What if your real job was learning elimination?
Learning is generally a sign that something hasn't been well designed. Learning is like friction - it's costly, inefficient and indicative of dysfunction. For a business, learning says 'something needs fixing here'.
The wonderful thing about an iPad is that you can give it to an 8-yr old or an 80-yr old and they don't need a manual. My first computer was the BBC Micro B. You had to program it in basic. Very few people really understood that this was a problem.
I've spent the last few years trying to describe the importance of shifting from courses to resources. In that time I've found that the deepest source of misunderstanding is that people think that a resource is just a shortened form of a course. 'Bite-sized learning'. It is not. It is the elimination of a course.
One of my favourite resources is the London Underground map. Whether printed or electronic it enables me to find my way efficiently. It has a significant and measurable impact on my performance. But it is not a learning tool - it is not a 'bite-sized nugget enabling me to learn wherever, whenever'. I am not quietly memorising the routes during my train journey. It is a way of removing learning, a way of mitigating learning. The pre-flight checklist used by pilots before take-off is not a handy way for them to memorise the steps involved.
When we shift from course to resource we externalise knowledge, we remove the cognitive burden, we enable the relevant information to be made available at the point of need without relying on human memory and all it's frailties.
There are - of course - things you can't look up. Deeper capabilities. But we should more clearly differentiate the methods useful in building capability and the resources required to exercise that capability. I may need to learn how to sail, but don't make me memorise the navigational charts. Maybe think about making it easier to sail the boat.
Thought-provoking post, Nick. I agree with the sentiment underpinning it, and I very much agree with your observation that "we should more clearly differentiate the methods useful in building capability and the resources required to exercise that capability".
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure though if I agree with the term "learning elimination". When you look up the underground map, indeed you are not memorising the routes, but you are for example learning how to get from Earl's Court to Regent's Park. Micro-learning, just in time, but still learning... no?
So I'm wondering if a different term would be "memory elimination".
A longitudinal study carried out by Robert Kelley at Carnegie-Mellon Uni. suggested that the percentage of knowledge that people needed to do their jobs and which they held in their heads, had dropped from around 75% in 1986 to around 10% in 2006. I tend to sum this up by saying 'people are Googling their way through life'. In answer to your question: 'why learn when you can refer?' - learning is effortful, after all. Generally, resources remove the need to learn - and we find that, thanks to SatNav, we can't recall the route we took from A to B.
ReplyDeleteMy generation stored what they needed to know in their heads - and we find the fact that current generations do not, horrifying. A few days ago the head of a major exam board (OCR) suggested students should be allowed to use Google during exams. Where learning professionals have tacitly assumed their role was about 'knowledge transfer' I see them struggling with this trend - and I wanted to highlight the problem.
So many thoughts stirred up by your post. On some of your points, we are in violent agreement. On others, I am not so sure. Everybody loves the map of the Underground, but how you use it (and I am assuming you live in London and have known the Underground since before you were born) and how I use it when I travel from my home in Texas to visit my sister in SE London are likely very different. I do memorize the routes!
ReplyDeleteI will be careful not to overgeneralize, but I don't think that learning is even generally a sign that something has not been well designed. It could be, but learning is needed for much of life, for which there is no map. There are many important skills that are not going to be addressed with a resource. The interaction of an oncology nurse with a terminal patient is based on instruction, example, and experience, tempered with a lot of compassion and mercy. There is knowledge that can be learned by rote, and surely a resource will likely work much better for supporting such than a course. But there are also outcomes in business that rely on specific competencies, and if we relied on resources and serendipity and flashes of insight, the time to competence might be intolerably long. All of which is what makes me nervous about formulas such as 70:30:10 that deprecate formal learning, and the notion I hear sometimes that resources/job aids/better design can eliminate the need for learning. I like Conrad Gottfredson's "Five Moments of Learning Need" for that reason. Rather than trying to reduce everything to a (speculative) ratio or to performance support, my preference is to find an optimum solution for each moment; that solution may or may not involve learning, or a resource, or (in many cases) a combination of elements.
End-of-the-day thoughts, not necessarily properly articulated, or even especially insightful, but I appreciate your post.
Thank you for your comments, Bill. I am glad you found the post interesting. I am struggling to think of occasions when good design does not reduce the learning overhead. This impression was deepened on reading Don Norman's book 'The Design of Everyday things' - as a rule of thumb the worse the design - the more counterintuitive something is - the more we have to rely on learning. Personally, I'm quite looking forward to the self-driving car (it took me three attempts to pass the test)! There are lots of things that people imagine they can do better that technology - driving, nursing, hiring. I think this is an all-too-human bias.
DeleteOn the topic of capability - I think we talk a lot of mumbo-jumbo in HR. There's really no such thing as capabilities; if you ask people about their jobs they will tell you about tasks and whether they can do them - and from this we infer capabilities, but in reality no-one is 'working on their capabilities', they are just getting stuff done. This might sound a bit abstract, but in practice you can make much more difference to performance by helping people get stuff done than 'developing their capabilities'. For example, weeks' worth of 'leadership capability' training can produce less change than a three-step daily checklist. I think we have invented a mythology of performance with 'roles' and 'capabilities' and 'training' - when actual behaviour is driven by other things, such as conformity and habit. I think this is starting to come into focus but it's still a unfamiliar picture for most. I appreciate any kinds of thoughts - end of day or otherwise :0)
Sorry, that should have been "70:20:10". My fingers work faster than my brain at the end of the day.
ReplyDeleteHi Nick,
ReplyDeleteLoved the post. Although much of Bill's points resonated also. I love Macs, and a hobby of mine is producing and editing films on them. Recently my wife tried to put together some footage she had shot, in imovie. I was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly she picked this up. Certainly apple products are well designed, and therefore somewhat of an intuitive experience. However, as you know, not everyone has the same experience operating an iphone or Mac, especially those using one for the first time. And I think this is part of the problem surely; namely that good design, then, relies on or naturally assumes, prior learning experiences - what people already know how to do. If you never used a mac, then you're likely to find imovie very difficult. At some point you need to have learnt how to use a mac, even if just the basic. But I'm not sure that this is indicative of something having gone wrong.
Is what you're saying (I genuinely want to understand) that the better the design, the less steep the 'learning curve'? If so, I agree. Though don't you think, depending on the context to allude to Bill's point, although if it implies a total reduction of complexity, I don't think it's always a good thing.
Good design does get rid of half the problem in almost all contexts, and I guess the question is whether the other half is 'solved' through providing a resource or a course. A well designed guitar, is great, and I learned much when I was younger using videos as a support, but having a tutor to point 'bad habits', just in time, was also invaluable.
Anyway, I think I'm veering off your initial points. Suffice to say, I absolutely enjoy your work. You are indeed a treasure to the learning community.
K
Hi Kenny - I think that's a good way to put it: we can flatten learning curves with good design. As you can see from the posts above this begs the question 'what can't be eliminated?' - and we quickly start talking about that. I like the guitar example as I get the feeling that learning will become something of a luxury pursuit in any case. By contrast when I think of areas like 'driving a car' or 'translation', these are fast being eliminated. Thank you for the movie editing example: my first computer way a BBC Micro B. When you switched it on you got a flashing cursor. Anything beyond that was dependent on your knowledge of DOS and programming. I edit on both Mac & PC - using Premiere - and was intrigued to see that my 7-yr old had edited together a video sequence on her iPad without any help from me. Something else she does that strikes me as interesting is she plays: in fact she has infinite appetite for playing with friends. She never tires of it. I don't doubt that she is learning as part of this process but at no point does it seem effortful. I could imagine 'messing around on boats' being similar. The kind of learning I am talking about eliminating is that which feels effortful. You will be quick to spot that this depends in part on motivation - which brings us back to affective context, I think. Which is where the conversation properly belongs.
ReplyDelete...well a few years late in my commenting Nick, however as I was looking for a nice way of explaining to a colleague that the aim wasn't training that rather it was helping people to perform a task effectively - I saw your blog post.
ReplyDeleteI like Don Norman's distinction between "knowledge in the head" and "knowledge in the world" and have used this idea to influence how I design things to help people to do their jobs more effectively- note that I didn't say to improve their learning :)
The challenge for me is to (politely) provide feedback to this colleague who has written a 'strategy' document with the aim to improve the way that staff complete certain documentation.
You've given me some ideas.