Learning to learn or learning for a purpose?
Learning is crucial if we want to improve, if we do not stop and learn, we will never get better. If you are doing knowledge work and you aren’t spending part of your day or week learning, practicing, and reflecting, then you are likely to be stagnating or regressing.
If your organization doesn’t tolerate failure and experimentation, and therefore learning — it is unlikely that you will have the support required for learning to happen in the workplace. Without a culture of learning and safety, people only learn if they are passionate about learning will do so out of work hours. If they are incentivized by a gamification* mechanism, they may be incentivized by the reward rather than the outcomes.
*Not all gamification is bad, please be careful when using it. There are many studies and real-world examples where things have gone bad.
As an avid learner, I’ve often struggled to connect what I watch, listen to, or read, applies to real work. Recently however, I’ve found that some things are starting to stick and embed. I suspect context, format, time and the people behind the content or course play a big part.
Recently I completed an incredible course by Modus Institue (Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria) called Lean Agile Visual Management (LAVM). It is a self-paced online learning where you watch videos, read plenty of articles and then apply your knowledge to a series of assessments / homework. Assessments are submitted in the open for others to comment on, not just the organizers. I had many great interactions with the learning community and ended up improving my assessments because of their feedback.
This is one of the few classes I’ve done (over about 9 months) that I have actively retained and put into practice daily.
In my experience, knowledge tends to go in one ear and out the other. Even as a child, my teachers would tell my parents at parent teacher meeting, that my reading comprehension was something to work on.
I would find myself going through the content but not really being able to properly embed that information for future retention.
I’m not sure that I have fully remediated that leaning challenge, but I have developed approaches that when followed tend to help.
- Keep notes as you learn, write down important quotes etc. (I’ve yet to develop a solution for audiobooks). This one could be an article in its own on how to take great notes.
- Collective learning is one way to learn together. Applied learning is where the magic happens. (Check out Situated Learning by Lave and Wenger)
- Share what you learn with others — share with your team what you’ve learned the next day / week. Being able to crystallize what you have learned helps you embed that knowledge.
- Read / watch / listen to many versions of the same topic, get diverse opinions, and see the points of view that others have. Even the contrarian / sceptical opinions. Another option is re-read the same thing multiple times — this could be a chapter / video etc but revisiting the same part multiple times in multiple environments can help you absorb.
- Write a blog about the topic or create a talk / presentation on your learnings / observations and interact with others. If you aren’t comfortable doing this, then at least join a meetup on the topic of interest to hear what others think.
This is just a brief list but I’m sure with the amazing resources out there, you’ll find some more specific guidance that is scientifically backed.
There’s a full set of other learning resources and areas of focus that are about becoming experts (10,000 hours etc.), memory retention, super learning, speed reading etc. I think many of those are interesting to pick and delve into.
Practically having a reason to learn something helps, ideally a problem or a goal and even better an opportunity to apply the learning. Learning just to learn could land you in inadvertently gamifying the learning just for the sake of it… I have recently fallen victim of this in my annual Good Reads reading challenge.
I suspect if I’d read half the books within the same period and spent more effort in applying the learnings, I’d have retained far more. My approach now is to revisit the content and read it a second or third time once I have a specific problem that I think the content can help with.
Some other interesting learning models that Chris Matts shared with me a while back:
Conscious competence model (Wikipedia)
- Unconscious incompetence
- Conscious incompetence
- Conscious competence
- Unconscious competence
Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (Wikipedia), although Chris has a modified version
- Concrete learning (Kolb) / Observation (Matts)
- Reflective observation (Kolb) / Modelling (Matts)
- Abstract conceptualization (Kolb) / Experience (Matts)
- Active experimentation (Kolb) / Reflection (Matts)
How do you approach learning as an individual or a team?
What have you found most helpful as a technique / approach?
Resources for learning how to learn
- The executive learning trap — Chris Matts
- Learning to learn in a risk managed culture — Chris Matts
- Kolb’s learning model
- Conscious competence model
- Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential — by Barbara Oakley
- Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning Hardcover — by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger, Mark A. Mcdaniel
- Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives) — by Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger
- Thinking, Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman Paperback — by Daniel Kahneman
- Deep Work Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World — by Cal Newport
- Atomic Habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits and break bad ones by James Clear
