It is important for L&D to concern ourselves with creating a lively intellectual climate in our organizations. An active, intellectually engaged culture matters because it contributes directly to the bottom-line, to expertise generated within the organization, to value created for employees and stakeholders alike, as well as to creativity, innovation and research, to name just a few areas of benefit.
In my previous post, I had raised some concerns about the learning culture in organizations and the considerations that L&D has so far failed to address. This time I’d like to focus on the choices that we in L&D make (sometimes unconsciously and at times deliberately), that have the effect of cueing people to be intellectually passive.
To begin with, there’s simply the most embarrassing, glaring omission: we don’t teach people how to learn. We don’t teach employees how to be intellectually engaged. Yet, according to the World Economic Forum, upskilling and reskilling were the priority focus of L&D programs in 2021. L&D had itself identified, in the LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report for 2021, that the top 2 skills for organizations were resilience and digital fluency (i.e. technological skills). But both require the ability to be a good learner, no? In 2022’s Workplace Learning Report, they mention ‘championing’ the notion of learning being the foundation of any great endeavor. So, isn’t most (if not all) of that effort going to be an elaborate and expensive waste of time if we don’t build a strong foundation of how to learn?
Okay, maybe some of this can be done through indirect teaching. Do we, though? Look at these practices in our formal trainings that negate active learning and foster a passive mindset…
We do not let learners infer, to work at understanding the smallest thing in any course. We consider it good course design to spell out everything including the blindingly obvious. But it’s good for a learner to use their brains and draw out reasonable inferences to construct meaning and make sense! Similarly, we even try to eliminate slightly difficult yet very specific, technical vocabulary. We consider that nobody should have to look up anything while learning… what, and risk incidental learning that could make them stronger in their field?! Technically precise language is important for expertise and is distinct from sophisticated language fluency. In the interests of avoiding the second, we have also successfully stripped out the first. There’s a balance to be struck between being clear and treating learners like they’re incapable of adult levels of comprehension.
We oversimplify our training designs by making knowing binary. One either knows or not, one has demonstrated the skill or not. There is no degree of knowing and degree of skill demonstration in a course. When is the last time you saw a knowledge check or assessment that highlighted the bad, good and better way to do something?
Our resources hardly ever include aspects for further study and growth. We do not point to a performance rubric and say that’s the development to aim for. We never mention good industry journals to start reading as part of professional development. We leave no room for further growth because, ‘by the end of this course you will know’. Travelling a learning path has got to mean more than collecting shiny pieces of information with the discernment of a magpie!
Speaking of performance rubrics, we also don’t create cultures or systems that truly reward learning, teaching, and knowledge sharing. There is a token mention in some performance appraisal parameters of the fluffier cousin, “mentoring”. But when is the last time we taught and formally mapped out what even degrees of coaching expertise look like? Where do we clearly, with evidence and reference to a standardized scale, discuss in a performance appraisal how well someone teaches or learns on the job?
Ah. How well someone learns. We should be talking about how to make coaching or teaching someone less burdensome for the expert – how can we go in better prepared and what mindset should we have? What attitude should we seek expertise with? The more effort-intensive it seems to teach someone, the less willing their colleague will be to embark on the task when already overburdened and short of time. It shouldn’t be the experts’ responsibility to spoon-feed a passive novice. Why do we perpetuate such a dynamic as the norm?
We have so much dependency on on-the-job development particularly for employees with work experience. When is the last time that we in L&D stepped in to see how the debriefing of experiences happens, and how to evaluate it? How to structure an experience for increased sense-making and development? The employee can simply coast through an experience, assuming that somewhere some learning will magically have happened, and we’re happy to share that assumption because it exonerates us from having to do anything. We choose to be uninvolved.
We do not ever address teaching veteran practitioners how to explicate, or to learn metacognition techniques to validate, structure, organize and share their experiential knowledge. Seniors are expected to mentor their subordinates. Yet every organization has seasoned practitioners who claim to “just know”. How useful is a nebulous, unverifiable claim to expert knowing? How much does it encourage us to really grapple with what we know or don’t, when the organizational culture can blindly accept such claims?
Speaking of environment and culture, let’s cast a passing glance at IP and similar elements that prompt stealth and internal competition. These are antithetical to knowledge sharing. How do we reconcile or counter the effects of these? We have chosen to not address these matters as well.
And then let’s look to time pressures and work culture. We should be helping shape larger organizational work culture because time pressures lead to reduced organizational citizenship behaviors. If you feel like you’ve less time, you’ll be less willing to share, teach and learn.
If we want employees who are intellectually active, curious, reflective and generous, we cannot script the shallowest of expectations for them to meet. Whether we do so deliberately to pick winnable battles or because we weren’t even aware of the choices we made, the effect is the same.
Our ‘default’ choices set up and perpetuate a culture of passivity about learning.
Written by Mridula R., Principal Learning Consultant @ Learnnovators
