Learning is creation, not consumption

This article (and so many more) is also available here on my blog.

The title of this blog post is not mine, it's from David Meier, but it so perfectly captures what I want to say, I had to use it.

Learning is creation, not consumption

(David Meier)

When I ask people what’s stopping them doing more Learning and Development, they almost all say the same thing: lack of time.

This is understandable, everyone is busy and everything is top priority, so L&D … yes, it’s important, but is it ever urgent?

Not usually.

I think they’re wrong, I don't think time is the problem.

My first proper grown-up job title was Trainer.

I remember some people once even asked me if I was the Instructor, as if I were there to force them to conjugate Latin verbs through a mixture of endless repetition and beating them with a cane.

This is because our concept of education is established by school and University where we are usually in the role of a passive consumer. Traditional education uses the method of an all-knowing authority figure telling us stuff that we write down in a notebook – the information moving from the notes of one to the other, avoiding the brain of both.

Unless there is endless repetition, and possibly also a cane, this active-transmitter-to-passive-receiver model of knowledge transfer in at best inefficient, more often it simply doesn’t work.

This is why when I ask what’s stopping people doing L&D, they hear “what’s stopping you doing more training courses” and so of course they answer “time!”.

Back in the 1990s many Training Departments changed their names from Training to Learning and Development for exactly this reason. This wasn’t just a trendy rebrand, it was intended to shift the focus from the input – the training (the consumption) – to the output – the learning (the creation) – and then on to the outcome – the development, meaning that it doesn’t stop with learning, we carry on until the new knowledge or skill is applied and therefore something improves.

This rebrand didn’t work, people still hear L&D as a newfangled synonym for training.

I have asked roomfuls of people to think about something they do well at work (if they know each other well, it’s nice to ask them to give each other feedback on what they do well). Then I ask them to think about how they learnt to do that things to such a high standard. Inevitably they talk mainly about experience, about trial and error, perhaps having discussions and better planning, about reflection, maybe having a coach or a mentor, or even reading a book or listening to a podcast … rarely does anyone mention training.

For good reason, we mostly learn and develop when we’re doing stuff (experience) and then reflecting on it. That doesn’t mean training is bad, it can be a great way to challenge our thinking and help us understand what we don’t know, but rarely is it the driving force of high-performance in the workplace.

But experience left to its own devices is a fickle teacher. It’s too easy to, like Mark Twain’s cat, learn the wrong lesson, especially if the “wrong lesson” is some variation on “it was someone else’s fault”.

Learning from experience is about noticing things happening, then framing them in constructive ways: “it’s was all his fault, what an idiot!” may or may not be true, but it’s not constructive because we can’t do anything about it. Much better to frame it as “I didn’t handle that situation as well as I’d like, how could I get better at least with situations like that”

Now we can reflect on what happened, try to work out why, then puzzle out what that means and so what we might try next time …

We can do this walking back after a meeting, chatting it over with someone over a coffee, talking to ourselves while walking the dog or in a more structured way such as writing in a journal. This active approach is what creates the knowledge, and it doesn’t take much time. It takes a bit of discipline and attention, because it requires focused brain power, but it’s not time-consuming.

So this is when I ask again: “what’s stopping you doing more Learning and Development?” hopefully their answer changes, time isn’t stopping them learning and developing, nothing is stopping them.

This article (and so many more) is also available here on my blog.

Irrelevant post-script: The photo is from a Stef Kamil Carlens (playing with the Gates of Eden) concert I went to earlier in the year. Stef was the original bass player in dEUS, one of my favourite bands from the 90s, an experimental indie rock band that sounded like someone had crossed Captain Beefheart with Tom Waits and then added jazz and punk ... anyway, Stef has been a musical hero for a long time ... and so when he came out to sign merch after the gig I queued up to buy a copy of his album, it turned out I'm not quite the sophisticated cool cat I thought I was. I was star struck and when I tried to connect through my very British humour, let's just say I made a complete idiot of myself. I have reflected on this, and learnt that when meeting your heroes, try not to behave like a complete idiot.

(If of interest, here's a dEUS playlist in Tidal).