A general process model for personal development.

Abstract

Experience with promoting the concept of learning-to-learn in courses, seminars and workshops for multi-cultural groups of managers, supervisors and staff has proved that 'self-organized' learning does not come easy for the majority of participants. Experience with Kolb's learning-style-inventory test revealed deficiencies in its concepts and design. Man's explicit learning stages are re-defined in terms of spiraling 'Doing - Sensing - Thinking - and Planning' activities, with accruing skills and insights as results. These stages are separated by four mental barriers (the 'Window - Skin - Gate - and Rubicon') which, as functional projections from Man's Inner-Self, regulate the volume, speed and nature of the explicit cyclic learning process. This explains why people's living styles are idiosyncratic and sometimes lopsided which is induced or exacerbated by fragmented practices in education, training and instruction. The 'Contingency, Holistic, Interactive, Liberating and Quality Principles' are essential for Man's total development. A number of views and theories on learning and development are synthesized in Man's primary, secondary and tertiary processes. Even apparent opposites, e.g. Jung's 'Individuated Person' and Kelly's 'Man the Scientists' are compatible in the meaning they give to the new pictorial Personal Development model that represents the interactions of these processes, internally and with the environment. Understanding the activation and functioning of Man's triune brain (viz. the old-brain and left- and right half of the neo-cortex) makes it possible to subdivide Bateson's four levels into categories of subconscious, conscious and selfconscious learning, that are useful for the praxis of education and training. The new model, a self-scoring 'learning-profile' exercise and a 'planning-guide' have been applied as aids in promoting self-development in culturally different organizations. This shows that managers/supervisors/staff have to progress through several identifiable levels of learning and that a holistic brain approach (requiring special resources) is essential before self-organized development can take off on any scale.

Date of Award	1980
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath