🦉 10x curiosity — Issue #109 — Systems for learning
How to maximise your own learning and the learning of others through creating a learning system.
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Systems provide a repeatable process that can be iterated and continuously improved upon. A system for learning incorporates several key items:
- Understanding the basics- Knowledge about how you learn; Asking better questions; Stimulus to feed creativity; Empty your day — space to learn
- A method of deliberate practice to maximise learning
- A feedback loop to measure the success of your learning
- A methodology to expand to organisational learning
This post provides a high level overview of several learning systems I find useful in developing learning systems for myself and others.
the value of these models isn’t in their conceptual elegance — it’s in their ability to help you be more effective in the world. Applying them shouldn’t be a time-consuming or difficult process, and in some cases it may involve nothing more than a few moments of thought after an experience and prior to its repetition (Batista)
Knowledge about how you learn
Learning how to learn
Barbara Oakley has an incredibly popular course on Coursera “Learning how to learn” in which she outlines some of the fundamentals about how our brain works and how we learn a new skill. In addition to highlighting how critical sleep, exercise and mood are to effective learning she also discusses how it is important to use different thinking modes, chunking and repetition.
Shane Parish on his blog also outlines a similar list for learning success:
- How you practice makes a big difference. You need to think about feedback loops, deliberate practice, and working in chunks.
- The mindset between top performers and amateurs is different.
- Sleep is incredibly important.
- There is a difference between hard and soft skills.
- Leverage tempo, focus, and routines to work for you not against you.
- Make sure you have time for rest.
- If you want to think, take a walk.
Asking better questions
Johnny Schneider has a thought provoking frame in his blog doing basic tests . He lays out a very basic matrix to work through any problem — very useful to apply to learning any topic. I have previously written about the value of good questions in questions to get you unstuck.
Stimulus to feed your creativity
Todd Henry in his book “Accidental Creative” highlights the importance of continually taking in stimulas to feed your creativity:
What goes into your mind often comes back out again in the form of new perspective or fresh creative thinking. If you want great ideas, you must take the time to fill your mind with inspiring stimuli that will spark new thoughts and help you think more systemically about your work… Set an amount of time each morning, whether it’s just fifteen minutes or an hour, for study and personal inspiration.
Taking this further, in order to be able to move into the adjacent possible your development and discoveries come from the space just beyond your current levels of experience and knowledge. The logical inference from this, is that the more you can widen your experiences and knowledge the wider your adjacent possibilities can expand and the more likely you are to be able to come up with something novel, new and wonderful. The pursuit of expanding your knowledge is the key to innovation, not the pursuit of innovation itself!
Empty Space
Michael Simmons outlines how adding slack to our day allows us to:
1. Plan out the learning. This allows us to think carefully about what we want to learn. We shouldn’t just have goals for what we want to accomplish. We should also have goals for what we want to learn.
2. Deliberately practice. Rather than doing things automatically and not improving, we can apply the proven principles of deliberate practice so we keep improving. This means doing things like taking time to get honest feedback on our work and practicing specific skills we want to improve.
3. Ruminate. This helps us get more perspective on our lessons learned and assimilate new ideas. It can also help us develop slow hunches in order to have creative breakthroughs. Walking is a great way to process these insights, as shown by many greats who were or are walking fanatics, from Beethoven and Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey. Another powerful way is through conversation partners.
4. Set aside time just for learning. This includes activities like reading, having conversations, participating in a mastermind, taking classes, observing others, etc.
5. Solve problems as they arise. When most people experience problems during the day, they sweep them under the rug so that they can continue their to-do list. Having slack creates the space to address small problems before they turn into big problems.
6. Do small experiments with big potential payoffs. Whether or not an experiment works, it’s an opportunity to learn and test your ideas.
Deliberate practice
Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.
Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process.
Made famous in the book “Peak” by Anders Ericsson, who argues that deliberate practice, unlike other forms of practice, has seven key elements to it:
(a) Developing skills that others have figured out, i.e. relying on an established knowledge base about what training techniques and methods work.
(b) Practicing with well-defined, specific goals in mind
c) Consistently moving outside your comfort zone (
(d) Using full attention and conscious actions, Involves being fully present and engaged in your training.
(e) Using feedback and modification to reach your goals
(f) Developing effective mental representations, i.e. developing new cognitive frameworks that allow you to master the skillset. It has been found in study after study of expert performers that they have developed advanced mental representations that allow them to overcome limitations faced by other performers. The classic example of this comes from the study of chess players and how they represent the pieces on the chessboard. Unlike novice chess players, they do not ‘see’ individual pieces on the board; instead, they see classic game sequences and patterns. This allows them to ‘chunk’ information into higher order representations and overcome limitations of working memory.
(g) Building upon your preexisting skillset, i.e. building newly acquired skills on top of previously acquired skills. This is the way that most learning is done and highlights the importance of mastering ‘foundational’ skills.
In his book “The Talent Code” Daniel Coyle highlights why deep practice is so important — and it is all about turbo charging the myelin in your nerves:
Learning and skill are built on three simple facts.
(1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons — a circuit of nerve fibers.
(2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy.
(3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become
“What do good athletes do when they train?” Bartzokis said. “They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire — lots of bandwidth, a high-speed T-3 line. That’s what makes them different from the rest of us.”
Skill is a myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals
Personal systems of learning
The Feynman Technique
Nobel laureat Richard Feynman was also a great teacher and student of life, constantly looking to expand his horizons and experiences. He outlined how he thought about learning:
- Choose a Concept
- Teach it to a Toddler
- Identify Gaps and Go Back to The Source Material
- Review and Simplify (optional)
Double loop learning
Problem solving is an example of singleloop learning. You identify an error and apply a particular remedy to correct it.
But genuine learning involves an extra step, in which you reflect on your assumptions and test the validity of your hypotheses. Achieving this double-loop learning is more than a matter of motivation — you have to reflect on the way you think.
Failure forces you to reflect on your assumptions and inferences. Which is why an organization’s smartest and most successful employees are often such poor learners: they haven’t had the opportunity for introspection that failure affords. So when they do fail — or merely underperform — they can be surprisingly defensive. Instead of critically examining their own behavior, they cast blame outward — on anyone or anything they can. (Chris Argyris — HBR)
Argyris found that organizations learn best when people know how to communicate. Leaders need to listen actively and open up exploratory dialogues so that problematic assumptions and conventions can be revealed. Argyris identified some key questions to consider.
- What is the current theory in use?
- How does it differ from proposed strategies and goals?
- What unspoken rules are being followed, and are they detrimental?
- What could change, and how?
- Forget the details; what’s the bigger picture?
Meaningful learning doesn’t happen without focused effort. Double loop learning is the key to turning experience into improvements, information into action, and conversations into progress. (FS Blog)
Experiential Learning
‘Experiential learning’ can apply to any kind of learning through experience. ‘Experiential learning’ is often used by providers of training or education to refer to a structured learning sequence which is guided by a cyclical model of experiential learning. Less contrived forms of experiential learning (including accidental or unintentional learning) are usually described in more everyday language such as ‘learning from experience’ or ‘learning through experience’. (Greenaway)
ACT: Do something — anything, in fact. Run a meeting, give a presentation, have a difficult conversation.
REFLECT: Look back on your experience and assess the results. Determine what happened, what went well and what didn’t.
CONCEPTUALIZE: Make sense of your experience. Seek to understand why things turned out as they did. Draw some conclusions and make some hypotheses.
APPLY: Put those hypotheses to the test. Don’t simply re-act. Instead, have a conscious plan to do things differently to be more effective. And begin the cycle again.
OODA Loop
John Boyd created the OODA loop as a learning tool initially for fighter pilots. It has wide applicability for any form of learning.
O: Observe: collect the data. Figure out exactly where you are, what’s happening.
O: Orient: analyze/synthesize the data to form an accurate picture.
D: Decide: select an action from possible options
A: Action: execute the action, and return to step (1)
The genius of Boyd’s idea is that it shows that speed and agility are not about physical reflexes — they’re really about information processing. They’re about building more/better feedback loops. The more high-quality OODA loops you make, the faster you get.
Organisational Learning
Moving beyond personal learning models to organisational learning models.
Addie Model
The ADDIE model is the generic process traditionally used by instructional designers and training developers. The five phases — Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation — represent a dynamic, flexible guideline for building effective training and performance support tools.
The 5 Learning Disciplines
Peter Senge writes in “The Fifth Discipline”:
Learning organizations are possible because not only is it our nature to learn but we love to learn…
a “learning organization”[is] an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.
For such an organization, it is not enough merely to survive. “Survival learning” or what is more often termed “adaptive learning” is important — indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning,” learning that enhances our capacity to create.
A learning organisation has 5 key elements (p10)
- Personal Mastery. People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them — in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.
- Mental Models. “Mental models” are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior
- Building Shared Vision. If any one idea about leadership has inspired organizations for thousands of years, it’s the capacity to hold a shared picture of the future we seek to create.
- Team Learning. When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.
- Systems Thinking — It is the discipline that integrates the disciplines, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice… By enhancing each of the other disciplines, it continually reminds us that the whole can exceed the sum of its parts.
Let me know what you think? I’d love your feedback. If you haven’t already then sign up for a weekly dose just like this.
Links that made me think…
The Power of Ripple: Developing Truly Impactful Leadership — www.forbes.com
Chris Hutchinson is the CEO and founder of Trebuchet group, and the author of Ripple, A Field Manual for Leadership That Works. Chris brings together field-tested practices for leaders to improve their personal impact and create long-lasting results.
Keep Your Identity Small
I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.
A different kind of new manager checklist: The 4 essential questions to ask yourself as a leader — Know Your Team | Blog — knowyourteam.com
Instead of promising you quick ‘n easy answers, this new manager checklist probes deeper with 4 questions to help you become better as a leader.
Thinking positive is a surprisingly risky manoeuvre — Gabriele Oettingen | Aeon Essays — aeon.co
Fantasies about the future have a troubling effect on achieving actual goals. If positive thinking doesn’t work, what does?
