Why is it that people can learn, pass tests and demonstrate their knowledge, yet still not change their behavior?

It’s an age-old question and one with a lot of potential answers. One of those answers is that we possess knowledge but lack experience. We sometimes call it the knowing/doing gap. Even though people know what to do, they are not able to execute.

Leadership development is a great example of this challenge. Leadership behaviors are often not hard to understand; they are focused on basic human motivation and psychology. Leadership books are read by millions. Many say they are inspirational and motivational. And there’s certainly no shortage of them: A search for “leadership” on Amazon.com yields more than 50,000 titles.

So, why are there still so few truly effective leaders?

Because leadership behaviors may be easy to understand, but they’re hard to execute. We learn the rules, but we haven’t yet experienced the ramifications. Why is leadership difficult? Because leaders are people who doubt their own decisions. Because it’s fairly easy to internalize the rule of effective feedback but can be difficult to look someone in the eye as they sit across from you. Because as human beings, we can find it difficult to provide both praise and criticism. So, it’s not because leaders don’t know how to act; it’s because there’s an emotional reason they don’t want to. And until we address those emotions, we aren’t going to see behavior change. Good learning experiences make you feel the same emotions that you’ll feel when you do it in real life.

We don’t learn to drive exclusively by sitting in a classroom; we get in the car and drive. And who wants to fly with a pilot who passed all the written tests, but never demonstrated that they can actually fly an aircraft?

Why Experience Matters

Aircraft pilots aren’t the only profession that requires experience to do the job. There are several professions that have experiential learning “baked into” the qualification process:

• • Trades typically require apprenticeships before certification.
  • The military engages in simulated missions.
  • The medical field has several tiers of experiential requirements.

What is the common thread in all these professions? They are all jobs where the impact of failure is profound. And they all require a certain “muscle memory” to make decisions quickly and with confidence.

A Model for Experiential Learning

There’s a reason why learning from experience is effective. Learning focuses strongly on the what, while experience focuses on the how: “How will I actually do this?”, “How will it feel to me?”, “How will it impact others?”

How does experience bridge the knowing/doing gap? The CAPE model is a simple way of expressing the benefits of learning from experience, by helping you gain:

• • Context: How does my behavior impact my role and the roles I interact with?
  • Application: When and where do I use this behavior on the job?
  • Practice: Try the behavior in a low-risk environment to gain confidence and perspective.
  • Example: What does it look like when I do it right? What does it look like when I do it wrong?

Deliberate Practice and Experiential Learning

Role-play is one of the most common practice methods in jobs with high interpersonal skills requirements, such as sales. Ask most salespeople, and they’ll tell you how much they dread role-play exercises. And it’s understandable why; role-play can be uncomfortable and require quick creative thinking. And these are exactly the elements that make the job difficult. So, the discomfort of role-play can help prepare you for the discomfort of a real selling situation.

Role-play is a type of systemic, deliberate practice that focuses entirely on honing and performing improvement. Deliberate practice can be difficult and uncomfortable because it is focused on testing the limits of your capability until you improve. For musicians, it might be playing a difficult passage repeatedly until it can be executed flawlessly. For salespeople, it might be practicing your sales conversation until you can do it without thinking about it.

Ultimately, the best experiential learning has some form of role-play incorporated. Role-play is a form of simulation, one of the most common types of experiential learning.

Experiential Technologies

Experiential learning doesn’t necessarily require any technology at all — apprenticeships have been with us for thousands of years and role-plays and paper-and-pencil simulations predate computers. But many technologies can make gaining experience more engaging and immersive. Here are a few technologies in use today:

Simulation

Simulations have been with us for many years, and technology-based simulations are a comparatively recent addition. The goal of simulation remains the same, though: Create a realistic environment where people can practice new skills in a relatively risk-free environment. In truth, most experiential learning approaches involve aspects of simulation.

Most people are familiar with flight simulators, but there is a broad range of simulations: Role-plays are simple simulations that focus on scenarios with high human interaction, like selling scenarios. Systems simulations allow you to explore the intricacies of complex systems without the risk of destroying valuable data or damaging equipment.

Branching storyline simulations are becoming increasingly commonplace (largely due to the advent of software that simplifies building them). This type of simulation follows an often-complex decision tree, allowing users to make decisions, see their impact and make new decisions based on that impact. Branching storylines are appropriate for many types of business skills, including leadership decision-making.

The Metaverse

Not that long ago, we called the metaverse “virtual worlds,” or environments that supported human interaction in a variable, somewhat realistic environment. Pioneering virtual world technologies like Second Life allowed for incredibly robust, user-determined environments, but were intimidating in their technological complexity and steep learning curves. Business-based virtual world platforms were often easier to adopt, but often diminished the features that made virtual worlds so intriguing in the first place.

Virtual worlds are back, rebranded as the metaverse, but they offer a similar value proposition: A persistent, 3D world where people can interact with each other, with the environment and with stories and scenarios created in-world. Like simulation, it offers opportunities to practice in a safe environment and gain some virtual experience. However, the metaverse may also offer increased opportunities for human interaction, coaching and user-created scenarios that may provide a more robust experience overlay to the simulated experience.

Virtual worlds are designed to be collaborative. While some apps focus on the kind of backchannel communication that programs like Zoom and Teams already do well, the best ones focus on getting groups to collaborate on a project or a task, adding to the emotional impact of the experience.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) is a particularly immersive form of simulation. Most VR systems make use of 3D goggles and immersive audio to create an experience that can feel a lot like “being there.” This opens up a new world of experiences, which might be difficult or impossible to create with other types of simulation. For manufacturing environments, VR can simulate the internal workings of machinery, which might be otherwise inaccessible. And for interpersonal skills, VR can ramp up the reality factor of feeling there is an angry, sad or upset person sitting across from you.

VR still has some significant barriers to entry, including the cost and complexity of making the VR headsets available and understandable to users. The cost of developing VR programs continues to be high, but the market continues to produce VR development systems that are more and more accessible to the average developer. It’s likely we’ll see more applications of VR in the future.

The Impact of Experiential Learning

The modalities mentioned are pretty cool, but do they really make a difference? How are organizations using experiential learning? Here are a few examples:

• • A major telecommunications company was anticipating the possibility of a labor strike. They had a plan to continue operations during a strike but had never executed it before. The telecom created a “strike simulation” to help people practice for the future state so they would be ready when a change occurred.
  • A large retailer identified that when buyers were promoted to merchandising managers, about 50% failed within the first year. The most common reason given was a mismatch of expectations; the job was very different from what buyers thought it would be. The retailer created a merchandising manager simulation to allow high-potential buyers to experience a year in the life of the job before competing for it. A significant percentage of buyers chose not to pursue the merchandising manager role after using the simulation because they knew they would not be happy doing it, driving up retention rates for those who chose to stay in the process.
  • Walmart created a VR program to simulate the intensity of a Black Friday sale, to prepare store personnel for the crowds and the demands of often frustrated or angry customers.

Conclusion

For professional development and personal growth, there is no substitute for experience. Experience helps us build muscle memory for tasks that we face often, exposes us to the likely outcomes of our decisions, and allows us to begin to experience the emotions that can make decision-making difficult, even when we know the “right” answer.

The modalities discussed in this article can help accelerate experience in simulated environments. While digital experience will never be quite the same as real-life experience, it can make us better prepared for the challenges and opportunities we face in our careers.

Technologies continue to morph and change, but technology is just the vessel, the tail wagging the dog. The experience is what matters.