After 15 years I’ve worked out what we do here and why it works so well.

I’ve always practiced “outside in” – bringing the world to my inbox via subscriptions to bloggers, periodicals, newspapers and book reviews.  This has its downside as a couple of them are American magazines (The Atlantic and New Yorker) and I can lose up to 20 minutes a day Trumping.  This is a phrase I have invented to describe reading stuff solely for the amazement/amusement of learning ol’ Crazy’s latest outrage.

One of the more relevant pieces I found last year was a reference to the model for how adults learn: 10% classroom, 20% socialized, 70% experience.

That’s what we have always tried to do at The Breakthrough: content in workshops, socialized at the workshops and in peer groups, and then put into practice. But we did it intuitively, and not always perfectly, usually because we didn’t take the learning through to something that could be adapted and practiced reasonably easily.

Now, as we design the customer experience in our new programmes and evolve our current programmes, we are very deliberately looking to satisfy all three dimensions of adult learning. It’s exciting because we know just how powerful this is going to be. I personally believe these are not going to be training programmes, they are transforming programmes.

We often say to people that a tad more structure brings a ton more focus.  Being deliberate about what you’ve done intuitively will accelerate your results.Often our greatest value to members is how we help them define and refine what they’re doing instinctively.

Applying how adults learn (10/20/70) is the difference between a programme that would have been pretty good and one that is going to be bloody amazing.

To go back to the beginning: my research practice is a form I call “standing in the river of knowledge” – positioning myself so that I can receive information from all sorts of places and then select which bits I will convert into knowledge.

My question to you is “What are you standing in?”