An introduction to the Neo-Paleo Cognitive Diet

My work covers a number of fields, but the core of everything I do intersects with human learning and how we teach and learn in society, business, and personal lives, and how we interface with each other.

This ties my entire holistic set of frameworks together - complexity theory, narratives, agility, decision making, teaching, retention of data, paradigm shifts, humanising, emergence and serendipity, strategy, interaction, culture, management science, ecosystem thinking, innovation and disruption, self-care, ethnography, and more, each an integral part of a whole.

The truth is, much as companies and individuals like to select a single niche buzzword to focus on, every one of these affects all the rest, and you cannot make changes in one without affecting the rest; but if there is one you can focus on, at least as a beginning to wider understanding and catalyst to the rest, it is how we learn, because every single thing in our lives depends upon this - and it's something we have been conditioned to do very, very badly.

I'd like to introduce an overview of a model I call Homogogy, and why it's more critical than ever.

An introduction to Homogogy

All humans learn the same way - by creating neural connections in specific patterns. This is how our brains react to stimulus, and how we create memory and learning, including the creation of "muscle memory" within the motor cortex. This depends on a process we call neuroplasticity, which is the ability to create these connections.

For us to do this effectively, especially with abstract concepts, we must be engaged, and this is the true task of any teacher - not knowledge transfer, but the drive, the incentive and inspiration to learn. You can lead a student to the door of knowledge, but they have to step through themselves, so a teacher should be inspiring them to do so.

This means we must know how to engage others so they want to learn, and then support them to do so, not attempt to drive knowledge into them. We are not filling a glass with the water of knowledge; we are lighting a fire and then stepping out of the way.

Homogogy promotes critical thinking, lateral thinking, and deep, applicable, and retainable understanding and comprehension. It's how we naturally learn, and draws on both neuroscience and experiential evidence.

Engagement is often where I see the most issues in teaching, from school to cross-industry. We deliver a standardised set of data in a specific format to force-categorise a class of individuals, often with too many learners to dedicate any time to. This is not only lazy but it ignores the fact that each of us must be engaged according to two areas:

• Individual aspects
• Cultural aspects

If you can't engage people, you can't impart concepts well, and that's generally not the failing of the learners, but the teacher.

There are 3 Domains of Learning

We compound things by ignoring two of the three domains of learning; only the first is usually considered "learning". You may hear a learning professional speak of Bloom's Taxonomy, which is only the Cognitive.

However, the Affective and Kinaesthetic domains are equally important; they trigger, and are triggered by, the Cognitive domain, and are where we can find further integrated concepts such as Emotional Intelligence, Inclusion, or Connection.

Think of how a story is told, how a story makes you feel, and how a story imparts data, and you begin to understand why.

Consider also how in education, society and business we have been conditioned to considering only the first as valid, and how even that is constrained very heavily for 3 main reasons:

• Convenience and control leads to a focus on the teacher within a class as the figure of authority, and the performance of the class then heavily metricised, meaning we focus on how they teach, not how students learn;
• With ever more data available, the over-metricisation, categorisation, and reducing to mere numbers on paper of complex individual humans arises, shifting focus from outcomes (learning) to objectives (scores, rankings, and so forth);
• Combined together, the previous two points then allowed the most currently valued aspect - profit can be made from this.

A teacher may be exceptional, but corporate and societal structures that dictate curricula can be as restrictive for the teacher as the students. Currently, those methodologies fall into two schools:

Previous teaching methods

There are two primary accepted methodologies of teaching used, both named in the West from a similar Greek root:

Pedagogy (leading boys) is the concept that children must be lectured and moulded, taught what they need to know. Pedagogues are traditionally associated with the young, strictness and pedantry (children should be seen and not heard is a classic integration with this concept).

Andragogy (leading man) focuses more on adults needing to teach themselves, and discover new skills through play. Andragogues are seen as adult educators and enablers who focus on experiential learning.

They were codified during the 1960s and 1970s by Martin Knowles, a US Professor of Adult Education. He noted that the way adults were being taught was ineffective; lectures, learning by rote, exams, and other techniques we still to this day associate with school and University learning (as well as industry) simply weren't achieving the results they should, relatively easy to monitor and perform though they were.

Books such as The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species changed the way adults and industries thought about teaching adults, although the older methods are still surprisingly widely used to this day - or perhaps not so surprisingly.

This was very beneficial to adults, especially in industries looking for new and effective ways to engage, and was a definite springboard for engaging techniques such as Agile Coaching to develop. It was not beneficial to children, however; for all his progressive thinking to how adult humans learn, Knowles assumed that because children had been taught via pedagogy for hundreds of years, it must be the correct way (it's interesting he quite consciously refuted this assumption for adults), and so he unwittingly and drastically reinforced the old, rigid, totally incorrect methodology for children. Given that we were all children once, this has impacted every single one of us more than we realise.

But Andragogy isn't perfect either; it doesn't account for neurodiversity or individual learning, language, culture and ethnography, and a number of other equally critical areas.

Neither of these acknowledge that all humans learn in a similar fashion throughout their life neurologically, nor are they technically correct in times when we are rightfully acknowledging that women are also an equal part of the human intellectual process in intellect and ability, if not recognition and reward. The terminology, in my opinion, needs updating.

Learning is a continuous path, not an end location. The progress is in the journey itself.

Pedagogy is still the core of learning in business. Certification is all; classes are strict; classrooms are arranged as desks, meetings are instructional. Typically there is an information overload delivered in too short a timeframe to too many people at once in a generic, boring, and "company approved" manner which often spawns bad conceptualisation, inability to apply or retain data, a hierarchy of go-tos, and a host of other problems. It is a terrible teaching methodology for humans, and it comes hand-in-hand with the expectation that the certification is the goal; a qualification that has more value than the learning itself both before and after.

As I said in my post Never Mind the Buzzwords, it is important to understand that a certification or qualification is the beginning of understanding and application, not the end. This should especially be borne in mind for younger humans, but it applies to us in all walks of life.

Andragogy has come to mostly be accepted only as a(n agile) way of teaching adults and is often misapplied as a result.

Rather than unlearning what you have once learned, it's better to learn correctly from the start… and continue for the rest of your life!

Learning from a Master

There is an unwritten assumption in almost all teaching that the teacher is always the holder of knowledge, correct, and that they are "in charge" of a class, although Andragogy is far less rigid in this respect. Sharon Bowman's book Learning from the Back of the Room stresses the importance of removing the teacher as an impediment, which I have always strongly agreed with, but I would go further: the Teacher is just another student helping to guide the rest, as every class I've ever run has resulted in new learning for me within and without my subject. More: "Mastery" brings connotations of the ability to fail to many, and the truth is There is no Failure; only Feedback. Failure is critical to both learning and success - watch this video for more!

I've met an awful lot of teachers and coaches who assume a dominance of mastery over others, and I've almost uniformly found ego unable to flexibly take in new learning. The best teachers I know are those who question themselves and never stop evolving.

So my first advice to everyone is: BE CURIOUS.

And my second is do it in psychological safety. I speak about comfort zones here and why popular models and ideas may not be as appropriate as we think. Being psychologically safe doesn't mean not being challenged; it means being challenged and retaining the ability to optimally perform and learn.

Homogogy is about always being a learner on a journey, and never stopping on that journey.

Never Stop Learning.

As I say here, this is the fundamental core of what humans do.

Humans are learning machines; we can adapt and learn faster and on more levels than any other creature we know of - and yet, we often manage to actively and aggressively damage that natural learning. We impose limits; we opt for profit over results; we force rather than inspire; and we muddy language around this process, often twisting terminology so it means the opposite to suit our whim.

So language is critical, and its correct application is as important. We must use the correct words, in the correct manner, if we are to comprehend.

Narrative is also critical for learning, but I'll talk about that another time, or you can view my TEDx talk here where I speak about Learning, Narrative, and Complexity as three seeds of human collaboration.

So how can I start teaching or learning effectively?

I'll leave you with a novel thought:

A TEACHER IS NOT A KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER DEVICE.

We are a guide; we inspire, we help; we provide information, too, but we are there to spark and engage, not enforce. Learning is not effective when you attempt to force it upon people for anything other than survival (at which point you expect losses). In addition, a teacher can only open the door; the student must decide to walk through it themselves.

We have conditioned ourselves to become lazy at teaching and learning, in a time where more humans have access to more information more quickly than ever before. Worse: we are so de-incentivised to learn by subjects perceived as boring, disagreeable, or too complicated that we often choose wilful ignorance, especially after years of neoliberal focus have instilled profit as the only value we should seek (and a growing distrust of expertise).

Homogogy, how humans teach and learn, can reverse this, and it begins with all human interaction. Everyone, every situation, has something to teach us. It's not enough to be skilled; we have to understand critical thinking and implement it.

Currently, in the middle of a pandemic, we have new opportunities to learn and grow, or even instruct (home schooling and more); but we also must be kind to ourselves and ensure Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is being met. You have not failed if you're not safe enough to learn; learn to find that safety, and positively progress from there. The paradigm has shifted, and we all need to find our feet and move forward.

You can always reach out to me if you need to understand how.