At a time of the rise of our technologies, communication networks, the pace of exchanges or even access to knowledge, new uses are emerging within organizations, companies or more generally in our society. From these new uses and sophisticated tools, come from new skills to master more and more complex. We need to learn to collaborate better, to better select information from a multitude of sources, learn more quickly, adapt to rapidly changing contexts¹. All these skills are crucial in today's world and even more so in tomorrow's one.

1. Technology revolution and skills revolution

The digital revolution that is under way is a great opportunity for transformation for businesses and organizations. It is especially important to optimize not only the ways of working and collaborating but also for the learning capacities of individuals! However, this revolution can also be a threat to the well-being of individuals if the issues are poorly identified and if the tools available are not powerful and effective enough.². Supporting this transformation through relevant and impacting methods will be a powerful driver of competitiveness for companies and organizations of the present and future. But in what ways?

2. Humans, drivers of digital transformation

One of the keys to this problem is to have access to a better understanding of human behavior in the face of this transformation, to not only allow the implementation of effective methods but also to create environments that facilitate this transition. Far too often the knowledge about humans and their cognitive abilities have been underestimated or even poorly identified when they are the basis for the growth of businesses and organizations, and also the engine of societal transitions.

However, we have never progressed so much in cognitive science or even neuroscience, that over the last few years, the results and the resulting knowledge accumulate. This knowledge now gives us more and more precise keys to reading human functioning. We have accumulated a great deal of knowledge about how our brains learn, reason, collaborate, and make decisions.³. This knowledge would benefit from being exported beyond the walls of our fundamental research laboratories to support this transition. Only this knowledge from fundamental research is still struggling to be transferred to the real world. But why?

While brain imaging has made great strides in the last twenty years and makes it possible to identify regions involved in this or that function (learning, decision-making, attention, etc.), it does not give us the answer to everything. They only explain part of the problem to us. Knowledge from fundamental research cannot give us ready-made answers, coming from a single methodology, for a complex problem. They will not and never can be prescriptive. In addition, in fundamental research, we systematically ask ourselves the questions why. Understanding and analyzing is only one part of our problem, which the fundamental sciences fulfill perfectly. However, in our managerial or even pedagogical practices, this data is not enough to guide us !

3. What tools are there to support change?

Faced with a changing world, between the transformation of our learning environments, our jobs, and the way we communicate and collaborate, we need more⁴. We need methods and tools that can be adapted to our individual but also collective needs.

We need not only to better understand how these new ways of working or the technological tools that populate our daily lives affect us, but also to understand How to build tools and methods that can help us adapt to this change. Indeed, the more we build quality environments in businesses or even in our schools, the more we improve our brain development, by strengthening our cognitive functions and our ability to adapt. It could even contribute to prevent or even compensate the occurrence of learning difficulties or disorders or even prevent pathologies such as burnout.

We need to go further than just rely on basic research studies that are far from sufficient and informative. We need to have a systemic and multidisciplinary approach, by the field and for the field. It is for all these reasons that over the past several years, at Rising Up, we have built a link in the chain that is sorely lacking not only in academic research but also in field practices: A space where we could build an approach that combines the strength of method and scientific knowledge with the reality of uses and new learning environments.  We need to understand why certain pedagogical approaches work better than others or to understand what content gives us the most relevant reading keys to progress and learn more quickly. Let's build tools and methods to have a concrete impact on skills development, everything by measuring these effects in organizations, schools and businesses.

Building on this expertise, at Rising Up we build, Solutions which allow in particular to boost individual and collective performance by strengthening and developing our skills. Let's discover Apprenticeship of tomorrow together.

References

1. Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute Survey, Digital Culture; March-April 2017.
2. Gallup, “The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis,” January 2016
3. Killingsworth, M.A., & Gilbert, D.T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932—932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
4. OECD (2019), How's Life in the Digital Age? : Opportunities and Risks of the Digital Transformation for People's Well-being, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264311800-en.

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