The Art of Experiential Learning

The art of experiential learning facilitation is in how the debrief/review is utilized to cull learning from experience, and having a process that reveals the system and using the insights to create useful actions that transfer the learning back to the operational system—and still having some fun with it.

It can be frustrating as a change agent when clients bring in an experiential program just to have a fun experience. Great, but look at the opportunity we've all opened up here together. People have responded to the invitation to speak their truth and tell how they feel about it by writing and performing songs together. Now it's on the table, in the open, often revealed in clarity and with a string of interesting connections that begs to be revisited. There is a window of opportunity to move on that information. We're in a unique emotional state—euphoric, a bit relieved, precocious, and the expression has also given is some detachment from the issues that are so close to us—a detachment that can be very useful in developing strategic ways of addressing and improving our situations.

Tip: Don't provide a stand-alone experience in the hopes that a group will come away with learning or shared understanding on what that encounter meant. Provide a process to explore what happened, meaning, and implications.

The art is in facilitating this discussion toward meaning, learning and action. Each culture and system has it's own strengths, challenges, quirks, tactics for approach and avoidance, code words, unspoken standards, history, etc. The key is to create a group process where the participants come together authentically, speaking openly and positively (even in confrontation), with respect, clarity, succinctness, and building off of each other through good listening and collaboration.

FTM's programs are an invitation to "speak your truth, and how you feel about it." The common boundary in question can be summarized as "How much truth do you want?". It takes a leader that really want to go there—to hear what people are thinking, what their experience is, and to have an open discussion that leads to the next place. One characteristic we have learned about the music approach is that people will say things in the lyrics of a song that they won't say in, say, a meeting with a facilitator at the front of the room with a flip chart—and, with the intensity of the emotion behind it. Once that bell is rung, it is our facilitator's job to support the group to discover meaning and insight that leads to new context and action.

The most common symptom observed in debriefs is a sort of over-politeness. They laid it on the line like bad-ass bluesfolks or a take-no-prisoners rock 'n' rollers, but in the light of day without the band jammin' behind them there seems to be a tendency to step back from the intensity of one's position the night before. In general, a boundary or cultural norm has been crossed, and in general it is one that needed to be expanded or redefined. Was that lyric a trail blaze to a new level of openness, or was it a misguided outlier that will be forgiven, forgotten, and “don't let it happen again”? Phony politeness is one of my least favorite cultural traits—the scope of that rant being too much for the purposes of this article, I'll just say that it is a big inhibitor of systemic progress and learning, and the facilitator has the job to invite the participants to work on that as part of the debrief process.

In a program with a large consulting firm, the overcoming of the cultural reticence to speak publicly about issues was the critical piece in the success of a 2-day offsite. The healthy antidote to the fake politeness is constructive confrontation—naming an action/behavior of another in the most objective terms that one can, and saying how that impacted you. In this way, there is not judgment, as in "you were wrong….[in doing what you did]", nor can the speaker be "wrong" since they are merely sharing their feelings and experience. This method can be useful in discovering the trapped energy in a system, where, perhaps, built up resentments, repressed opinions, and other things fermenting in the dark can be brought into the light and their energy released.

In the debrief, I like to use the Roger Greenaway framework of:

What: 1. Facts—What happened? How did you use time & resources? Make decisions? 2. Feelings—What did you experience personally? How did it feel?

So what? 3. Findings—Why did that happen? How is that at work in other places?

Now what? 4. Futures—Implications for moving forward? Actions? Possibilities revealed?

Also leaving room for discussions that might arise that don’t necessarily fit into that framework.

Music-based experiential learning can be a powerful and time-efficient tool for delivering meaningful, integrated, and impactful training and change projects. It gives participants the opportunity to create their own meaning and ownership to what is presented by the leadership and program designers. And it creates space for—Mojo…

This article is an excerpt from Paul’s chapter Whole System Transformation with Music,

Published in the Handbook of Personal and Organizational Transformation, (Springer, 2018)

Paul Kwiecinski

Managing Partner, Face The Music