Some readers contacted me me to discuss my last post about stories. Here’s another story. And it has everything to do with improving how we train the workforce to be better thinkers.
I was giving my oldest a bath.
She was about 5 and was talking about a book we had been reading to her, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” She wanted to make sure she had the names of the four siblings in the book, oldest to youngest.
I refreshed her: Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
“Is Edmund a boy name or a girl name?” she asked.
Boy, I explained.
“Hmmm,” she said. “An A-B pattern.”
It took me a minute: She had been learning about patterns in math. She felt confident in her understanding of mathematical patterns. Once she had better knowledge of a certain boy’s name, she applied patterns to the book’s characters: boy, girl, boy, girl. A, B, A, B.
“I just wish my people would THINK about what they’re doing.”
I get this all the time. “Critical thinking” skills for employees would solve a lot of problems for organizations: less customer blowups, less missed opportunities to make sales, less frustrated coworkers, less wasted time.
My coaching practice uses the tagline, “Wrestle and grow.” When asked, I explain that I want clients to grow more organized, confident and influential.
Those three words were not chosen out of a hat. They show up daily, whether you’re giving kids a bath or training the workforce to be better thinkers.
I witnessed one such instance recently during a sales training. My friend and colleague Mike Marshall and I recorded a podcast episode about it: “Do you know these three powerful training methods?”(YouTube, Apple and Podbean).
Here is a little more background:
By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.
This ancient Jewish proverb gives us three “by” statements for how to attain success.
By knowledge: The stuff we have to memorize and categorize in our minds. If you want to read a book in Spanish, you better learn Spanish letters, words and grammar rules. In fact, the ancients would call all of it Grammar.
By understanding: Knowledge is useless unless you figure out how it all works together. This will probably take a fair bit of conversation—dialogue—with the teacher and fellow learners. And that is why the ancients called this “wrestling” toward understanding Dialectic.
(By the way, the ancients had a term for people who were confident in their understanding before they had actually wrestled with the knowledge: Fools.)
By wisdom: Once you have knowledge and some understanding, you can apply your newfound wisdom to practical situations. These are the folks who can make good decisions and influence others to the right answers: our best sales professionals, customer service providers and managers. The ancients called this art of speaking Rhetoric.
True education as described was to ensure that NOTHING could make you a slave: not clever-sounding arguments, not poor thinking, not even your own passions.
So:
Organized in your knowledge.
Confident in your understanding.
Influential in your wisdom.
Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric—three of the seven “liberal arts.”
“Liberal” didn’t mean left-wing. It comes from the same root as “liberated.” Slaves were not offered this kind of education.
True education as described was to ensure that NOTHING could make you a slave: not clever-sounding arguments, not poor thinking, not even your own passions.
“I just wish my people would THINK about what they’re doing.”
In your training and when you train your workforce to be better thinkers, which of the three arts is your biggest opportunity?
What could you do to get more “Confident” in that area?