Advanced Metacognition: Bonsaï Thinking Game™ To Support Learning, Unlearning, And Relearning
Intended for people who are the CEOs of their own lives, executive coaches, L&D and organisational development professionals, and senior leaders responsible for capability and change.
Metacognition is the capacity to monitor, evaluate, and regulate one's own thinking. In the era of artificial intelligence, it has become one of the most consequential human capacities. As more thinking is delegated to machines, the ability to question how we arrive at our judgements matters more, not less. In an information environment shaped by fake news and algorithmic persuasion, metacognition is what allows us to notice when our beliefs are being formed for us rather than by us. It is also our main defence against blind spots, the unexamined assumptions that leave individuals and organisations exposed to black swans: rare, high-impact events that no one saw coming because no one thought to question what they already knew.
Neurocomb25® Lab is pioneering research in Advanced Metacognition. Established frameworks have treated metacognition mainly as a cognitive skill, thinking about one's thinking in order to plan, monitor, and evaluate learning. Advanced Metacognition goes further. Drawing on cognitive, affective, and conative neuroscience, it extends metacognitive awareness beyond how we think to how we feel and how we will and act. It addresses not only learning but the harder processes of unlearning and relearning.
The Bonsaï Thinking Game is a proprietary instrument that turns this research into structured experiential practice through five elements of Bonsaï Thinking: Watering, Fertilising, Pruning, Positioning, and Wiring. Participants apply the game to complex professional and personal situations and examine the patterns that shape how they learn, unlearn, and relearn. They leave with a distinctive method for facilitating this work with themselves, their clients, and their teams.
Presented by Aleksandra Halchenko, founder of Neurocomb25® Lab and creator of Bonsaï Thinking® , who defended her dissertation on metacognition at University College London (UCL).