Welcome to the Age of Learning Elimination

The bad news is that we are living through an era where the need to learn is being systematically eliminated. The good news is that if you’re a learning professional, that’s now your job.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

To understand why learning is being erased, imagine that you are running a London taxi company in the 1980s. Every single one of your cabbies needs to have ‘The Knowledge’ – a grueling accreditation, certifying that they are intimately familiar with over 60,000 streets and more than 100,000 places of note. Of course someone with that kind of capability has a pretty scarce skill. They can command a certain salary.

And then someone invents GPS and in a stroke everything changes: now anyone can be a taxi driver. With real-time traffic data they can even outperform experienced London cabbies. Your entire business model changes, and then a new business model springs up – Uber.

Now imagine GPS for every job: GPS for every job means resources and guidance that allow people with little or no capability to get up to speed very quickly, then outperform employees with years of experience. At the same time, our technology is being designed in such a way that it ships with no manuals. Nothing to learn.

There is no future skills crisis. The plan is to make (almost) every job do-able by someone with next to zero capability (unless automation is a better option, or as a stepping-stone on the way to automation).

When we imagine this world it’s easy to picture devices like Amazon’s Echo in the workplace, providing expert step-by-step advice. But actually guidance and resources can be much simpler: a stepping-stone on the way to automation involves codifying what makes for good performance in a given role – for example in the form of simple tips, checklists or easy-to-follow guidance.

This is the kind of work my team are doing, and the good news is that – at least for the foreseeable future – learning professionals are well positioned to undertake this learning elimination work. We possess the capabilities to design and create resources and guidance that accelerate performance in a wide variety of roles – paving the way for a business model that can deliver greater performance with a fluid workforce and lower levels of capability – and at lower operating costs. If you aren't already doing this, your competitors will be.

Along the way, we’ve found that oftentimes roles are not nearly as complicated as they are made out to be: effective leadership, for example, is largely comprised of simple everyday behaviours.

So what’s stopping us? It’s tough for professionals with an emotional attachment to learning to switch to learning elimination. To let go of the idea that somehow our job is about getting knowledge into peoples' heads. It’s tough for us to switch from building individual capability to building organisational capability.

But if we can let go, we can become the future architects our organizations need.