Critical Skills - Learning

The third post in a series on the critical skills that are needed for the future of work (terms that are skills on the Ibbaka Talent Platform are in bold italics).

Learning may well be the most important skill we discuss as it really is the foundation of all the other skills. There may be some skills, like mathematics or music, that rely on a certain innate ability, but in general people who are good at learning will be able to develop many other skills. What does it mean to have the skill learning?

Looking at the Ibbaka skill graph, the first thing one notices is that learning comes in a lot of flavours. A partial list includes:

Blended Learning
Collaborative Learning
Deep Learning (OK, this is actually the computer science usage)
eLearning
First Nations Learning
Social Learning
and so on

Learning also has a lot of related skills, many of them social skills such as coaching and collaboration, others domain related, such as software development and business processes. This is just scratching the surface. Over time, I expect that learning will become one of the key nodes in the skill graph, connecting to many other skills and virtually all domains.

How does one develop the foundational skill of learning?

One of the people with the deepest insights here is Chris Argyris. In his classic 1991 Harvard Business Review article Teaching Smart People to Learn, Chris Argyris identified what really blocks learning for many of us.

First, most people define learning too narrowly as mere “problem solving,” so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right.

It was this insight that led us to identify reflection as a skill in an earlier post. Before we dive into other skills that support learning, let's see if we can get a better view of the different contexts for learning and some of the individual differences in learning style.

The Contexts of Learning

There are many different ways learning gets organized and discussed, even when one limits the discussion to professional learning for adults. In our work over the past decades in learning design, we have found the following two dimensions to be useful in understanding context. The delivery modes and skills engaged in each quadrant are different.

Intermittent - Immersive

Sometimes we need immediate help with the task at hand. This is an important part of learning, which needs to be woven into the moments of our day. But this is not always enough. To really understand a discipline one has to take time and go deep. This requires sustained concentration. Both the intermittent and immersive modes are necessary for real learning. These can also map to both the practical application of skills, which is often (but not always) intermittent and the understanding of the larger theoretical framework, which almost always requires sustained study.

Individual - Collaborative

Learning can also take place on one's own or in social or collaborative environments. Again, both are important. Most skills that we want to learn, we learn from and with others, and we often need to apply them in teams. Social or collaborative learning is important. But learning also requires periods of deep concentration followed by reflection. These are solo activities.

Skilled learners know how to vary collaborative with individual learning and intermittent with immersive. They can put the abstract to practical work and use insights from that work to test and evolve their models. Different skills come into play in each of these quadrants,

The Styles of Learning

Once upon a time there was a great deal of interest in learning styles defined as a person's preferred mode for receiving information (as if receiving information is the most important aspect of learning). In this old model the four learning styles were Visual, Aural, Reading and Writing, and Kinaesthetic. These were later expanded to eight learning styles and no doubt someone somewhere is working on stretching them to sixteen. The problem with this approach is that there is little empirical support for these models. A little introspection shows that most of us want to learn in more than one mode, and that a mix of modes will be best for most people.

This does not mean the idea that different people learn in different ways is wrong. There are clearly great differences. One of the most important learning skills is developing an understanding of how one learns. Coaches and leaders need to understand how the people they work with learn, and to help them develop an understanding themselves.

In my own case, my learning style seems to be abstract, historical, social, written, and kinaesthetic.

Abstract

I need to understand the theory and be able to build and manipulate models. The manipulate part relates to my need for kinaesthetic learning.

Historical

I learn best when I start at the beginning and trace the evolution of ideas and how they have been applied. I especially learn by poking about in the dead ends to see what might have been.Social - I learn best when I learn with other people. My wife teases me that when I want to learn something I start a company or organize a conference.

Written

Learning gets consolidated when I can express it in writing, and in sketches.

Kinaesthetic

Manipulating things, drawing them, acting them out (we once even choreographed a dance to show how a Turing machine works).

Each of these different aspects of my learning connects to the others, and I expect the same is true for you as well. Having conversations with one's colleagues about how each person learns is a rich way to improve collaboration.

Pulling this together into a skill model for learning, we get something like the following.

Learning is one of the most personal skills. Each of us learns in our own unique way, depending on our other skills, the people we work and learn with, and our larger life goals. As I have gotten older, I have felt more and more pressure to learn effectively and to find ways to put what I am learning to work. Working on the Ibbaka Talent platform has been a great learning accelerator. It is one of the main ways I want to contribute moving forward.