How do you expect me to learn that?

You cannot look at a web forum today without discovering a post proclaiming that the world is changing faster and faster and we all need to learn more and better if we just want to keep up. If you hope to avoid the perils of offshoring or being replaced by robots, the answer is simple: you have to learn, continuously.

For some people this is an exciting challenge. For others, it is a stressful admonition. You may already be studying as hard as you can, or working full time and wondering where you will fit in this new job requirement. As learning professionals or managers, we wonder why people in our organizations are not rising to meet the challenge: we tell them it’s important, we give them the tools, and … little changes. So let’s look briefly at how we learn. We can think about four fundamental aspects:

1. Learning is physical
2. Learning is linked to emotion
3. Learning is more effective when we set goals and use repetition over time
4. Learning is about play or, in adult language, “acting as if”.

Then let’s ask another question: by focusing on this almost Darwinian challenge to “learn or disappear”, are we missing a more important issue?

1.Learning is physical. To understand this, think of a simple word like “tomato”. What first comes to mind is the word in six letters. If you let your mind wander, you realize you have many images of “tomato”. Your hands may know something about picking tomatoes or handling a knife to slice them; your nose knows what fresh tomatoes smell like. In other words, your knowledge of “tomato” is not just cognitive – it is distributed throughout your body.

Much knowledge is acquired and stored physically, through action and experience. Which raises the question of how to retrieve such knowledge when we need it. For tomatoes, it is fairly automatic. But what about more complex processes? Think of the theater troupe which had mounted a successful production of a Shakespeare play. Several months later, the actors came back together to organize a repeat performance. They seemed to have forgotten the whole play. Finally, they simply got back on stage and started practicing – and everything, the lines, the staging, the characters, came back. The knowledge had always been there, but it required the appropriate context to make it accessible. How do we use context to anchor physical learning, and to enable people to access this type of knowledge in the workplace?

2.Learning is linked to emotion. The starting point here is the limbic brain, which records our assessments of experience (both positive and negative). This enables humans to use emotions to make decisions before the neocortex even starts to grapple with the problem.

It can also be a source of unconscious bias, skewing the way we use our more conscious thought processes to make choices. Yet emotions are a powerful way to stimulate learning. Think for a moment about a favorite teacher or coach. Chances are that in addition to positive memories of this person, you also have strong memories of what this person was trying to teach you, whether it was how to throw a ball or why medieval literature matters to the modern world.

What holds for positive emotions is true for negative ones as well. But negative emotional learning and the positive sort differ in their quality: knowledge and skills associated with positive emotions can be deployed flexibly – they give us more options. Things we learn under negative emotional constraint are often intended to be applied by rote, without thinking. This is fine for emergency procedures, which need to be executed accurately under stress. But it may stunt our ability to question and adapt what we have learned as conditions change. How can we make greater use of positive emotion, especially to acquire difficult or critical knowledge?

3.Learning is facilitated by setting goals and by repetition over time. Today repetition has bad press – we are afraid of boring learners, and the “10,000 hours” expertise model has been seriously challenged. Yet repetition and the pursuit of goals have huge value: achievements like reading and writing, or practicing a hobby with reasonable skill were acquired by pursuing goals you chose - even if each step towards the goal was small. Repeating these small steps over time enables us to lock in learning more effectively than “cramming”.

Yet learning professionals encounter two problems today when promoting these crucial practices. First, we find ourselves pushing learning that may not excite our audience (think of all that compliance training). Under these conditions how to get people to take ownership of any learning goal other than “get it over with”? How to frame mandatory learning interventions in such a way that individuals can set meaningful goals for themselves? The second issue is time – we have reduced course lengths from weeks to days to hours. In such contexts, it is difficult enough to cover the material, let alone create opportunities for repetition. If continuous learning is critical to our professional survival, how can we help learners prioritize time for learning on a regular basis?

4.Finally, learning is about play or, in adult language, “acting as if”. Children know this intuitively and are constantly experimenting with new skills by pretending to be something or someone they are not – yet. Among adults, one of the magic questions for someone who says, “I can’t do that” is “what if you acted as if you could?” Long before neuroscience explained why people learn by observing others, we used role-play, mentoring, or peer tutoring to enable people to act their way into a new skill or attitude.

Indeed, the idea of play combines everything else we have said here about learning: it is physical, often filled with positive emotions, and can be enhanced through repetition and simple goals – the classic advice to new managers to “act as if” they know the role: it actually helps them grow into their task. This is on-the-job learning at its best!

In short, we know how important this learning challenge is – and we know how to mobilize individuals and groups to respond to it. So what is the missing ingredient that holds some teams and organizations back from becoming hotspots of continuous professional development?

The answer lies in the Darwinian “adapt or disappear” perception of the task. If senior leadership portrays change as stressful and high-stakes, then people respond by doing more of what they have always done – because the risks of failing (or playing and learning something really new) are perceived as being too high.

But Darwin didn’t say only the biggest and the strongest survive – the winners are those who are best adapted or most able to adapt. In organizational terms, those who are able to experiment and to learn.

In response to the question “how do you expect me to learn that (i.e. whatever our organizational challenges require)”, the answer from senior management could be, “we expect the learning roadmap will be fuzzy and focused more on experiments than on immediate outcomes”. The answer from local team managers could be iterative: “let’s look together at what works and what doesn’t, and try to understand why”.

People are capable of tremendous adaptations – all the more so when given a learning environment is safe and fun!