The DoubleHelix

An excerpt from the Winning Helix by Cristina Andersson

A metaphor for an intensive action-learning process for true lifelong learning

“From a circle of learning to an action-learning process with growth, quality improvement and shifts of skill levels. Build yourself a structured process that helps you to achieve your goals and learn with enthusiasm. Understand how energy flows in the action-learning process and how to create a dynamic interplay between action and learning.”

“Find how the energy moves in the action-learning process and what kind of learning helps you to create the best learning results.”

The doublehelix emphasizes the ongoing nature of learning: movement instead of status quo. Learning is a life-long process rather than a series of individual educational episodes. The intention of the metaphorical structure is to help the reader to get a concrete picture about how the abstract energy-flows of action and learning are intertwined.

“The action-learning doublehelix helps you to turn the random steps of development into purposeful movement towards the direction of your goals.”

The idea of the doublehelix is to help a learner to create an ideational scaffold, a metaphorical structure, a personal mental environment where he can place his knowledge and experience. The doublehelix illustrates how the energy is transmitted in an intensive action-learning process. It is, however, good to be aware that a mental structure is not a solid entity like a physical structure, like a building, with spatially related parts. The parts of a mental or cognitive structure are related psychologically -- logically, creatively or emotionally.

“The doublehelix illustrates an action-learning process supported by a learning theory “the Learning Wheel”. This combination helps the individual, team or organisation to create themselves a mental learning environment that promotes success in processes aiming for development, improvement and/or shift in the level of competence.”

Excerpt from the book

Introduction to Part II – The Double Helix

In the Part 1, we studied the elements that make learning and performing successful. Willpower is the basic driving force that gives an impulse to start the learning process and that helps to keep on going through all difficulties and restraints during the process. Mental virtues provide energy and mental patterns enabling effective decisionmaking and use of knowledge. Coachability skills enhance learning and improve interaction in different learning situations.

The abovementioned factors combined with an intensive action-learning process, presented in this part, form a powerful concept and environment for successful learning and performance.

Action-learning process means simply that action is combined with learning so that they form a continuum where the use of energy alternates according to the learners’ needs and different phases of the process.

A learner who is pursuing excellence possesses a powerful will to go beyond skills and competencies to something extraordinary and fantastic. The action-learning process enables him to create a structure to facilitate his strivings. On the other hand, the process is rich with contradictions. It brings our greatness into light, but also reveals our incompetence and ignorance. An experienced learner knows that the more he learns, the less he knows. A person who strives to gain personal mastery in his domain of skill learns to enjoy the creative counterforce of excellence and ignorance.

In this part, we will also present a theory for learning, the learning wheel, that helps the learner to understand, plan, develop and organize his learning along the action-learning process.

The DNA

When I realized that, instead of studying winning, I should embark upon studying the process that prepares to win, I outlined a simple single-loop energy-model combining action and learning. My carrying idea was, and still is, that when the energy level is high on performance, it must be low on learning.

One early morning, with great enthusiasm and excitement, I faxed my action-learning loop to the hockey-coach. The coach phoned me back in five minutes saying that he did not like my loop at all because it was lacking the aspect of growth. “Learning is about growth” he said “and you cannot present any models about learning without growth”.

“I knew that” I thought, feeling really stupid. After years of speaking about the importance of learning and growth to teachers, managers, trainers and other people, a hockey-coach had to remind me about their necessity.

Growth is a quality of life and it happens in an action-learning process no matter how consciously or unconsciously a person seeks to grow. This book aims to contribute to the growth of those people who want to grow in the direction of their own choice and who want to consciously create a personal learning environment to support and enhance their learning.

Thanks to the coach, I began to study what, as a matter of practice, happens in an aspiring action-learning process with peak-performances, transitions and shifts to the new levels of skill, and how to illustrate this continuum so that it helps people to create themselves a mental framework for successful learning.

To get a deep, personal experience of the issue, I decided to carry out an introspective study, studying my learning process preparing for a concert.

During the introspection, the one-loop chart developed into a double-loop model, where a loop of transition followed a level of skill and preceded the shift to the next level of skill. When I presented the new picture, many people said that it reminded them of the DNA doublehelix. For curiosity’s sake, I acquainted myself with the doublehelix, reading James Watson’s fascinating book about the discovery of the DNA. I found out that the doublehelix is a perfect metaphor for the kind of action-learning process that I had in mind.

We, Collin and I, had a lot of fun discussing the DNA and we created our own language to talk about learning. We sent each other inspirational messages about “major and minor grooves,” “base-pairs” or “strands.” We used these terms in our discussions and gradually, the DNA doublehelix began to teach us how it could be used.

When I felt that the metaphor was ready enough, I presented it to Professor Rickhard Fagerström, the head of the biotechnology department at VTT. He found the metaphor acceptable and intelligible. In fact, he said he was surprised how well prepared the metaphor was. Now I could feel like a winner!

“In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation, the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.” - Gregory Bateson