Are You a Victim of the Unconscious Learning Inertia?

Are You a Victim of the Unconscious Learning Inertia?

If you ask someone whether learning is important, they might look at you as if you are out of your mind.

What kind of a question is that?

Of course, everyone knows that learning is not only important, it is important to learn at a breathtaking speed just to catch up and stay current - forget about staying a step ahead.

Then, how do you explain what I call “Unconscious Learning Inertia”?

Here is my take on it:

Unconscious learning inertia is a phenomenon where you are clearly aware of the long-term benefits of learning, but not do anything in the short-term about it AND, you are not aware that you are not doing anything about it.

The funny thing about “unconscious learning inertia” is that there are almost zero short-term negative effects of being afflicted with this disease, because you can always make up for the lack of learning with “hard work”

The not-so-funny thing about “unconscious learning inertia” is that it results in long-term “unconscious incompetence” - serious lack of skills that work in the present time, but you will be unaware that you lack those skills.

[ Please read the article by Dr. Ulrik Juul Christensen on the topic of unconscious incompetence titled “How to Teach Employees Skills They Don’t Know They Lack” in Harvard Business Review, September 2017 ]

The interesting thing about “unconscious learning inertia” is that ( if you are not careful ) you will start developing it at the same rate of the growth of your career. When you forget that “what got you here will not get you there” lots of problems happen.. What got you here will let you thrive for some time and if the problem persists, it will let you survive for some more time and then, (suddenly) everything unravels and results in flatlining or a complete implosion. 

It seems to have happened suddenly, but in reality, it happens gradually, then suddenly.

The Invisible Growth Assassin

Unconscious Learning Inertia is the invisible growth assassin you nurture and feed in your own home - you are just not aware of it’s presence until it’s too late.

Let’s see how this manifests in general.

When you are young and at an early stage of your career, you rarely develop unconscious learning inertia = you just can’t afford it. In fact, you are exactly doing the opposite - you are consumed by conscious hunger for learning.

Why?

First to survive, then to thrive.

You create opportunities for learning conversations - either with yourself (by reading books, taking courses, watching educational videos) or with someone else (peer discussions, meeting with mentors, attending conferences etc.)

Life would be just simple if you can maintain that hunger for the rest of your life.

But, you can’t.

Not because you don’t want to - otherwise it won’t be called “unconscious learning inertia”

Then, why does this happen?

One (surprising) reason is that you start growing!

Hmm…

Growth should create more hunger to learn more, shouldn’t it?

You are right about that.

That happens in the early days of growth.

But…

Sooner than later, growth brings a few other responsibilities.

For example:

  • You have to deal with people.
  • You have to deal with projects.
  • You have to deal with deadlines.
  • You have to deal with promises made by someone else that you are held accountable.
  • You have to deal with (office) politics.
  • You have to deal with crisis situations created by clients or from someone on your team.
  • You have to deal with incompetence of other people.
  • Then there is "work about work" that might take more time than the actual work


This is just at your work.

  • Your responsibilities outside of work also keep growing.
  • You have to deal with aging parents
  • You have to deal with growing family.
  • You have to deal with your health and stress created by trying to balance work and life.


Plus, there are a few more things that complicate this even more.

  • You are always ON to almost everything, but mostly OFF to what is present right in front of you.
  • Your social media stream seems to indicate that everyone else (except you) are having a great time - simply because most people on social media display the best parts of their life and keep the broken parts to themselves.
  • You are bombarded with advertisements (because you are always ON) that continuously tell you that you life is indeed incomplete without the widget or the gadget that the advertisement is trying to sell.

Gradually, the time you have for investing in those "learning conversations" depletes. When you get used to the lower volumes of those "learning conversations" it depletes at a faster rate. Soon your awareness that this is happening depletes.

Now, tell me - where can you find the hunger to keep learning at any pace (forget about learning at a breathtaking pace)

The Cascading Effect

The problem in organizations get complex because you as a leader will set the example for those that you lead. If you are NOT learning at a breathtaking pace, you show (by your actions) that it’s OK for those that you lead do the same.

What happens then?

Not only you are setting a wrong example, those that follow your footsteps are providing social proof that it’s OK for those that are operating on the “to learn” or “not to learn” fence.

Unless you or someone (becomes aware of and) deals with this vicious cascading effect, your organization will soon become a “somehow getting by” organization where there seems to be a mountain of work for everyone because people have to make up for lack of learning with increased incremental cost to get their work done - leading to over work, increased stress and growing employee dis-engagement.

Since nobody wants to blame themselves for their problem, most people start blaming their bosses (that might very well be YOU) for the situation at hand.

So..

As a leader, the vicious cascading effect simply comes back and bites you.

The Visible Intervention

The invisible silent growth assassin has to be dealt with a very visible intervention to tackle it head on.

What will that visible intervention look like?

Well, “unconscious learning inertia” developed over a long period of time and as the term “unconscious” indicates, you are probably not aware that you or people in your organization are even affected by it.

With that in the background, here are a few things that you can do to start witinch:

#1 Raise awareness

To solve this or any problem, you have to be aware of the problem and acknowledge the presence of it. Just like a good doctor, you need to be able to see the symptoms AND attribute those symptoms to the right problem.

The symptoms in this case manifest in various forms including, but not limited to:

  • employee disengagement
  • increased stress at work
  • out-of-balance work and life
  • growth of office politics
  • increase in the blame game for lack of results

and so on.

It is easy to mis-diagnose those symptoms and start creating surface-level solutions (e.g.: employee engagement surveys that go nowhere) and be happy with short-term solutions.

#2 Get help for those that lead first!

It starts with helping people who are supposed to help other people. Leaders have a tough job - with the changing market needs, they need to be re-applying and re-qualifying for the job at hand almost every six-months. However, that rarely happens. Without good help, their previous skills will run out of their “shelf life” and in some cases create a burden instead of being a blessing.

Rather than asking them if they need help (most won’t admit they need help because of their ego ) assume that they do and start creating programs that will be of help to them. If we create a culture of learning from the ground up and factor in those costs into the cost of doing business, it will create short-term discomfort, but sooner than later you will realize these learning expenses are not expenses - they are investments in your own people with a big payback.

When the leaders become everyday learners, there is hope for a virtuous cycle of learning to cascade as the leaders also act as role models for those that they lead.

#3 Design learning that fits the busy, always connected, distributed lifestyle of your people

Yes, you and your people need to be learning at a breathtaking speed, but you and your people are also working at a breakneck speed just to keep up with everything. The global nature of the business requires flexibility of working hours and many times distributed teams. That makes the learning design more complex.

You need a fresh approach to designing learning content - the content has to bite-sized meaning should be consumable with a low incremental cost. It should also be powerful, meaning the incremental value of that investment has to be very high. This requires curation of amazing content at the highest level.

You also need a fresh approach to content delivery - the content has to be consumable through your phone (always with you), preferably audio (so that you can consume it while you are doing something mundane on the side - such as commuting, exercising, taking a morning/evening walk or just in-between meetings). This way, they capitalize on time that was generally spent listening to news, entertainment etc. They can’t complain that they don’t have time - the content is specifically designed to fit their busy lifestyles.

The design and delivery of learning should also include a certain level of discovery built-in - otherwise how will someone know about something that they don't know they don't know?

This is not to say that traditional learning is not important, but you need to start somewhere.

At Audvisor, this was the foundational thinking behind creating a service for "push-button learning on demand" where a user can learn from over 125 world-class experts in 3-minutes or less. It works like Pandora or Spotify, but instead of songs, you get to listen insights from the experts.

#4 Choreograph purpose-driven conversations between peers

In your organization, there are accomplished people and also there are aspiring people who are looking to get there. If the right purpose-driven conversations are choreographed between them, there will be accelerated learning that both parties will experience as the context is rich because of the same company both parties are employed with.

One of my favorite authors, Susan Scott says in her awesome book “Fierce Conversations”, says:

“Given that, while no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a company, a relationship or a life, any single conversation can – what is the conversation that has your name on it?”

There is a lot of knowledge that your people have - it’s just that you need a mechanism to distribute it far and wide.

At MentorCloud, we have a product called MentorCloud SPARK with only one aim - making it dead-simple for organizations to choreograph purpose-driven conversations between the accomplished and the aspiring among their people.

Yes, it's just a conversation. But, we have seen first-hand how one conversation has changed the trajectory of people's careers and sometimes their entire life.

It's magical!

#5 Teach and practice gratitude

Before you conclude that this is too simple, think again.

Yes, I agree that everyone knows the importance of gratitude - but, how many of them actually practice it powerfully and from their heart.

Practicing gratitude may be basic, but basics are very important. Knowing the value and power of gratitude does not give you the benefits of practicing it.

Here is a video on the above topic based on the book "Gratitude: Grow and Change Your World One Thank You at a Time" (foreword by Marshall Goldsmith)

When people practice gratitude, automatically they stop taking others for granted. When this becomes part of your culture, the office politics will take a hike.

#6. Help yourself and your people deal with the change monster

Most small kids are scared of strangers.

That scary feeling does not leave many adults - these are scared about their new self - meaning they don't want to change themselves. They are happy to maintain the status quo.

But, they know that when the world around them is changing, they can't remain who they were.

They will be outdated.

They MUST change.

It's a dilemma.

My earlier article on "why many smart people don't finish reading business books" sheds some light on this.

But, a long-term solution is to help yourself and your people deal with the change monster head on.

For starters, I want to share a concept from Ray Dalio's brilliant book "Principles" that might help you deal with change more graciously.

Dalio says (I am paraphrasing) our minds default to focusing on first-order consequences that generally have an opposite effect as the second and third order consequences.

A couple of examples:

#1. Eating ice-cream often:

  • First order consequence: Happy
  • Second order consequence: Not very good.

#2. Exercising regularly:

  • First order consequnce: Inconvenience (until you get used to it at least)
  • Second order consequence: Good health

Just remembering to check the second and third order consequences alone on a daily basis will help you take the right short-term decisions.

HT: My friend Arun Nithyanandam for brainstorming this article with me.

Sameer Karwal

Business & Finance Leader | SME Supply Chain | Credit Risk | Trade Finance | Wealth Management | Hero Fincorp | Ex-ICICI | climate finance

6 年

Gratitude and thank you

回复

Sent the gratitude video clip on to my daughter for possible use in an interpersonal communication class she teaches to high schoolers. Great message. So true. Needed to hear this.

Sudhakar Prabhu

Software Development Manager @CoreOS (Base, Sillicon, Graphics, Media, ML), Azure Edge+Platform, Microsoft.

7 年

Loved reading... Well written. What really tickled me is so much of this i can relate to what was going through few years back...now there is realization that it was not just me. Thanks Rajesh.

This is a very long post. I am having reading inertia to this post.

Leonard Cochran

Helping emerging and existing leaders improve their Relational Leadership skills.

7 年

Great insights as always Rajesh!

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