All programmes place great emphasis on exploring the principles of good management practice using an experience based method of learning.
In the learning cycles which form the building blocks of each programme, practical tasks, many of them outdoors, are used as metaphors for the world of work. In the review sessions which follow, the group is encouraged to examine the process by which the task was (or was not) achieved. These observations are then used as a springboard for discussing management principles and team work concepts.
Finally, with the benefit of both experience and fresh ideas, the group undertakes a further exercise, again designed to highlight the particular management process under review.
Actors play an important part in all major exercises, lending authenticity to the task and a further dimension of the unexpected.
An experience based learning method has the following major advantages:
It re-stimulates the learning process. Very often managers have been subjected to a surfeit of traditional, theory-first learning. By turning the process upside down and presenting it in a new and challenging context, learning becomes fun and a person's capacity for learning can be revitalised.
If focuses on the individual and thereby becomes a process of self teaching. This means that the lessons learned are more likely to have real impact on the individual.
Because the exercises themselves are both cerebral and physical, and because experience is always supported by theory, this method embraces all learning styles.
By ensuring that the tasks are different from the person's everyday work experience, the usual preoccupation with the task is removed. This then enables the process by which groups or individuals achieve their objectives, to be examined more clearly.
Away from the workplace people are more free to learn from their mistakes, safe in the knowledge that the worst consequence of failure is dented pride or a dunking in the lake!
The use of tasks which are unfamiliar and often challenging helps reduce the distorting effect of organisational relationships on behaviour. This then allows the individual's full potential to become more apparent.
Finally, experience based learning provides powerful visual images, capturing valuable moments of insight and self discovery in a mental picture which may then be carried back to the workplace.
These factors combine to create the profound impact required to take the learning process beyond an intellectual understanding of ideas, toward actual changes in behaviour. In the final analysis, this is the essential of any development programme.