Expanding Horizons – Mastering the Learning Pyramid

Our media and conversations are consumed by the future of work, which tends to quickly reduce to concerns over the spread of AI and what it will mean for jobs. I’ve noticed that the discussion quickly turns to what skills we might need to continue to be employable in the future, especially when the participants have children who are trying to prepare themselves for the world ahead.

The static world of skills

We’re focusing on the wrong thing. Focusing on skills betrays a static view of the world. The assumption is that if we acquire certain skills, we will be protected from an onslaught of the robots and the rapidly changing world around us. It ignores the fact that the average half-life of a skill is now about five years and continuing to shrink.

It’s precisely that static view of the world that is our biggest barrier. We need to find ways to prepare ourselves for a world where learning is a lifetime endeavor. The question can then become: what will help us to learn faster so that we can quickly acquire whatever skills are required in the moment?

The learning pyramid

In that context, we would all benefit by expanding our horizons and exploring the learning pyramid outlined below that can ultimately become the key to sustained and accelerated learning for all of us. Skills are at the top of the pyramid – they are ultimately what helps us to achieve impact and create value in a specific context.

Putting knowledge into context

But, let’s dig a bit deeper. Skills are about “knowing how.” Knowledge – the second level of the learning pyramid - is about “knowing what.” Our schools tend to focus on broad-based knowledge like history, economics and science that give us a context for understanding the world we live in, but the knowledge here tends to be reduced to facts and figures that can be recited on a test – it truly is about “knowing what” rather than “knowing why.”

Even at this level, though, the knowledge is largely about the broader context that we all live in – it's rarely about the narrower contexts that we confront on a daily basis – our families, our circle of friends or our local community. It turns out that success in our lives could ultimately hinge on our ability to deeply “read” these narrower contexts to quickly understand the key elements and dynamics that shape them.

In part, this is because skills are inevitably context specific – they involve knowing how to act in a given context. In a world that has been driven by increasing standardization, there's often been a tendency to underplay this aspect of skills, especially in the business world. We're supposed to believe that our skills can be applied in the same standard way across most, if not all, contexts.

Capabilities that drive learning

That leads to the third level of the learning pyramid – capabilities. Supporting the development of skills and a deeper understanding of our contexts are more fundamental capabilities. These capabilities can take many different forms but, in my mind, the core capabilities are curiosity, imagination, creativity, critical thinking and social and emotional intelligence. If we cultivate these capabilities, we would be able to quickly understand the evolving contexts we live in and acquire the skills that would help us to operate successfully in very specific contexts.

It can get confusing because many people refer to these capabilities as skills, sometimes calling them “enduring skills” or “basic skills.” I believe it's helpful to draw a sharper distinction between skills that are very context specific and tend to evolve at a rapid rate versus the capabilities that would help us to quickly and effectively “read” our contexts and develop the skills that are most appropriate for that context. Skills grow obsolete at an accelerating rate while our capabilities not only endure, they help us to more quickly acquire the knowledge and skills we will need to be successful.

Passion as the foundation of learning

But, wait, there’s more. What will help us to cultivate and deepen those capabilities over time? I would suggest that there’s an even more fundamental level supporting the learning pyramid, one that often gets ignored, but that ultimately is essential if we are serious about learning faster over time.

The foundation of the learning pyramid needs to be passion. It’s a very specific form of passion that we have identified in our work at the Center for the Edge – the passion of the explorer – that I've written about here, here and here. This form of passion has three components – (1) a long-term commitment to achieving an increasing impact in a particular domain, (2) a questing disposition that seeks out and is excited by new challenges and (3) a connecting disposition that actively seeks to connect with others who might be helpful in addressing these new challenges.

People who have this form of passion are driven to cultivate the capabilities that can help them learn faster and acquire whatever knowledge and skills are required to succeed in their chosen domain. Sure, without this passion, we might still develop some of the capabilities required to learn faster, but we’ll be unlikely to nurture them to the extent of someone who has this passion and we’ll be unlikely to apply these capabilities as aggressively as someone who is constantly striving to increase their impact in a particular domain.

Broadening our horizons

So, why does all of this matter? As I mentioned at the outset, virtually all of our conversations on the future of work are focused on the wrong thing. We’re understandably worried about our skills becoming obsolete (or, more accurately, performed much more efficiently by ever smarter machines). Understanding and embracing the learning pyramid can help us to broaden our horizons and focus on the elements required to learn faster. We’ll never equip ourselves to be successful in our lifelong learning journey if we don’t broaden our horizons and find a passion that will drive us to learn faster and nurture the capabilities required for learning.

Re-thinking our institutions

At a broader societal level, the learning pyramid can help us understand how our institutions should evolve to support life-long learning. If I’m right about the learning pyramid, our educational system should be re-thought and re-designed from the ground up. Rather than focusing on transmitting broad-based knowledge and building skills, our schools would need to shift their focus to cultivating capabilities and drawing out and nurturing the passion that is latent within all of us. Rather than giving out certificates verifying that specific knowledge or skills have been acquired, schools would need to expand their horizons and become life-long learning coaches that get to know each of us individually at a very deep level and can help and challenge us to learn even faster throughout our lives by building deep and long-term trust-based relationships.

But, it wouldn’t stop with our educational system. As I’ve written about elsewhere, all of our institutions would need to be re-imagined. Rather than thinking about learning as something that occurs in the occasional training programs that support a scalable efficiency operation, we should re-imagine our work environments in ways that can support scalable learning, learning that occurs day to day, on the job, in the work environment. If we’re serious about scalable learning, we should find ways to cultivate and amplify the passion of everyone who participates in our institutions.

And, by the way, don't fall prey to the current focus on worker engagement. As I've written about here, worker engagement is helpful, but the success of our institutions in a world of mounting pressure will require us to find ways to cultivate passion among our workers.

The learning journey of the individual

And, what about us as individuals? How do we harness the learning pyramid to thrive in a world of accelerating change?

First, we shouldn’t wait for all of our institutions to catch up and help us to learn faster. That will likely take time and there’s urgency to act quickly as our skills are at increasing risk of becoming obsolete.

We should shift our attention to cultivating the capabilities required to learn faster. And how do we do that? Well, there are certainly a broad range of books and courses that focus on developing the core capabilities that I described above. But those can only go so far.

We will be much more successful if we focus on the base of the pyramid and find a domain that we can be truly passionate about. Most of us went to work because we wanted a paycheck. It turns out that paycheck will be increasingly dependent on finding work that we are truly passionate about. Without passion, we’ll never learn as fast and as effectively as someone who does have that passion. In a world of mounting performance pressure, that means we could become increasingly marginalized. Find your passion and the paycheck will follow.

If you haven't yet found your passion, don't stop. Many of us did not discover our passion until later in life (and many are still looking). In the meantime, focus on cultivating the capabilities for learning faster because those can help you to explore a variety of domains until you connect with your passion.

Bottom line

The current discussion of the future of work is a reflection of the short-termism that increasingly dominates business and all of our institutions. Get the right skills and everything will be alright. Beware - if we shrink our time horizons, we may get blind-sided by events on the horizon that come at us with increasing speed.

If we truly want to turn mounting performance pressure into expanding opportunity, we should make a journey to the base of the pyramid. Until we find something that we can really be passionate about, we’ll experience increasing stress and, no matter how hard we try to learn, we’ll never learn as fast as those who have connected with their passion. But, here’s the real prize: when we connect with our passion, we can achieve far more of our potential and have far greater impact in the world around us. Isn’t that something worth striving for?

[This post originally appeared on my blog at https://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/ Please subscribe there to be notified of lots more posts to come]