The Threat and Opportunity of Lifelong Learning

Our conversations and media are increasingly consumed by the topic of the “future of work.” And, within this topic, one of the buzzwords that has emerged and acquired increasing prominence is “lifelong learning.” The message is that, in a more rapidly changing world, we’re all going to have to abandon the traditional notion of going to school to learn and then going into a career to apply the learning we’ve received.

While this is certainly an important message, I’m deeply troubled by the loose way it’s communicated – it rarely questions our traditional view of learning, it rarely addresses the issue of motivation and it doesn’t systematically explore what’s required to support lifelong learning.

What is learning?
When most people talk about lifelong learning, they’re still locked into very conventional views of learning – it’s about training programs and classes. More sophisticated views may explore how snippets of training programs can be delivered on demand electronically to workers in their workplace.

But, here’s the problem – most of these discussions focus on learning in the form of transmitting existing knowledge. In a more rapidly changing world, existing knowledge becomes obsolete at an accelerating rate. The key to success in that kind of world is to focus on a very different form of learning – creating new knowledge through action by addressing unseen problems and opportunities as they emerge in whatever context is relevant (and context becomes increasingly relevant, see my post on the “contextual age”).

What’s the motivation to learn?
Very few people that talk about lifelong learning focus on a key question: what’s the motivation to learn? Learning requires enormous effort and that effort will need to be sustained over a lifetime.

Sure, we can try to motivate people through fear with the message that, if they don’t sustain their learning efforts, they’ll be increasingly marginalized. Good luck with that. They might invest some effort out of fear, but they’ll never invest the level of effort required to truly excel at learning. Lifelong learning becomes a threat and they’ll be reluctant and resentful.

We can try to provide extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards like higher compensation. That may help, but it will be no substitute for powerful intrinsic motivation. What if people engaged in lifelong learning because they were excited by the opportunity and couldn’t wait until the next challenge that would provide an opportunity to learn more? They’re the ones who will learn fastest and sustain that effort throughout their lives.

What would provide that motivation? Well, I’ve written extensively about the growing importance of the passion of the explorer (see, for example here but be aware that I have many blog posts on the topic of passion, as well as this post that provides a taxonomy of passion). Those who have drawn out and cultivated this specific form of passion, are driven to learn faster throughout their lives – and the learning that excites them the most is addressing challenges and opportunities that have never been addressed before. To be clear, this form of passion is very different from the conventional focus on worker engagement that I discuss here.

But, here’s the rub. All of our institutions are built on a model of scalable efficiency and these institutions are deeply ambivalent about, if not openly hostile to, this form of passion. People with this form of passion have a hard time sticking to the script and the process manual – they get bored easily and they’re often deeply frustrated, seeing so much opportunity to get to higher and higher levels of performance and frustrated by the obstacles in their way. That may be why, at best, our research indicates that only about 13% of the US workforce currently has this passion of the explorer. If we’re truly serious about lifelong learning, we need to change that.

What’s required to support lifelong learning?
Here’s a key observation: no matter how smart any one individual is, that person will learn a lot faster as part of small group of people who share a commitment to getting to higher levels of impact and who form deep trust-based relationships through acting together. If we remain narrowly focused on learning in the form of transmitting existing knowledge, we’ll miss that key insight because it is particularly true if we are looking to create new knowledge through action in addressing unseen problems and opportunities.

At an institutional level, this shifts the focus from individuals to tightly knit workgroups who are working together to find ways to increase impact. At an individual level, it suggests that, once you’ve found your passion, you’ll achieve much greater impact once you are able to connect with a small group of others who share your passion. In fact, people who have the passion of the explorer, naturally coalesce into these small groups committed to learning faster together.

Once these groups come together, they’ll benefit by adopting a set of practices that can help them to accelerate learning and performance improvement. Our research on this front can be accessed here.

And these groups will be much more effective at accelerating their learning and performance improvement if they're provided with environments that are explicitly and systematically designed to accelerate learning and performance improvement. We’ve done a lot of research in this area and were unable to find a single company that has attempted this systematic redesign, although we wrote up the impact achieved by companies that had redesigned slices of the work environment here.

The question is: how can we scale the efforts of these tightknit workgroups and amplify their ability to learn faster together? Well, that requires a fundamentally different culture and institutional model, shifting from our current focus on scalable efficiency to a focus on scalable learning, which we’ve written about here. As part of this, we’re going to have redefine what we mean by work. Today it's viewed as a set of tightly specified and highly standardized set of routine tasks. Instead, we need to focus everyone on work that involves addressing unseen problems and opportunities in ways that can create much more value, something that we’ve written about here. It also requires us to adopt a very different organizational model, something that we call “creation spaces” that we’ve written about here and that can ultimately scale learning well beyond the boundaries of any single institution.

In short, if we’re serious about this, it will require a fundamental transformation of all our institutions. And that’s a challenge, given the powerful immune system and antibodies that exist in all our institutions and that are relentless in mobilizing to crush any attempt at fundamental change. Never, ever under-estimate the power of the immune system In that context, we’ve become strong proponents of a particular approach to organizational transformation that we call scaling the edge.

Before I stop, let me also make an obvious point. If we’re serious about lifelong learning and re-framing learning around the creation of new knowledge through action, it will require us to re-think our educational institutions from the ground up. We’ll need to abandon the model suggesting that school addresses only a specific phase in a person’s life and, once they have their degrees or credentials, can move onto other things. Rather than pushing content to students who are viewed as passive recipients, we’ll need to embrace a pull-based model that focuses on creating environments for people to discover and pursue their passions and helps them to connect with others who share these passions. In short, schools will need to evolve to become life-long talent advisors, developing deep trust-based relationships with individuals and small groups, helping them to accelerate learning and performance improvement throughout their lives.

Bottom line
Yes, we all will need to embrace lifelong learning as a prerequisite for sustained success in a world of mounting performance pressure. But, we’re going to need to embrace it as an exciting opportunity rather than as a burden or threat. To do that, we’re going to need to commit to discover and cultivate the passion of the explorer that resides within all of us and to find ways to integrate that passion into our work.

But, we need to avoid the temptation of many who say that lifelong learning is solely the responsibility of the individual who still needs to find ways to fit into our existing institutions. If we’re truly going to harness the power and potential of lifelong learning, we’re going to have to transform all of our institutions to help people to learn faster and accelerate performance improvement.

The rewards will be enormous. If we get this right, we will create environments where we will all be able to achieve far more of our potential and have far more positive impact on the people around us. And, we’ll foster a set of institutions that for the first time are able to deliver increasing returns to their stakeholders.

Comments

[Reza]

Hi John

In a version of this article that you published on LinkedIn, why did you choose an image of 2 second pit stop (Formula One) for this article? I'm curious. Thank you.

[Heather B]

Mary Meekers 2017 internet trends deck highlighted just how many key skills and capabilities videogamers developed particularly when playing collaboratively. I’ve referred to that many times since as an instance of just how far ‘education’ may need to change, not just in terms of format but also in terms of how the activity is perceived - the issue with gaming switches to one of how to ensure that players recognise and are recognised for their competence. The passion is innate in playing the game!