If you want anyone to learn, only this ONE thing really matters.

The Single Most Important Lever for Effective Learning

The hardest part of making someone learn is to have them realize that they need to learn at all. This is true for people of all ages, and stages of life. Therefore, it is worth your attention, whether you are an L&D person, a parent, an educator, an EdTech product owner, or even if you are yourself the learner!

The single most important lever for effective learning is: The learner's internal urge to learn

The Triggers to Learning - according to Neuroscience!

What would make us WANT to learn?

Neuroscience specifies two specific things that make the brain want to pay attention - a rush of adrenaline, and a rush of dopamine. Seratonin is another neurotransmitter that helps with the general good feeling about something - in this case, learning.

In practice, these manifest as emotions that push us to want to learn. The FOUR most important ones are:

1) A deep regret

2) A burning ambition

3) A threat (to a lesser extent), or a fear

4) Inextinguishable curiosity

Two of those are positive triggers, and two are negative.

Notice that the term 'failure' is not there. Why? Because it is not the failure itself that teaches anything - people can fail repeatedly and keep making the same mistakes. What does teach some people when they fail is the remorse or fear associated with the failure. If you feel none of these emotions after failing, the failure per se cannot teach you anything or nudge you to learn better the next time.

What Learning Triggers Look Like in Real Life

1) Regret

The pain of a missed opportunity or of a failure that hurt in some personal way, manifests as remorse. Further, if the opportunity cost was high in a personal way, and you can't easily get it back again, the sense of a 'missed bus' sets in. You really regret the cause of the mistake because you are unable to make good the situation easily. Sometimes you don't even get a second chance. Now THAT hurts! You really regret. You want to learn to avoid it.

2) A Burning Ambition

Usually a product of one's internal environment of competitiveness or a socially driven sense of achievement that is expected from you. The words 'A Burning Ambition' often translate to acceptance in one's tribe. This can drive serious levels of grit and the ability to stay focused enough to learn well to get the job done. The carrot of a good job or an increase in power/influence can translate into greater group cohesion and wanting to learn quickly.

3) A Threat or Fear

The risk of losing a job, or of not getting admission into the right college, or of punishment can result in an underlying persistent fear of getting into trouble or missing an opportunity. This keeps a person interested in learning and self-development. The other thing is time running out. Remember how fast you learnt when there was only 5 hours left to leave for the exam? Yeah, the threat of time running out creates a high level of adrenaline in the system and we really pay attention and learn fast.

4) Intense Curiosity

By far the best reason to learn. It doesn't depend on external factors, is self-motivating, and rewarding even during the journey. Generally this is related to the 'high' our brain experiences from the rush of dopamine on finding something novel to go after.

Pushing the Learning Triggers On-Demand

Now, how do we evoke one of these feelings in the learner at short order?

I am not a fan of forced learning of any sort (except may be skill-building for on-the-job skills). But for any learning to be done at the higher orders of Bloom's Taxonomy, the need to learn HAS to be intrinsic.

Can we do something to help push those triggers?

Pushing the Learning Triggers Organically

In my estimation, there are a few things we can do to nudge the learner to want to learn.

1. Create a learning culture
2. Let them struggle with the problem for a while
3. Create a reward & penalty system and enforce it
4. Democratize access to content and mentors
5. Create unexpected circumstances for the learner to stumble upon

Here's how it'll work:

Create a learning culture: Make learning cool. Lead by example. Create circumstances to establish that learning is a cool thing in your environment. As parents, praise and reward when children show the inclination to learn or the curiosity to want to find out. As managers or leaders of organisations, conduct "What did you learn this week" fireside chats where staff can share whatever they've learnt recently. The top management should be there to listen and encourage, and should participate actively as well to set an example. Reward high-frequency learners and effective learning instances. Give employees the time and opportunity to learn new things and to practise / apply them, say in projects outside of their immediate work areas. Make great learners great heroes. Permit failure. Seratonin has long-term effects on how we think of learning. We get positive feelings about learning when we get a regular supply of seratonin in our brains. All the above activities help with it. Hackathons are another great mechanism to create high-impact learning. More on this soon.

Let them struggle with the problem for a while: If you anticipate that a person will need to use Python for a data analytics project soon, give them a toy problem in the data science space several months before it is actually needed. Let the learner struggle to solve it using their current skills - it will be amply clear to them that what they know won't do. They will then realize that to solve the work problem coming up a few months down the road, they will need to start upskilling right now! Help them act on this realization by giving them a little time off to take a course or some hours off each week to learn by themselves. The same thing can be done with kids. Don't go in for the rescue too soon - let them struggle. They will come to you pretty soon either already having solved the problem, or asking you for help in learning to solve it. Don't push it too far - they may give up! :D Encourage while they are trying. Support when they are failing, but don't solve the problem yet. Intervene when they are frustrated, but still interested. That's the golden hour of learning intervention!

Create a reward & penalty system: Good learning gets rewarded. Poor learning leads to loss of opportunities. Simple. It may be in the form of opportunities for promotion, role change, winning a prize, being appointed a supervisor (or a monitor, for children) etc. The reward and penalty are the same - you either get the prize or you miss the opportunity. The key here is to not hand over the reward if the learning happens much later. The reward has to be given in a time-bound way, with the clear expectation of what is expected rom the learner/employee within that period. Not meeting those learning expectations results in a regrettable loss of opportunity - an opportunity that won't knock twice. Hackathons are a great way to create time-bound and predictable learning needs. It is similar to having to study before an exam - the adrenaline rush is palpable during a hackathon, so the learning effect is intense. It's all good. Plus, the community feeling of collective pain and collective support is an amazing environment to enable quick and effective learning towards a well-established, measurable goal. The prizes at the end and the accolades can only help!

Democratize access to content and mentors: The urge to learn can hit nay time. The topic can be anything. Be ready by keeping content subscriptions negotiated and access to the content readily available to the learner. Create learning-support groups and encourage people to form buddy-relationships in learning new things. Have a hotline to mentors. That way, they can strike while the iron is hot and their brain is still amused by the curiosity or need to learn.

Create unexpected circumstances: Even as the learning is in progress, let the learner stumble upon utterly unexpected things - it could be fun facts, strange results, unexpected questions, weird graphics etc. Novelty kicks the brain into paying attention. It releases dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter most associated with attention and memory. Good learning design can create Easter Eggs in the learning pathway. Absolutely nothing creates deep lasting learning than one that is associated with surprise and happiness.

What, then, according to you, are some things we can do to make learners WANT to learn? Have you used any of these mechanisms? Do share your experience.

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