Using Mimesis To Establish and Sustain New Behaviours

Chief Learning Officer's April Edition featured an article on 'Imitating Virtuous Behaviours' which had a focus on ethics and morality but which also shared important insights into the broader topic of how to establish new habits, both from a personal and an organisational point of view

Warren Buffett once said, “Pick out associates whose behaviour is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.” The insight is relevant to personal development, and to the manner in which organisations design and deliver their ethics training and leadership programmes. 

The idea of imitation, or “mimesis”, as the ancient Greeks had it, has been a critical part of philosophers’ thinking about moral development - and the effects of people in power on those under them since the time of Aristotle, 2,500 years ago. What the Greek philosopher argued is the basis for Buffett’s statement - people learn to behave morally not just by knowing something but by imitating their superiors’ behaviours. By practicing those behaviours they become habits. Over time, the habits turn into traits of excellence, morality and personal power - which is what virtue literally means.

Part of that sounds much like cutting-edge corporate learning philosophy. A good learning environment is more than just giving employees knowledge. It’s about changing the way people act - practicing new behaviours and reinforcing them over time with a variety of experiences so they become ways of working that align with new processes, strategies or technologies.

Picking up firstly on this idea of 'Mimesis' or imitation, our experience is that even where Leaders recognise the importance of this and demonstrate good intent in modelling the right behaviours, they are often unsure how to codify and communicate what they are doing so that others can interpret this and take these ideas on board for themselves. This is an area where FranklinCovey often provides support - providing a breakdown of the new ways of thinking and working involved in the behaviours leaders are trying to model so that they can share (and scale) these more effectively within their organisations.

A second key idea that the CLO article refers to is that of not just learning but reinforcing these behaviours over time and this is another key focus for FranklinCovey. Our emphasis here is to support 'deliberate practice' which helps translate learning into doing and also the 'reporting out' of key successes over time (typically in an online depository) so that we also capture how the 'doing' translates to results.