Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method

Chapter 8Flow—The Joy of Effective Learning

As mentioned in the introduction to Part II of this book, we see learning as making sense of an experience and incorporating that into our own mental models. It so happens that nature has equipped us with a special type of biological feedback that rewards appropriate learning activities (i.e., activities that serve to ensure our survival). Of course, survival for modern human beings largely means learning effectively in a meaningful context. Nature has arranged it so that we are rewarded with a deep feeling of enjoyment and satisfaction when we achieve this. We experience this feeling when we succeed, for example, with an interview for a job we really would like to land. The bigger the challenge seemed ahead of the interview, the bigger the reward in terms of a feeling of not only pleasure, but satisfaction.

This good feeling with which the body rewards us when we learn something important is the one of the most important driving forces in our development and understanding of the world. The body uses positive emotions and sensations to encourage us to learn what is important for us, since effective learning has been aiding us in our struggle to survive since the Stone Age. As mentioned in Chapter 7, the emotional reward drives our attention, which drives our learning, which drives our memory.

Over the past 30 years, countless researchers and scientists have thoroughly investigated this sense of deep satisfaction. One of these individuals ...