Learning to Succeed

The SB transformation changes both “The Viewing Self, and the World we View” (Hoskin 1995, pp. 141-162). To succeed in this new world, we need to learn how to think otherwise and, above all, to free ourselves from the fear of failure. This chapter explores how the pedagogic tool of Improvised Role Play can do just this. The SB world opens up, makes sense of and constructs itself providing we can overcome the monocular vision instilled in the Modern world over the last few centuries. Science and experience now reveal the many non-economic or, more pointedly cash-based interactions, that daily constitute ourselves and the world we occupy. Yet many business and personal developments and measures of success are still perceived as being monetary-based and quantifiable at heart. The freedom of thinking that permits open-minded, reflective, pragmatic judgment is hard to find in business, politics and people. Action in businesses and businesses schools alike can be taken to foster the appreciation of the world’s complexity and interdependence and the untold riches that are revealed by the recognition and appreciation of multi-values. But first of all, mental blocks need to be removed. Improvised Role Play reforms learning by planting seeds of reflection that promote “thinking otherwise” and reduces that debilitating fear of failure. They are seeds that all academics, businesspeople and citizens urgently need to plant. The approach rests on two interlinked ideas. The first is the systematic creation of experimental spaces and the second is about reducing or, preferably eliminating, the fear of failure. If we can achieve this space, participants will have a far better chance of “thinking otherwise” about themselves and the world they occupy. The first step is to deal with the fear of failure that is prevalent in formal learning, and which goes on to frame lasting attitudes in far too many lives. John Holt discusses this fear at source in school children in his two books going from “How Children Fail” (1982[1964]) to “How Children Learn” (1969). Holt argues that fear, boredom and confusion are the reasons why children fail in school. Schools, he argues, are not about learning but about obsessive tests and finding “right” answers because teachers “try to control the content of their [students] minds” (1982[1964]), p.231). The Improvised Role Play described in this chapter creates an experimental space where the fear of failure is taken out enabling participants to be their open-minded, eager to learn, selves. The following song reaffirms this sentiment.