A Professional Engineer and the Neurosciences - an unintended Insight and Journey.

Setting the Scene:

My life changed at 00h15 on the morning of 1st February 2013…..

I was awakened by a stranger’s voice on the phone asking me, in very broken English, if I knew a young man, “who might be called Bradley”, and who drove a blue Ford Fiesta…

This devastating telephone call would serve as the catalyst for a series of experiences that would completely change my perception and understanding of everything I had ever read, facilitated or consulted on, for nearly 17 years, with regards to learning, knowledge transfer and memory development. It was also the start of a (24 x 7) x 7 month vigil, as my wife and I sat and slept in the quarantined section of the ICU unit at Milpark…my 26 year old son clinging to an almost invisible thread of life in a very deep coma, with massive Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) and multiple other, life altering main limb injuries, with vital statistics that were on the wrong side of the chart for any form of mildly positive outcome....for a very long time.

In retrospect, I am not sure if I really thought I could make a difference, or if it was just my desperate need to try and understand what was going on in my son’s head…and what we should start to plan for, as the neurological sequelae and possible realities my wife and I needed to contemplate, were just too devastating to comprehend.

And so day after day and night after night for 7 months, as I sat next to my lifeless son's body, I devoured whatever I could find on the brain and brain rehabilitation, with no real direction, and in the process, probably became the worst “patient’s parent” in history, as I started to ask increasingly well informed questions of the seemingly uncommunicative ICU medical team….although I now understand why they are so reluctant to get drawn into making even the smallest predictions…as they really have no way of knowing the outcome of a serious TBI.

And then, late one night on a weekend after about two months of devoted daily vigil, the kindly offered experiential wisdom of a retired ICU Sister on “weekend relief” duty in the quarantine section of ICU with my son... and one other badly shot up security guard, changed not only the future for my son…but also the entire future direction and focus of my company and everything we had been doing in the fields of Knowledge Management and Structured Mentoring...for nearly 17 years.

As I sat quietly next to a deeply comatose Bradley, reading the fascinating book “How we Learn” by Benedict Carey, the ICU night sister came over to me and said in a hushed, but beautiful Southern English accent…. “Mr. Marsh….you should not let the doctors depress you too much…there is a lot you can do to start his healing, even whilst he is in a coma….never stop talking to him and gently telling him it is all going to be alright….and start telling him stories about his life from an early age up to the present day…help him to start to reconnect to who he is….and tell him what has happened and that it will be alright….and tell him that you love him. He will have a lot of confusion and fear at present, and then a lot of new learning and re-learning to do and you can start that process right now – but without any expectations and pressure and always with a lot of love and patience….look for the smallest improvements and changes and always give genuine, positive feedback and encouragement”

She also went on to advise me that I should stop researching optimal Intracranial Pressures (ICP), and the plethora of other vital signs, which by now I was beginning to consider myself an unpublished expert in…and that I should instead concentrate on important post ICU rehabilitation and recovery topics such as Neuroplasticity and the latest discoveries in Learning and Memory for TBI’s…as the doctors would do their job better than me…and that my wife and I would have a very long road ahead with my son’s recovery and that everything we could do to support and complement a very overworked rehabilitation unit, would be to my son’s very best advantage.

After at little over 90 days, he started to stir from time to time and then on about day 100, although still unable to speak due to a combination of the tracheostomy tube in his windpipe and the severe depression fracture on the language and speech areas of his brain (left temporal and parietal area) and exacerbated by what appeared to be almost complete paralysis in his entire left side, (as a result of another terrible impact injury to his right frontal and temporal lobe area), he started waving his right hand slowly and seemed to indicate with his fingers that he wanted to write…even though his eyes were still closed and he lay motionless and sometimes almost “lifeless” for most of the time.

It would be impossible to describe the impact of this unexpected gesture on my wife and I, but after recovering sufficiently and attempting to muster some form of more respectable parental composure, we launched into a frenzied effort to find the most appropriate writing tools and a small white board for him to communicate on. For what seemed like an age, he scribbled a few unintelligible combinations of lines, semi-letters and shapes …..and we gave him the gentle feedback that we could not make it out yet…but that there was no rush and it was wonderful to make this first exciting contact with him…..and then suddenly, he started to slow down and become more focused and discernibly deliberate….and then it appeared in the most beautiful scrawl I have ever had to try and decipher…..

I  l o v e   y o u   dad…p l e a s e   d o n t    l e a v e    m e

This was the first sign of any real life and a very welcome confirmation that many of his main cranial nerves had not been irreversibly damaged…as up until this moment, we had been told that he may also be totally deaf.

Due to the nature of TBI’s and the length of time required to heal and re-learn so many basic life skills again and the sheer medical uncertainty involved in the microscopic miracle of brain recovery, Brad’s future is now certainly different from before his accident and also quite uncertain in many ways….but possibly with an unexpected, huge element of new potential in him, which was never as apparent in him before his accident.

A gift of unexpected insight:

To me, Brad’s accident, and his short to medium term recovery and then long term future, is a lot like the future of South Africa, which is still struggling to rectify an iniquitous and unfortunate past and is now desperate for sustained healing and profound new learning and development and the effective sharing and transfer of millions of collective years of experiential wisdom and knowledge. In the next 5 to 10 years, the current leadership capabilities, scarce and critical skills and knowledge and the hard earned experiences and key relationships of the knowledge rich “Baby Boomer” generation, which has been responsible for the vast majority of South Africa’s technological, infrastructural and academic development to date, will have retired or emigrated and the new guard of ambitious young graduates will be firmly entrenched as our future leaders and to take our country to what at present, often seems like a rather uncertain future.

A rapidly declining Maths and Science capability and the turnstile like turnover amongst the younger generation in the job market, is also not doing a lot to ensure the necessary sharing and transfer of the critical intellectual capital, technical expertise and experiential wisdom that is so essential to our long term success and sustainability as a developing Nation.

The well documented and global under-delivery of the so called Knowledge Management movement since the late 1990’s and the continued lack of quantifiable Return on Investment (ROI) of the estimated US$315 Bn global spend on “sheep dip” like training programmes, all points to a desperate need to do things differently… if we are going to actually realise any of the benefits of bold new Nation Building initiatives such as the National (Infrastructural) Development Plan and the 18 associated Strategic Integrated Project (SIP’s) clusters put forward by Government.

Indeed, on the 18th of April 2014, Higher Education Minister, Blade Nzimande. told a Department of Labour (DoL) Employment Equity (EE) and Transformation Indaba gala dinner that “South Africa has spent R57 Billion over the past 10 years through the SETAs in various training programmes, but the country does not have much to show for this investment”.

And so, as Bradley slowly recovered and indeed, took more and more control over his own recovery, through his incredibly brave and unrelenting commitment to learning and re-learning almost everything, from walking, talking, feeding, toileting, cleaning and dressing himself….and then slowly building up his attention and concentration spans, from only a few minutes… to a few hours, along with increasing reasoning, planning and other essential executive, cognitive and emotional improvements – we witnessed the power of the brain to recover, learn, re-learn and start to thrive again.

My research efforts now had far more focus and effect and I continuously devoured everything I could lay my hands  which dealt with anything to do with “brain sensitising learning and memory development for damaged, sick or elderly brains”…

And then one morning in late 2013, nearly 8 months after the accident, my wife said to me “Phil, you have put so much work and effort into all your research on the brain and it is having such a positive effect with both Brad and now increasingly with our clients, you should really take time out to put it all down in a book”.

This gentle suggestion from my wife was the final insight I needed to extend my research focus and new found passion, to move far beyond improving just how we would help Bradley recover and fully rehabilitate from his TBI, (or indeed, stave off my own brain degeneration in the future). We had actually experienced first-hand, the incredible potential of the brain to learn, un-learn and re-learn again and the almost insuppressible power of a committed, positive attitude when aimed towards a defined learning objective or new capability development. We had seen in Bradley’s recovery, that what at first appeared to be disconnected and random collections of neuronal associations and learning processes, had slowly at first, and then with increasing urgency and effectiveness, once again transformed into a cerebral symphony of exquisite human capabilities.

And then the next insight dawned…why not use these profound new discoveries and proven rehabilitation methodologies for learning and memory development in perfectly healthy graduates and young staff members, all hungry for rapid advancement to the corporate throne.

Turning Pain into Potential:

And so in late 2013, I set out to try and integrate everything that we knew that worked from our experience with Brad and all my continued research into the latest brain sensitising Learning and Memory development space…along with our vast experience from 17 years of consulting in the Knowledge Management practices space…and all wrapped up into what we also knew really worked well, which were the fantastic results achievable, through professionally, project managed and regularly monitored Structured Mentoring Programmes.

The first step was a thorough “position audit” of everything I had learned, researched or experienced in my corporate, consulting and recent family life, which had any reference or applicability to successful and sustainable learning and memory development and the effective transfer of scarce and critical knowledge and experiential wisdom. – I was looking for obvious corroborations, synergies, anomalies and gaps…which quite quickly confirmed some very interesting themes:

• There were still a lot of gaps to fill….which needed both further research, as well as practical experiential evidence, before they would be useful to implement at any reasonable value adding scale.
• Many historically accepted and widely perceived, so-called de-facto “best practice” teaching and learning methodologies, were actually quite Wrong !!..and had been wrong for many years.
• Training alone, will not, and cannot solve our Nation’s development challenges, or secure a successful and sustainable future for all, if we all wish to exist in a reasonably sophisticated and stable society and economy in the future.
• Training alone, whilst an essential component of short term learning and skills development…is actually a very small contributor to medium, long term and long lasting memory development…and more importantly, memory retention and recall capability.
• The critical interplay and balance between a practical journey (mainly frontal lobe executive functioning activity) and an emotional journey (mainly limbic system response activity), in real capability development (involving whole brain potential), is completely missed in almost every training intervention.
• The sustainable sharing and transfer of Critical Knowledge and Experiential Wisdom cannot be achieved by most of the current popular methodologies still used by a significant number of organisations, as it assumes that knowledge is a “package-able commodity” which can be shared and transferred via performance management systems, change management initiatives, informal or formal coaching and mentoring relationships...... and even exit interviews.
• The unfortunate, seemingly myopic focus by Government and the SETA’s on training interventions alone, will not and cannot, build the future scarce and critical skills and knowledge base required for the National Development Plan…without a significant shift in the appreciation of how to ensure "volunteered engagement" of the Knowledge Sources, using proven critical knowledge transfer processes and programmes, such as Knowledge Mentoring interventions and other group based knowledge exchange initiatives, by nurturing a far higher degree of trust and acceptance of the power of the neurosciences and the importance of brain sensitisation based learning and memory development.

This process of introspection and the critical evaluation and analysis of my own very personal experiences in the brain sensitising learning and memory development  space, combined with 17 years in the Knowledge Management and Coaching and Mentoring space, as well as those of all the well documented local and international business, people development and talent management experiences, led to the realisation that only a very well structured and balanced interplay between 3 inter-dependent, knowledge building and reinforcing focuses, would provide the optimum “Critical Knowledge Transferring” solution. This new "Knowledge Mentoring" approach, for both the prospective “knowledge seekers or gatherers” (the younger and more enthusiastic and expectant Knowledge Mentees) and their generally older and more senior “knowledge owners or brokers” (the older and more experienced…and often somewhat jaded, Knowledge Mentors) would provide the critical relationship of trust and group collaborative space needed to truly get knowledge to flow.

This new Knowledge Mentoring framework approach, would require groups of committed participants, with common Critical Knowledge Transferring objectives, assembled in relationships of knowledge exchange and who would need to develop a far more profound interest and appreciation for the workings of their own brains and those of the other participants – and more specifically in the very complex area of Learning and Memory development. 

This would require a significant point of departure from many of the usual training interventions, or learning and development initiatives, where the HR or L & D manager, facilitator, trainer, teacher or coach is often assumed and accepted to be the expert in all things “soft and human” and the trainees, or recipients of the intervention, are viewed simply as “grunts from the operational battlefield”, with good functional skills, knowledge and experience, but almost no understanding, or interest, in the new neuro-sciences, or their own or each other’s learning styles, or brain sensitising techniques for learning and memory development and their incredible impact and value in the accelerated development of human potential.

I have recently started referring to this as “Brain Sensitisation Based Knowledge Acquisition and Assimilation” and it is a core message in my book entitled “Knowledge Mentoring? - a Framework to Bridge the Global Scarce and Critical Skills and Knowledge Crisis”… which for the first time ever, gives non-psychologists the ability to accelerate and optimise sustainable learning, un-learning and re-learning, in an age of impatience. Our experience with Bradley and more recently with several of our major clients, had shown irrefutably that effective and sustainable learning and memory development will only take place way beyond the normal focus on classroom type Semantic Learning techniques, and into the experiential “Watch one - Do one - Teach one” associative learning domain, requiring integrated combinations of guided Episodic Learning experiences and long term, collaborative relationships of trust.

 Making Business Sense out of Life’s Tough Lessons:

In the business environment, where a “family bond and love” does not exist, the trick is to ensure that a sustainable environment of “experiential empowerment and enablement” is created, in order to ensure that the critical skills, knowledge, behaviours, experiences and relationship are exchanged with sufficient “wisdom and wonder” between the individual partnerships and collaborative groups, in such a way that they leave indelible etches in the memory banks of the younger participants, or Knowledge Mentees, as I refer to them.

This is now achieved through a modification of a consulting model I had developed several years ago in the Knowledge Management strategy space, and with some significant re-modelling, the Integr8ed Knowledge Mentoring Framework? evolved – ensuring that a sustainable knowledge based Culture is nurtured, through sustainable knowledge sharing Habits, with mutually agreed knowledge Assets being packaged and shared using collaborative, knowledge sharing Tools, - creating a knowledge rich environment of celebrated and rewarded knowledge exchange and transfer.

The next step is to ensure that a sustainable Critical Knowledge Transfer vehicle is put in place, to carry the process forward. We have found that this is best achieved through a medium to long term collaboration group structure, such as a Structured Mentoring Programme, but where Critical Knowledge Transfer is the primary focus and the accepted currency of exchange and not just individually focused growth and development.

I have also found that validated growth and development “metrics of knowledge acquisition and assimilation” are critical to not only keeping the momentum, but also to grow commitment and effort. Just as Bradley bravely entered a 5 km Park Run with my wife, only weeks after re-acquiring sufficient balance and strength to walk again after about 14 months of indefatigable effort, which immediately re-energised his absolute focus on the next hurdle, a 10 km walk and to start to regain his previous life as a triathlete, Critical Knowledge Transfer initiatives in a business environment require a transparent and objectively validated Return on Investment (RoI), supported by an equally important participants Return on Expectation and Experience (RoEE).

Huge personal motivation, drive and commitment are all cornerstones of Bradley's day-to-day recovery efforts, but to get appropriate attention in the Board Room, and to elevate the conversation beyond the general level of ignorance or scepticism towards new people development initiatives, an impactful “thought starter” was desperately needed and so I developed a model called the “Value of Knowledge at Risk”, or V-KaR Model – which provides executives and managers with a pragmatic way of managing, measuring and monitoring their investment and continued commitment to Critical Knowledge Transfer - as well as a "vultures eyes   view" of the risk and cost of not doing anything.

Having recently completed my book Knowledge Mentoring? and immediately implementing several Critical Knowledge Transfer programmes in major organisations, I can confirm that after only a relatively short space of time, there is an infectious step change in the participants engagement and enjoyment, as well as the quality and tangibility of results.

A traditional focus on Competency Development has effectively been transformed into committed and confident Capability Realisation…and that the future of the National Infrastructural Development Plan and our Nation suddenly seems a lot more tangible to me now….and that my son, Bradley, through his on-going, brave commitment to his own remarkable recovery, will have also contributed meaningfully to our Nation Building needs.