Let me alert you to a fascinating interview I did with Elizabeth Swan on how people learn and the implications for knowledge management, innovation, and accelerating the rate of organizational learning. The conversation started because we discovered that we both enjoyed the same book, How We Learn by Benedict Carey of the New York Times. 

The book is full of useful tips on how to learn more efficiently. In the book he debunks several myths about learning, such as the myth about staying focused on a single topic or task for a long time and not letting one’s self get distracted. It turns out that intervals between practice work better (i.e. produce better recall) than clustered practice. Carey also provides a research-based rationale for why teaching is such a powerful device for learning: forcing yourself to create a framework and linking relevant content to it in order to teach others happens to also be a great way to drill that information into your own long-term memory.

As you might expect from me, I steered the conversation to how these “learning hacks” might help accelerate the rate at which we can bring novices up to speed faster as our baby boomer experts retire or move on to other projects. We were both very interested in one approach to create expertise: the use of perceptual learning modules. Here is what Elizabeth had to say about it.

ELISABETH: In How Smart Leaders Leverage Their Experts, you and Lauren Trees [APQC’s KM research program manager] talk about the challenge of bringing novices up to speed faster. Carey’s book identifies “perceptual learning modules” as one way of meeting this challenge. He writes about the challenge of getting novice pilots and medical students up to speed. The traditional approach to this problem would be to just wait for them to get the experience. The same phenomenon plays out in most organizations; you have new folks and you want them to get experience, but you just have to wait. However, there are certain things one can learn through perceptual learning modules. This can take the form of simply creating a slide deck of facts and logistics and practicing it over and over.

For example, expert pilots can look at a dashboard of indicators and make quick assessments (about the slant of the plane, the speed of their descent, what it means in terms of the runway and landing, etc.). It takes novices a long time to be able to read and make those snap judgments while also dealing with everything else going on in the cockpit.

So, flight instructor schools created a slide deck with different potential combinations of speed, altimeter, and angle. They would give rapid fire tests where students would say, “I think we’re off with this,” “We need to change the angle here,” and so on. By flashing that deck rapidly, they would cut years off the process of developing novices’ ability to read the instrumentation panel. This way, they could move on to learn other aspects of the job.

I believe one reason novice pilots learned so quickly was because they received immediate feedback on their accuracy in interpreting the array of cards. For me, this raises an interesting question about informal learning via social networks: can you take the expert providing correct feedback out of the process and still expect people to learn accurately and well? How much can we really expect novices to learn through give and take in an informal social network unmoderated by an expert and without a framework? I think we need to be smart about how much and what kind of learning can take place with crowdsourcing and peer to peer feedback. If it requires judgment and expertise, crowdsourcing from peers is probably not the best vehicle for getting feedback. Elisabeth agreed.

CARLA: Do you think that peer-to-peer learning could also be an effective way to improve recall and get novices up to speed quickly?

ELISABETH: Peer-to-peer learning has its pros and cons. There has to be some kind of expert testing or standard to verify what’s being learned. A phrase I always associate with peer-to-peer learning is: “If Joe is teaching Mary, whatever Joe doesn’t know Mary will never know, and whatever Joe got wrong, Mary will always get wrong.” I think peer-to-peer has an important role in the learning process, but you have to test it against a standard.

I recently witnessed a perfect example of the power of expert mentoring and immediate feedback: how doctors teach their acolytes in a teaching hospital. As they make their rounds from room to room, doctors ask their retinue of residents what symptoms they see and what they think it means.  The experienced doctor/teacher immediately provides unvarnished feedback on their answers, hopefully with research evidence to back it up. 

This also illustrates the importance of on-the-job learning and why corporations have to be world-class learning environments.  Two of my favorite phrases on this topic come from Michelin and General Mills. Michelin says, “There are no tire universities graduating people who know how to make tires.” Similarly, General Mills says, “We have to run our own cereal school because there isn’t one anywhere else.” You can get an Agricultural Science degree, but it isn’t going to teach you how to make cereal at General Mills. 

You can read the full Elisabeth Swan interview here.

Download How Smart Leaders Leverage Their Experts.

Check out the rest of my Big Thinkers, Big Ideas interviews on APQC’s Knowledge Base.

Subscribe to the Big Thinkers, Big Ideas podcast on Itunes or on APQCPodcasts on Podbean.

You can connect with me on Twitter @odell_carla