By David Creelman

If you’ve ever designed a training program you’ll understand the pressure to have it go from A to B to C in a logical linear way. This works well for subjects that are logical and linear. Is management like that? Not very often.

John J. Cimino, founder of Creative Leaps International, hails from two contrasting but interconnected and complementary worlds, the world of science and the world of the arts. With that background, perhaps it’s not surprisingly that he doesn’t see the world as a place of straight lines.  When he talks about learning he talks about “orbital learning” and that’s an idea worth investigating.

The term orbital learning suggests humans can choose to orbit around an idea the way planets orbit around the sun. If an idea challenges our existing way of thinking we can’t just dive straight in; we need to walk all around the idea, look at it from a variety of angles, and maybe, if it doesn’t seem too dangerous an idea, we start to lower the orbit and get closer to the heart of the idea itself.  As Cimino explains it, “setting ourselves in orbit around an idea and wandering through its neighborhood activates our intuition, imagination and our senses, all things which jump us out of our taken for granted beliefs and opinions.”   The key he says is “to give ourselves the opportunity to see things from multiple perspectives and through different lenses and to do that we need to set ourselves in motion with an explorer’s eye and an explorer’s curiosity.”

What orbital training looks like
There are many ways to implement the basic concept of orbital training; however there are a couple of things you must include:

1. Set Expectations: We are all used to approaching a topic in a linear way and if you deviate from that people will be confused. If you start by explaining that you’re covering a challenging topic that needs to be looked at from a variety of angles and with some new lenses, then participants will be prepared for what follows.

2. Allow for some catalysts and lots of discussion: If it is a challenging idea that needs to be considered from a variety of angles, people may need some help climbing their way to new vantage points. Novel experiences are often just the right catalyst for this: the arts, the outdoors, speakers with deep expertise in adjacent or contrasting fields can help get our minds moving through new terrain.  Once in the space of new ideas, people will want to discuss things for themselves, not just listen to presenters.  Part of the purpose of this is for participants to share, compare and refine their ideas.  But there is something else that is equally important.  The great management thinker Karl Weick likes the phrase “How can I know what I think until I see what I say.”  Articulating an idea is an essential part of grappling with it.  In orbital learning at least half the time should be spent on small these group discussions.

An example
Let’s imagine you were running a program on the role of HR. A linear approach would be to step through each of the HR functions specifying their deliverables and how they operate. An orbital approach would look at HR through the eyes of employees, then shift the angle to how it looks through the eyes of middle management and then onto the view from the boardroom. As you sweep round the topic you’d then dive to how it looks like from inside HR, and perhaps how it looked in the past and how it might look in the future. As you move through the orbit there would be repeated discussion to reconcile the different views, to tease out where they are aligned, where they are in conflict and how one might find a practical way forward.

What’s next
Most of the time you will still want to approach the world in a linear manner; even this article is written in a largely linear way. However we should be aware that sometimes linear is not the right approach and that there are alternatives.  The notion of orbital learning provides a powerful metaphor that opens up a subtle new approach for engaging with complex or difficult ideas.  Look for an opportunity to bring that method to your own training; perhaps not as a whole program but at least as a one segment of the day, so that you and your participants can get can get richer views of the topic they are embracing.

David Creelman’s does research and writing on people management. His mini-course for HR leaders on the Fundamentals of HR Analytics is available at Udemy.com.