Leadership and learning to learn

"Give someone a fish and they will eat for a day, teach someone to fish and they will eat for a lifetime" Source debated.

This quote introduces what I believe is and will be one of our greatest skills for the future. Constantly adapting, learning and reinventing ourselves. Recently I've been back in NZ and had some success fishing. This success highlights how much I still have to learn about catching fish where I now live in San Francisco! Much of what I know here in the NZ context doesn't really translate. I'm a beginner again. It's frustrating and interesting. You never stop learning to learn. 

This is even more relevant with leadership development as careers and jobs become less defined and less predictable. In my 25ish years working I've had 9 distinct roles that could easily have each been a career. Each of them with totally different challenges and opportunities requiring a lot of leadership flex. This isn't an exception. We have billions of people living on a very interconnected world with rapidly evolving technology, the next 25 years will likely see more change than the last 100! 

Here is my concern. In this environment of change, content is relatively unimportant as it is soon out of date but the ability to understand and adapt to context is huge.  Why then does so much leadership development focus on 'teaching content'? We make it worse with many digital (and non digital) technologies homogenizing life lessons and spreading simple 'formulas' for success that only worked in one context. It's selling a false promise of an easy path to a version of 'success' that is unlikely to be relevant to the next person.

There is hope. Some of the most progressive (and popular) methodologies today focus more on context than content, on learning to learn. I find it interesting that all of these are in service of something big and beyond any one individual. I alone don't shape my context, we all do. Humans became great at learning in service of survival. Design thinking is a method in service of human experience. Agile is a method in service of reaching large shared goals. Lean is a method in service of a start ups vision or a corporates drive to reduce waste. Indeed, I believe the core reason these methods sometimes fail is when the 'content' within them dominates (here are the 'rules') at the expense of the context they 'service'.   

So where does this leave us? What are you in service of and how does that inspire you to learn and keep learning? When developing other leaders, are we helping them clarify what (really) matters to them and equipping them with the skills to learn and keep learning what it will take to be in service to what matters? Content can then support this - not the other way around.  These are the fundamentals that leadership development companies I know well are built on; the D-I-Y approach that JumpShift and Adeption's digital coaching workouts. Let's keep refining, improving and sharing them. I believe that as humans our ability to live in harmony with each other and everything else that we share this world with, depends on it. :)