'Learning': what are you talking about?

‘Learning’ is the most terribly confused and conflicted term. It has been so utterly subverted by education, that it’s near impossible to use it meaningfully any more.

It has helped me, personally, to identify three distinct types of activity sometimes described as 'learning':

Education: this is a set of rituals in which people are expected to memorise information (sometimes described as ‘learning objectives') in order to pass a test. Whilst humans are able to do this given sufficient incentive, it is terribly inefficient process (they forget almost all of it quickly) and it rarely has any impact on behaviour. It is not ‘learning’ in any meaningful sense and doesn’t change people. Sadly, almost all of the activity we describe today as ‘learning’ is, on closer inspection ‘education’. However, the activity has become bureaucratised on a monstrous scale and is proving hard to stamp out.

Learning Elimination: books and digital devices have provided humans with the ability to externalise knowledge and guidance, effectively doing the opposite to education and presenting us with the opportunity to improve performance whilst reducing learning.

When we talk about ‘performance consulting’ or ‘point-of-need support’, our aim should be to reduce learning as much as possible in order to improve performance.

Often, the aim of organisational L&D is ultimately to improve performance so – paradoxically – the main job of L&D teams is increasingly to reduce the need to learn (as more opportunities to externalise knowledge - for example using mobile devices - become available). Learning elimination is often corrupted by education where, for example, someone intending to create 'useful stuff' ends up creating educational modules instead.

People Change: this is the only true sense of learning and comprises, in essence, experience design. People are changed by their reactions to the world, and by experiences that have some affective consequence. Often (though not exclusively) this means ‘learning by doing’ since what we do ourselves typically has the greatest personal impact (although watching another person make a terrible mistake can also be impactful).

If we wish to change people therefore, our work is to design the kinds of experiences that will do that – in practice this is often challenges.

Today, almost everything we describe as 'learning' is in fact 'education'. We could easily get a lot better at doing learning elimination, and it would be nice to see people start doing 'people change' well - i.e. in a more scientific, less 'magical' fashion.

Image: Ben Iwara