Category: Learning

Heroes always need a Sancho Panza. Not for comic relief but for essential logistical support.

In high school I found my way into the theater, not onstage but in the wings. I had a friend who persuaded me to audition with her for her school’s upcoming production. I was horrible. That disaster became a path to working on the tech crew where I learned how much work went into creating the magic.

Even a one-person show has a multitude working out of sight. There are directors, producers, set designers, lighting designers, carpenters, electricians, stage hands, ushers, ticket takers, publicity managers, and the list goes on. I financed a chunk of my college education working in those roles. I met my wife working backstage in community theater.

The role I gravitated to was stage manager, which sits at the intersection of several streams. It is where the design work, preparation work, and backstage efforts come together to support the performance on stage. The insight I gained from that perspective was that excellence depended on blending all of the elements in play. You could get acceptable results from focusing on any one to two elements. But the best outcomes depended on taking advantage of all the components interacting.

They way I would explain that today is that excellence flows from systemic performance. For all that we talk of systems in today’s organizations, developing a true systems perspective runs counter to most of our intuitions. Russell Ackoff remains a source for replacing those intuitions with more principled understanding. The following video is longish but more than worth the time to work with and understand:

The tag line for this blog is a quote from Dorothy Parker, “the cure for boredom is curiosity, there is no cure for curiosity.” I chose it on a whim when I started this experiment while I was teaching at the Kellogg School.

Curiosity is not a popular trait in many circles. Serious professionals are expected to keep curiosity in check, on a short leash in pursuit of clear, focused, objectives. That’s an expectation that has fallen out of sync with the environment we live in. We need to be more curious, not less, in the world we inhabit.

One consequence of cultivating curiosity is that we need to become comfortable with not knowing. This can be surprisingly difficult. Most of the settings we operate in reward the appearance of knowing. In school, we are evaluated and rewarded for demonstrating our knowledge not our ignorance. So too in the world of work. “I don’t know” is seen as an admission of weakness, when it ought to be celebrated as a sign of strength.

To be an effective leader in this world we need to keep not knowing in mind. For all the knowledge and answers we accumulate, we need to stay familiar with not knowing. This is an active process not a passive one. It is not enough to acknowledge that there are things we don’t know and then stay comfortably within the boundaries of what we do know. We need to seek out the edges and wander across them.

Early in my career I knew a little bit and was effective because I was always asking annoying questions to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. In the middle, I thought I knew a fair bit but was often reluctant to share what I did know. The problem then was that I knew enough to realize how much there was to know and knew there was always an expert somewhere who knew more than I did.

Today, I know a good deal, know that I know it, and know how much more always remains to learn. I’ve become more comfortable with the fluctuating balance between knowledge and ignorance. I’ve relearned to be comfortable raising questions, whether out of knowledge or ignorance.

I’ve gotten over the desire to demonstrate that I am the smartest person in the room. Which is good because that happens far less frequently than I once believed it did.

One particular blessing in my development was the chance to work with Tim Gallwey. Tim is the author of The Inner Game of Tennis, which explores how the way we think affects how we act.

One of the central lessons from my work with Tim was how I thought about what it means to be a coach or a teacher. I started with the naive but typical view that a teacher was someone who knew more. Tim offered a more powerful perspective.

It hit home for me during a session on the tennis court. I played decently enough that the court served as a good laboratory to understand Tim’s methods and point. He asked what I would like to work on that morning.

“I’d like to learn how to put spin on my serve.”

“That’s a good idea, Jim. Spin is a useful tool, especially for a left-hander like you. How much spin is on your serve now?”

Excellent question! “Tim, I have no idea.”

“Why don’t you hit a few serves for me? As you do, give me a number between 1 and 5 for how much spin you think you’ve put on the serve.”

I hit some serves and called out my guesses. Tim’s only action at that point was to correct my answers.

“That was more of a 3 than a 4. Yes, that one was a 2.”

What Tim was doing was increasing and calibrating my capacity to observe my performance. It didn’t matter what Tim could see in my serve until he could help me see for myself.

My friend, Alan Kay, likes to say that “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” This moment with Tim was when I began to see a deeper level to Alan’s dictum. Finding a better perspective is powerful. Getting others to see from that same vantage multiplies power.

Tim was showing me how to use expert knowledge to help someone else reach a new perspective. Which, of course, starts with empathy not expertise.

Two elements of that, which I’ve found valuable, are remembering what not knowing feels like and looking for blinders built into the current vantage point. Both of which are worthy of their own exploration. Stay tuned.

“Standby Cue 103.”

“Go Cue 103.”

We had about two minutes left in the finale. Twenty five dancers filled the stage, the music director was in the pit with another twelve musicians, I was stage right talking to the lighting crew via a headset and the stage crew via hand signals. In about thirty seconds, I would give a “Warn Cue 104” followed by a Standby and a Go.

It was the final night of our ten-city tour and we were performing in a lovely theater at New Trier West High School in Winnetka, Illinois. There’s a story about the space I’ll save for another day. Steve, the only performer not yet on stage tapped me on the shoulder. I looked away from my cue book. Steve was in his costume dressed as the Statue of Liberty—another story for another time.

Ok. He’s about to make his entrance upstage center. I’m not sure why he’s interrupted me.

Until he turns around.

Steve is not actually wearing his costume. He’s taped it on so that it looks normal from the front. From behind he’s naked from head to toe.

I miss giving the warning for Cue 104, but do manage to get out the Standby and Go in time. I then warn the crew to keep their eyes on the next 90 seconds. We set up and execute the next half dozen lighting cues, the band continues to play, and Steve makes his entrance, which starts from upstage center and proceeds downstage to the edge of the orchestra pit. As Steve passes each row of dancers, that row misses a step and recovers.

The finale ends, the curtain falls, and cast and crew breaks into hysterics.

Juvenile? Certainly. Unprofessional? Not really.

One of the payoffs of rehearsal and constant practice is the capacity to go with the flow. And to know when you can tweak the flow without interfering with the audience’s experience. It was the final number in our final performance. The steps were muscle memory at this point. Letting me know at the last moment was more of a gift to the crew than a needed warning.

One thing that puzzles me about ordinary organizations is how they develop capacity to respond to the unexpected, to go with the flow successfully. The magic we see on stage or on the athletic field demands time dedicated to practice and rehearsal. It is the practice and rehearsal that creates the capacity to adapt. That time is built into the process.

Ordinary organizations don’t build this into their process. Learning and rehearsal time is limited to occasional training experiences or stolen moments of on-the-job training. The rare major systems rollout may get planned training and support time.

Conventional wisdom says that people in organizations resist change. What they resist, sensibly, is demands for polished performance without rehearsal. By ignoring the role of rehearsal and practice, organizations end up with lower levels of performance. Rehearsal happens but only by disguising some performance time as a mediocre form of rehearsal. Neither practice or performance is effective.

I’ve made the claim that the half-life of knowledge is shrinking in most domains. We often frame this from the perspective of the increasing volumes of data and information we are called on to assimilate, but there is something worth teasing out by thinking in terms of pace instead of volume.

One of the first places I encountered this notion of the accelerating decay of knowledge was in reference to its impact in engineering fields. James Plummer, Dean of Stanford’s Engineering School, observed that

“The half of life of engineering knowledge is three to five years. As dean, I used to tell students it doesn’t matter what we teach you because it will be obsolete when you graduate, so go out and have a good time.” The Engineers of the Future Will Not Resemble the Engineers of the Past

He’s right if you think of his teaching responsibility as installing an up-to-date and accurate body of knowledge. While he nods in the direction of life-long learning, he doesn’t say anything about how life-long learning should differ from the way it has been organized in formal educational settings. Our naive assumptions about how learning works are anchored in our experience in schools and classrooms; there’s stuff to be learned, an expert to teach it, and a timetable to follow. At the other extreme, there is on-the-job training with little or no structure or guidance.

We see some attention to the notion of learning how to learn. Most of that, however, focuses on how to do a better job within the structures of courses, classrooms, and schools we feel comfortable with. The proliferation of new channels for learning—Khan Academy, Udemy, MOOCs — stay within the broad outlines of that comfortable structure.

None of that addresses the question of how to approach learning when the knowledge landscape is in constant flux. What do you do if you need to pick up a new skill before someone writes the book or the course you need in this structure? How do you manage your learning when figuring out what you need to learn is the first order of business? Worse, everyone else is in the same predicament; new knowledge is accumulating and old knowledge becoming obsolete faster than the systems we know can adapt.

There is one example I can think of for managing learning under these conditions. That is the world of doctoral students in evolving disciplines.

The assumptions about knowledge and learning baked into work at that level match the environment much more effectively than the assumptions built into studies at earlier stages of learning and knowledge acquisition. That change in assumptions, in fact, is one of the traps that students fall into when they try to make the transition into doctoral level work. It isn’t that the work gets harder. The work doesn’t conform to the practices that worked for acquiring and demonstrating your mastery of a known body of knowledge.

First, you discover that the consensus on what constitutes the relevant body of knowledge is in flux and always will be. As a fledgling expert in the field a doctoral student is now expected to develop a point of view about where the knowledge edges are; eventually, you are expected to push beyond them. In stable fields, you have the luxury of limiting your search for answers to the authoritative texts. In the worlds we are discussing now, you are forced to seek out and make sense out of primary sources. Behaviors that once would have gotten you in trouble–questioning sources, arguing with your teachers, disputing conclusions–are now skills to be developed. You must learn to develop your own models and conclusions to make sense of new data as it appears.

This leads to the second key difference; there are more experts to know of and they disagree. The good ones expect you to disagree with them. Learning is less about finding a master whose feet you can sit at and more about finding colleagues to travel with. Learning takes on the flavor of conversations with challenging people.  Conversations imply that you should expect a balanced distribution of questions, answers, hypotheses, and evidence. Asking “will this be on the exam” becomes a     question you must answer for yourself.

Finally, you must develop map making skills. You are in new territory, out where the dragons lurk. You need to keep track of where the sinkholes and oases lie. This will keep you safe on your own journey and give you something to compare notes on as you encounter other travelers drawing maps of their journeys.

“We need you back in the office now, Anthony’s team just got fired.”

I was at lunch. Back in the office, we were running a training simulation where a team of consultants was engaged in an assessment project for a hypothetical client. Over the course of a week, the consulting team interacted with the client by way of email, phone calls, and a handful of face-to-face meetings with client executives. The client executive roles were filled by retired executives who we paid to play the parts of CEO, CFO, and CIO.

Somehow, Anthony’s team of consultants had provoked the client CEO to fire the team on day 2 and demand that they vacate the premises. This was not a scenario we had built into the design of the simulation. How do you get fired from a  simulation? It was one of the more memorable “teachable moments” I had encountered.

We broke character and I facilitated a debrief of the “firing” that offered the junior members of the team a peek into the dynamics of managing client relationships they wouldn’t otherwise see and gave us a path back into the simulation for the remainder of the week.

It also started a deeper train of thought about how to get better at working in dynamic, high-stakes, settings. That proved important beyond the bounds of training as the environment continued to become more dynamic and the stakes continued to rise.

We designed this training simulation with help from a group at Northwestern University called the Institute for Learning Sciences. It was a group accustomed to building carefully scripted and automated training simulations for organizations such as Accenture and Verizon. They were  also accustomed to project budgets that looked more like our annual revenues than our budget.

Our resource limitations forced us to focus on design principles and forgo sophisticated technology features. We shifted the balance toward something that was more structural outline and less line by line script. We used a mix of technology and experienced support staff behind the scenes to shape and go with the flow as the simulation played out. Our goal was to create a learning environment that prepared people for the real consulting environments they would soon have. When our new consultants went out into the field for their first real assignments, we got the feedback that mattered. Our consultants were ready for what projects and clients threw at them.

The environment our consultants encountered was also changing. All organizations were dealing with accelerating innovation in strategy, technology, and organization. We had created our company on the belief that this acceleration would continue and would demand more responsive approaches to cope with and take advantage of that acceleration. The idea that the half-life of knowledge and expertise was shrinking was no longer an issue on the horizon. It was becoming a central feature of our day-to-day work.

Our training design was born of resource limitations. As much by luck as by design we had stumbled on deeper lessons for our work. We were learning how to navigate environments without a script and without rehearsal time. We were developing perspectives and practices oriented to an improv logic as the world demanded more responsiveness and adaptability.

I’ve come to believe that navigating this environment requires a shift in perspective and a set of operating practices and techniques that can be most easily described as improv adapted to organizational settings.

The shift in perspective moves from a world of connecting the dots to a world of “solving for pattern”. I borrowed the phrase from essayist Wendell Berry. It asks us to step back from the immediate details and view problems from a higher, systemic, vantage point.

Connecting the dots thinking is simplistic; find the picture hiding in the data and the details and select the appropriate script to respond. Google the term “bedbug letter” to see a classic, although possibly apocryphal, example.of connecting the dots.

Solving for pattern seeks to understand the driving forces that can explain the situation at hand as one instance of a class of similar situations. Instead of selecting a script that matches the immediate problem, solving for pattern looks for leverage points within the structure of forces where smaller nudges can trigger disproportionate responses.

As you make the shift to solving for pattern, you find yourself in a much more dynamic and collaborative environment than your likely comfortable with. If you’ve given up on the idea of a pre-existing script to work from, you must now learn how to create an actual conversation in the moment. This is the essence of improv practice in the world of theater.

Improv is something that can be learned and finding an improv class to participate in wouldn’t be a bad idea. For our purposes, it’s more useful to explore how we might adapt improv practices and mindsets to ordinary organizational settings.

Good improv practice is anchored in presence and focused attention. The fundamental rule is to agree to interact and agree to keep moving forward. In improv parlance, that agreement is referred to as “yes, and…” Adapting that mindset in an organizational setting calls for accepting that all players in a conversation have something to add.

What that also implies is a responsibility to bring as much as you can to add to the conversation and  commit to learning all that you can to better understand what everyone else in the conversation is bringing with them. This advice may seem contradictory; you must be prepared to both teach and learn at the same time. In a script world, you can simply accept the answers of specialists or insist that your specialized answers be accepted without modification.

In an improv world you must be prepared to “show your work.” Not to force your conclusions onto the conversation, but to enrich the conversation in search of a better collaborative answer. There are practices and techniques that can make the learning and the sharing easier to manage. But becoming comfortable in the mindset is essential.

Spinning a new consulting firm out of older, bigger, ones is a common story—no different from the founding of a new religious sect in a schism with the past. A charismatic leader and a few faithful followers declare a new revelation and start preaching from a new street corner.

When we started Diamond we all had experience in large professional service firms.  We were driven by things we didn’t like and wanted to fix and by opportunities we saw being ignored. We were less aware of the unique issues connected with being small and vulnerable.

Coming from big firms, we knew that training and knowledge management were important capabilities. As the only person who seemed marginally qualified, I was handed both problems and the hats of Chief Knowledge Officer and Chief Learning Officer. I had no staff and only the promise of a budget.

We lumped these two functions out of the reality of limited resources. In the organizations we had come from and knew, these functions were distinct. They demanded lots of resources and had grown from different origins and histories.

The decision rooted in our constraints generated insights that have become more relevant over the past twenty plus years. I want to start with the individual consultant—one of the prototypical knowledge workers that drive today’s organizations.

Alvin Toffler predicted that successful knowledge workers would be those who could “learn, unlearn, and relearn.” We live in the world he predicted. What we need to know as knowledge workers continues to grow at the same time that the half-life of our knowledge base continues to shrink.

The reality of this environment means that as a knowledge worker, you can’t count on organizations to be responsive enough to support your learning needs. They face the same problem you do and their problem is magnified by issues of scale.

Conventional strategies for learning break down. You can’t keep going back to school. You can’t afford the time and schools are as slow or slower to adapt their curricula to morphing demands as the organizations you inhabit.

Old avenues for learning in smaller, more up-to-date, chunks still exist and new avenues are appearing. If anything, the proliferation of options—YouTube, Udemy, EdX, Coursera, Khan Academy, workshops, seminars, webinars, ebooks—threatens overload more than relief.

What’s a reasonable path forward? I think it includes an explicit and dynamic personal learning plan coupled with a coherent set of supporting learning processes and practices. A learning plan should build on understanding how learning works, a view of your base of knowledge, and expectations of what skills and knowledge need developing.

Learning processes and practices provide the scaffolding and support structures that would otherwise be provided by the formal schooling environments that aren’t available. They will likely include:

• reflective practice
• cohort of co-learners
• journals/journaling practice
• reference management system
• systematic note taking and management

What you might correctly infer from this is that I am actively engaged in updating and formalizing my own plans and practices. I’m curious who else finds this a journey they might like to join?

We think of learning relative to a body of knowledge; we talk about learning a foreign language, data science, corporate finance, or carpentry. Academic degrees are built around demonstrating mastery of a body of knowledge.Professions are defined and certified in terms of mastering a specified body of knowledge.

I have two problems with this thinking from the perspective of learning. Who specifies what constitutes the relevant body of knowledge? And, how do you handle the problem of updating the body of knowledge? The way we conventionally think about those two questions seriously interferes with our ability to learn in the environment we face.

What is it about the environment that triggers my worries? The pace of change. We’re familiar with Moore’s Law, for example. There is the exponential growth in multiple measures of data and information. There is the exponential growth in scientific publications.

The simplest organizing idea here is the notion of the half-life of knowledge. We know that this half-life is shrinking in all sorts of fields.

What happens when that half-life is shorter than the time it takes to update a relevant body of knowledge and fold the new knowledge into certification processes and school curricula? Professional associations worry about this. Schools doing curriculum design worry as well. Organizations that find schools and professional associations moving too slowly worry and respond by creating corporate universities.

What does it all mean from the perspective of an individual trying to cope? What do you do if you understand that you can’t simply turn the problem over to the experts?

The standard responses of going back to school or trusting in the continuing education requirements of your chosen field are insufficient. All of those responses are rooted in the assumption that learning is simply about mastering a body of knowledge.

One of Alvin Toffler’s oft-quoted observations is that “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” He had a handle on this problem. We need to master another layer of skills, to see the body of knowledge as something dynamic and evolving.

From that vantage point we take on responsibility for actively updating and maintaining the bodies of knowledge that concern us. Whatever our central interests, we have to also acquire basic competence in how learning works and in how knowledge is created. We need to become our own curriculum designers and our own research directors.

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the Earth” doesn’t work if you are standing in the wrong place.

It’s tempting to focus on the lever—to make it longer or stronger or out of some new  material. What you aren’t likely to do is take the lever you’ve got and look for a new place to stand. Nor are you likely to ask whether a lever is the relevant tool.

One of the courses I teach is on Requirements Analysis and Communications. The goal is to equip students with the tools to articulate a problem with  enough detail and precision that a effective solution can be designed and implemented. That phrasing is awkward because all too common practice is to define problems in terms of known solutions.

It’s the inverse of children with hammers pounding everything as if it were a nail. It’s claiming you have a nail to be pounded because someone with a hammer has come along.

None of this is any easier in a world rife with voices clamoring that they have the magic hammer for X.

Everybody has an answer. Everybody is selling a solution. Everybody has a hammer.

How do you learn

• to take the time
• to ask the questions
• that will define the problem first?

The root question is always “what problem are we trying to solve?” The first several rounds of answers to that direct question are always statements of a solution, which is not a statement of a problem.

Asking effective questions is a learnable skill. I can give you a list of useful questions and I can lay out a process for asking them. But, what you really need is an opportunity to observe effective questioning in action, to practice in a safe environment, and to get feedback.

What I’m describing, of course, is the case method—either law school of business school flavor—or problem-based learning. What’s less emphasized is that these are inquiry processes; they are about questions, not answers. That makes them frustrating when you’re accustomed to being rewarded for answers, whether in school or in life.

The way out of that frustration is to understand the goal is building a skill not parroting an answer.