How Practitioners Are Using the Learning Fables Series

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• Lynne Maynor, director of leadership and development at the hospitality company Gaylord Entertainment, uses all the learning fables at Gaylord's corporate university. When she wants to illustrate why everyone on a team needs to perform at a certain skill level, she combines the community maze exercise from the Systems Thinking Playbook, by Linda Booth Sweeney and Dennis Meadows, with creative activities based on Outlearning the Wolves. For example, she assigns people to wolf, sheep, and Otto tables, where they create profiles of their respective characters. Each group then talks with the others, for example, the Ottos describe their change initiative to the sheep. She then weaves these activities back to the maze so the group can see what happens when certain sheep don't get involved in the process. When exploring paradigms, or mental models, in-depth, Lynne relates two of the habits from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey with the messages of Shadows of the Neanderthal and The Lemming Dilemma, respectively.

• At a regional meeting of Singapore police officers, the group discovered how powerful the method of storytelling is to facilitate learning. They read Outlearning the Wolves aloud together, with assigned individuals role-playing different characters. Afterwards, the officers had a meaningful conversation about learning in their own organization.

• When Singapore's telecommunications and computer regulatory agencies merged to become Info-Comm Development Authority, leaders used Shadows of the Neanderthal to think about the role and purpose of their new organization. By introducing mental models, that is, the concept that beliefs and assumptions can limit what we can see and create, they helped the group see new possibilities and what they could do to bring them into reality.