Learning is the Triumph of Bravery

Recently I was writing on an article about patterns of the learning organisation. An important pattern my co-author Allan Kelly and I were talking about revolved around fear - it seemed to be one of the biggest obstacles to overcome in an organisation to enable learning. This got me thinking - how is it that we carry around so much fear with us? I have seen people go completely numb out of fear! Maybe someone will think they are incompetent if they speak, or ask a question. But more often, the fear is about loss of position - what if what I say offends someone in power and I lose my position? What if I make a mistake, and then I get blamed or seen as less? What if I am “found out”?

How is that productive for anyone? But maybe more importantly - what will that do to us and our ability to learn and grow, critically think - our major advantage over AI? Honestly, I don't have the answers to these questions, even though it is tempting to find easy solutions. But I wish to share some personal stories and reflections on this topic.

The 20 years of experience guru

I sometimes have these conversations with senior developers on waterfall vs agile. Well, I am an agile coach, so I have to occasionally get challenged on how terrible agile is and get confronted with some myths. One big argument is - well, by pushing to get everything done quickly, and in small batches, we sacrifice quality. I find this to be an extremely delicate situation. I am sitting there with someone with 20+ years of experience who hasn’t realised that the only way to actually can have speed and quality at the same time, by building in quality and speed (that can very well be the only way to actually have quality over time). Now, I need to find a good way to introduce this person to this new way of doing things, and, in many cases, I get confronted with reasons why “well, we can’t do this here” rather than, “oh, cool, I really want to try this now”. It takes a lot of courage to actually admit that after a 20 year career, we might need to start from 0 again to be able to do good, modern engineering. it’s much easier to cling to the excuses and the “I’ve seen it fail so often” mentality.

Bad apple you’d say?

Now, is the person to blame? I would say - definitely NO. It is the job of leadership to invest in their people, and make sure they are able to keep up. Without exception, I have heard this line of thinking only from people who weren’t given enough opportunities to learn and bring in new learnings “back home” enough.

Leadership and learning - taking on knowledge debt?

It’s Leadership’s job to make sure learning is a top concern and not an afterthought. Companies that dismiss regular training as too expensive, or find reasons to exclude people from learning opportunities, usually struggle. They are saving on the wrong end - they are taking on a new kind of knowledge debt - the knowledge you decide not to acquire today, you will have to pay back later, with interest. I say knowledge debt deliberately — knowledge is the asset, the capability a person carries. Learning is just the process of acquiring it. When companies skip training, they're not just skipping a process — they're preventing the asset from ever forming. Over time, if you don’t repay your debt, it quickly becomes too hard to bear - it gets harder and harder to attract the right talent and as time goes, the competition that invested in acquiring knowledge is now suddenly faster in adopting this new shiny technology and blasts us away - yes, right now our prime example is AI.

But if that’s not enough to scare you, I have an even scarier thought - maybe, just like with going bankrupt, there is a point where you can never start repaying knowledge debt, even if you shifted your strategy 180 degrees overnight.

What, why? Can’t we just at any time simply start learning again?

People who haven’t been training their learning muscles for years and years, might find it hard to suddenly have to learn and face all the consequences of being beginners once more. The reluctance to learn isn't always stubbornness - it’s both loss of position, feelings of vulnerability and frankly, lost habits and fear of it showing. Especially for the people who have grown older and might fear their age might make them poor at learning new things - it can be truly daunting to suddenly shift.

The engineer I described earlier isn't resistant to learning — he's someone crushed under 20 years of compounded knowledge debt, and it wasn't his doing alone. He could have thrived and led people to a new era - if only the company didn’t save at the wrong end. Of course, the issue isn’t only systemic, but we often mistake it for purely personal and say the person is just too proud, stuck in his/her ways, rigid or what not. It’s time we moved away from the personal bashing and started seeing and questioning the system that produces or promotes such behaviours.

The topic of knowledge debt begs its own article, so I would leave it at that. Now I want to focus on something else which we also often blame on personal failing, but have started to see its systemic roots: Fear wears many faces — sometimes it's the fear of starting over, but sometimes it's the fear of speaking up.

Learning and our ability to do so must be directly related to how much we let fears control us - after all, to learn you need to admit not knowing and that can make one feel vulnerable and weak. So, what concept have we come up with to battle the uncomfortable feelings of weakness and vulnerability? My mind shifted again to leadership - which job it should be to create a "safe" environment for free thought to thrive in. It must be then that the ability of a group or an organisation to learn is strongly linked with the quality of our leadership. Be it in society, companies, any organisation - the fabric of how we organise and what we allow determines our ability to learn and grow.

Not my problem? What is in our control?

So, in that case you say - it is not up to me, why should I care, what can I do? Thing is - everything and all! While taking on knowledge debt is a leadership decision that is hard to counter from within, a culture of fear can be overcome from within. A culture of fear is a weak culture, it is doomed to degrade, but it has an antidote. Here is when the abstract pattern "everyone a leader" can manifest into reality.

Questioning

I don't know if it is the "coach" in my job title, but recently I noticed, I have been polishing my question-asking much more. In a fear culture everyone is masked, knowledge is scarce, people don't ask questions. So, I start asking questions - small and meaningless at first, then feeling my way into it. Then people catch on what I am doing and soon start also asking some questions - seeking to understand and bond. We learn from each other what are good questions to break barriers and which ones to keep for later. It might take long - but it can work and has worked for me. The more we get comfortable with questions and show others how to do it, the more the act of "questioning" becomes natural.

Paraphrase and document…

I like to sometimes start with just paraphrasing what others say and asking if I understood correctly. More often than not we uncover a misunderstanding which no one dared to raise. Then people start to catch on and do the same. One time, I turned this into a decision log and because I was doing this, it gave me grounds for asking what the reasoning for each decision was. That’s a hidden gem on why we want to have structured decision records - not only to have an insight into the past. But, by sticking with the structure, we can de-bias ourselves about our decision-making. If a template requires us to state reasons for a decision, it puts us much less on defence than if a person does it.

Not all questioning needs to feel like an attack, and this strategy gives an easy way for anyone to start introducing questions. There is a caveat here - now with AI being able to summarise online meetings, people might not be so keen on someone keeping track of decisions like that. But, we could turn AI into an advantage - we can teach it a template to apply and agree with the team to go through anything that we missed to cover for the template. Or, have the AI ask us the uncomfortable questions. After all, it’s usually perceived as a neutral observer, not a “judgemental” colleague.

Next level?

And so, if questioning is natural now, why not question our own assumptions and theories? With each time we discover some assumption has been wrong, it becomes easier and easier to accept that maybe our own assumptions might be wrong as well. And so an act of bravery can inspire another, bigger bravery - to admit that also our assumptions can be wrong.

Asking a question is an act of bravery - not knowing what the answer would be. An act of bravery inspires and can go viral. And bravery neutralises fear. When bravery triumphs, learning can thrive and where learning thrives, the sky is the limit.

But how to start?

So, what brave question will you ask during your next meeting? Note what happens when you ask more and more questions, does the air start to change? Do you feel the fresh breeze of freedom in your hair?