What is learning?
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers
It is very easy to find long and detailed discussions of what learning is and what it means to learn. Most of these definitions, while interesting, are of little practical use. Of considerably more practical use, however, is this:
Learning is the (hopefully!) permanent change in behavior resulting from practice and experience.
Sounds simple. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy. We have only to look at the number of failed learning initiatives and the frustration so many people feel around learning to see just how often learning is not handled well. Part of the problem is that learning is treated too often as an event, not as a process: a single class rather than an ongoing practice of skill development. To understand how this works, consider the process of learning a skill.
As I often tell students in my jujitsu class, learning a move is easy. Performing the move when you want to is what’s difficult. For example, it takes only a few seconds to demonstrate how to block a punch. Most people, upon seeing that demonstration, are then capable of moving their hand in the correct manner. They are not, however, blocking the punch yet; they are only moving their hand. In other words, they are repeating an action but they have not yet internalized the action. Under carefully controlled conditions, they can block the punch: it’s slow, it’s clearly telegraphed, their partner doesn’t really want to hit them. If their partner does something unexpected, the student freezes, panics, gets hit, or all of the above. Similarly, a sales trainee might learn a script to use or a set of phrases and actions designed to make the prospect sign on the dotted line. So long as the prospect behaves exactly according to the script, the trainee is fine. Should that prospect deviate in any way, the trainee is lost: their brain is full of the script and there is no room for anything else, such as improvisation.
Eventually, after enough practice, the block improves, right up until there is some pressure: a belt test, a more aggressive partner, or anything else which suddenly raises the stakes of getting it right. At that point, many students instead of blocking with their hands, block with their nose. It takes a great deal more practice before the skill works reliably under pressure. Similarly, a trainee might do well on practice exercises, but fold when tested or put in front of a real client.
This process of continual practice is known as automatizing the skill. Because we are not actually that good at thinking about multiple things at once, if we have to think about how to use the skill, we can’t pay attention to what’s actually going on. We have to learn something so well that we no longer need to think about it. At that point, the skill is becoming reflexive and we only need to recognize the need to use it for it to happen. This frees a tremendous amount of brain power, enabling us to take in more information and respond more effectively to our environment: the beginning basketball player is so busy concentrating on dribbling the ball that an experienced player can walk right up and take the ball away. The beginner will often report that, “I didn’t even see him coming!” As dribbling becomes automatic, the basketball player becomes more able to pay attention to the other players and evade the person trying to steal the ball. The beginning salesman is so focused on her script that she misses the warning signs that the sales call is about to go off the rails. The experienced salesman notices the subtle shifts in the prospect’s behavior, and is able to adjust his strategy accordingly. The rote action is transformed into a framework for activity.
Of course, there is a catch. As I alluded to a moment ago, we have to recognize the need to use a skill in order to use it. It doesn’t matter how much we’ve automatized the skill if we don’t realize that we need it. Thus, part of skill learning is situational: like an actor, we need to know our cues. The more time spent looking for our cues, the slower our response will be. Just like a scene in a movie seems artificial and unbelievable when actors don’t realize it’s time for their lines, so too do behaviors ranging from leadership to engineering to sales seem artificial, and hence unbelievable or not trustable, when we don’t recognize our cues in those settings. The leader who is not aware of the signs, or cues, that indicate a group is entering Storming is thus more likely to respond inappropriately or too slowly to the changing team dynamic. In the worst case, like the jujitsu student who misses the warning signs that it’s time to block, he may be gob smacked.
As a result, proper training includes coupling the behavior and the appropriate cues for the behavior. This pairing must also be automatized, although not necessarily at the same level of reflexivity as the base behavior. Sometimes we want to be able to choose between several trained choices. The important thing is that the appropriate cues bring the appropriate options to mind, and that we have the cognitive resources available to evaluate the situation and choose. Training conducted in an artificial environment which divorces situation from action reduces the value of the training; similarly, management training that does not include the rest of the team lacks appropriate cues from the team, and often teaches the manager behaviors that the team doesn’t know how to respond to. As we discussed in earlier chapters, training the leader and the team separately is not all that effective: this is one of the big reasons why.
Another important point of how learning works is that people have to be able to get it wrong. Learning is not just absorbing, memorizing, and rehearsing behaviors. It is also experimentation and exploration. Making mistakes is a critical part of skill mastery: being able to execute a skill reflexively is great, but you still need to be able to adjust when something unexpected happens. When people learn without the opportunity to make mistakes, the skill is brittle. Failure becomes a catastrophe, and fear of making a mistake can paralyze performance under pressure. That jujitsu student learning to block will get hit many times along the road to mastery: under training conditions, the student might end up with a bloody nose or black eye, but otherwise will be unharmed. Along the way, they learn how to make their own movements more effective. More to the point, they learn that getting hit isn’t the end of the world: it isn’t fun, but you can keep going. This enables them to relax under pressure. Paradoxically, the less afraid you are of getting hit, the less likely you will get hit. The less afraid the salesman is of screwing up, the less likely she is to screw up. The leader who is confident that he and his team can recover from mistakes is more open to trying new and innovative ideas. That confidence and that lack of fear come from making mistakes. Note that there are limits to this: I have been told that the best way to avoid being stung by a bee is to be unafraid of the bee. I can state from personal experience that the bee does not know this.
Unfortunately, too many learning situations are focused around fear of failure, a lesson we all learned in school, when failure meant bad grades and quite possibly Not Getting Into The College of Your Choice. These learned habits often interfere with ongoing learning in organizational settings. Typically, when we learn something new in a class or training exercise, we will only have time to get down the rote memorization piece of it: the process of then mastering the skill, that exploration and experimentation piece, needs to happen on the job. If you can’t handle making mistakes, you just wasted roughly 90% of the training.
Is this all there is to learning? Of course not! If it were, we’d have a lot more experts out there! A key part of making learning successful is understanding what your goals really mean and understanding the context in which learning is occurring.
Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.
Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications
