Win Wenger

What can the Socratic Effect do for your enterprise?
 

A Quick Overview:

If you want more than the routine and unthinking from your employees and colleagues, then you want the same positive forces unleashed in your organization which produced world-class geniuses in classical Greece and in Renaissance Europe. — From tiny population bases, when Socratic Method was used it produced world-class geniuses at a rate some ten million times higher per capita than do the present schooling methods. What can the heightened and more ingenious performance induced by use of modern Socratic Method accomplish for your organization?

People forgot what the Socratic Method was and what it did. In every state, we mandated by law that the public be educated. But we made a mistake. We entrusted education to our schools and school teachers, who settled instead for merely teaching. But if we look at what Socratic Method truly is and does, we can begin to see what the Socratic Effect can accomplish within your organization, and for you, in whatever practical context, and not just in the limited context of schooling.

Three Keys:

1. The principal natural law of behavior, referred to by psychologists as the Law of Effect, is this:  “You get more of what you reinforce.” What does get reinforced in your laboratory or office, and what does not? If you want just the results you’ve been getting, continue doing what you’ve been doing. If you want better results, do something better, beginning with looking at what’s been reinforced day-to-day and what’s not been.
   
   

2. Socratic Method causes one to search his or her own perceptions and awarenesses, and to seek to respond from there to questions or challenges #151; thus reinforcing not only the particular perception sought after, but the trait, the behavior of being more perceptive and aware! Small wonder the method produced such genius! “Socratic Miracles” — such wonderful results came from its use that its practitioners were convinced that all knowledge and understanding are somehow already within each person, needing merely to be “drawn out,” i.e., “educated” — which is very different from “being taught”!
   
   

3. What’s critical, then, is the type of challenge or question asked. To respond, does your employee or student dig into his or her actual perceptions and subtler awarenesses, or do they get to settle for short-term memory and conventional knowledge instead, and settle for that in what they reinforce? Or to just go along with the expected?

Examine the following Winsights articles below to see some of the ways in which the Socratic Effect is applied in modern context. (Great many other, highly diverse, ground-breaking Winsights articles are also posted on this website. See the Winsights index.) Then, see if you can answer for yourself what the Socratic Effect can do for your situation, and do for you, and do for your organization!

How best can you get your employees, your colleagues, drawing each other out and drawing you out on the finer and better points of what’s needed there in your work and enterprise? How best can you draw yourself out and tap into your own richer resources?

Further Reading:

• Add Depth and Richness to Every Facet of Our Mutual Lives, Winsights, No. 33 (September 1999)
  
• The Socratic Continuum, Winsights, No. 57 (Feb./March 2002)
  
• Windtunnel!!!, Winsights, No. 55 (November 2001)
  
• Responsiveness, the Power of Feedback, Winsights, No. 22 (July 1998)
  
• Dynamic Format
  
• Mutual Listening
  

Contact:
Win Wenger

Top of this page | Click here for next page

• Introduction
• Socratic Method at a glance
• What can Socratic Effect do for your enterprise?
• Comparing classical and modern forms
• The Law of Effect
• Core Readings
• Conclusion