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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Aligning

25 August 2015 by Clark 2 Comments

I’m realizing that a major theme of my work and the revolution is that what we do in organizations, and what we do as L&D practitioners, is not aligned with how we think, work, and learn.  And to that extent, we’re doomed to failure. We can, and need to, do better.

Let’s start with thinking. The major mismatch here is that our thinking is done rationally and in our head. Results in cognitive science show, instead, that much of our thinking is irrational and is distributed across the world. We use external representations and tools, and unless we’re experts, we make decisions and use our brains to justify them rather than actually do the hard work.

What does this mean for organizations and L&D?  It means we should be looking to augment how we think, with tools and processes like performance support, helping us find information with powerful search.  We want to have open book learning, since we’ll use the book in the real world, and we want to avoid putting it ‘in the head’ as much as possible. Particularly rote information. We should expect errors, and provide support with checklists, not naively expect that people can perform like robots.

This carries over to how we work.  The old view is that we work alone, performing our task, and being managed from above with one person thinking for a number of folks.  What we now know, however, is that this view isn’t optimal. The output is better when we get multiple complementary minds working together.  Adaptation and innovation work best when we work together.

So we don’t need isolation to do our work, we need cooperation  and collaboration.  We need ways to work together. We need to give people meaningful tasks and give them space to execute, with appropriate support. We need to create environments where it’s safe to share, to show your work, to work out loud.

And our models of learning are broken. The trend to  an   event comprised of information dump and knowledge test we know doesn’t work. Rote procedures are no longer sufficient for the increasing ambiguity and unique situations our learners are seeing. And the notion that  “practice ’til they get it right” will lead to any meaningful change in ability is fundamentally flawed.

To learn, we need models to guide our behavior and help us adapt.   We need to identify and address misconceptions. We need learners to engage concretely and be scaffolded in reflection.     And we need  much practice.  Our learning experiences need to look much more like scenarios and serious games, not like text and next.

We’re in an information age, and industrial models just won’t cut it.  I’m finding that we’re hampered by a fundamental lack of awareness of our brains, and this is manifesting in too many unfortunate and ineffective practices.  We need to get better. We know better paths, and we need to trod them.  Let’s start acting like professionals and develop the expertise we need to do the job we must do.

#itashare

Comments

  1. Chris Riesbeck says

    25 August 2015 at 11:16 AM

    All that and more, but two Quinn quibbles.

    1. Why do you say our thinking is “irrational” rather than “emotional”? If we were irrational, designing effective education would be very challenging, if not impossible. The real point I think is to take learner passions, fears, annoyances and such into account from day one.

    2. While collaboration matters a lot — for emotional reasons as much as intellectual — still, for me, often I learn the most when I get to be alone, to pause, reflect, probe, experiment, guess, fail, repeat, … Private exploration needs to be designed just as much as the team activities and deliverables.

  2. Clark says

    27 August 2015 at 12:09 AM

    Chris, good feedback, thanks. I should, rather, say we’re not good at formal reasoning rather than ‘irrational’ :). Which is one reason why we should treat learning design as much more complex than you’d think by looking at our tools and processes. And I definitely am an advocate of adding the emotional component to our learning (as my next Learrnovators post will address).

    Second, you are absolutely right about personal time. In fact, in a recent post I wrote for ATD Science of Learning blog, I pointed out how brainstorming needs individual reflection before working together. It definitely needs to be there, it just can’t be all.

    Thanks again for the discerning comments,

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