We are pleased to announce the launch of Syntropy’s Corporate Toolkit! The 4 tenets of Conscious Capitalism that we help companies catalyze— of deeper purpose, authentic leadership, conscious culture and a stakeholder orientation—which I shorten to “impact”—are inspiring to many, but they can sound like aspirational business philosophy as opposed to actionable practices. With this toolkit, we hope to move from the realm of ideas to answering the question “what do I do first thing Monday morning?” We have curated a list of summarized, simplified and synthesized practices that support the implementation of conscious, or “syntropic” business.
WHO THIS IS FOR:
Syntropy’s toolkit was designed for the time-pressed, seasoned professional who is serious about transforming themselves, their teams and their organizations. While this project was conceived for corporate audiences, it is equally applicable to any context— corporate, domestic nonprofit, government, nongovernmental organization (NGO), or even neighborhood or community groups or others, where conscious people are willing to learn to develop themselves and their collectives to be of service to a call larger than themselves.
THE PROBLEM:
While between $70-$90B1 is spent on corporate training and development every year in the U.S. alone, precious little of that investment translates into real performance change on the job. At most, 10 to 20%2 of training transfers to the job in the form of performance change. That is a $50B/year waste of money, not even factoring in the cost of the unsolved performance problem that persists!
Most training is delivered in dedicated off-site settings. Whether it is a half-day, full-day, or multi-day event, a lot of material is delivered in a short period of time. Didactic instruction, “sage on the stage”, instructor-led training has conventionally been the most common format of training. We’ve inherited it from our school system and the military, where a teacher who has some body of information, would try to impart that knowledge, usually unquestioningly, to their students. With the advent of online platforms, the instructor-led webinar format is the digital equivalent of the traditional classroom experience. The problem is that this method of instruction is not supported as effective by the research. The best instructional design employs interactivity to get the learners to engage with the material in an active way. Adult learners in particular learn most successfully when other factors are woven into the curriculum design.
According to Malcolm Knowles “andragogy”—the study of how adults learn—there are four (4) critical instructional design components to include in effective adult learning environments:
1. consider past learning and life experience;
2. provide practical, applied learning opportunities relevant to the job;
3. create iterative learning, marked by spaced, interval practice;
4. provide opportunity for peer-to-peer learning and reflection
This is a version of learning by doing, recognizing that we learn and retain new information best when we have opportunities to practice and apply the new information in high-fidelity contexts—that is, as close to “on the job” as possible. Ideally this would include actually practicing these new skills on the job, iterating, perhaps with the help of a personal coach, engaging with and learning from other colleagues in a peer-to-peer format, and applying again.
THE SOLUTION: Syntropy Toolkit
Our strategy is to provide a modularized toolkit, where discrete practices can be trained just-in-time (JIT), as needed, assembled and ordered according to the individual needs of each learner, in a cafeteria style and in individualized practice chains. Finding that “simplicity on the other side of complexity” is a challenging balancing act between distilling information to its essential parts—thereby honoring our time-pressed audience— while maintaining high enough fidelity to still be effective. The team at Syntropy is deeply familiar with each of these practices, having learned them and then applied them internally and with a range of clients. Said simply, if engaged sincerely, they work! Check out the toolkit here!