Sep/091
Surviving the skills-learning labyrinth
How do you and your staff learn new skills? And what can be done to make it quicker and easier to learn those needed skills? One answer is to explore the patterns in the skills-learning process.
On the surface, each skill is different, and different for every person; yet there are also patterns in the learning-process that are the same for every skill. The most common view, perhaps, is that skills-learning occurs in a linear sequence, with identifiable periods of practice needed to achieve distinct levels of skill:
- pick up the basics (typical: 0~10hrs)
- start out as a trainee (typical: 10~100hrs)
- learn a bit more as an apprentice (typical: 100~1000hrs)
- apply the skill as an independent journeyman (typical: 1000~10000hrs)
- achieve acknowledged mastery (typical: at least 10000hrs)
Whilst that’s largely true, the learning-process within each of those overall stages is nothing like a simple linear progression. Instead, thinking side-wise, it follows a pattern that’s more like the classic seven-turn single-path labyrinth found in ancient Crete and many other cultures around the world.
The skills-labyrinth
There’s only one path in a labyrinth: as long as we do keep going all the way, we’ll achieve the end-point – in this case, mastery of the skill.
In colloquial English labyrinth is generally synonymous with maze, but many contemporary scholars observe a distinction between the two: maze refers to a complex branching puzzle with choices of path and direction; while a single-path (unicursal) labyrinth has only a single, non-branching path, which leads to the center. A labyrinth in this sense has an unambiguous through-route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate.
So in principle, “not difficult to navigate”. But despite the simplicity, there are all too many opportunities to get lost along the way… So the following is a brief summary of the various stages in the journey through the skills-learning labyrinth, using traditional names for each respective phase.
(prelude) Beginner’s Luck
Starting from Beginnings, we move almost immediately to a point where we seem to have a kind of mastery – but only for a moment. We often succeed, in fact, because we know so little about what we’re doing – which itself can be a source of many difficulties further down the track. We then have an explicit choice: to back out, avoiding any commitment to the skill; or ask “How did I do this?” – and start on the Journey.
(1: Third loop) Control
This phase emphasises Training, moving slowly towards the Apprentice stage. Much of the time the focus will be on rules – the ‘Simple’ domain, in Cynefin terms – and on analysis – the Cynefin ‘Complicated’ domain. Those rules and analyses do seem to give a sense of control, though it’s nothing like the ‘instant mastery’ we achieved back at the very beginning. Yet every now and then things seem to break down – the ‘best-practice’ rules somehow don’t work for us, in our own specific context – and it becomes clear that we are part of the process. At some point, then, we must change direction, and look inwards. Until this point, everything we’ve done should (in principle, at least) have been the same for everyone; this change in direction is also the moment at which the practice changes to a true personal skill.
(2: Second loop) Self
In this circuit we explore our own involvement in the process – the parts of the skill that are specific to us alone. Often there there’s an new emphasis on patterns, on emergence – the Cynefin ‘Complex’ domain. But despite the increasing excperience, and despite knowing more – and having to face challenges of our own that we now need to address – we find our mastery seems to be getting steadily worse. The further we move along this path, the worse our skill will seem to get – until eventually it seems no better than that of a rank Beginner. At that point, it seems self-evident that looking at self was the wrong way to go: so we change direction, trying to revert to ‘the Rules’ to get our skills back on track.
(3: First loop) Survival
This doesn’t do what we expected. The turn-round takes us outward, not inward; far from bringing us back to Control, it takes us to the Cynefin domain ‘Chaos’… Although ‘the Rules’ haven’t changed, we have – and it’s all too easy here to fall into the dreaded ‘sophomore slump‘. In particular, there’ll have been a key personal shift, from ‘unconscious incompetence’ to ‘conscious incompetence’: but an unfortunate side-effect of that increased awareness is that we can now see that ‘incompetence’ – hence it will often seem that nothing works. Stuck on the outer – in several senses – this can seem like a struggle for survival, an endless cycle of “practice, practice, more #!%*&%*! practice”. And comparisons with others only make it worse: everyone seems better at this than we are. This is the worst stage of the Labyrinth, and by far the longest… and as with the previous loop, the longer it goes on, the worse that feeling gets.
(key-point) Dark Night of the Soul
Then comes a key point – classically the day before the exam, or just before (or after) the presentation to the Board – where we’re brought face to face with our apparent incompetence. We realise we’re further away from mastery than when we first started: seems we’re not just worse at this than a Beginner, some raw recruit, we’re no good at all… Traditionally described as the ‘Dark night of the soul‘. this bleak moment of despair can also be called the “Oh, @#!* it!” point.
- It’s crucial to understand here that this period of despair is a normal and necessary stage of the skills-learning process – a crescendo of ‘conscious incompetence’ that is the gateway to the beginning of ‘conscious competence’.
Whilst the despair is all too real, and may well seem as if it will last forever, there is a way through – if we can find the strength to keep going. The danger here is that if we give up at this point, walk straight on and break out of the Labyrinth – as the steep turn encourages us to do – we lose everything we’ve gained, except for a large dose of disillusion… Instead, the key is to trust – ‘to listen to the heart’ – and choose to care about the skill for its own sake rather than for any extrinsic reason. By accepting that we know we don’t know and can’t know – a return to the Cynefin core domain of Disorder, a “surrender to the ‘cloud of unknowing’ and the ‘cloud of forgetting’”, in traditional terms – there’s a sudden breakthrough, a change as fast as that at the beginning: from Chaos we suddenly find ourselves almost at the centre once more. A brief moment of calm: then the Journey continues, changing direction again.
(4: Fourth loop) Caring
Here, for the first time, our effective skill at last extends beyond the best of training – though it’s been a long haul to get here. It also never falls back below that level, as if at least this level of skill has become ingrained into our very being. But there’s another important twist, because, as indicated by the current scientific research on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivators, the usual external ‘carrot and stick’ motivators – promises of reward, or threat of punishment – that pushed us to succeed at the Training levels not only cease to work here, but often make things worse, damaging the quality of decision-making and the like. (In that sense, banks’ bonus-schemes were almost certainly a primary cause of the current global financial crisis.) What does work is caring: finding value in the work itself, and what it means in terms of personal and shared values. So to go further into the skill, we need to care about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and care about the skill for its own sake: in effect, “a commitment of the heart as well as of the head”.
(5: Seventh loop) Meditation
At another key point, the quiet euphoria of the previous stage fades as a new focus comes to the fore. This is a different form of observation and self-observation which could be described as ‘thinking about feeling’ – a kind of meditation, a deep, often intense and personal absorption in the work and its processes, yet at the same time seemingly almost detached from it, as if observing from the outside. This sense of engagement in the context is essential for successful action in the Cynefin domain of true Complexity. For a while – and especially to outsiders – this may well seem like mastery: yet there’s actually still quite a way to go before we get there.
(6: Sixth loop) Mind
In yet another disorienting shift of perspective, ‘thinking about feeling’ becomes ‘feeling about thinking’, as the previous changes in practice become embedded at a much more visceral level. For some skills this will literally be ‘embodied’, as in the development of ‘mechanics’ feel’, or the subtle delicacy of touch so essential to true musicianship. In the ‘knowledge worker’ skills that are more common in the business context, this would be embodied more as the deep-learning expressed in an experienced manager’s intuitive grasp of a complex real-time business process, a product-designer’s ability to elicit customers’ real unspoken needs, a trader’s test and trust in hunches and ‘gut-feelings’ about the subtle ebbs and flows of the market. This kind of awareness and sensitivity is essential to work well in what Cynefin describes as the Chaotic domain – the domain of inherent uncertainty, the salesman’s ‘market of one’, this person, unique, right here, right now. The mind here helps us make the link, back through principles and patterns to everyday practice, though in a way that sometimes seems quite opposite to the way we used the mind when – so long ago – we thought we were in Control.
(7: Fifth loop) Communication
Another mode of thought comes through, to provide reflection and review between sessions of practice – typified by techniques such as the US Army’s deceptively simple After Action Review. Sometimes it may seem as if the skill-level is falling once more – an apparent echo of the struggle back at the Survival stage – but in fact this impression arises solely because we’re paying more attention to the fine-detail of the work. To help us learn more, and also to challenge us to greater competence, we’re also likely to need mutual support from and with our peers – a community of like-minded people with similar skills and similar concerns and interests. The other key theme of communication here is that of helping others to find their own skill. Often this will spring from a kind of altruism: the renewed self-doubt, though much quieter than that in the Survival stage, leads to a sense that even if we ourselves may never reach the pinnacle of mastery, we can perhaps do so by proxy, through helping others to reach it in our stead. Yet this activity of educating others also helps us in our own process of reflection: it’s often said that the last stage of learning is to teach it to others. The result, usually unexpected, unheralded, and without any warning…
(postlude) Mastery
…is that we discover that we’ve reached mastery of this specific skill. Yet here we also find that the skills-learning labyrinth has an even stranger twist: it’s recursive, nested, fractal, in that the same overall pattern occurs simultaneously on many different levels. We can be struggling with the Survival level in one skill, or one part of a skill, whilst also experiencing the elation of Beginner’s Luck, the quiet of Meditation, the information-overload of Control and the despair of the Dark Night of Soul in others, all at the same time. Hence plenty of opportunities for confusion, for losing one’s way even in such a simple structure with only one path.
There’s also a social dimension in this. With each circuit, the path alternates from clockwise to counter-clockwise, with the result that everyone on the immediately parallel path – usually either one step ‘later’ or ‘earlier’ – will seem to be going the opposite direction. On top of this, earlier skill-levels will often seem ‘better’ – closer to mastery – than later ones: things seem to get steadily worse as we go onward yet outward from Control to Self to Survival, for example. So others will often try to ‘help’ by telling us we’re going the wrong way, or that we’re doing the wrong things; and we’ll no doubt do the same for them. And even though our immediate cohort would in principle be facing the same way as us, they’re just as likely as we are to be confused by all of this – so they’re likely to ‘help’ us in the wrong ways, too. Tricky…
Learning each new skill takes us into the labyrinth all over again: the tangled, twisted, tortuous path that at times can seem torturous too. Yet in the end, there’s just one simple rule to help us achieve mastery in any new skill: all we have to do is work with whatever comes up at each moment, and keep going, keep going, one step at a time.
Aug/093
The rise of the business anarchist
If you work in a large organisation, no doubt you’ll have analysts everywhere; you may well be one yourself. You know who they are, what they do, what part they play: financial analysts, business analysts, process analysts, quality analysts and the like, keeping track of activity, performance, change.
But what about your business anarchists? Do you know who they are, what they do, what part they play, in managing the overall needs of the business? And how much your business depends on them?
And no, I’m not joking: every business does have a real need for its anarchists, every bit as much as its need for its analysts. For example, take a look at the list of ‘Six Essential Skills for Exponential Times‘, by brand consultant and social-media strategist Michelle Tripp (and also expanded on by Burton Group consultant Mike Rollings in his post ‘What to do when waking out of an EA induced coma‘):
- Skill #1: Rule-breaking – “Rule breakers will be ready to consider possibilities that others are told ‘don’t make sense’ or ‘aren’t the way things are done around here.’”
- Skill #2: Entrepreneurial – “Seeking out new opportunities and new ways of connecting and creating … finding them even when there isn’t an available mentor or an established path.”
- Skill #3: Self-Educating – “More proactive than ever in learning independently and not relying on structured programs … don’t sit back and wait to be taught … searching for information and charting their own educational course.”
- Skill #4: Bonding – “Bonding will be a matter of how much value you can provide to the people you’ve promised it to. … Those bonds can be through adding value to people’s lives through technology, information, guidance, validation, or friendship.”
- Skill #5: Revolutionary – “Revolutionaries are at the forefront, creating the future. … Brains that thrive on change, innovation and invention, high information uptake, and leveraging technologies are geared for the future.”
- Skill #6: Visionary – “Everything is changing faster than ever. … Having the skill of vision allows you to imagine what’s possible, imagine what’s next, and predict the needs and values of tomorrow.”
In short, the skills of thinking side-wise.
These aren’t the skills that we would expect from an analyst: far from it, in fact. In Cynefin terms, the tasks of an analyst sit squarely in the squarely in the domain of the ‘Complicated’ – calm, calculated, everything according to the rules. Which works just fine as long as everything stays much the same. But when the world changes, becomes uncertain – when we move into the Cynefin domain of the ‘Chaotic’, where the assumptions that underpin the analyst’s so-certain rules no longer apply – those analyst-skills may well be worse than useless, giving us nominal ‘right answers’ to what turn out in practice to be the wrong questions. That’s when we need a very different set of skills, to find out what questions we really need to ask. That’s when we need those skills above; that’s when we need people who are comfortable with the chaos and confusion of change. That, in short, is when we need our business-anarchists.
Don’t worry: we’re not talking about ‘kiddies-anarchy’ here – pointless disruption for disruption’s sake, or the classic student stupidity of “all property must be liberated, but don’t you dare touch my stuff!”. There’s no discipline there, no awareness of personal responsibility in a complex social context. Instead, each of those skills above have their own distinct disciplines, and, like the analysts’ skills, will rely on many years’-worth of experience to do well. The catch is that, as the Cynefin model demonstrates, the business-anarchist’s disciplines and experience are structurally different from those of the analyst – so if we try to measure them in the same terms as for the analyst, we’ll be in deep trouble straight away.
What we need from an analyst is depth of experience, in what marketers would call a vertical domain. Analysts are specialists – many years of practice in a single domain, steadily developing their skills and, especially, their speed at the work. As Cynefin shows, the core tactic is ’sense / analyse / respond’, and the key driver is a kind of ‘outer truth’, with that ‘truth’ identifiable in concrete, repeatable terms. In that sense, the analyst’s performance is relatively easy to measure, and the tasks easy to monitor, too.
But what we need from an anarchist is breadth of experience – horizontal rather than vertical. Anarchists are generalists – many years of practice at connecting across multiple domains, cross-fertilising, creating conversations between them, linking different ideas and experiences via analogy and metaphor. Yet here the key drivers are principles or values, and, as Cynefin shows, the core tactic is ‘act / sense / respond’ – we have to do something to shake things up enough to sense what’s going on and which way to go. So performance is hard to measure, because there are no clear rules to measure against; and tasks are difficult to predefine, too, because by its nature much of the work deals with inherent uncertainty. Tricky…
Generalists are the ‘glue’ that hold the organisation together: without them, there would be no end-to-end processes, nothing of practical use towards the organisation’s aims. But another problem here is that the generalist’s experience in any single domain will necessarily be less than those of an equivalent specialist who’s worked only within that one domain: so the generalist will almost always come off worst in any single skill-for-skill comparison – often leading to some very misleading performance measures. Worse, if most of our measures are ‘vertical’ (as they usually are in large organisations), then, according to those measures, the more that generalists do their real work of ‘horizontal’ connection, the less they’ll appear to do – which again can lead to some very misleading ideas about performance, with less-skilled generalists appearing to do more work than the most experienced ones. Tricky indeed…
So when do you need those business-anarchists? Who on your existing staff would be good at this kind of role – or already is? How can you tell the good from the not-so-good? And what support would they need from you to do that role well?
When do you need business-anarchists, and for what purpose?
When the world is certain, you don’t need an anarchist shaking things up: that’s when you’d be better to stick to plain ol’ everyday analysis. But fact is that the business world is not certain – especially not at the present time, where stability is more the exception than the norm, and where the roller-coaster-ness of the ride sometimes seems to get rougher by the day. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to need people who thrive on coping with chaos – the business-anarchists.
The trick here is to identify what changes, and what doesn’t – which is where business-architecture and enterprise-architecture would come into the picture, because those are key tools to help you tell the difference. Where things don’t change, or don’t change much – and there’s still a lot of those, even in the most innovative business – stick to the analysis: don’t rock the boat just for the sake of doing so. Efficiency will always matter; so will operations excellence. Use statistics and the rest wherever appropriate. But remember that statistical analysis only works well when you’re dealing with large numbers of things that are exactly the same – or supposed to be the same: for example, by definition, Six Sigma makes little sense unless you’re dealing with literally millions of identical events. If the products or tasks have a high degree of inherent variance, or have any significant ‘one-off’ elements, you’ll need to apply anarchist-like approaches to those parts that change.
Who would do this work well?
Look for the natural generalists on your staff: the people who can get interested in anything, and like making connections between different domains, different levels of abstraction, different professions, different people. You need people with both breadth and depth, and intimate knowledge of your industry and context: outside consultants may help, but experienced ‘insiders’ usually have the most to offer.
Natural talents and tendencies may help: for example, people with Myers-Briggs xNxP ‘types’ may tend to think and act in an anarchist mode by nature. But much more important is experience: people need to know ‘the rules’, and know them well, in order to understand how and when and why to bend them to make things work better.
What are the critical success factors?
Analysis depends on the quality of algorithms and data. By contrast, the business-anarchist depends on the clarity of the organisation’s principles and values, to act as the beacon or ‘guiding star’ in conditions of inherent uncertainty. Use a structured framework such as vision, role, mission, goal to aid in anchoring those principles into everyday practice.
As above, experience is a key factor here – especially experience across a wide range of domains, and at every different level of those domains. Unlike analysis, theory alone is not enough here: it also needs to be grounded in practice, in hands-on experience, yet also with enough awareness to be able to break out of the “do it the way we’ve always done it” trap.
And there also needs to be discipline in moving between the domains: a dilettante ’scattergun’ approach to new ideas will not be enough, especially in developing sustainable business-anarchist skills over the longer term. (See here for a ‘cheat-sheet’ on moving between disciplines in a rather different set of skills: the domains may seem strange at first, but the same principles do apply even in everyday business.)
What support do your business-anarchists need from you?
In a context where things are inherently uncertain, we need to make it safe to fail, or at least safe to seem to ‘not-succeed’ in the expected way. Where ‘command and control’ would require everything to be ‘fail-safe’, here we need to allow for safe-fail – for ‘graceful failure’, for practice-space, for fallback to a known recovery condition, and so on. The purpose of an experiment is to learn, to probe into the unknown (the ‘emergent’ domain, in Cynefin terms) so as to arrive at some new understanding – so if we only allow so-called ‘experiments’ that will tell us what we already know, we fail before we start.
You will only get appropriate innovation happening within the business if you make it safe for people to ‘fail’. Simple as that.
Your business-anarchists also need protection in several different senses, often right up at the executive levels:
- business-anarchists must necessarily break the rules: to do their work, they will need official sanction to ‘break the rules’ appropriately
- business-anarchists and other generalists must often bridge across the silos, necessarily breaking through bureacractic boundaries: they’ll often need formal authority to do this
- by definition, cross-functional generalists will usually have multiple reporting-relationships, often skipping over or sidestepping the ‘normal’ hierarchies: they’ll need protection from possibly-disgruntled managers in order to do this
Hence another clear, simple point: you will only gain business value from your business-anarchists and other generalists if you make it safe for them to do their work.
And in the same way that, in Six Sigma and the like, everyone is an analyst, everyone needs to be an anarchist in their own way too. Many innovative companies allocate work-time for everyone to explore their own new ideas and new business practices: India’s Tata Group, for example, allot everyone an hour a day for personal experiments, whilst at Google and 3M it’s the equivalent of a full day each week. Sure, most experiments may well go nowhere: but those that do succeed bring huge returns that repay that ‘wasted’ work-time many, many times over – and it took a real ‘anarchist’ mindset to turned a ‘failed’ experimental glue at 3M into the almost immeasurable business success that is the ubiquitous Post-It® note.
So who are your business-anarchists? And how can you help them do their work, to help create your company’s success? A question that’s worth pondering in practice, perhaps…?