Social-emotional competency can’t be learned from books

Chunk 07 of the forthcoming Attract More Cultural Creatives to Your Team Human Org
Subtitles: Group Process at the Center of Organizational Development;
Creating Social Glue As an Art-form;
How to Re-Invent Face-to-Face Culture Series

My aim here is to fast-forward thru developments leading up to Best Practices in large group learning and live events, as pioneered by Insight Seminars. If other groups are doing live events like Insight, I wish to know about them and support them too.

The following flies thru developments in group process as I and other experienced them, starting early 1960s.

Necessity as Mother of Invention

The Internet will show you scores of books and text-based ways for learning or increasing your EQ and interpersonal competency.

What commercial providers won’t tell you is how books and text-based programs have proven since the 1960s to be relatively ineffective conveying social-emotional learnings to adults or any other age group.

I wish I could cite you peer-reviewed research and books supporting this. I can’t. I think no one can.

A new problem is typically first solved where the practical need for solutions is greatest, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

When was the question, ‘How to facilitate live groups of adults so they learn more and faster?’ of practical interest? Where was this problem acute and pressing, such that it HAD to be solved? Here:
- Weekly sensitivity training groups,
- Large group awareness trainings,
- New Games, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Games_Book
- PlayFair: Everybody’s Guide to Noncompetitive Play (1980) by Matt Weinstein and Joel Goodman

When was this? 1965–1975.
If we pull back, take in a slightly wider field of activity, in the 1960s-1970s, the question was practical for leaders-facilitators of grassroots:
- professionally led therapy groups,
- lay counseling groups,
- sensitivity groups.

Practical experiments creating-sustaining healthy groups and effective group learning began 1946 in the US and UK with the deluge of vets needing help from too few therapists and counselors. New group techniques kept evolving as healthy learning-counseling groups spread into living rooms, church basements and more and more therapy rooms able to seat 12–20 people were built.
Probably several tens of thousands of grassroots therapy, counseling, sensitivity groups occurred on the West Coast alone in the 1960s-1970s. I’m not even counting grassroots TA, Transactional Analysis activity, which I know much less about.

Many text-based engagements materials have been tried since the 1960s:
- reading-study groups with books
- workbook pages
- written sentence completion exercises done solo
- custom 3-ring binders of printed info.

What was learned?

People are much more interested in other people, in each other, than in anything you can print on a page or write in a book.

The above conclusion was a somewhat obvious conclusion amongst group leaders and trainers in the 1960s-1970s.

Consider: When group facilitators met together at conferences and workshops, they shared what they had learned from facilitating groups.

Group leaders tended to be mature people with psych degrees and wide experience They knew you can’t get water from a water almanac; nor, can you get enlightenment from spiritual books. It was obvious books and text-based approaches were poor ways to facilitate.

No need to write about it. Silly to. If you needed to read a paper on why texts were poor ways to facilitate a group — you probably shouldn’t be facilitating groups (this is how they thought 1950s-1960s).

Similarly, trying standardize group process into rigid written formats seemed pointless. What was the focus of early group facilitators in the 1960s?

Classroom management, mindfulness, kindness and sensitivity. These were the useful focus for managing unpredictable, unscripted group sessions. Even printed handouts were only sporadically useful, given the focus was on feeling your feelings, experiencing your feelings, not your mind.

Q: Are you saying group work in the 1960s-1970s was too right-brained, not yet a good balance of right and left, Thinking and Feeling?
A: Yes.
What else was learned? It became abundantly clear, if skillfully facilitated, people can learn some things more quickly and deeply in large groups than in books, classrooms or any academic group process.

What worked which people could not get from books or old-fashioned classrooms? Structured dyads, structured small groups and structured cooperative-collaborative experiments, where participants directly experience working together as teams and have abundant opportunity to learn from each other.
Starting in the mid-1960s, large group learning was systematized into several profitable live event training series.

in the 1980s-1990s, shorter, better-written, smarter, more concise printed handouts started showing up. If they were really good, the handout led participants into a sequence of live activities, a dyad, small groups, debrief, etc.
In the 1990s, handouts of one page or less became more common. If the endgame was arranging things so people would cooperate when asked to form up a dyad with a stranger; then, all you really needed on paper was the questions, sentence completions, statements, needed to complete the exercise.
I’ve even used slips of paper two inches wide, I cut horizontally from pages I print out. Simple. Low-tech. If the dyad questions amount to 20 words or more, slips can support co-learners

Tho dyad exercises in groups existed prior to the 1980s-1990s, it wasn’t until then that facilitating dyads in large groups became more mature as a group process format. Triads mostly did not exist until USM proved them workable for professional training of counselors, starting in 1983.

Groups — like life — can be planned. Still, showing up in-person, ready for anything often works best. Woody Allen put this into an aphorism: “Half of life is showing up.” Source books? Event script? These are the tail of the dog, not the dog.

In the earliest days, collections of exercises other group leaders could use were collected. Growth Games paperback (1972) by Howard F. Lewis and Dr. Harold S. Streitfeld is from this time, the first mass-market paperback handbook of group awareness exercises for group leaders. It was superseded by later, better books. For time traveling tho, this book retains the flavor of late 1960s early 1970s group work, before better-organized events, before a balance of T~F was known to be needed.

What innovators learned is: only face-to-face practice, ideally guided practice allowed, promoted, created changed behavior in participants, deeper than mere lip-service levels.

Q: Was “sensitivity training” ever made into a trainable, system?

A: This is what the large group awareness trainings, LGAT 1.0 and 2.0 worked on. Once a better balance of T~F was acknowledged as necessary, more progress was made. Insight Seminars are covered below.

This insight: books and text-based programs are ineffective to convey social-emotional learnings, has never been disproven since, to my knowledge.

Younger promoters of books and online text-based programs never learned; or, wish us to forget this lesson.

If your goal is to practice and convey social skills competence — to any age — there simply is no substitute for social, interactive, live events.

The younger your audience — think middle school — the more true this is. Only experiential, hands-on processes have proven capable of effecting significant often lasting positive learning. Book-learning can only be the tail of the dog.
Q: No good books at all?

A: One good dog tail worth mentioning is the book Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1969), transcripts of live group sessions of Fritz Perls’ methods. This became a media event bringing Gestalt therapy wide public attention. Again it’s for flavor. It’s not scripts to re-create wholesale.

Another good dog tail is Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (2009) by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves. Since no method behind this I’m aware of, only talk; still, it’s a well-intended, concise re-stating of the high points of Dan Goleman’s books, I think of this NOT EQ 2.0 but more: EQ the Executive Summary.
The body of the dog remains live, in-person, face-to-face experiments where you feel what you feel, learn what you learn; and hopefully, form new intentions about how to behave and begin to form new habits you wish to repeat and make into new habits.

Q: Was book reading and book study of Emotional Intelligence all useless too?

A: It was primarily useful as HOPE, as group agreement and social permission to pay more attention to our Feelings. As a way to change and upgrade interpersonal behavior between people, books and book learning was not effective. Books can change minds with better abstractions. Changing hearts and behavior can’t be changed with any number of abstractions.

You can’t learn empathy from books

You can only learn about empathy, practice it in person, cognize how you do it somewhat uniquely for you; and then, do more, practice.

Q: Why are there so many books and so much written about Feelings and Psychology?

A: Perhaps most books on feelings are written for and read by therapists, counselors, facilitators and lay persons whose interests lean this way.

We may know why: For you yourself to receive, take-in, insights-lessons from another person’s life experiences, requires holding your focus on empathy long enuf for their insights-lessons to sink into your psyche. The individuals already having this higher degree of empathy are typically already counselors and therapists (and lately also untrained, still talented “empaths”).

Feelings are like the weather; much that happens is unpredictable. Trying to predict or control weather or Feelings 100%, is Quixotic and paradoxical. If control is your goal, you’ll be disappointed.

What was gradually learned, and gradually perfected, in large group awareness trainings, is what you CAN do is put large groups in a room, give them fun, interactive social tasks, and they will learn from their own reactions, responses and feelings. They will also learn from how other people’s Feeling expressions prove workable or unworkable.

The above sketches the process moving from Thinking-dominated teaching-lecturing to whole-brain group facilitating. Facilitators don’t teach, don’t lecture, they arrange things so you can learn more from your own experience and from your fellow cp-learners.

A reason exists why we don’t acknowledge, “You can’t learn empathy from books.” It’s not a complex idea. Rather it challenges how we think we learn.
Male Dominators believe we think and learn this way: Think as I do; Follow the Rule Book; Take on authority what I say is true; follow precedent and tradition; don’t rock my boat.

The easy way to address the partialness of the above paradigm of learning is the iceberg model of our psyche:
dg-iceberg
What Male Dominator Thinkers wish learning to be, only exists in — and pertains to — the upper 10% of the iceberg exposed above the water.

Where are our social-emotional BEHAVIORS and HABITS? In the lower two-thirds of the iceberg below the water line.

Not possible to alter or improve social-emotional BEHAVIORS and HABITS by one choice. You have to choose the new healthy behavior over and over again until new habits and behaviors form in our lower two-thirds.

The way humans do this is together, in relationships and in groups. Make sense?

Good~bad news of group learning

Not many people reading the above went thru many of the experiences first-hand. This suggests why so few people NOW know HOW to successfully facilitate large, live groups. They know virtually nothing of Best Practices in Group Process.
Outside of groups, to get one person to change, do a brand new behavior, often requires money and/or acute pressure.

Guess what? Get a group together, and thousands of people will try new things together and adopt new behaviors; just because, “everyone else is doing it.” This is flock-brain-behavior in human beings.

In the negative: Nazis training ordinary Germans into Nazi behaviors and mindset
In the positive: New Games, PlayFair and large Insight I, Awakening Heart trainings, training people into new, more workable ways of living and interpersonal competence.

The positive innovations can grow out of and expand joy, happiness and enthusiasm. You don’t always have to be solving a problem.

Finally another thing was learned: Large group awareness trainings were by far the most effective learning format for spreading holistic, humanistic, social-emotional learning benefits widely.

Still, the Devil is in the details.