The exponential power of experiential learning

Rachel Sceats, Trudi West, Leah Henderson

In one theater show in London, the audience is asked to remove shoes and socks before entering the set, where they’ll encounter fluffy carpets, cold stone, and even wet sand. If you’ve ever been to a performance like this, you’ll know that the story becomes much more memorable when you’re part of the action yourself.

This concept is key in experiential learning, where people regularly encounter uncertain and ambiguous situations. “Chances are, that may feel uncomfortable,” says Rachel Sceats, Head of Experiential Learning at Hult Ashridge Executive Education. “But that is exactly what leaders have to deal with.”

And, as the first to introduce experiential learning to leadership and organizational development in the 1950s, we know what goes into creating just the right level of discomfort to help leaders to apply their learning in the real and messy complexity of their role.

Experiential learning is designed to provoke a response that we feel – clammy palms when you’re worried, or a rapid heartbeat when you’re anticipating something. And that response, whatever it may be, has a functional purpose. Combined with reflection, it’s what enables learning to go deeper into memory – what we call ‘sticky learning’.

Sceats sees it all the time in her work with leaders – when they’re practicing difficult conversations, for example. “Instead of talking the entire time, you might think, ‘I've got to be quieter’. The first time you try, you might not say anything. Then the next time, you find that balance. And then you’re able to experiment back at work.”

This cycle of testing and tweaking is crucial to embed learning, but it can also be exhausting. According to Trudi West, Professor of Practice in Leadership and Psychology at Hult International Business School, “It has to be felt for you to be bothered enough to actually think about it again.” It’s why traditional approaches that only cover theory have such a short shelf-life in terms of impact.

While leaders need to be stretched in experiential learning, it does have to be on the right side of their comfort zone. Because if it’s taken too far, “they can experience an amygdala hijack – leading to intense emotional response that may be disproportionate to the situation or they simply disengage,” says West.

This duty of care is built into how Sceats and her team innovate. “We excel in linking our research to new experiential exercises, and we go through strict testing before anything is run with a group,” says Sceats. So the priority is always to develop impact, rather than innovation for innovation’s sake.

She’s passionate about the exercises, emphasizing that their success – i.e. transferability to the workplace – depends on the set up before the exercise and the debrief after. “Without that, they just become games. It isn't just an add-on for a bit of fun; it needs to embed the learning.”

The focus on sustained learning means that experiential elements are always informed by organizational impact. “They’re designed to feed into the risk appetite, cultural ethos, or strategy of each unique organization,” says West. “It has to be relevant to the participants, otherwise it's like learning a language you’re never going to use or be tested on – why are you doing it?”

In one of the most impactful simulations at Hult Ashridge, participants go to work for a day – ostensibly. “But in the way it's designed, everything is shifted slightly, as if through a prism,” explains West. It allows people to see their thinking and behavior differently to how they would normally.

“It brings out all sorts of experiences – how people cope with uncertainty, and the assumptions they make. Threaded through are moments to question: where else do I feel like that? What does it tell me about how I think?”

And that’s when people start to have small epiphanies. Because how they respond is often indicative of what happens in their real world: in meetings, negotiations and pitches. Like an ultra-fast highway to self-awareness, it accelerates our recognition of behavior patterns. “If people can see their own thinking and feelings in action, they can be more choiceful about what they do,” says West.

At its simplest, experiential learning can be whittled down to three phases: do, review, and apply. “The experience provokes you to notice, and the reflective practice is where you learn. If you don't have that sensemaking part, it's almost like you're left taking a breath in with no exhalation.”

It’s important to point out that there’s no big reveal – nothing definitive to ‘work out’ so to speak. People’s learning journeys vary by the simple fact that people are different. “If somebody is trying to learn to step back, their experience will be quite different to somebody that's trying to step up,” says Sceats. “That's the joy of experiential.”