Rally A Cohort

What's become clear after 12 years of teaching (in classrooms at Stanford & in organizations all over the world) is that the volume of total learning is dramatically amplified by taking a cohort approach. Whereas when one person learns in isolation — or even if many learn, but all in isolation — learning is largely linear, when many folks learn in parallel, and come back together to share, the learning curve is exponential:

This could be expressed mathematically:
An individual learning in isolation: 1 person x 1 insight = 1 unit of learning
Many people, learning in isolation: 10 people x 1 insight = 10 units of learning
Many people, learning in community: 10 people x 10 insights = 100 units of learning

It makes sense intuitively, yet hardly anyone in organizations attends to the cultivation of the cohort as a learning organism. That’s why so many of our sessions consist of students sharing their progress with one another: not because we don’t have anything to say, but because they can discover and share much more together, and in a way where the learnings are much more durable.

I’ve read somewhere that the shelf life of the learning from most workshops is less than one week. My hunch is that has a lot to do with the way knowledge is transmitted. In our learning experiences, we are always seeking to craft environments where students themselves both create knowledge, and also share that created knowledge with one another. At our best, we are only shepherding the knowledge-creation process, pointing a few notable things out along the way.

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