Bridging

Of late, I’ve increasingly been convinced that what too much of formal education does is prepare you to perform. That may not sound like a bad thing, but…I want to suggest that it stops short. What do I mean? I’m referring to bridging the gap, the one between learning and doing. So what am I talking about?

So, I’ve argued before that we need different things as we move from learning to doing. First, of course, we need reactivation. That’s typically more models, examples, and most importantly, more practice. But that’s still about learning, not doing. Even the practice is about sample problems, not real life.

Of course, we can (and should) start bringing in real life. We can start having folks applying the knowledge to real problems. But then we need contextualized feedback, about how the particulars suggested a course of action, and how the learners’ choices reflected that, or not. Ideally, we’d have someone in the loop providing this feedback, but that’s not always possible for a variety of reasons: scale, cost, availability, etc. We can move to asking the learner to remedy it themselves, and maybe have a backstop.

So, we have coaching, we have spaced learning solutions (*cough* Elevator 9 *cough*), we have certification (the particular type where people submit applications to their own work/life and get feedback). All these facilitate the bridging. Circumstances will dictate which makes sense (factors like cost of errors, frequency of practice, availability of supervision, etc). But, the thing that occurs to me is, this is too often left to chance. The fact that I was inspired to hear about how an org wouldn’t release a learning solution until they’d planned how it’d be persistent tells me that it’s too rare.

This goes on to actual impact. What results are you seeing? This is, quite simply, moving up the evaluation chain, but it’s also moving up the chain from just offering a course to achieving an outcome that positively affects your organization. We can ask, we can tie into systems, but we shouldn’t just offer a course and exhort the gods that something good will happen. “Spray and pray” isn’t an effective strategy.

So, what I want to do is implore you to not ignore bridging. Instead, figure out how your learning is going to sustain impact. It can, and should. That’s what we’re here for, after all. Despite any beliefs to the contrary, if we’re not moving needles, we’re wasting effort (and that’s not a professional stance). We can do better, We know how, and it may require bucking some trends and beliefs, but we really shouldn’t settle for complacency. We can do good. Let’s.