Do you know how to learn?

Do you know how to learn? Does your organization expect you to be capable of keeping up with changes and adapting to new situation? I bet they do! And, what are they doing to help you learn how to be effective at that? Because the evidence is you’re not now. And unless someone’s doing something about it, it’s going to stay that way.

Sure, you survived college most likely, or at least high school, and in theory they teach you how to learn.  Yet, they don’t. Yes, the require it, and expect it, but actually teaching you specific skills is rare. There are a lot of things people do that aren’t effective.  And, let’s be honest too much of high school and college is about passing the test to achieve the grade anyway. Or any possible way to achieve marks without actually learning anything. The few who actually want to learn may become better at it, but that’s not the way to bet.

We have strong evidence that people aren’t good at learning. They use ineffective methods like highlighting. They get the experience of feeling like they learning when it’s easy and they can pass test right away. However, there’s strong evidence that the outcomes of such don’t linger.  And most educational interventions and organizational training doesn’t actually look at long term bridging. Even mine! (OK, I’m trying to get better. ;)  We ask it of you. We expect it of you. And, we don’t support it for you.

By and large, we ignore most folks on self-development. Yes, when people show executive potential, they may well have it as an objective for leadership development. Except, as Jeffrey Pfeffer (c.f. Leadership BS) will point out, most leadership development is ‘make you feel good’. It doesn’t teach much of anything, and rarely ‘how to learn’. Worse, that’s still only for the select few! What about frontline workers? Jay Cross’ back of the envelope calculations suggested even a 10% improvement across the board would be valuable.

There are significant things we can do to be better learn. Harold Jarche‘s Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) talks about seeking knowledge effectively. How do you make the feeds that continue to give you new ideas without overwhelming you with information? How, when you’re searching do you get good answers not the easy answer but the right answer? That’s not a given, possibly even less so with AI summaries! Then, you make sense: you can experiment or re-represent, but too often we stop there. We’ve got the information, we processed it. We think we’ve learned, and that’s not the case. If you wanna have ownership of it, you have to take tested and refined it. Repeatedly, over time.

And, we’re not even talking motivation! Do you believe it’s a professional obligation to continue to improve? Too many people are happy being complacent. Yet, motivation is addressable as well (c.f. The Motivation Blueprint). And, of course, it’s an important part of learning (c.f. Make It Meaningful). Even if they are motivated to learn, again it takes the skills as well.

Then, if you’ve learned something you should share it so others don’t have to do the same struggle you did. Or, they can give you feedback to improve you because maybe they’ve been there before. You should be learning ‘out loud’. These are all mechanisms we can get better at if we have the guidance. If we are supporting learning how to learn, we need to make that explicit. Teach it in courses and universities, and until then even organizations.

I’ll suggest the answer to the question “do you know how to learn?” is ‘no’. Sure, most of the readers of this blog will, I reckon (or you wouldn’t be here). But the average answer will be ‘sure’, but they’ll be wrong. Heck, it may be that you are too (c.f. The Accidental Instructional Designer).

What does your organization do to make sure you’re a more effective learner? Not just access to information, by the way, but actually making use of it? (Access to information can be useful, but again it’s not the way to bet.) Organizations should be providing specific training on effective learning skills, particularly in this era where the tools are getting more seductive, but potentially actually decreasing learning. There are ways that let you stay up-to-date, adapt, and be agile to meet your needs. For biologically secondary learning, your natural instincts are likely to be wrong. You can make it explicit in your pedagogical practices, but explicit instruction is the best way to actually provide a positive answer to the question.