Entrepreneurial learners are individuals who can be in any situation and see the opportunity to learn, explained John Seely Brown during his General Session address on Tuesday. It is these individuals, he said, who will help organizations to thrive in this 21st century world of constant change.
Brown described the disposition of entrepreneurial learners as questioning, communicating, reflecting, and playing. These can’t be taught, however. They only can be cultivated. The importance of play is that it allows you to use your imagination, evokes innovation, and fosters collaboration.
Take for example, Facebook’s “hackathons” that give employees the opportunity to try out new ideas and collaborate; and Google’s “20 percent time” policy in which engineers spend 20 percent of their time working on projects outside the scope of their work to improve or change products or ideas, or develop something new.
Both these programs, Brown explained, allow employees to create new knowledge with innovations. Brown added that business models should be reframed to embrace this notion of play. “A sense of imagination is key to the concept of reframing,” he said. “How did we learn about the world? We engaged in play that would help us make sense of everything, with the provision to try and fail.”
Brown believes Millennials are inherently entrepreneurial learners. “To them, the workscape must become a learningscape supporting agency and engagement,” he explained. “For this to work, mentorship and reverse mentorship must deeply co-mingle.”
And the CLO’s role, Brown said, should become that of chief organizational architect because “the architectural and institutional structure we currently have does not have the capability of letting us be responsive to the world of constant change.” Another reason is because “we need to create organizations that [Millennials] want to be part of.”
By creating work environments that foster creativity and innovation, organizations will further contribute to employees’ learning while also helping the organizations adapt to the rapid change by implementing the new ideas and solutions that result. “Play in a very deep, hardcore way,” Brown said. “Where imaginations play, learning happens.”