Pep Talks and Storytelling

Prescribed education aside, experiential learning for employers is typically a short induction program, usually little more than the provision of a descriptive pamphlet of the organization, a pep talk or tour by a senior executive, or a mentoring program for more senior employees. When some form of reflection is used to examine performance, some organizations use a technique known as storytelling, where individuals are encouraged to relate their experiences through narrative witness, usually in some theatrical way, or through the use of the linguistic framework of metaphor (Denning, 2004; Klein, 1998). Alongside this is a branch of experiential learning that concentrates on others’ experiences. Called benchmarking, it is a tool whereby an institution measures its performance or processes against other organizations’ best practices, determines how those employers achieved their performance levels, and uses the information/knowledge to improve its own performance. It is usually lost on practitioners that, however imaginative the external experience is, it still has to be adapted to one’s own environment to be effective—making OM and its lubricating component, tacit knowledge, the critical arbiter.

With the exception of museum visits and mentoring, the commonality among these applications is that the experiences to which the students or new employees indulge, or organizations examine, is of the present—the intention being to provide them with a familiarity of actual activities within a recent timeframe and within a particular discipline, their own employer’s or competitor’s environment. The point here is that the experiences are only accessible while individuals remain in situ or actually remember; once they join the flexible labor market, their experiences become lost to the organization, as does the dynamic between individuals, leaving the employer dependent on their new employees’ experiences with their employers past. Excluding benchmarking and action learning, the intended erudition is mostly informal, unstructured, tangential, and typically modest. At present, mentoring and benchmarking are perhaps the most effective ways of all the types of experiential learning.

While all of these approaches are unquestionably preferable to just listening to a teacher in the classroom, the concept of experiential learning is being short-changed. As already indicated, it overlooks an area that is arguably just as valuable as a learning medium and which has become decisive as the wider workplace has adopted short job tenure as its raison d’être. Learning from prior practice within an organizational context is where the traditional definition and application of experiential learning falls short.