How to keep learning
Instruction. I almost universally hate receiving it and yet I often can’t resist giving it. It’s a quintessential adulting dilemma. How do we learn what to do when we actually despise being told what to do? How do we tell people what they need to know, without telling them what to do? It’s something (being told what to do) that I will go to almost comic lengths to avoid. And yet, I want to learn. The desire to acquire new knowledge and skills is a part of my personality that I seem to have very little control over. I want to know stuff. I want to understand the world. It’s a part of my identity that I hold on to, that defines me still, even as an adult. But I don’t always want to learn what I probably should want to learn, and I almost certainly don’t want to learn what you think I should learn. You can call me rebellious or difficult but I’m probably just human. We are driven by a desire to learn new things and, just as strongly, by a desire to be autonomous.
Photo by Kush Dwivedi on Unsplash
In the world of work, we tend to think about learning in two distinct ways: as a way to turn ourselves into better, high-performing products; or as a way to turn our teams into better, high-performing products. Consequently, adult learning is often couched in mysterious terms. You’ve either got it or you don’t. Some of us are lifelong learners, some of us are not. The question often turns to ways to manipulate or trick adults into learning, how to create circumstances so effortless that adults learn by default or by accident. But adult learning is not just something you need to do to get a better job, or a promotion or to brag to your friends that you can now kind of understand spoken French. What if, as renowned American psychologist, Carl R. Rogers noted, successful adult learning is about seeing ourselves and our teams as a process rather than as a product, and more specifically, as a process of becoming?
But what does a process of becoming mean? As adults, we have a self-concept. Each member of our team has a self-concept. We want our team members to be responsible for their decisions and for their own lives and yet we forget that they also need to be responsible for what and how they learn. As functioning adults, we resent and resist situations where we feel like others are imposing their will on us. In his seminal book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire argues that the minute people walk into training or education contexts they tend to return to the conditioning of their school experiences, fold their arms and say something like, “teach me, then”. This creates a deep and uncomfortable conflict within us. We give up our power. In this situation, the learner is by default dependent on the teacher or facilitator and we all hate being dependent. For adult educational contexts and learning experiences to work, we need to clearly understand the link between what it is we are learning and a better future version of ourselves. It must be deeply relevant to who we are becoming as people, and how we hope to function in our life and work. As purveyors of learning, we need to make better cases for why learning matters and develop learning that really does matter.
So how do I learn without being told what to do? I take responsibility for my own learning. But how?
Below are some key ways to improve how you learn as an adult, without being told what to do:
Participate in a knowledge community. Knowledge communities are cool things. I feel like all workplaces should cultivate them. In essence, they are another form of social media but better, with the big difference being that social media tends to lack any form of moderation or outcome orientation. A successful knowledge community knows where it’s going.
Develop problem-solving cultures and a problem-solving mindset. Seek out thorny problems and find people who you can work with interdependently to help solve them. Learn from other people and solve the problem.
Look for uncertainty and complexity. Seek it out. Look for unfamiliar situations, angles, perspectives, and dimensions. This builds capability and develops adaptive competencies, things such as agency, collaboration, adaptability, and flexibility.
Use coaching to foster a culture of collaboration and curiosity. We can also use coaching principles in our private lives (but please no coaching of significant others), by cultivating meaningful relationships with different types of people, taking on constructive feedback and working on our communication skills.
And I think perhaps the most important of all, my principle, always be guided by your own sense of curiosity and discovery. Follow your nose. Ask questions. All the questions.