Inviting Openness
Designing an Experiment in Receptivity
I was eight years old when I wandered into a library and stumbled across a book that has probably influenced me more than any other. It was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
I wasn’t looking for it. It was hardly the usual reading material for an eight-year-old. But we were visiting distant relatives, the adults were doing what adults do, and I was bored. So I went exploring and as libraries were my home-away-from-home, it was where I ended up
I pulled the book off the shelf and started reading. One story in particular lodged itself somewhere deep inside my young brain. Carnegie described his desire to positively influence a bored ticket seller he was about to interact with. He looked for something about the man he could compliment genuinely, and when he reached the counter he delivered his intervention. Then he stood back and watched what happened. The man’s whole demeanor changed. He’d effectively changed an emotional state, we’d probably say today.
That fascinated me. One small interaction. One sincere compliment. A completely different emotional state. From bored to genuine engagement.
I’ve been experimenting with that idea ever since.
Sometimes it worked beautifully. Occasionally it backfired. Men often interpret compliments from a woman as flirting. But far more often than not, I found that genuine warmth softened situations that might otherwise have been tense. The situation didn’t change. The emotional state did.
And it influenced how I taught. For years I believed the challenge was making people passionate about learning and if I gave enough praise I’d find that passion. You see, like so many people who become teachers, I loved learning. I assumed everyone else did too, and all I had to do was uncover that passion. It’s a common mistake among idealistic teachers. We mistakenly believe everyone else must feel as we do. It shakes our world when we discover most people don’t.
Some learners arrive already curious. They lean forward before you’ve said a word. They’re a gift to teach. But many don’t feel that way. They’re there because someone else decided they should be. Their minds are full of family worries, dating issues, self-doubt, or simply the feeling that this is just one more obligation they have to fit into an already overcrowded week.
The problem wasn’t ability. It was all about receptivity.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I wondered whether we’ve been asking the wrong question. We spend enormous amounts of time and money asking how to teach better. We spend surprisingly little asking what emotional and psychological conditions make learning possible in the first place.
The more I read across neuroscience, psychology and education, the more I realized receptivity didn’t belong to just one field. It seemed to emerge wherever people were trying to understand change. The ideas weren’t new. But what interested me was how I might be able to incorporate it, when preparing a learner for learning.
My favorite was Agency. People tend to respond better when they feel they have some choice. Compulsory training often removes that feeling. You’re told where to be, when to be there, and what you’ll learn.
I was in charge of a Second Chance Educational program run at college level. School rejects would come to us because they couldn’t get the dole otherwise. No one wanted to be there. The animosity was often intense. Until they realized no one was forcing them to be there.
That led to what we teachers laughingly called the Learning Tree. A place where our students would congregate when they should be in class. Eventually, probably because they saw how other students behaved, they’d begin drifting back into the classroom.
We got results. Why? Because we gave them agency. Choice. Control, even in a small way, over their life.
So, what if I designed a pre-training activity that said, “Adapt this to suit yourself.” That tiny shift might be enough to transform organizational compliance into participation.
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Prediction error is a term being bandied about a lot these days. And it was not something I ever applied to learning. But the more I came to understand how it worked, the more potential I saw in it.
Neurologists tell us our brains are constantly predicting what will happen next: “If I do this, people will laugh.” “If I ask that question, I’ll look stupid.”
Sometimes those predictions are wrong. That’s prediction error. When the expected doesn’t happen. When the poker machine pays out. When your horse comes in first. Current neuroscience suggests that dopamine is closely tied to expectation and surprise, not simply the reward itself. It’s the expectation that something might change and, when it does, the brain pays extra attention.
When reality turns out differently than expected, the brain has to update its model of the world. When it’s in that state it’s open to new possibilities.
What if I could engineer a way to interfere with the predictions ahead of time. Not much. Just enough to have the brain doing a little readjustment. If they can’t safely predict one small event in their day, what would that do to a closed mind?
I remember walking past our college quad one day when suddenly something sailed down from above and plopped to the ground not far from me. It was unexpected. I was surprised. And then I laughed. Middle-aged women appeared, rushing up to inspect what had fallen, chattering and laughing as they checked out the bubble-wrapped raw egg. It was a science experiment run by one of my teachers, and I was so proud that I’d employed her. That novelty, that prediction error, meant that lesson would always be remembered. And an environment where such things could occur without question? That was my ultimate goal.
Which leads perfectly onto Play. I have always believed people learn better from games. I invent games. I would use them in my classrooms as often as possible.
But to get adults to play is harder than with children. Adults often treat play as the opposite of serious work. Children, on the other hand, see play as where they experiment with life. It’s where mistakes don’t matter. Where they can try something new without risking their identity.
Getting adults playing takes trust. I remember an assessor telling me that my Values Auction I’d created only worked so well because my students were willing to go there with me. I was reminded of the times when games didn’t work. How could I build the kind of trust that would allow me to bring adult play into prep for training?
Another of my favorites for altering emotional states is Small successes.
We often celebrate the dramatic breakthroughs. But Psychology suggests we might be celebrating the wrong thing. Repeated, manageable successes may change how we see ourselves far better than one unusual success. Every tiny success becomes another piece of evidence. Eventually it becomes harder to maintain the story that “I’m just not that sort of person.”
The cornerstone of my work has always been that small steps build momentum. Small successes therefore had to figure prominently in what I would design.
Novelty is very similar to prediction error. But it’s subtly different.
Routine has enormous advantages. We don’t have to make decisions that exhaust us. We can perfect it so it runs smoothly and effectively.
But it also has a habit of putting people into autopilot. We drift through hours of our day and wake from it without remembering much of anything. In that state, it’s so much harder for new information to get in.
Novelty interrupts autopilot. It asks the brain to pay attention again. Not forever. Just for a moment. And that moment is enough. Especially where learning is concerned.
So I needed to build novelty into my pre-training. I had to get learners out of autopilot before they walked through the classroom door.
There were more fields of research I could draw on. But these were a good starting point. Because, if the emotional state influences learning… If we know that agency matters to how receptive someone is to new information… If we know that play, curiosity, small successes and prediction errors all influence how open we are to experience… then what might happen if I deliberately tried to combine those conditions in a way that influenced a learner ahead of learning?
Could Greta help me do it?
