to take full advantage of opportunities, and raise the organizational learning intelligence and maturity.

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