How Well Do You Learn?

If you’re a little like me, you may think that you are open minded and look for ways to learn things everywhere that you go. When I pause to think about my own learning habits, I easily convince myself that I am open minded and that my learning has led to me having a tremendous sense of reality and understanding of what is going on in the world. I occasionally go so far as to attempt to prove to myself that I am truly a perpetual learner.

I believe that we suffer from an incomplete approach to learning. Much of what we understand about learning was developed and engrained over many years using traditional deductive approaches. Going to school, sitting in tidy rows, listening to speeches and lectures, reading scholarly books and accumulating knowledge was and is the de facto education practice.

At a recent event that I hosted, I was reminded how difficult it was to suspend judgment and opinions of what’s right and what’s wrong with what is being discussed. Fundamentally, I believe that it’s imperative to listen with an open mind in order to seek insights that ultimately bring clarity to issues that we grapple with. Nevertheless, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Try as we might, we often slip into judgment and opinions while at the same time missing most of the opportunity to learn new insights. This is frustrating after the fact, and compromises our ability to learn in the moment.

To offset our inability to listen deeply and make new meaning out of others’ experiences, we need to develop a few techniques to help us learn. I have committed myself to mastering this; although I acknowledge that being a flawless learner in reality is something that one can only approach yet can never arrive as a destination. As I get older and have more learning opportunities (i.e. failures, screw ups and stupid mistakes) under my belt, I have become more comfortable with the notion that I will never know enough – whatever enough is. I think knowledge to the learning individual or learning organization is analogous to money for Dale Carnegie. When Carnegie was asked, “how much money is enough money for a wealthy person?” He is purported to have said, “just a little bit more.”

I think this needs to be carried into our lives and organizations and business as leaders. Enough knowledge, skill and learning in order to be a world class entity can only be satisfied by seeking a little bit more (or perhaps a lot bit more).

I like the way Stanford professor Bob Sutton makes reference to learning and teaching. He states, “It’s important to learn how to convince people as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held in the face of new ideas or creative approaches.”

Back to the event. The events that I host are not the type where “nobody goes anymore because it’s too crowded.” Quite the opposite. I limit the group size to eight so that we can go deeper with some fundamental yet critical topics. At our last event, we explored the challenges of creating high trust relationships. This brought out all kinds of insights that had us all buzzing.

Here are a few things that I learned and would like to share (as if talking to myself):

1) Quiet your mind and listen intently. See how you can apply what is being said to your own situation. If you find yourself going down the road of critiquing others as if trying to help them, you may be running the risk of thinking you know something that they don’t, rather than learning from and building upon what they are sharing.

2) Write stuff down. If you can’t frame it in a way that makes sense to yourself, how are you going to frame it for someone else?

3) Talk about what you have recently learned or are learning. If you don’t create a regular forum for dialog, how can you continue to refine so that you continue to sharpen your competitive advantage.

The overall message here may seem quite simple, but I would suggest to you that being a master of learning is challenging and rigorous work that separates the wheat from the chaff in business.