Accelerating Learning

We all wish we could learn more quickly.  As managers we wish we could accelerate the learning of our teams.  In some ways, we cannot shortcut the process of accumulating knowledge and skills over the long term.  But as we learn how to learn, we discover that some methods of learning are better than others.

Someone recently asked why engineers should earn more than teachers.  My reply was that the two are not mutually exclusive.  In fact, any great engineering manager is also a great teacher.  A manager is only as good as their ability to teach their team.  We can take this a step further to say that the best learners do not passively get taught.  Most learning is self-learning.  The better we can teach ourselves, the better we learn.

An old proverb goes something like this, "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn."  Some medical schools use the method of SODOTO, “See One, Do One, Teach One.”  If we delve deeply into this and expand upon it, we have a framework, not just for learning a concept but for accelerating the achievement of mastery.

See One

You start with observing the right approach to what you want to learn.  This could be an expert demonstrating a skill, the prevailing theory on the optimal approach, or a story of what worked.  As humans, we have added to our collective wisdom from generation to generation by passing along knowledge through story.  Stories make powerful connections to us as we learn vicariously through the experiences of others.  This is good for understanding what to do, but not necessarily how or why it was developed. 

If we are going to go beyond what is considered the best, we need to be able to advance the theory.  To do this, we want to know how we arrived at the theory.  Anyone who learns the complete history of the topic holds the advantage.  William Duggan delves into this in his book, The Art of What Works.  Researching lessons from history gives us insight into what has worked for others in the past. 

Napoleon became one of the most successful generals in history because of his extensive knowledge of the history of warfare.  Later Patton took his knowledge of the history of warfare to another level.  When the Wright Brothers decided to try to achieve heavier-than-air flight for humans, they started by researching everything they could find on the history of flight. 

When Jeffrey Katzenberg went to work at Disney in the 1980s, he discovered the archives that Walt Disney kept on making movies and telling stories.  He began to stay up at night to absorb all he could and started applying what he learned to the films that rejuvenated the Disney brand such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.  I highly recommend the book Disney War by James B. Stewart.

Barry Diller, former CEO of Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, started his career in the William Morris Agency when he discovered their archives.  He spent three years devouring what was essentially the history of the film industry, which gave him an edge over anyone else his age.

When I made the career leap from financial services to manufacturing, I decided to learn everything I could about the history of quality.  That’s how I discovered Walter Shewhart, W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, and Taichi Ohno, some of the people most responsible for the most important advancement in management during the 20th century – the quality revolution.  I thought I was going to learn about quality, and I ended up learning about management.

Every year I read business biographies, listen to business podcasts, and watch business documentaries.  I also read business theory to give myself some basis for interpreting all the stories I absorb.  All these stories help me weed out a lot of the bad advice that is available.  The stories also help me communicate tips and techniques to my team because I can readily give compelling examples of others who have used those techniques to great success.

I will add that one of the best ways I have found to enhance the See One stage is to take notes.  I find that taking notes with a pen and notebook works far better than electronic notes.  When I have a conversation with a client on the phone, I will take notes directly into our CRM rather than have to spend the extra time transcribing later.  When I am in learning mode, I prefer a physical notebook or journal.  For some reason, this seems to give me a closer connection to what I am writing, so I can better absorb and remember later.

Notebooks seemed to be far more common in the past than they are today.  Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Walter Chrysler all kept notebooks.  When I was 12, I read the biography of Robert Louis Stephenson, and learned that he carried a notebook in his pocket, so I started keeping a notebook ever since.

Do One

In this stage, you put what you learned into practice.  Management and many of the microskills that make up management are not learnable through books alone.  You must experience the thoughts, feelings, and distractions that come along with doing.  Learning negotiation by reading a book is different from feeling the adrenaline rush and shaking hands that come with going through a high-stakes negotiation where the pressure is on while the level of agreement and certainty are low. 

One of the best reasons to do is to better deal with the real pressure that comes along with doing.  I love to watch the Olympics because these people have spent years preparing for an opportunity that comes only once every four years and may never come along again for the rest of their lives.  The future path of their lives comes down to a few minutes of performance, so the pressure is high, and some can deal with it while others crumble under the pressure.  I think back to this when I feel the pressure rising in my life, and I welcome the pressure.

Doing is about experimentation.  Experimentation is also about improvement.  As a runner, I read about techniques, but until I do them I do not actually know how they feel.  I have to do it, feel it, and then get some sort of feedback that validates that this sensation equates to the optimal technique. 

Teach One

I really learn when I teach.  You could say that I learned this the hard way.  The point in my life when I hit rock bottom was when I was 20 and living in New York City with no job and $50 left in my pocket.  My parents were living in their van traveling the country, and I had no idea how to contact them.  During the end of that cold December I had walked into one retailer after another to fill out job applications, but everybody was winding down from the holidays and more likely to be laying off than hiring. 

I spoke to a friend who had directed one of the plays in which I had acted, and he told me about a teaching position at the high school where he taught.  It was for Algebra, Geometry, Earth Science, Biology, and Physics.  The other teacher had left halfway through the year, and they needed somebody.

A million reasons why I couldn’t do it raced through my head.  “But I don’t have a teaching license.”  Apparently, that was not a requirement because it was a private high school.  “But I don’t have a degree.”  He said that didn’t matter because I did graduate from an acting conservatory.  “But I never took Physics before in my life.”  He said they wouldn’t care.

If I had any other option, I never would have thrown my hat into the ring.  I had been eating less to save money, and my insecurity level was high.  But I was desperate (and hungry).  I got an interview, and I was honest about myself.  He said I got the job.  They must have had no other options either.  I had always loved math, and I had found science to be very intriguing, but I was far from being able to teach the subjects and far from being qualified to stand before some kids who were only a few years younger and portray myself as an expert. 

On the first day, I tried to hide the fact that I was in my panic zone.  Did I mention that this was an all-boys school?  Oh, yes, the energy level was high.  They were polite to the other teachers who were older and wiser.  But they were so rowdy with me that the principal made regular visits into my class.  As soon as he would enter, they would quiet down.  I survived the first day.  One day they asked me what pH stands for.  I had to look it up in the book, and somebody complained to the principal that I had to look it up in the book, so he had a talk with me about that.  Then I survived the first week.  Then I survived the first month.  Each night, I would study the lesson for the next day. 

In the beginning I had been spending a lot of time learning the topic where I had to be an expert.  I had tried repetition to learn and practiced like I would practice lines as an actor.  Then about a month into this experience something crazy happened.  As the weeks passed, that process compressed, and I jumped straight from getting introduced to a new topic to immediately teaching that topic.  I had just read something in physics, and realized I felt like an expert even though I had never known about that topic only a few minutes earlier.  This sparked a self-learning technique that I still use to this day. 

What did I do?  I read it once to get a general introduction to the idea as if it were someone else’s words.  Then I read it a second time as though they were my own words, and I was trying to explain it to someone else. 

This is a variation on an acting technique.  I had once taken an acting class with Alan Arkin who told us to first read the script with no preconceived notions.  In other words, read it first with an open mind.  Just take in the information in an accepting way.  Then you make the words your own.

Now when I come across something I like and want to absorb as a part of my learning, I repeat it in my head as if I am teaching someone else. 

If we are all learning, we are all teachers because we teach ourselves, and as we develop, we pass along our knowledge and skills onto others.  That is how we connect with others and contribute to our collective advancement.  We owe our knowledge and abilities today, in large part, to the discoveries others have made and passed along to us.  Our responsibility is to learn from our history, improve upon it, and pass it along for the next generation.  If we can accelerate not only our own learning but also the next generation’s learning, we can accelerate our collective learning.