Learning in four courses
There’s a reason fine meals have courses.
Experiences have layers, and learning together, which is what collaboration really is, works best with layers. When Joanna and I designed the A Matter of Taste leadership coaching approach, we each had memories of “bad meals” of learning to look back on to guide us: too much or too little info, too fast or too slow, not relevant, not cohesive- without the dopamine rush you get after an transformative experience, or from feeling a sense of accomplishment.
We are doing it differently. Four courses take us from a cold start to ready to fly with new wings and confidence in how to take off (and land), as people and as a team.
Walking in the door, life tries to shoulder through the doorway with you, shoving and distracting. It’s completely unrealistic to expect each person to individually shed all the baggage at the door and offer an open mind and heart for the next thing. Not in the real world without editing, y’all.
And also expecting flat or floating content to dramatically transform itself into actions for tomorrow without solid paths (options, please!) from A to B is also a movie moment that doesn’t help get value from what we’re “learning”.
Our approach:
First, welcome and please make yourself comfortable in a space set for you with everything you’ll need, getting your body here so your mind will follow. We’ll start with the first palate-cleansing activities as ‘mindful orientation,’ using a specific taste tied to a specific thought to get into the purpose of the session, the goals, and to welcome each person in the room for fun, curiosity, and a dose of successful learn-and-do. The tone is set.
Now we’ll dive into the topics at hand with content-rich ‘guided learning.’ This is the course where we talk methods, applications, and examples- layering specific techniques or tools with sensory anchors. We’ll consider ways to write vision statements while enjoying an umami-rich miso butternut ravioli dish or compare tasting notes of single-origin chocolate bars to as a way to understand different communication styles.
Learning gets reinforced when we use it, so the third course is ‘discovery by doing.’ Activities to practice leadership and problem-solving skills along with culinary concepts result in personal and shared experiences to savor and remember. From individual goal-setting sessions to brokering difficult conversations within teams, we rely on collaborative and empathy building activities- like flavor pairing and make-your-own activities to stress-test the relevance and real usefulness of what we’re doing. Between the second and third courses, we have the nutrition of professional curriculum to build on and activities aimed at the real work of the team, dialed up or down based on team objectives and PDU targets for the experience.
To make sure that what we’ve done has wings, and that what we learn today can be used tomorrow to solve real problems or achieve real results, we close with fostering action, a course of translating what we’ve learned into specific steps forward, in whatever life aspect they support. New recipes, personal plans, individual professional steps, or team activities and deliverables, capturing the ‘popcorn of ideas’ in the moment locks in commitment. Finally, over our closing tastes and sips, we practice communicating for meaningful exchange, leveraging each other for help and support.
Why it works:
Joanna and I draw from extensive culinary experience and relationships with experts and local makers to create unforgettable tasting experiences; and we deliver useful, actionable, and accredited training curriculum designed from years of leading high-functioning corporate teams and university-level instruction. It’s a perfect recipe of experiences to go into this approach, and we’re finding it applies really broadly, and can be tuned for team communication and culture needs too. Loud and lyrical, quietly contemplative, or all points in between, no matter the topic themes, group size, or even the duration of the event, we can follow this very human flow of effective connections. Starting with being present, learning together, collaboratively doing, we lock it in with collectively and individually committing to the change new learning offers, especially if that means making and sharing great food together more often!
So, if you’re like us, you remember the different team building activities, training classes, or even big meetings you’ve been in when you were mentally checked out and were thinking, “Isn’t there a better way to do this so it means something??” We think so too, in four courses.
