What is experiential learning?

Experiential learning is about learning through experiences and often the more unusual or unexpected the experience, the greater the learning.

Six or seven years ago, I took a trip to Nepal. Two days heading up high into the Himalayas along dusty, rocky, precarious, narrow mountain roads. We travelled in two jeeps in convoy and eventually arrived at a small village. No running water, toilet facilities or other mod cons for the next five days. It felt like our tents were perched on the edge of the world we were so high up. Our mission, as five business people coming together, was to talk to the villagers and elders and identify ways to uplift the community. Sometimes that meant focussing on a family or individual who was struggling, other times we considered community issues such as health and education.  

 

As business people we came together to question, listen, empathise whilst being careful not to patronise, to analyse, research, get creative, understand the cultural dimensions and what it really meant to walk in their shoes, to collaborate, talk and of course problem solve. 

 

What would you do if faced with a women with three young children, no real education, a one room dwelling high up in the mountains with wind whistling through it, just one Chinese installed electricity socket hanging from a wire, but no money and just £250 as your budget to set her up in some kind of rural enterprise so she can begin earning money?

The aim of each of our Accelerator Programmes is to help people become financially self sufficient – using our money to set them up for earning, rather than just bail them out of a current difficult situation. 

 

The whole week was a challenge, but was this just an adventure I was lucky enough to be on? Or is there something in this kind of activity, where we operate way outside of our comfort zones, to accelerate learning and understanding, that then brings the most enormous value to our own organisations? 

 

While I had spent a lifetime volunteering in different settings and learning through those activities, I had never previously identified a way to bring that learning back into my business for anyone other than me or to bring it to our clients who come to us for training and development programmes.

 

But since my Nepal adventure, Jaluch has been working hard to achieve an exciting offering that can be fully blended according to your preferences, including in person training, online training, digital development options, gamification to embed learning, one to one coaching and of course experiential learning delivered through our Accelerators.

 

Our Accelerators are mostly developed as online activities so you needn’t worry about us hauling you off to Nepal! We find these are consistently the most phenomenal way to develop and engage our valued managers and leaders.