Category: Learning

One of my professors, Warren McFarlan, made an observation about the choice of questions that has stuck with me. He argued that you could either ask questions that would get you published or you could ask questions that mattered.

He might have been a bit more diplomatic in his phrasing but that was the essence. Were you going to be driven by safety or by curiosity?

Most of education and society drives our questions to safety. We learn which questions lead to the answers that our teachers and managers are looking for. “Will this be on the test?” is the default question. The ways we suppress curiosity while pretending to encourage it are limitless.

I had a classmate in business school who liked to chat with our professors after class, which earned him a reputation as a brown noser. The notion that you might be genuinely curious about the subject was a foreign concept to most of our classmates. I got to know Phil as the year went on and discovered that he already had a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science. I may have been the only one in our section that he revealed this to; he believed, rightly I suspect, that this would only brand him further.

Curiosity is a dangerous value; it has killed more than cats. Suppose you also believe it is important regardless of the risks. How do you encourage, promote, and nourish real curiosity in environments that fear and suppress it?

How do you learn to ask questions that matter?

I’m making a claim here that I’ve avoided this problem and navigated the system with my curiosity intact. How did I manage that? More importantly, are there any lessons to learn?

School was a place where most things came pretty easy. But the culture still rewarded right answers and compliant behavior. As I listen to others tell tales of the pressures to achieve they faced from parents and teachers, they strike me as foreign. I was certainly praised when I did well, but I never felt pressured. My mom was always a believer. She was pleased with my results. But, she never talked about expectations. I imagine that with my six younger siblings to wrangle she was mostly relieved that I was operating on my own.

Looking back, my dad was pretty tricky. It was never “were you the best?” The question was “does this represent your best work?” If the answer was yes, the actual grade was immaterial; if the answer was no, then an A was no defense. That got me through high school and by the time I reached college I was comfortable chasing my interests instead of grades. I took courses based on my interests at the time, not based on my grade point average. As I often tell my students today, I managed to collect at least one of every possible grade.

Grades served as feedback, not measures of my value.

My work in the theater taught a second important lesson. Working on stage productions was always about scarce resources and hard deadlines. You can generally negotiate an extension on a class assignment; you can’t move opening night. On a show, the question is always “does this make what the audience sees better?” That leads to a second question, “if the audience can’t see it, why are you doing it?” There’s no good reason to paint the back side of a set.

The question is not about effort; it’s about value. We track effort because we can’t always wait to measure value; effort can be an appropriate early warning signal. Demanding maximum effort is a lazy manager’s way to avoid thinking about the value you are seeking to create.

The old adage is “if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” I encountered an improved version on the bulletin board of a doctor friend:

If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well enough for the purpose at hand. It is probably wrong, and certainly foolish, to do it any better.”

Throwing resources at problems is rarely an effective strategy despite the frequency with which it is employed. Acceptable as a strategy if you are resource rich, questionable if the problems and opportunities exceed the resources available. Getting the most leverage out of resources starts with learning how to ask better questions.

One of my enduring memories from my first days in business school is a video interview of a second year student offering advice on surviving the case method. While I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, it was totally appropriate that his advice was a case study in its own right.

He began with a story of the business challenge of “sexing chickens.” In the chicken business, it turns out that it is important to separate roosters and hens when both are no more than puffs of feathers. The clues are subtle and not reducible to a checklist. Novice chicken sexers can’t be taught to do their job but they can learn.

Prospective chicken sexers go through an apprenticeship. They sit down with a batch of chicks, pick one up, flip it over, inspect, and guess. Sitting next to our prospect is a veteran chicken sexer. The veteran’s job is to give the prospect feedback; either a “yes” for a correct guess or a smack in the head for a mistake. After a hundred or so guesses, the prospect’s error rate will drop close to zero. Neither the prospect or the veteran will be able to offer an explicit theory of what they are doing, yet they are effective.

Learning by the case method is a similar process of guessing and rapid, memorable, feedback. As an aside, recognize that this also describes the essence of machine learning. It is experiential learning at its purest.

The craft in designing case method learning lies in selecting and sequencing cases so that the lessons can be delivered more rapidly and reliably than the random accumulation of experience permits. The assumption here is that there is an order that can be exploited to guide action. There must be an underlying pattern that one can solve for.

If you subscribe to the value of the case method as a learning strategy, you are making a claim that there is a balance between theory and practice to be managed. It is a claim that the particulars matter; that experience or theory can only go so far in crafting a response. That you have a responsibility to design a response that acknowledges that every situation is a mix of old and new, predictable and unpredictable.

There’s a notion here that I am struggling with that has to do with the rate of change. I think that case-based learning potentially makes this issue more visible.

In a slow-changing world, experience matters greatly. Recognize how this situation maps to what we’ve seen and responded to before and right action is clear. As the rate of change increases, the value of experience changes. Prior experiences suggest actions and responses that can serve as the basis for designing a modified response that blends old and new.

Pushing the rate of change still higher means that effective response demands more design and less “here’s what we’ve done before.” What does that imply for learning effectively?

My hypothesis is that we need to make the experiential learning process visible, explicit, and deliberate. In a conventional case-based learning environment, there is a separation between those who are learning and those who are facilitating the learning—which is not the same thing as teaching. The goal is for those learning to build a robust, internal, theory of action. The facilitators have strong ideas about what that theory should look like and cases are sequenced to force the learners to develop an internal theory that matches the target theory.

What’s happening in higher-paced environments is that our learners and facilitators are becoming harder to distinguish. In a sense, we are back to a world of pure learning from experience. What changes is that as learners we now must be responsible for building our theories dynamically.

While this can still be described as a form of reflective practice, that reflection now must operate at several levels of abstraction. We can’t rely simply on organic processes to slowly and unpredictably get smarter over time. We need to get smarter on purpose and by design.

Jay Cross is at it once again. He’s launched the Real Learning Project, an exploration of DIY learning in today’s organizational environment. Here’s his description of the effort:

The Real Learning Project helps people who are taking their professional development into their own hands and shows them how to learn to learn.

My new book, Real Learning is for all those people we’ve made responsible for their own learning. This is the missing manual.

Real Learning explains self-assessment, setting goals, dealing with feeds and flows, improving retention, curation, working out loud, social learning, and more. Each technique is backed with a practical exercise.

Real Learning reveals how to:

• Learn from experience

• Take advantage of the latest findings from neuroscience

• Save time by accelerating how you learn

• Remember things faster, better, deeper

• Adopt sound learning practices as lifelong habits

• Form a sustainable, nurturing community

• Use shortcuts, cheatsheets, and rules of thumb

Real Learning is about how to learn for yourself. No classrooms. No instructors. No training department. Little in the way of theory. Just stuff that works.  (Although learning with your team is encouraged,)

The core focus is experiential learning and tacit knowledge. It’s learning to be all you can be rather than amassing more content.

This matters for two reasons. One, DIY learning is something we are all going to have to get better at. Organizations won’t have the time or the resources to invest in time-consuming formal training efforts. But the need to learn new things will only continue to increase. Two, Jay is one of the key people thinking about this problem in organizational contexts.

There are a number of resources to take advantage of with this effort:

• The Real Learning Website

• The Google Plus Community

• A blog that Jay describes as a Plog—A personal progress blog

I’ve purchased the e-book version of the book in its present beta form and hope to follow along and contribute as it evolves.