learning

How to Learn with Photography in an Innovative Economy

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“The demands of a collaboration-based, talent-hungry, global, wired economy are evolving so quickly that success depends on nothing less than continuous learning. Fall behind and you may find yourself disqualified from the race.

One senior innovation advisor at a major energy company put it this way, “In today’s economy there is no way anybody can be an expert in a substantial part of their total field
. The modern ‘renaissance man (or woman)’ is one who understands how to learn.”  This is huge and so important.
Companies of all sizes in all industries are trying to meet the new imperative
. Learning and Development (L&D) spending was up 12 percent in 2013, the largest jump in almost a decade. The goal is to integrate learning into a company’s culture and processes. There are also training sessions, workshops, conferences, and retreats, but the most successful strategies are those that make learning a continuous process, hardwired into a company’s metabolism.
For leaders this is both a daunting challenge and an exciting opportunity to engage and retain top talent. You have to keep your eye on the horizon, your ear to the ground and your nose in the wind. Your company’s needs are ever-changing, and you must stay one step ahead.” (Meghan M. Biro in The new rules for leadership for Forbes)
How to cope with that? What to do? How to keep learning at a high pace? Not only the learning pace has become challenging also the huge mass of date that needs to be processed is a challenge of its own. Can one do all that through reading, talking, listening? I dare to say no. We learn best through visualizations. When we see “the bigger picture”, we understand, we memorize and we get inspired to develop new things, technologies and products. The high demands of learning in nowadays economy need the matching tools to do so and photography has and will have a key role in this process. Photography makes visible what is non-visible and by doing that, it makes it easy to understand and learn. Leaders need to learn how to communicate with visual tools and not only leaders of marketing teams, who are working already with images for their marketing campaigns, leadership itself will become visual and communicated through images. The learning utilizing photography is an accelerated process. It includes fun, awe, surprise and unconscious learning, which supports and ignites innovation. Photography makes visible what the conscious mind is not able to see yet and allows quantum leaps in learning, understanding and innovating.
And how does it exactly work? First to make clear, no photography skills are needed, no photography course needs to be attended and one does not have to go on trips and photographic safaris to do it, yet this environment does support and accelerate the process. A cell phone camera is enough to start experiencing the strength of photography under the guidance of a qualified trainer, teaching the delegate through assignments to accomplish the desired results.
And now just try it and see yourself.
Ute Sonnenberg for
www.rohoyachui.com