Last September, a Corporate Learning Bar Camp (#CLC17) took place at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, which was a co-organizer of this event. This was the capstone of an exciting journey and tremendous effort of the Corporate Learning Community in Germany via a MOOCathon (#clc2025), which started in May 2017 involving L&D experts of key players in the German industry field.
I was honored to be invited there to offer my workshop on how one can become resilient and turn disruption into an opportunity for creative thinking, innovation and efficient collaboration in the complexity that the future of Corporate Learning is bringing into the HR and L&D world. I grasp the opportunity to share with you the serious game concept behind the design of this highly interactive workshop and seize upon the necessity of using disruptive interventions as a tool for intentional transformation and future making.
Being playful, I thought of a mini “self-interview!” as a disruptive and provocative way to bring out my content. So, there we go!
- Yannis the interviewer: Yannis, since it was invented, the word disruption as a noun has a strong negative flavor. However, when used as an adjective, like for example in “disruptive innovation”, it provides a rather positive nuance to the noun, which is following. Could you please shed some light on this paradoxical phenomenon?
- Yannis the responder: Well, let’s start with the definition of the word, which consists of two parts: dis+ruption. Both components carry the strong negative flavor that you mentioned. The first component “dis” comes from the Ancient Greek prefix (δυσ-) and induces a bad condition, capacity, or identity to the second part of the word, which comes after. It is such a strong prefix that even if the second part is a positive word, it totally nullifies it. (e.g. Harmony-Disharmony). When the second part also has a negative notion then the prefix “dis” intensifies it. This is what happens with “ruption”, a word of Latin origin from the 15th century, which is defined as a breaking or bursting open. So the negative perception of the word makes sense and there is no paradox about it. On the other side, for many years already, the corporate and lately the “Start-up” world have overused or even misused the word “disruption” attempting to provide a unique notion of a rapid-induced change that may lead to an innovation mindset. In my opinion, this didn’t occur, at least to the degree that it was expected and disruption seems to become another “airy-fairy” buzzword in the corporate narrative.
- Why do you say this didn’t occur?
- Because disruption really works in a level beyond change. This is the level of transformation, which is deeper and is closely related to the identity and the core values of an organization or a person. This is a difficult matter to deal with in an organizational system. Change is situational and relates mainly to the external environment, or to what can be seen. Transformation is psychological and can be understood as an inner re-orientation, or as what can be deeply felt and supports us to incorporate the change that takes place out there. This is the level where disruption occurs and it challenges individuals and systems to grow or vanish. Isn’t this happening for some years now with MOOCs both in the academic and corporate environment? There is a call for a deep intentional transformation rather than superficial adaptive change. And then in order to be innovative, you need to re-orient yourself and your business. Disruption does that in a radical, acute and emerging way. As Nik Beeson, a Canadian Change Navigator and good friend of mine say, “Real disruption is a wound to the integrity of an identity”.
- So it looks like that disruption is a very painful experience. But then how come disruption is promoted in your work?
- Now you touched the point by connecting disruption to pain because this is a core aspect of my work with disruption. I am not actually promoting it but with the use of serious games and/or art, I create a safe environment for people to “play” and experience with it. In this sense, they start becoming more resilient to it as disruption usually appears with a bullying attitude. Literally, I try to support them to learn how to respond to the disruption in a creative and intelligent way and avoid the pain that it provokes. Knowing that disruption blasts our identity, the workshop starts by proactively asking participants to take their “Learning Expert” hats off, getting into a totally different role, which allows them courageously and playfully to deal with any disruptive intervention.
- People participating in your workshops become familiar with disruption as an intervention. How do you manage to make them release their creative thinking?
Firstly, there is a paradox here. Creative thinking does not take place in the brain, as someone would expect. Creative “thinking” is born in the heart and in the gut, and then it takes the path to the brain before it is spoken out. However, it should not stay for a long time in the brain because the more it stays there the more it is re-constructed and filtered by our biases. A safe environment, like the one I am offering to the participants as a facilitator, eliminates the filtering process and their creative ideas come out pure, as they have been initially created.
Their creative-self blossoms in various moments throughout the workshop process, starting slowly at the beginning and evolving up to the end where they have to create and tell the story of the outcome of their work. Let me share with you one of these moments. The core part of this workshop consists of a serious game where the participants use some “Disruptive Intervention” cards. One of these cards, which I intentionally give to the participants to use sometime in the middle of the game and not in the beginning, has a particular effect. Participants at that time are working intensively on the assignments they have, facing disruptive incidences that create really hard time for them. After picking up this particular game card, they are asked to lay back in their chairs, or move to a specific quiet place created for this part of the game, take a 30 seconds silence and reflection time and then let their imagination to fly. How often do organizational executives and managers have the time to become silent and reflect on a daily basis? This intervention becomes very effective as it is a combination of the brainstorming and body-storming technics. So, all these processes that the participants are experiencing allow them to release more of their creativity and come up with innovative ideas and solutions in service of the future strategies of their Corporate Learning programs. At this particular moment, we have a strong winning situation because participants are “disrupting the disruption” as I love to say.
-How do participants respond to this shift point of their mindset?
In one of the workshops, I remember when I asked the participants for their feedback about an “aha” moment, which really impacted them, there was one who said: “I became aware of myself being creative when I stopped thinking!” This is a very provocative statement but it gives the essence of the whole process. Let me elaborate a bit more on this.
A strategic serious game allows participants to deploy their skills and collaborate openly and playfully with others in a novel way by “promoting” less rational, planned behavior in the exploration of disruptive scenarios. In this way, brand new ideas for the future may pop up. Playing is acting and this is a tactic, where action precedes thinking so that people act first and think later. What “playing” does is to unhook behavior from the demands of realistic goals. So, as participants liberate themselves from thinking, they start becoming really creative producing ideas and future solutions, which may sometime seem quite revolutionary. And there comes an important point.
As said before, my intention as a workshop owner is to create a space where amongst others, participants become able to trust and believe that their ideas and suggestions will be seriously taken into account during and after the process. This resonates a lot with what another participant said: “I felt being taken care of, in this workshop.” In order to bring their creativity and innovative thinking into the workshop setting, participants begin to learn to take pleasure in the process in the "Here and Now" rather than only take pleasure in the outcome for the future they want to create. Then, in order for the workshop to be successful, playfulness needs to be accepted and supported by all parties involved.
The other thing is that participants are taking advantage of unanticipated changes or crises in the environment as opportunities to review how they could respond to a changing environment, rather than reacting to it. In this sense, they become confident to pioneer and encourage the development of spontaneous processes that can cope with unanticipated changes in their working environment as well.
Now, I have a task for you. Please read once more the answer of the above question but this time by replacing the word “participant” with the word “manager” and the word “workshop” with the word “company”. You will immediately understand the impact that a process based on a strategy serious game could have on a bigger scale in the real life.
- How is disruption related to the prediction of the future of Corporate Learning in your workshop?
- As we found ourselves day by day living in a more and more highly disruptive world, dealing with fuzzy systems, I strongly believe that predicting the future not only of the Corporate Learning but of anything, cannot happen without experiencing, “playing,” and getting more familiar with the disruption itself and its consequences. However, initially, this needs to “be learned” in a safe environment like a workshop is. Because intentional disruptive interventions can be very painful if imposed in a careless way. There are theory and research behind it of how could this work. According to the Parallel Process Phenomena principle, what happens in a system A (the workshop environment) may likely have an impact on an interrelated system B (the participants’ learning or working place in real life) in the same way as experienced in the system A. So when participants are invited or even challenged to reach an effective level of “creative” thinking around the future of Corporate Learning during the workshop, it is more likely that they will re-enact this fearless thinking process in their everyday tasks and duties. Further on, they will be able to even reform it using several disruptive interventions as an attitude learned during the workshop. The more you experience with that, the more it becomes obvious that you are not only able to influence the future of Corporate Learning, but you actually become able to create it.
- Thank you Yannis for this beautiful discussion and wish you all the success with your workshops.
- It was my pleasure.
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