JOHN'S JOURNAL: Based Learning 12: LBL

LBL: Life-Based Learning

Life-based learning proposes that learning for work is not restricted to learning at work. The premise underpinning life-based learning is that all learning is interrelated, so it is not easy to separate learning at work from the other types of learning that adults do.

LBL Highlights:

The shift is from a perspective of seeing work and learning as separate from leisure, family, and personal life, to one where more realistically they merge and allow for a more integrated or holistic approach that acknowledges the realities of adult learning.
Learning is a multi-dimensional experience and individuals have knowledge, skills and attributes that may not always be visible or recognized by organizations, but that significantly contribute to organizational achievements and relationships.
The need is for multiple sources of learning that open up opportunities for developing the capability.
The challenge is how to utilize this more open-ended approach for the benefit of both the learner and the organization.
As boundaries between work and learning increasingly blur, there is a need to have more positive and holistic approaches to learning.

LBL Includes:

The need for a greater balance between creativity and standardization;
The need for a greater balance between innovation and uniformity;
The need for a greater balance between control and open self-organizing systems.

LBL Synonyms:

Life-Long Learning: Learning throughout the whole of a person’s journey through life.
Life-Wide Learning: Focuses on learning from the whole of a person’s life at any point in time and the source of that learning.

LBL Characteristics:

Emphasizes capability
Promotes a strength-based orientation
Change is qualitatively different
Human dispositions are critical
Developing the whole person
Contradictions are strengths
Organizations are enablers
Learners are responsible for their learning
Balances integrity and utility
Recognizes multiple sources of learning

LBL Features:

An emphasis on a strength-based orientation rather than strategy;
Explicit recognition of underpinning foundation truths and values including trust, mindfulness, consideration and tolerance;
Acknowledgment of the learner as a whole person who accesses many sources of learning.

LBL Benefits:

Articulates and legitimizes what is familiar and known intuitively
Proposes a way forward that is within reach
Expands the perspective of learning, which has the potential to open up more opportunities;
Considers more productive to reduce and blur the artificial boundaries that currently compartmentalize the context of learning;
Legitimizes life experiences as a key source of learning;
Reinforces the fact that learning is transferable, and that ‘harvesting’ learning from one context and sowing it in another is a very practical, achievable and productive initiative;
Acknowledges the whole person, which in turn has the potential for utilizing individual talents in better and smarter ways.

LBL Approaches:

Guiding Principles: Seen as providing the scaffolding on which capability development can be built; Offered as a starting point and not as a prescriptive list; Work with strengths; Understand your learning ecology; Learners design their own learning and acknowledge the whole person.
Organizational Enablers: Provided as a starting point and not a prescriptive list. Establishing more effective connections and networks; Developing a culture that supports job reshaping for personal growth; Creating more meaningful spaces for exchanging and sharing ideas; Creating ways of gathering; Interpreting, generating and applying new knowledge that is gained from formal learning or a more personalized learning journey.
Strength-Based Strategies: Conversations, being integral to daily organizational activity and a source of rich learning; Talent management which is about identifying, valuing, guiding and nurturing the talents and aspirations of employees; Positive deviance is about the people who function better and achieve more than others with the same set of constraints and resources as everyone else; Appreciative Inquiry is based on the premise that organizations change in the direction in which they inquire; Disruptive technology challenges orthodox ways of doing things.
Evaluation: Appreciative Inquiry which embeds self-evaluation into the processes used to discover the core strengths and best practices within an organization; Most Significant Change which involves both participatory monitoring and evaluation through significant change stories that are collected from the field.

LBL Resources: