One of the things we’re excited to develop here at Self Emergence is a robust understanding of the science and professional research relevant to the Emerge app and our goal of scaling effective leadership development throughout all levels of an organization. We’re just beginning, but we thought you might want to see a bit of what’s out there as well.
Research in organizational development, leadership studies, e-learning, m-learning, and augmented reality technology and training systems in education and in corporations, and coaching are all relevant to our efforts. The initial survey shows that there is evidence in these literatures that our intuitions are correct that the core functions of Emerge! give it the potential to become a very effective tool for generating immersion, engaging employees, and helping them learn and change. These functions include role-play, perspective-taking, user-generated experiences, and social sharing.
Role-play and story-based learning have been used to improve engagement and retention with e-learning (Roger Schank, Lessons in Learning, e-Learning, and Training: Perspectives and Guidance for the Enlightened Trainer). And self-identity shifts that come with role play have been shown in other learning contexts to shed self-limiting images and take on new, constructive self-images, thereby increasing learning (Chris Dede, et al., “Immersive Interfaces for Engagement and Learning”). Dede also showed that utilizing 1st-person perspectives “enable participants’ actional immersion and motivation through embodied, concrete learning, whereas [3rd-person perspectives] foster more abstract, symbolic insights gained from distancing oneself from the context (seeing the forest rather than the trees). [Using both perspectives, as Emerge! does] combine these strengths.” (cf. also Gjedde, “Role Game Playing as a Platform for Creative and Collaborative Learning”; Friedman, “Learning to make more effective decisions: changing beliefs as a prelude to action”; Lindgren, “Generating a learning stance through perspective-taking in a virtual environment”)
Jane Hart, workplace learning expert, highlights the value of social video, especially user-generated content (UGC), social mentoring, and setting up a strong community of practice for creating highly effective cultures and systems of ongoing workplace learning (Modern Workplace Learning: A Resource Book for L&D). The Emerge! app puts user-generated social video is at the center of all Emerge! sessions, and the app automatically encourages social mentoring by sharing and commenting on your own and others’ videos. Combined with group facilitation the whole program becomes a community of practice, which we’ve already seen employees wish to continue after the training ends. Hart quotes Muriel Macdonald from her article “HR and Social Media: Employee Generated Content Matters:” “Employee Generated Content (EGC) is the biggest HR strategy that most companies overlook … Employee Generated Content is first and foremost valuable internally. Organizations of any size can benefit from employees sharing their knowledge with coworkers or expressing enthusiasm …The easier it is to share expertise, the more likely employees are to do it. Create opportunities for “the cream to rise to the top” and for everyone else to benefit from their knowledge.”
We’ve also found other, more academic projects that are similarly attempting to use role and/or perspective-taking and externalization of internal voices to aid transformation in specific populations. These projects are not competitors of ours, and their successful implementation adds confidence to our potential success as well. These include:
- Kognito (kognito.com) a firm that builds several 3D simulations and virtual human avatars to help people learn to have difficult healthcare conversations more effectively.
- Avatar Therapy. Led by Dr. Julian Leff of University College London and Thomas Jamieson-Craig at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Avatar Therapy is a new approach to the treatment of auditory hallucinations (hearing voices). Computer avatars are first designed by patients to give a form to the voices they hear and then the avatars are controlled by therapists to encourage patients to oppose the voices so that the voices gradually come under the patient’s control.
There are several other elements of the Emerge! app+service program will increase employee engagement at work. According to Dr. Cristina Wildermuth and those she cites, employee engagement is driven by many factors including job, organizational, leadership, and individual level factors, each with it’s own sub-aspects. (“A Perfect Match: Decoding Employee Engagement”). The Emerge! program addresses some of these. At the job level, Emerge! can increase the sense of “meaningfulness,” the “concern about the ‘impact’ of one’s job” by helping people gain insight into and strengthen their awareness of their basic motivations, and goals and what they most value from working. At the organization level, Emerge! can increase the sense of “rewarding work relationships [in which] employee[s] feel safer, able to experiment and “be herself” (Kahn, 1990)… [and] the employee’s energy may be spent on the job rather than on interpersonal conflict.” By training participants to understand their needs and the needs of others better, helping them communicate more clearly, and increasing empathy, Emerge! can improve workplace relationships. In fact, this is one of the major benefits people noted in our trial offering at a San Francisco health platform company. At the leader level, the “ability to vision, inspire, and [have] a caring, service orientation” increases employee engagement. Emerge! trains visioning and inspiring directly, and while it doesn’t directly suggest particular motivations to participants, we do believe that the increased self-awareness and empathy it trains does lead to greater maturity, including ethical maturity. And finally, at the individual level “resilience, self-responsibility, and active coping” correlate to engagement. Emerge! helps participants find greater resilience through finding and developing stronger inner and outer resources for responding to and rejuvenating from difficult situations. It helps participants develop more self-responsibility by getting better at delineating what they add (mentally or behaviorally) to external situations which make them better or worse, and taking steps to change these. Emerge! also trains participants to develop healthy proactivity, giving them tools to discover what they most want and go after it, thus contributing to increased active coping.
This research also helps to establish potential allies in academia who may be interested in partnering with Emerge! to develop our technology, study it’s effectiveness, or help connect us with organizations that would be interested in implementing our program. A few of these potential allies includeDr. Cristina Wildermuth at Drake University, Dr. Chris Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Dr. Roger Schank, Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University, Dr. Sheldon Friedman at the University of Maryland University College, Dr. Lisa Gjedde and Aalborg University, and the team of interdisciplinary scholars working on the Hearing the Voice (HtV) project at Durham University.
We will continue to conduct research into role-play, perspective-taking, user-generated experiences, social sharing, and other aspects of the Emerge! app. We’ll also continue doing research into the best practices in e-learning, m-learning, and augmented reality simulations in order to generate the highest levels of engagement and transformation as we build out the app and in-person training elements over time. The investigations we’ve made so far are just the beginning, but already we’re feeling encouraged by the support it lends to what we’ve built so far, and are looking forward to integrating further insights into the way learning works into our future versions.