Transformational learning to achieve the UN’s sustainable development goals

This summer I race cycled with a friend in the Dutch countryside. I was struck when I saw a brand new house, where recently an old farm had been: a sign that this area – 50 km from Amsterdam – is under pressure of urbanization. One cause of urbanization is migration from Africa and Asia. I heard myself saying: “Let them fill up this area with houses and traffic lights. I will use my home-trainer; that is a small price to pay for world peace ”.

At once I realized that some years ago, I would never have said such a thing. I would have said that the beautiful Dutch countryside should be saved. But today I believe the Netherlands is one rare place where different cultures may develop together in harmony. And migration cannot be stopped. It is preferable to invite people in need to safe, prosperous and democratic countries. It may cause less net loss of countryside in the world. Migrants will send money home, better international relationships will speed up development in their home countries and overall population growth will decline: less net landscape transformation at world scale.

I admit, it is a long shot, but that is not my point. 

My point is that to gain deep insights needed to deal with sustainable development, one needs to put one’s feelings in a larger perspective. And if we help each other to do that, the UN's Sustainable Development Goals may be achieved.

John Wenger explains such deep insights here, calling it transformational learning. In my view, modern development assistance, for example, should include a focus on transformational learning if the goal is that developing countries learn to take care of themselves and to make their development sustainable. Professionals all over the world are aware of this need, but I rarely see acknowledgement in discussions about sustainable development.

What do I mean precisely, and what should be done?

Wenger compares transformational learning with transactional learning: explicit knowledge transfer, nowadays often in flipped classrooms, e-courses and MOOCs. Result is measured by testing the acquired knowledge. It is supposed that the receiver of explicit knowledge has the skill to do something useful with it. But in the case of complex problems like sustainable development, more often than not they don’t.

Those skills can be acquired, however, by crossing emotional barriers by means of transformational learning, and developing emotional intelligence (Daniel Goleman). Not by cognitive information transfer, but by letting others help someone to act outside of her comfort zone. Edgar Schein describes how others can do that in his book helping. It goes beyond coaching because it combines leadership skills with explicit knowledge. Schein distinguishes humble inquiry, diagnostic inquiry and confrontational inquiry; with the latter type the helper confronts the helped with her own cognitive dissonances. Outside her comfort zone.

New forms of organization emerge to enable helping to occur, like coaching ourselves (Henry Mintzberg e.a.) or mastercircle. This may be called organized helping to facilitate transformational learning, as opposed to spontaneous helping.

However, in a universe where one is rarely allowed to do something if one cannot promise measurable result, there is a problem. Organized helping is a little time-consuming, but the results are difficult to specify in advance and difficult to measure. Its result is a skill the helper transfers to the helped, which can only be put in practice if there is an opportunity. The context of that opportunity determines the nature of the result. Often the first result is a marginal change in what other people think and feel. As this change gets more collective, visible behavior may change but it is difficult to trace that back to organized helping. So, organizing helping may be a strategy for sustainable development, but if we achieve sustainable development we may never know what enabled it.

One thing is certain though: for sustainable development we need innovations which are inherently difficult to predict. Breakthroughs of sustainable technologies and sustainable consumer (and voter) behavior depend more on skills of transformational learning than on explicit knowledge. See Linda Hill’s Ted Talk. She asserts that it is sometimes better as a leader to define vague targets so that people can look for unexpected innovations. Such a vague target like “develop a sustainable energy system” are deliberately difficult to measure, and they are an invaluable complement of measurable targets like the sustainable development goals. Measurable policy targets still remain important to motivate people in the first place. They give a sense of direction to those who otherwise do not understand what innovations are all about. But to achieve these measurable end-targets we need unknown innovations. How to measure if someone contributes to that?

This dilemma is not new of course. Geoffrey Pullum summarized Noam Chomsky (1965) in this blog: “Competence is what you expect; performance is what you get.” James March wrote in 1991 that refining exploitation of old certainties more rapidly than exploration of new possibilities is likely to become effective in the short run but self-destructive in the long run. Henry Mintzberg writes in a recent blog: “Measuring as a replacement for managing has done enormous damage—undermining the souls of so many of our institutions. (...) If you can’t measure it, you’ll have to manage it.” The competency of managers is not objectively measurable. Results of complex change processes are not accountable to individuals. Mintzberg describes this management skill in a way comparable to Hill: facilitating transformative learning.

So, we are not without warning of the risk of a one-sided overemphasis on transactional learning. But we keep tumbling in that pitfall. If government agencies create bad results, the reflex is to cut costs. Learning then consists of removing those who perform badly in a measurable way. Management layers are often removed to cut more cost. The pressure increases not to manage and only to measure. In the words of March, there is only exploitation and no exploration. Innovation is frozen.

Many professionals react by trying to improve the organization of transformational learning. They often do this despite a lack of explicit political approval. An overview of municipal initiatives in The Netherlands is presented here (in Dutch). There is a permanent war going on between those who try to make exploitation more efficient and those who try to make exploration more efficient. 

Transitions happen, whether they are the result of conscious efforts or not. People who – genetically, culturally or because they have a trauma –cannot be helped to transform by learning, will have to adapt the hard way. Some say that more democracy does not help (André Meiresonne in See Public (in Dutch)): giving people a democratic voice if they are not capable of understanding and realizing their own interest does not work; what can they do with that power? Like me, years ago, they stick to the strong feeling that the landscape in their own country must be saved. In their own long term interest, they will have to rely on others. The discomfort that this gives many is the price we pay for our complex welfare. (But has it ever been different?).

The capable ones try to improve transformational learning even more, developing a common but local language for rewarding competencies for the public cause in complex conditions. Hopefully, they will be able to help not only each other. In the book Ambtenaren! Davied van Berlo and Jeroen Pepers show some nice examples (but in Dutch). One of them is Hans Leeflang, who ironically has been co-responsible for the destruction of many Dutch landscapes. Such people may also be able to help people in developing countries help themselves. It seems to me that, otherwise, sustainable development will not be reached.

(This is an adjusted translation of a column that has been published in Dutch in Virtueel Bestuur)