In the 18th century, Lancelot Brown was probably the most revered English landscape designer. He worked on over 250 sites including Chatsworth House, Blenheim Palace, and Hampton Court Palace. Brown was known as "Capability Brown" because of how he would tell clients their estates had great "capability" to improve the landscape. He swept away the traditional formal gardens into a gardenless landscape with serpentine lakes, scatterings of trees, and smooth undulating grass up to the house.
The length of time these landscapes would take to come fully into fruition spanned many generations. We've been experiencing them in their full glory for only a few. Capability Brown and his clients were creating something for the generations ahead to build upon and enjoy, knowing they were unlikely to ever fully see it themselves.
They had an infinite mindset. The journey is endless, not a series of discrete or finite events. It would have been easy to create the then in-vogue formal gardens, which would likely have been replaced in the future. But they chose something that has lasted. It is possible they found greater fulfilment in the journey than in a destination they were unlikely to reach.
Capability Brown offers a useful lesson for learning and personal growth.
We can view a learning opportunity with a finite mindset. A discrete event with a start and a finish point. We move on to the next event, tick it off, and fail to connect it to anything larger. Or we can view it with an infinite mindset. A small step in a journey that has already started. We don't know where we're going next or where we'll end up. We just know that today we are a little further along than yesterday.
We've all had moments when we couldn't wait to leave an event or an interaction. In that moment, we have potentially lost an opportunity to turn an event into a meaningful experience.
In an earlier post I wrote about readiness, willingness, explicitness, and clarity in relation to deliberate and active participation in learning. Participation is a conscious choice. The other side of the same coin is that learning design has to make space for infinite mindsets in how we construct learning experiences.
If we stop viewing learning as a finite event with a start and finish, and instead design for the transformation of content into context, we can start to identify what action we can take to change something.
Learning is as much about application as it is acquisition. With an infinite mindset, who knows what we could achieve.