Learning Readiness, Capability, and Brain Savviness

As an invited speaker with a group of business leaders, I was sharing our (www.TeamTelligent.com) perspective on talent management.  As expected with tough audiences, one of the business leaders asked, “In two words, what do you do?”  The two words that popped out of my mouth were: “Learning Engineering.”

Engineers design, plan, and build according to specific standards and calculations; it struck me that the term was just right.  We are engineering learning for individuals and organizations to enable them to achieve their goals and purpose.  By helping organizations provide a way to profile leaders, managers, and individual contributors essential to perform, we help individuals at all of those levels understand what is required for a given organization.  By facilitating individual learning paths through a career, we are engineering learning to leverage individual talents and to build capability for their career futures.

Then one of the business leaders said, “I will not limit you to two words, but what do you think is essential about learning and why does it seem such a challenge to get people where they need to be?” After suggesting that lots of dissertations and books have explored this topic, I said, “I’ll share with you what I’ve noticed of the conditions for and actions related to how others learn. There are three factors that seem to me to be always present.” 

Learning readiness is essential.  By that I mean the individual is open, questioning, curious, and has an “and” perspective.  Readiness is often preceded by some kind of event that was uncomfortable, difficult, or jarring.  They failed at something or received feedback that their behavior was difficult. Sometimes the jarring event is an insight that the person he or she believed themselves to be isn’t the person people characterize when they talk about him or her.  Without readiness very little learning occurs.  In a sense, readiness is the condition that says the person is willing to explore and understand, and to tweak or change behavior to be more aligned with how they want to be.  The lens is that learning requires an “and” rather than a “but” about the new behavior.  For example, “I need to learn to be assertive and empathetic.”

Learning capability is ultimately about degrees of complexity, risk tolerance, specific learning tactics, and reality testing that an individual can do.  Complexity relates to the depth and range of analysis an individual does about the thing he or she wants to learn.  Some things are easy, and many are hard to learn about and adjust in oneself.  Using various tactics like accessing mentors, trial and error testing, researching, getting feedback, and being aware of the emotional energy that behavior triggers, promotes a deep focus on learning.  If an individual is tolerant of risk, he or she is willing to explore a broader range of possibilities; less tolerance of risk means that a narrow path will be followed to limited learning.  While being imaginative and creative is part of learning, magical thinking isn’t. Reality testing has a direct effect on learning capability; the learner must be able to monitor and measure with as much clarity about real time consequences of personal change as possible.

Being brain savvy is vital to be an effective learner.  Learners who understand that the brain works as follows: learning is gradual, requires repetition and reinforcement, needs activity and practice, and intentional stimulus management—don’t try to learn calculus while listening to rock music.  In brief, learning requires work and focus. These are principles of how the brain operates for a change to occur.  Deep in the brain’s operating system are strongly held beliefs about who we are, what we are about, and how we are seeing ourselves move through time and place. If this deep programming is at odds with a learning you are aware you need to integrate, you are pushing against a deep commitment about yourself.  These commitments are as robust and immune to shifting as the hard wiring “rules” of personal change.  For these reasons, a serious learner knows he or she will need to work persistently to make a shift.

It doesn’t really matter if personality patterns are deeply ingrained, learning requires readiness, capability, and brain savviness.  Yes, personality may affect how an individual approaches these factors of learning; however, no personality pattern can defeat these factors.  When we say self-awareness is essential to effectiveness, we mean you need an understanding of how your current behavior affects others if you are ever going to understand what changes may make a difference—regardless of personality patterns.  And self-awareness means you take yourself seriously, using your talents and your capabilities to learn effectively.