La société de e-learning Socratic Arts ne manque pas d’audace! Fondée par le professeur émérite en informatique, psychologie et éducation Roger Schank, Socratic Arts affirme haut et fort que ses experts en savent plus que ses clients et qu’elle entend donc ne pas leur livrer ce qu’ils demandent, mais plutôt ce dont ils ont besoin. Je livre l’intégral de ce message un peu provoquant, mais intelligent, publié sur leur page d’accueil :
Why is Socratic Arts different from all other e-learning companies?Here is one reason: We don’t start by listening to what our clients say they want.Now this is a very weird approach to business and we know it. But like architects, or automobile designers, or a great chefs, we feel that we know more about our subject than our customers do. In fact, that is why they come to us in the first place. Our customers may say they want us to build a course in a given area of knowledge. But what they really are concerned with is something very different.They want their employees to do their jobs better. They want costly mistakes to stop occurring. They want their employees to be able to think more clearly about what they are doing and why. They may say they want a course in some subject but what they really want is to teach their people to think more clearly within a certain domain of knowledge. Then they want that new thinking to be put into practice.Teaching them the ten rules of honesty or the best practices of some other company is a continuation of the serious problem that exists in e-learning and in training in general: It is just like school.But if schools were so good, your employees would already have learned what you want them to learn. School is dominated by subjects. At Socratic Arts we are concerned with thinking processes, not subjects. We start with an attempt to figure out what people are doing wrong in your company and why. This is often a conversation that only takes an hour or two. Then, working with our client, we attempt to figure out how to prepare employees for their jobs such that common mistakes stop occurring, We do this by using a method as old as Plato: learning by doing.We try to simulate the job situation in such a way that the most common mistakes do happen. In this way, employees can learn from their mistakes, the way people normally learn, by trying to understand what they did wrong. We are the learning experts. We know about how the mind processes information, and we know about where technology is relevant and where it isn’t relevant in enhancing human thinking processes.
Convaincre les autres, ça commence par notre propre conviction. Il ne serait pas approprié pour nous au SSF de publier un texte semblable, loin de là, mais j’avais envie de partager cette découverte, sans objectif précis.