So let's talk a little bit about how companies actually train or to put it another way, how we learn. There are so many different ways that we can learn and take in information these days. I mean, look at what we're doing here. So yeah, I'm recording these videos, you're listening to them, maybe on your commute, maybe while doing the washing up, perhaps you're on a treadmill, if you're using this just to help you get to sleep, I'm very slightly offended, I will tell you. But broadly there are many ways we can consume it and so it kind of online has opened up a lot of other opportunities. How are companies actually leveraging this, what do we need to do to help our people, to help them build the skills that they need? So various different ways of thinking about learning and development. One way that's very popular, particularly the world of corporate development, is what's known as the 70-20-10 model. So this is the idea that kind of people learn in different ways. And so the idea is about 10% of our learning comes from formal instruction, the kind of thing that we're doing now. About 20% comes from peer learning, hearing ideas and thoughts from the people around us. And about 70% actually comes from just on the job learning, trying things, figuring out what works and figuring out what doesn't. So I mean, if you look into it turns out there's alarmingly little data behind the 70-20-10 rules. So I think there was a survey of managers, and those managers said that, that was how they had learned. If they thought about all the different things that they needed, one survey, everybody picks it up. But in some ways probably the sheer frequency with which this is cited does suggest it at least rings true to people. So I don't want to stake my reputation on these fractions of 10%, 20%, 70%. But they at least tell us that there was kind of these three very different modes of learning, and each of them important in developing people. So let's spend a little bit of time just talking through each of them. Kind of their strengths, what it takes to get this right. So let's take formal instructions. So what we're doing here, somebody kind of taking you through formal set of principles, what we say, some people think, maybe only about 10% of the stuff you really need to know, comes through this. I don't want to quibble with numbers. What's the point in doing it? I think it has some advantages, so it's good for kind of teaching abstract frameworks, kind of some broad scaffolding of ideas, you can then use to learn details. A couple of other things like it's scalable that as I understand it is a slightly classier way of saying it's cheap. That is, you can get one or two people to develop the content and then kind of just roll it out across the large numbers of people, and it is consistent, right? So everybody who's been through the same program, should have learned the same things. So it has those advantages. What does it take to do it? Well, it you've probably found out already, it's surprisingly hard to do this well, particularly in ways that people actually learn and remember. And there's a lot of very depressing research on how people teach, how people learn. I think the reason it's depressing is one of the key results seems to be that what people think is effective teaching, in terms of it's easy to grasp. We get the principles actually leads to some of the least retention, that actually we remember things when we've really had to think them over and struggle. And so when somebody is very good at conveying information, you think, that's interesting, that's entertaining, yep, yep, good. Yeah, it goes straight in, but then it goes straight out again, right? Whereas the more we have to really fight, what on earth is he trying to tell me, in some ways we may actually be more likely then to remember it in the long run, because actually it is that effort that we put into understanding things that actually helps us to hang on to it. So that obviously is why I'm so confusing. It's a clever strategy of my, well generally I think what the research suggests, is that because of this we tend to learn partly when we frequently revisit the same materials that keep coming back to a building on that level by level. because that way we're both kind of trying to grasp the higher level principle, but also spending some time consolidating what we learn before and really kind of effortful recall. So you're seeing a lot of these courses, there are a lot of quizzes, do we really cared that much whether you've, how much of this, you've learned, you care for you. But a lot of the point of these quizzes is just forcing you to think back what was it we did before? So continually getting people to kind of reconsider what they did, continually getting them to try and remember that actually embeds the memories. And so, having that kind of continually visiting, getting people to try and remember stuff that seems to be what's most effective and actually making this instruction stick. And some kind of formal instruction is one part of how people learn. Second part, like I say, is this peer learning, so actually learning from those around you, I think it can be a valuable for a couple of reasons. One is, I think if you're building cultural values, trying to get people to really reflect on what's important to them, to understand what's important to other imbibe these values, very hard to do from a video, right? Actually being around people, sharing ideas, sharing values with others is important. And so I think for some of this kind of culture building that's when you tend to have on programs that really need to bring people together. Another reason why peer learning is valuable is yeah, it's often a great way of solving problems. So if I'm having a problem with my work, being able to talk to other people who might have encountered this in the past, is really useful because often they'll have solutions that I haven't thought about. It can be very good for this kind of practical learning. I think this is a place where the internet has really been very helpful, right? Because it used to be for this, I could talk to the person sitting there and I could talk to the person sitting there and maybe somebody across the room, but the number of people I could really reach out to get their ideas was reasonably small. These days, we have all sorts of tools like message boards, and web sites where people can post queries and get answers from people all over. You see people posting, if they have a really great way to a process, they can post a little YouTube video to an internal site or something, and then other people can look at that and use that to learn. So I think learning from others is a valuable way of developing knowledge, and the opportunities for doing that kind of across much more far flung sites. It's much greater than it was before. The elephant in this room though is experiential learning. This idea that most of what we learn, that's really a value, we learned from doing things ourselves on the job. There's a lot of evidence from this in the labor market, and if you think about how you get hired, one thing people are interested in is your education, but they're usually a lot more interested in your work experience. What have you done? Why do they care? Because there's a sense that what you've actually done is what you've learned. That as we try to ask, we figure out what's hard about them in doing. So we start to build routines and ideas for solving those problems. We create contextual details, right? So the kind of stuff that I'm talking about somewhat abstract high level, how should you think about this problem? How we solve it in this particular situation, we need to know a little bit about the situation as well. So we learn those situations as well from actually doing things. Now, you might look at this and go great. So you just told me that training was very expensive but, people just learned through experience. Then I just need to tell them go do the job, right? And then they'll learn. So the train is basically free. Maybe this is a lot easier than you're telling me it is. You want to be a bit careful, because when you look at how people learn from experience, they learn by struggling, right? People learn by doing something they haven't done before. I'm finding it really hard, finding it really hard trying out various different things until they work out the solution, okay? So the problem with learning by doing is it's costly in a different way. It's costly kind of low productivity. And yeah, I mean just this weekend I was at a store where the woman on the checkout was clearly new, didn't really understand how little work, had to keep asking the person next to her. On the one had great sympathy for the woman who was struggling with all of these things. I mean this is a tough job. I don't think I could have done it particularly easily. It's a tough way to be trained, on the other hand, slightly irritated with the store, right? Because, they're not providing a great customer experience and you kind of think, well maybe you could have trained her at another time. And so the challenge with learning by doing is it is associated with low performance, while people are learning. Some organizations will try and fix this by having like fake stores, will have a mock up of the entire store, where people can go and go through all of these processes and practice serving fake customers, and all of those sorts of things, so that they can do that learning by doing without incurring that performance penalty. Obviously though, again that is time that you're paying them, when they're not actually doing the work. The other reason why experiential learning is not kind of free money is, tends to require feedback and reflection and you tend to get that from coaches, right? So in order to be effectively learning from experience, I have to be able to understand what I'm doing well, what I'm doing poorly, and I've got to be able to think about what might be other strategies that I could use. Having somebody I can talk to around this is really valuable. And so this is expensive and managerial time, you need managers, coaches, who can do this. Again, my favorite example with a lot of this development stuff will come back to Chipotle. We talked about how they invest a lot in general skills training. They also invest a lot in developing their managers because they believe in promotion from within. And so if you're a store manager, if you're a really good store manager, what happens? How do you get promoted? Do you go to kind of running a whole bunch of stores? No, they actually promote you to restaurateur where you're still running your store. But in addition, you're expected to be coaching people in a bunch of other stores, and your bonuses actually tied to how well you do, getting those people promoted to the next job. And so they recognize that getting this experiential learning really working requires heavy investment in coaching people. And so overall there's a variety of ways that we can train people, we can do it through formal instruction, we can do it through peer learning, we can do it through experiential learning. Each of them really train different things, none of them are free. And so getting the most out of each of them, requires us really to sit down and think, how do I structure this in such a way that people take on information, take the right lessons, and really learn them? But when you do that right, it can be very effective and building up that organizational capacity you need, to be effective in your work.
