Experiential Learning - learning by doing

There is a quote attributed to Aristotle that may not have been from the great man himself: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”. There is some evidence that it was an English author named Will Durant who took a saying from Aristotle and changed it to make it less wordy. The stoic philosopher Epictetus would later say, “capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking by walking, and running by running… therefore, if you want to do something, make a habit of it.”. Basically, the same thing. If you want to get good at something – do it repeatedly to the point that you may not even be aware that you are doing it.

Learning can likewise also be a habit. How many activities do we engage in day in day out that are the result of building skills over time? We may have had an initial learning opportunity to get the basics – think of a driving school or learning to cook – but then over time we build our own intuitions and techniques based on our responses to and interests in that topic.

I have an interest in gaming – particularly strategy games and particularly those that involve playing against human opponents. One f the reasons I particularly enjoy human opponents is in each case I play against someone who arrives with a whole array of experiences, skills and approaches to strategy that have been built up over time. In some of my favourite games, you run countries or businesses and have to compete against a player or players that draw on those unique experiences to derive strategies that enable them to beat me in minutes. But what happens after such a session? I stop, grab a cup of coffee (or several) and think about ‘what would I do if faced with that situation again?’, and ‘how could I recognise a player that is about to adopt that strategy?’.

In this way, that experience has given me a valuable series of lessons in how to get better as a player. But I wasn’t sat down and given a slide show, I read no books, and the only conversation I had was a reflective one after the fact. All the new knowledge I acquire comes directly from the experience itself and my response to it.

I am a huge fan of experiential learning for this reason. Much of our educational philosophy consists of those approaches – textual learning, visual learning through slides and graphics, or discussions with people that have recognised expertise in a particular topic. However, I am of the firm belief that we remember the lessons taught by interaction with a topic and the period of reflection and absorption that follows.

At SAP there is a game that has proven very popular with students at the university classes I teach and support – ERPSim. This is a game published by two institutions – HEC Montreal and baton Solutions based in Canada. The game – ERPSim – is a bit of a misnomer as it is far more than ERP now. But the Sim part is spot on – it is a business simulation that uses a game engine to simulate several competing companies that students can take over and run within classes. The students enter decisions through an SAP front-end so they are technically learning two skill sets at the same time. The first is general knowledge of how to use an SAP interface. The second is a wider skillset around business analysis and decision-making. Iven that in most cases the students are having to make decisions within a group of 4-5 students we can also argue they are learning team skills.

The biggest hurdle is that it is expensive. It is, at the moment, only available for students within universities supported by SAP. And even those institutions have to pay for the system landscape as well as a fee-per-student. This means for large numbers of students ERPSim can get prohibitively expensive – it is more suited to small classes of 10-20 students in a specific class such as an MBA group.

If you have read my earlier articles or taken a look at my Coursera course you’ll know I am more keen on scalable learning opportunities – those that provide a rich learning environment, but one that is either self-determined or is a hybrid of self-determination and advisory-led. I’m sure ERPSim or an equivalent would do spectacularly well as a true online game for example. In fact, there are already simple versions of online learning platforms that are free to use and that teach specific narrow concepts.

My two favourites are the Beer game from MIT for students interested in supply chains. The beer game teaches the bullwhip effect. This is a concept from SCM that refers to how making a single subtle change in order can result in changes within a supply system that travels all the way through the system and then returns to the decision originator in the form of an unexpected increase or drop in supply volumes – just like the curve of a whip. https://beergame.masystem.se/

Another favourite of mine is the Loopy systems thinking game. This is less a game and more a simulation tool, but it is still fun to create systems diagrams based on real systems and then experiment to see how the decisions we make regarding inputs affect the system as a whole. Again, if you read my other articles, you’ll know I am a big proponent of systems thinking as a way if trying to understand the modern world and the incredible degree to which we are now all interconnected. https://ncase.me/loopy/

Another favourite of mine is https://buildyourstax.com/ - this very basic financial simulator teaches the value of an Index Fund and an emergency fund on your life, and the variation in individual stocks and shares as well as commodities like gold. I have accounts in place for my 9-year-old son that already has a pension and one of the reasons is that I understand the mathematics of compounding as a result of games such as these.

My final favourite is ‘Going Critical’ – a simulator that shows how any new concept can be shared among a population -whether an idea or a disease - https://meltingasphalt.com/interactive/going-critical/.

In an ideal world, there would be a free game online using an SAP interface that also simulated an organisation using SAP and that could be used by any student anywhere in the world at any time of day. Perhaps even leading to certification. Until now however, that isn’t an option as no such game exists and SAP isn’t a games developer. This is a shame because I would love to play that game and I think it would expose students to aspects of SAP without needing a classroom environment.

But in the meantime when teaching students in class settings or even online in design thinking sessions I will use loopy and the Beer game to get students to reflect on processes as design concepts that can be tweaked to create effects – both positive and negative – and that by playing around and coming to your own conclusions you can often learn more than if you had spent ten times more effort in a class setting formally studying the same concept. And even if there is a process of formal study before or after the simulation the student will remember, and be able to apply, those design thinking concepts better having had direct experience of their effects.

All the best

Martin

Photo by ?Linus Mimietz on Unsplash