it often comes when we tackle new work.
by bill reeb
the learning process is often frustrating. so why is it so difficult to learn new things?
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one answer is that we don’t have “hooks” for what we don’t know (neither the mental acuity nor the physical skills). an example of this is found anytime businesses train their employees.
there is a common misperception that intellectual understanding and skill development are the same. i see people regularly giving instruction to their direct reports and then walking away thinking that the employee is now capable of competently completing a task or project just because it was explained verbally. if an employee has successfully done this work before, and the explanation is simply a reminder of the steps and processes to be followed, then success is likely. however, most of the time, the person receiving the instruction is being bombarded with a combination of previously known and new information simultaneously.
when this occurs, especially regarding the new information, most of it will likely come across like a fire hose shooting water – a stream of information splashing everywhere. except in rare circumstances, a high volume of splashing information does not change one’s ability to perform. in order for our skills to improve, we typically need to go through a “learn, try, fail” cycle that looks like this:
- first, we need an intellectual understanding of what we are trying to accomplish.
- second, we need to experience what we just learned.
- third, based on that experience, with the likelihood of failure being some part of that experience, we can then discover important gaps in our understanding that negatively impacted our performance and ask for updated information.
- fourth, repeat steps two and three until we are fully competent to do the work without supervision or guidance.
as we perform steps two and three over and over in the “learn, try, fail” cycle, we are repetitively building new “hooks” to hang new information or skill upon.
let me digress for a moment to better conceptualize this “hooks” idea. picture a big coat closet full of hooks screwed on the wall. in this scenario, hooks represent our brain’s access system to whatever is hanging in the closet, and coats represent information, experience or a combination of both that we want to access. some of the hooks in the closet will have heavy coats hanging on them, others light coats, and some no coats at all. additionally, picture a lot of room for new hooks to be screwed into the wall when more are needed.
now consider something as mundane as improving your skills using microsoft word. first, in order to teach someone how to use this program, as i noted above, you need to provide both an intellectual understanding of what to do as well as the opportunity to experience doing it. so, if i were to teach a class on this subject, i would want to explain the material in sections (chunking or learning in chunks) and then have each person perform specific tasks on their own to cement in that learning before moving on.
why? because in working through this cycle, the trainee will identify what he or she did and did not understand. each time someone identifies what is not understood, awareness starts to generate a new hook to store more information. if there was already some knowledge or comfort with the information just covered, then think of that situation as a hook being in place with only a windbreaker on it (some awareness of the topic, but needing more for a greater understanding and applicability). the more that person learns, or the better skilled the person becomes, the more that windbreaker turns into a heavy coat full of knowledge and expertise.
repetition is the fastest way to generate new hooks. we need to experience and re-experience what we have been learning, which will produce new hooks that will allow us to hang our developing knowledge and skill (coats). without hooks, the coats simply end up on the floor. and while the information may be in the coat closet, we have no easy way to retrieve it or build on it.
most organizations simply provide the planning or intellectual component of the training process. management tells people what to do and what steps to follow. even if they are conveying that information in the right amount of detail, the problem is that they mistake the transmission of facts and data with the recipient’s ability to be able to assimilate it and do it. the recipient might have heard it all, even taken good notes, but if there are no available open hooks, all that new information will just be lying on the coat closet floor.
we typically jump to the erroneous conclusion that the recipient’s successful assimilation of the new plan and knowledge equates to skill development (for example, i can watch a specific martial arts technique and understand it, yet not be capable of performing it). we need to know what we are trying to do, attempt it, evaluate what we did grasp, identify what we missed, and then repeat over and over. with each progression of the learn, try, fail cycle, we combine a little more knowledge and experience to create a little more skill.
don’t short yourself by losing sight of this important cycle. put in the time to build the hooks you need in order to continue progressing toward whatever you are trying to achieve.
where can i apply the learn, try, fail cycle to help me achieve my objectives? how do i need to restructure my personal training, as well as the training of others, to incorporate the idea of building more open hooks to improve the overall development process?