#38 - Learning What Can't Be Taught
Hello,
I feel surprised whenever I hear that a company measures learning and development with one simple metric, which is the # of training hours per employee. The only thing that this "lazy" metric captures reliably is training costs. But it says nothing on whether it's money well spent.
First, it ignores how effective training is for the people. Some studies say that only 5% (!) of learners apply what they learn.
Second, it omits the fact that a lot of learning happens on the job, in the myriad of daily tasks, projects, and social interactions. And the quality of learning depends on conscious intent to get better at what you do and the availability of great role models to learn from.
And, last but not least, it does not consider the actual outcomes and impact on performance. In fact, many people can go from good to great when they've changed the context and type of work, not because of the training.
What can be a better measure? I do not have an answer (yet). But I hold a few strong beliefs.
First, I believe that when you have a limited budget, it is better spent on hiring exceptional people than on training. I believe in social learning of things that can't be taught. Great people tend to be life-long learners who elevate others and become magnets for more great people.
Second, I believe we do NOT need more training opportunities but a better curation of the available opportunities. It's hard because it requires individualized attention, but the payoff could be great. Another way to make the training relevant is to enroll your superstars and your executive team as teachers.
Last but not least, I believe in flexibility and allowing employees to self-direct a part of their training budget to ANY learning they wish. Even if it's just remotely relevant to the job, but helps people become more interesting and well-rounded - a foreign language, stand-up comedy, salsa, or wakeboarding, whatever - that's great.
And finally, there is a number of fundamental questions: What is good learning? How can we learn to understand? How do we learn what can't be taught? Do we need university degrees at all? And finally, do all the learning and experience guarantee us success in a changing world?
In this newsletter, I've curated a few good ideas that help answer these big questions.
Is your training budget well spent?
"Hiring is the single most important people activity in the organization (... and yet) hiring yields average results. Can't you compensate by training people to be great? Aren't many companies renowned for their leadership academies, global training centers, and e-learning? Doesn't that let them breed greatness in their new employees?
Not so much. Designing effective training is hard. Really hard. Some experts go so far as to say that 90% of training doesn't cause a sustained improvement in performance or change in behavior because it's neither well designed nor well delivered. It's almost impossible to take an average performer and through training turn them into a superstar (...) There are examples of people who were mediocre performers and went on to greatness, though most of those successes are a result of changing the context and type of work, rather than a benefit of training.
(...) So we're left with two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find the way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best. Put simply, which of the following situations would you rather be in?
A. We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away.
B. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers.
Doesn't seem like a hard choice when put that way, especially once you realize there's probably enough money in your budget to get the exceptional people - it's just spent in the wrong places."
Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
It all starts with the intent
Source: Liz and Mollie on Instagram
"We learn best when we have a clear sense of *why* a new skill or piece of information will help us achieve our goals. In other words, when it comes to learning, reasons are far more motivational than rules."
Names don't constitute knowledge. Memorizing is not understanding
"When you know the names of all the birds in all the languages, you still know nothing, but absolutely nothing about the bird. And then we would talk about the pecking and the feathers. So I had learned already that names do not constitute knowledge."
"Students could pass the examination, and "learn" all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized. (...) I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system, in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything."
How can we learn to understand?
Take smart notes. Use a simple system - a slip box to write down and interconnect the ideas - and make this system a part of your learning and thinking habits.
It's so much easier to remember things we understand than things we don't. It is not that we have to choose to focus on learning OR understanding. It's always about understanding - and if it is only for the sake of learning. Things we understand are connected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models, or explanation. And deliberately building these kinds of meaningful connections is what the slip-box is all about.
Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does that fit into my idea of ...? How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory? Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complement each other? Isn't this argument similar to that one? Haven't I heard that before? and above all: What does X mean for Y? These questions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learning as well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.
How do we learn what can't be taught?
"I prefer to think of formal education as being the tip of an iceberg sitting on a far larger amount of tacit learning. This is knowledge and skills that we can’t articulate easily, but still make up useful knowledge for doing things (...) Unlike learning from a formal curriculum, or a well-defined skill, there’s a number of problems with learning in this way:
You might not recognize the skill or knowledge others possess.
You might not even know how to describe what it is you need to learn, even if you can recognize it in others.
Because there’s no books you can read or classes you can take, even if you correctly identify which skills you need to improve, it’s not clear how you do that.
These barriers mean that, unlike learning history, calculus, or accounting, much of what makes learning tacit knowledge difficult isn’t even a problem for most learning tasks.
How do you get around this? I think the answer is to see what has already worked in our species for millions of years—finding prestigious examples and copying them. This may seem unglamorous, but it’s the mechanism by which you’ve already learned most of your tacit knowledge and how most of humanity has learned since the dawn of history.
Find people who have the skills you want to learn, observe them closely and copy their approach.
One of the major bottlenecks in this process is access to good models to emulate. Therefore, anything you can do to expose yourself to skilled individuals will accelerate your learning. In this sense, networking and mentor-relationship building can be seen as a core learning skill.
And then you practice more until the new skill becomes a habit.
"The principles of good management are simple, even trivial (...) It is not enough to know what the principles are; you must acquire deeply ingrained habits of carrying them out, in the face of all sorts of strong urges to stray onto more comfortable and pleasant paths, to respond without inhibition to provocations, and just to goof off.** (Herbert Simon)
Consider patience.
"Patience is one of those things that’s easy to understand and hard to practice. That’s what makes it so rare and so valuable. It’s easy to say no to bad opportunities. It’s hard to say no to average opportunities so you have room for the good ones. It’s even harder to say no to good opportunities so you have room for great ones. One way to improve your patience is to be as proud of the opportunities you say no to as the ones you say yes to.
The most important things can’t be taught, they must be learned. Just because you can’t be taught what you need doesn’t mean you can absolve yourself from learning. You can learn the principles but you can’t learn patience. You can copy the answer but not the understanding and confidence. These you need to learn on your own."
The Simple Principles of Good Management, by Farnam Street Blog
Do we need university degrees at all?
Well, but who said that university is just about learning? Marc Andreessen puts quite nicely that it is a bundle of different things and a number of different signals your university degree sends to employers.
"A sort of advanced view on college is, college is not one thing. It's a bundle of things as "education", but it's also a daycare for young adults. And then it's also like a social dating environment. And then it's also a testing gateway kind of thing on the way in. And then there's a certification, branding thing on the way out. So it's a bundle of these things.
(...)So what do we know about what colleges and universities actually are? What we know, and Bryan Caplan has probably written the best on this, what we know is it's mostly the stamp of approval. (...) It's the brand that you get when you successfully complete the degree. And then you kind of dig underneath that.
What exactly does that brand mean? And it actually turns out it means a couple of things very specifically, in my analysis, at least.
It means that you passed an IQ test on the way in, which is basically, and it's quite literally, it's SAT, ACT, admissions process. You made it through the front door.
(...) and then, it's a test for the personality trait of conscientiousness. Quite literally the personality trait of I finish what I start. I'm a responsible adult and I'm capable of finishing complex projects. And this is why graduates out of top schools are so attractive to employers is because it's somebody who's very smart, who has a demonstrated track record of applied conscientiousness. Those are the ideal employees. That's what you want for the highest-end jobs. Those are the two qualities that you want. And so basically, I think there's an argument that a huge amount of the sort of activity at the university level is a kabuki dance around fundamentally these two tests, the test for IQ and the test for conscientiousness.
(... )But sitting here 5 years or 10 years or 20 years, do we really believe that the only way to kind of check that box that says I'm a conscientious adult is that I went and sat in a classroom for four years? It is hard to believe that that persists, especially with all of the other consequences of the educational system that are kind of getting so pathological.
And that's the long run opportunity. And we're excited about that as VCs. We're excited about that. We're trying to back online education companies that are kind of behind that trend. And again, it's like, COVID doesn't change all of that overnight, but COVID's enough of a system shock where I think it's going to cause more people to be asking these questions.''
Making the Future, interview with Marc Andreessen - Invest Like the Best
Will all this learning and experience guarantee you success in a changing world?
"In 2020 psychologist Robin Hogarth and behavioural scientist Emre Soyer published “The Myth of Experience”, arguing that although experience is a fantastic teacher, it can sometimes teach us the wrong lessons. Central to their argument is the difference between what they call “kind” and “wicked” learning environments. In a kind learning environment, feedback is abundant, immediate and accurate, making it easy to learn useful lessons. And in a wicked learning environment? Well, the feedback is incomplete, delayed, or just plain unreliable - making it much harder to learn from. We often find ourselves in wicked learning environments, believing them to be kind. We take in the available feedback, assume we have all the information, draw conclusions, and learn the wrong lessons. Find out why it’s important to assume things are more complicated that they first appear – and that past experiences aren’t always a dependable guide to future ones - in the latest explainer video from iluli by Mike Lamb."
The Myth of Experience: Kind and Wicked Learning Environments
To know you is to love you
Let's finish this long newsletter on a light note, with this groovy piece from DJ Greyboy - on the best kind of learning ❤️
Stay healthy and safe, and keep learning
Arina
Image: Lorenzo Belassen @ Unslpash