Blog

Updated July 27th 2023

Have you ever considered yourself and your learners as potential addicts?

Have you ever heard of the neurotransmitter Dopamine? Dopamine is a chemical released when people are doing something they enjoy. Dopamine consolidates new circuits and causes addiction.
Addiction is a plastic change in the brain.

Imagine for a moment, if you could turn all the people you are looking to develop into ‘learning addicts’. They are so addicted to learning, they cannot wait to apply everything they have learnt so that they can come back and learn more. The impact of the “learnings” would then ripple across the organisation, affecting the bottom line, as your training budgets would expand twofold, threefold and more. Wouldn’t that be something? From my perspective, we should be looking to turn everyone into addicts who enjoy learning and thus consolidate new neural pathways, which in turn leave people wanting more. We all know how challenging it can be to change an existing habit.

I recently spoke at The 2014 Learning Technologies Conference in London. Following that talk, they asked me to write an article for their Inside Learning & Technologies & Skills Magazine which was published this June. In this speech I outlined 7-Steps or areas that need to be considered and applied in learning to make it addictive, to enable people to learn and for neural changes to take place in the brain that have lasting impact. Over the coming months I am going to outline these 7-STEPS here. They all overlap as you will see:

1) IMAGINE

Neurons that fire together wire together: The brain strengthens connections between things that happen in real time and predictions of possible outcomes. The brain blends what happens and the predictions together. The expected outcome and the reality of the outcome; the brain weaves its own explanation of reality that is the basis of new skills. Therefore, people need to get clear on what the benefits of changing their behaviour will be. We need to help people think bigger for themselves. My experience of many approaches to working with changing people’s behaviour, is that the time is just not put into this. We’ve got to allow people to dream, to IMAGINE and to see all the possible outcomes. Otherwise, there is very little chance they will commit.

We look forward to sending you the 2nd-Step in this 7-Step process. We are currently delivering an interactive workshop to teams and groups in organisations to actively assist them in applying these 7-Steps. Get in touch if you’d like us to talk you through what we can do for your organisation.