#187 - Learning is not a motivation problem
And two other useful ideas
Learning is not a motivation problem
Execs and human resources leaders often frame employee learning as a motivation problem. If people felt motivated enough, the leaders say, they could learn so much. That the desire to learn invariably turns into higher competence over time is a deep belief. I’ve believed this too. “If I have people who are driven, my problems as a leader would be solved.”
There’s a big assumption hidden in there. We assume that the way people learn is the right way. What if the way they learn reinforces their most deeply held misconceptions?
Common view of learners: The problem is outside. Solve the problem. Learn from it.
Alternative view: I contribute to the problem. Unless I accept the possibility and take steps to identify and weed out the ways I may be holding things up, the problem will remain in some form or the other because I remain in the problem.
Until this awareness is built systemically, employee motivation translates into learning defensiveness. I want to do more things, I want to learn—about the problem, not me of course.
Organizations put a lot of thought into how to make employees feel better about their work and not enough about how to help them think better. Why is that? Org designers believe only if employees were more driven the learning problem would be solved. In a meta way, they don’t know how to examine their own roles and they can’t see how they may be inadvertently contributing to the overall problem.
Note: If you’re interested in understanding this tendency of ours to externalize problems, an excellent short read is the Harvard Business Review piece Teaching Smart People How to Learn by Chris Argyris.
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If you’ve a job making recommendations, this is what you may want to do different
During change, if you can help people see that their prevailing assumptions and beliefs cannot be defended, you're giving them a clearer view of reality. Having shown them this glimpse, if you can help them construct new beliefs more in sync with the new reality, you're empowering them to manage their new worlds. And they'll always be thankful to you.
People, too often, and myself included, stop at the first. They think they've done their job of disabusing others of untenable beliefs. But you've only made someone more aware of their powerlessness if you cannot offer a hand to take them to a place of safety in the new reality.
You're like a doctor telling a patient that their lifestyle is at odds with their current physiological state and that they're at serious risk if they don't make wholesale changes. And then not tell them what changes.
As a business strategist, I have spent a lot of meetings feeding information and recommendations to my decision-maker bosses in the C-suite.
More often than it helped my ego, my suggestions would gather dust.
I thought it was them. Until I understood it was not.
If you're someone who relates to my described experience, let me tell you:
Your job isn't making the best recommendations supported by the best information. If you're doing just that, you're not doing your job.
Your job is to get the best ideas accepted and implemented. For that you need to identify the beliefs of your decision-making stakeholders that may be in the way of what you're asking them to do.
You do this by uncovering their assumptions. It's possible that these assumptions were made before when reality (market, consumer choice, competition, suppliers) was different.
Sometimes reality is so far removed from our mental models that our perceptions are in the realm of fantasy.
Now getting your stakeholders to share their assumptions can be frustrating. They will be defensive; they may not even be able to articulate their assumptions; and so on. So you have to be patient and approach it like a game you're playing to learn, and not to win. Unless you teach yourself to enjoy the game, whatever the result, it'll bruise your ego.
Now you've not just made your recommendations, you've also showed your execs how/why their earlier assumptions may have been getting in the way. You’ve pointed to them the problem with the recipe. It’s meal time, right?
Not yet.
You've just told a bunch of execs who are used to being right that much/some of what they believed in is false. It is disorienting for them to have to part ways with their confidence. They will stumble.
You have to help them take their first steps.
Are you a bee or a botanist?
Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, describes this encounter with a friend:
I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people—and to me, too, I believe. Although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. But at the same time, I see much more in the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There’s beauty not just at the dimension of one centimeter; there’s also beauty at a smaller dimension.
The way a bee sees beauty in a flower is different from the way a botanist sees it.
The bee sees the striking color, it sniffs a fragrant strain in the air, and it knows. A botanist sees all of that and more. She imagines the cells, she imagines the countless evolutionary iterations that have brought this species of plants to this shape and smell.
The way we see people can often be like how a bee sees a flower. It is skin deep. Such beauty can be misleading. It is one-dimensional, really. Making a snap judgment on one dimension is flawed. It gives you the assurance of having arrived at a result that may be way off the mark.
We may not all be experts on people but try a little harder and it may not be impossible to find more dimensions to them. It is not something that many do, so if you do it, others will notice that about you and appreciate you.
Here’s another thing we sometimes miss. In life, we’re both the bee and the flower. We fall for a single dimension as the seeker. We optimize for one dimension as the object of others’ seeking.
The smart one believes that sprucing herself up can make her stand out and give her an advantage over others.
The wise one understands that while she can spruce herself up and be noticed, she should not trust all that she sees because others too are sprucing themselves up for her attention. This two-sided understanding helps her see the world as a botanist, not just as a bee.
Most of us have worked hard to be better bees. Few have stopped to think about what it takes to be a botanist.
Thank you for your time 🙏 I’m a decision-making trainer and coach. I write about better thinking at the intersection of business, career, and life.