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Features

Published July 2008

Transform Corporate Learning With a User Network

  Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn

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Different people learn in different ways. One of the best ways to accommodate the myriad of learning styles is through a user network, in which participants create and consume content.

All students learn differently from each other. Aptitudes and intelligence strengths differ, as do preferred learning styles and paces. This means that to ensure each student realizes his or her full potential, we need to customize learning opportunities to address each student’s needs.

It’s no different when we become adults.

Companies have long acknowledged that employees differ from each other in meaningful ways. Just witness the widespread use of the Myers-Briggs test in many organizations and its impact on how people manage.

As modern companies increasingly acknowledge that employees learn differently, it significantly impacts how they teach and train.

Most of us intuitively know that we all learn differently, through different methods, with different styles and at different paces. Academic research increasingly supports this contention, as well. This research has bubbled up under a variety of rubrics, and while there is considerable certainty that people learn differently from each other, considerable uncertainty persists about what those differences are.

One of the more well-known theories about how people learn has arisen from Harvard University Professor Howard Gardner’s research. He suggests we each have “multiple intelligences.” According to
Gardner, there are eight different intelligences. Most people excel in two or three of them and are weaker in the others.

For example, some people have strong “linguistic” and “logical-mathematical” intelligence, whereas others are weak in those two areas but have strong “bodily-kinesthetic,” “musical” and “intrapersonal” intelligence. The other three intelligences in Gardner’s schematic are “spatial,” “interpersonal” and “naturalist.”

There are many competing theories to Gardner’s. Some people, for example, prefer to think of cognitive differences as differences in aptitudes, not intelligences. The Ball Foundation has done significant work exploring people’s aptitudes and what it means for their learning. It has developed the Ball Aptitude Battery to help individuals understand their learning differences and, given those differences, help them think through what careers suit them best.

Corporations increasingly are incorporating this new knowledge of learning differences into their day-to-day business operations. Wynn Resorts is one such company. Buying into the idea that employees learn differently from each other, Wynn Resorts uses a number of methods to determine its employees’ cognitive differences. For example, in partnership with Gallup Consulting, it uses the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment to help its employees understand their strengths and preferred learning styles.

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