learning – Page 3 – Faster Than 20

Documenting Is Not Learning

Part two of a three-part essay on facilitating group learning. See also part one, “Getting real about experiments and learning.”

A few years ago, my friend and colleague, Rebecca Petzel, wrote about a participatory art exhibit where the artist asked, “What is transformation?” One of the replies was, “Moving beyond documentation.”

I laugh every time I read this, but I also shake my head. How and why did documentation become so synonymous with learning (or worse, transformation)?

My mentor, Doug Engelbart, always said that the distinguishing characteristic of a high-performance group was its ability to learn and improve. One sign that a group was good at learning was its ongoing care and maintenance of what Doug described as a “dynamic knowledge repository.”

When people asked Doug what a “dynamic knowledge repository” looked like, he always described something digital. That made sense. Among the many things that made Doug a visionary was his recognition that digital technology had the ability to transform the speed at which we act and the quality of those actions. It’s something I still believe wholeheartedly.

But there was always something that seemed inconsistent and incomplete about how Doug described these knowledge repositories. For one thing, he used the word, “knowledge,” not “data” or “information” — both de rigueur terms of the time. For another, as much as he talked about the potential of tool systems, he also stressed the importance of human systems.

Knowledge can manifest itself as external artifacts, but those artifacts themselves are not knowledge. The essence of knowledge is that it’s actionable, and humans can’t act on knowledge unless it’s in their heads. I can have a whole library of books on nuclear physics, but it doesn’t become knowledge until I figure out a way to internalize what those books represent. I can read all the books I want on how to ride a bicycle, but it’s not knowledge until I actually demonstrate the physical ability to ride a bike.

I know that Doug understood this. I had many deep, wonderful conversations with him about this. Doug focused on the digital, because he was always looking at what was possible, which was way beyond what everyone else could see. That was one of his many gifts to the world.

Today, too many of us are fixated on digitally capturing our knowledge. That is the wrong place to start. We shouldn’t be so focused on externalizing what’s in our head in digital form. We should be looking at the problem the other way around — figuring out how best to get knowledge into our heads. That is the much more challenging and important problem.

How do we do that?

The number one thing we can do to help groups learn is to create space and time for reflection. How many of you take the time to do that with your groups?

Externalizing our knowledge can be a valuable way for individuals to reflect and internalize, but it’s only valuable for peers and colleagues if they take the time to absorb it. In theory, having access to written forms of knowledge — digital or otherwise — gives people flexibility as to when they can sit down and read it, which is one way to create time. However, that time is easily outweighed by the possibility that reading someone’s writings may be the worst way to learn something.

Last week, I wrote about my eight-year-old nephew’s physics experiment. He was learning by doing (i.e. experiential learning) and through mentorship and feedback. Would it have been better if I had written down everything I knew about physics and emailed it to him?

What if, instead of spending so much time, energy, and money on trying to get people to share more information digitally, we assigned people learning buddies? What if we incentivized time spent in reflection and with each other? What if we created systems for shadowing each other and for practicing the skills we need to be effective? Wouldn’t those be better first steps toward facilitating effective group learning?

See also part three, “The Key to Effective Learning? Soap Bubbles!”

Getting Real About “Experiments” and Learning

Part one of a three-part essay on facilitating group learning.

Last year, I went to Cincinnati to visit my sister and her family. My older nephew, Elliott, who was eight at the time, asked if I could help him with his science experiment. He was supposed to pick a project, develop a hypothesis, and run some experiments to prove or disprove it.

Elliott explained to me that earlier that year, he had participated in a pinewood derby and had lost. He wanted to figure out how to make a car that would go faster. I asked him, “What do you think would make the car go faster?”

He responded, “Making it heavier.” That seemed like an eminently reasonable hypothesis, especially coming from an eight year old. I helped him define the parameters of an experiment, and he constructed a car out of Legos and a ramp using a hodgepodge of race track parts to run his tests.

In theory, mass has nothing to do with the speed of the car. The only thing that matters is the acceleration of gravity, which is constant. A heavier car should go down the ramp at the same speed as a lighter one.

Except that’s not true either. Wind resistance counteracts the effects of gravity, which might make a lighter car go slower as a result. Then again, the aerodynamics of the car might have a bigger effect on decreasing wind resistance than mass. Then there’s the issue of both the friction and alignment of the wheels. And so forth.

Wading through all of these variables would require a carefully calibrated measurement system. Suffice it to say, Elliott’s system was not very precise. When he ran his experiment initially, the lighter car went faster than the heavier car. He dutifully proceeded to conclude that weight had the opposite effect on speed than he had theorized. I suggested that he try the experiment again just to be sure. This time, the cars took the same amount of time.

He was thoroughly confused. So was I, but for different reasons. How was I supposed to explain to him all the possible reasons for his results without delving into the intricacies of physics and engineering?

It was a ridiculous thing to expect an eight year-old to figure out, but it would have been fair to have asked of a high schooler. Science is clean that way. You can set up experiments and controls, you can meticulously account for variables, and you can repeat and replicate your experiments to build confidence in your results.

This is not the case with people.

It has become en vogue in the business world to frame knowledge work around experiments and learning. This is the essence of the Lean Startup idea, but it’s not limited to lean. I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone, and I’ve been doing it for a long time now.

But what exactly does it mean to frame people-work this way? Unlike science, you do not have laboratory conditions where you can set up replicable experiments with controls. Sure, you can come up with hypotheses, but your conditions are constantly changing, and there’s usually no way to set up a control in real-life.

How can you fairly draw any conclusions from your results? What are you even measuring? The realm of trying to assess “impact” or “effectiveness” or (to get very meta about it) “learning” tends to devolve into a magical kingdom of hand-waving.

The reality is that experimentation without some level of discipline and intentionality is just throwing spaghetti against the wall. The worse reality is that — even with all the discipline in the world — you may not be able to draw any reasonable, useful conclusions from your experiments. If your ultimate goal is learning, you need more than discipline and intentionality. You need humility.

In The Signal and the Noise, data analysis wunderkind Nate Silver points out how bad humans tend to be at forecasting anything reasonably complex — be it political elections or the economy. There are way too many variables, and we have way too many cognitive biases. However, we are remarkably good at predicting certain things — the weather, for example. Why can we predict the weather with a high degree of certainty but not things like the economy?

There are lots of reasons, but one of the simplest is accountability. Simply put, meteorologists are held accountable for their predictions, economists are not. Meteorologists are incentivized to improve their forecasts, whereas economists generally are not.

What does this mean for groups that are working on anything complex and are trying to learn?

First, be intentional, but hold it lightly. Know what it is you’re trying to learn or understand, and be open to something else happening entirely. Measure something. Be thoughtful about what you measure and why.

Second, be accountable. Track your learning progress. Review and build on previous results. Be transparent about how you’re doing. Don’t use “experiments” as a proxy for doing whatever you want regardless of outcome.

Third, be humble. Despite your best efforts, you may not be able to conclude anything from your experiments. Or, you might draw “convincing” conclusions you might validate again and again, only to discover that you are totally, entirely wrong.

How to Fail Successfully

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote speech for the 2014 Hult Prize finalists, a social entrepreneurship accelerator for university students. Many thanks to Mansi Kakkar for the invitation to speak and to Kate Michi Ettinger for the referral.

My 20-minute talk was entitled, “How to Fail Successfully.” The video is above, the slides below.

The delightful sketches in the slides are courtesy of my long-time collaborator, creative consultant extraordinaire, Amy Wu. The cute kids are courtesy of my sister and brother-in-law. The stories of failure are all my own, although I do go into a mini-rant about failure competitions.

Repetition Is the Key to Learning

Todd Pierce, a former client of mine, loves to say, “Repetition is the key to learning.” I thought I understood this already before I first heard him say it, but watching him model it made me realize otherwise. He said it so often, it became engrained in my head. I find myself repeating it often, and whenever I do, I think of him. Apparently, it works!

Repetition is the key to learning.

Learning is hard. It’s easy to hear things, to believe them, and to even say them to others. It’s hard to do them, to put those beliefs into action, to live those beliefs.

Repetition is the key to learning.

The challenge with most group work is that everybody in the group needs to own the results. Goals, for example, aren’t useful if no one can remember what they are. My main tool for addressing this challenge is to make sure that everybody plays a role in creating those goals. If you make it, you’re more likely to remember it.

This is true, but it’s not necessarily enough.

At my previous company, we had an extensive conversation about our organizational values, and we co-created a list of six. About a month later, I was troubled. I couldn’t remember what those values were. I was the leader of the company, and these were supposed to embody our organizational identity, and yet I couldn’t name them all. I asked my business partner if she could list them. She couldn’t do it either. Only our associate, who had facilitated the process, could remember all six.

We had a followup conversation, and we decided that we still believed that list represented what we were about. We just needed to remind ourselves what they were. We tried different things. We listed the values on the front page of our internal wiki. We encouraged everybody at our weekly checkins to share a story that embodied one of those values. Every so often, I would simply ask people to name the values. Some of these practices worked, others didn’t, but we were persistent. Over time, we all knew those values by heart.

I left my company a little over a year ago. Just now, I tried to name all six. I could only remember four.

Repetition is the key to learning.

I’m particularly proud of Changemaker Bootcamp’s three ground rules:

Be nice to others
Be nice to yourself
Don’t be nice

I love how simple and provocative they are. I find myself referring to them often, not just in bootcamp, but in all my work. There are only three, and they are such a big part of bootcamp culture, they’re even on the T-shirts.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had conversations with two past bootcampers where the ground rules came up. Neither of them could remember what they were. Both of them seemed embarrassed, but they shouldn’t have been. I realized that I could be doing even more to make sure people remembered them — simple things like reviewing them at the beginning of all of our sessions, not just the first, and having them up on the wall for all of our sessions.

The ground rules came up with one of my bootcampers, because she was telling me that she did not always feel like she had permission to speak up. I gently reminded her of our third ground rule — “don’t be nice” — which she had forgotten. Maybe the ground rule alone wouldn’t have corrected the problem, but it would have helped.

Repetition is the key to learning.

A big part of my work has been about designing and facilitating meetings where people have powerful learning experiences. I’m pretty good at it, as are many of my colleagues. But those experiences are of limited value if the lessons from those meetings are not constantly reinforced afterward. Designing great collaborative engagements requires thinking beyond meetings — figuring out ways to continue and to reinforce learning.

The way to do this is through repetition. That repetition can come in many different forms, but it needs to happen.

Repetition is the key to learning. It’s a message that bears repeating.