Playing with Purpose: How Experiential Learning Can Be More than a Game

Citation

Hutchinson, S. (2012), "Playing with Purpose: How Experiential Learning Can Be More than a Game", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 20 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2012.04420faa.011

Playing with Purpose: How Experiential Learning Can Be More than a Game

Article Type: Suggested reading From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 20, Issue 6

Steve Hutchinson and Helen Lawrence,Gower, 2011, ISBN 9781409408055

The main goal of Playing with Purpose: How Experiential Learning Can Be More than a Game is to help trainers to design, develop and adapt artificial experiential-learning activities such as simulations, role plays, in-basket activities or case studies to enhance training effectiveness.

Experiential-training methods have been increasingly used in practice as they help to illustrate and teach “real-life” principles and concepts.

Trainers tend to focus on making their activities fun to attract trainees’ attention and to engage them in the training program. Based on their observation throughout their careers as training consultants, however, Steve Hutchinson and Helen Lawrence indicate that most experiential-training programs have lost sight of their main purposes: learning and change. In other words, for a training program to be effective, it has to be “objective driven” rather than “object driven”. The purpose of a game is not the game itself; rather, it should be to produce a real impact.

In the first chapter, the authors suggest two overarching frameworks: an experimental exercise-design process and an experimental learning cycle.

The former emphasises the inclusion of theoretical knowledge and understanding the experiential-learning process as well as choosing effective methods and techniques when a trainer designs an experiential-learning program.

The latter model modifies Kolb’s well-known experiential cycle of a learning process with which a learner transforms a concrete experience into action. It also demonstrates that an individual learner has his or her own personal learning style that trainers must take into account in designing and developing a program: diverging, assimilating, converging and accommodating.

The authors place attention on the fact that linking objectives with objects requires a continuous review of each activity. Trainers must not be afraid to ask, “So what?” or, “What was the impact of that?” Participants in the program should be encouraged to reflect on what happened so that they can take the learning from the event and apply the key lessons to their daily activities.

To accomplish this goal, the authors propose ten strategies for an experiential-learning trainer when reviewing the activities that participants are involved in, and helping them to reflect on what they have learned through the activities. By applying these strategies in any experiential-learning context, the trainer helps participants to become more actively involved in training. In turn, this enables them to transfer more of the knowledge into their jobs.

The remaining chapters delve into specific techniques to take advantage of experiential methods in a series of eight developmental issues including team-building, leadership development, organizational change, creative thinking and diversity. For each training context, the authors present key issues in the specific training setting and provide possible scenarios, sample activities and useful questions that match the specific context.

Training has recently become more experience-orientated. Playing with Purpose: How Experiential Learning Can Be More than a Game is an effective guidebook for training specialists whose traditional roles are challenged and who are looking for new role models that match the work environment.

The book seeks to help trainees to discover something meaningful and useful from their experience, no matter if it is real or artificially manipulated. In the book, the person who is in charge of experiential training is not called a “trainer” but a “facilitator” who facilitates the learning process rather than produces intended and predefined outcomes.

Rather than structuring and organizing a distinctively specified model of the learning process, the authors attempt to fill the book with practical tips that cover various training contexts.

The trainer’s core role as a facilitator of experiential learning is to help learners to reflect on their own experiences: not giving an answer but guiding them to an answer. Experience itself is not learning. Rather, the experience needs to be minded, distilled, condensed and reduced for real learning to take place. While defining objectives, designing artificial activities and developing training materials are still important responsibilities of experiential trainers, the primary focus should be more on reviewing and reflecting on each activity so that learners can extract lessons from it.

Therefore, the overarching strategies suggested in chapter 2 are insightful advice that experiential trainers must keep in mind as they read the subsequent chapters. Whatever the authors’ intention was, placing the chapter at the start of the book is appropriate and effective.

Although the authors provide questions to be used in training rooms, they do not present possible answers or guide trainers to the appropriate actions or behaviors related to the answers. Clearly, experiential training does not define a perfect scenario, unlike well-organized traditional training. For many novice trainers, however, it will be hard to predict what kinds of answers or reactions they will receive from participants, how they can handle the reactions and how they should conclude the review process.

Being experienced trainers, the authors could have shared their actual experience with the questions they asked. In addition, the book neglects an important experiential-learning trend: training via social media such as Facebook or virtual reality such as Second Life. Without addressing experiential learning in the cyber-world, the book is limited and does not accommodate trainers’ demand for a comprehensive and updated guidebook. The absence of an index is also a drawback.

These limitations are too minor to outweigh the benefits of the book. Overall, Playing with Purpose: How Experiential Learning Can Be More than a Game is full of insightful and practical advice.

Reviewed by Sung Jun Jo, Utica College, New York, USA.

A longer version of this review was originally published in European Journal of Training and Development, Vol. 36 No. 4, 2012.