How to exploit the 3 types of Informal Learning Opportunity

There are 3 opportunities for learning in a team-based informal learning event  – planned, shared and serendipitous. If you want to learn faster than your competitors  you should exploit all of them!  

1. Planned Insights This is just learning something you wanted to learn yourself. However if you don’t know what you are wanting to learn then you have little chance of learning it.  So its important to decide what you want to learn first at the start of the session! Better if you tell others – ie be publically specific – then you are more likely to take it seriously.  
2. Shared Insights It has been said that everybody can learn from their own mistakes but only a wise person can learn from other people’s mistakes. It is a very costly and slow business having to learn everything by making your own mistakes first.  
3. Serendipitous Insights Serendipitous insights are the things which come up which are valuable but which you were not actually looking for!  It’s the “money found down the back of the sofa learning.” So a good ambition in any team-based informal learning event such as a simulation game is to come away with a “3-2-1? learning result:

3 * Planned Insights + 2 * Shared Insights + 1 * Serendipitous Insight