Never Stop Learning

Brad Staats: I think it's a recognition of this key role of learning in our success, that for such a long time now we've been focused on the knowledge economy, this idea of what we know will help us to get things done. And that's certainly true in the moment, that to accomplish our tasks today, whatever they might be, we have to understand the environment and we have to respond to it.

But I think there are a number of trends that are taking place now that really have sped up the rate of change, the standard aphorism of "the only constant is change." And if that's the case then it's no longer only what I know today, but also what I'm going to know tomorrow, and the day after, and beyond, which means we have to be dynamic, we have to be able to learn and change with what's going on around us.

Rachel Salaman: And in your experience, how well is that understood by organizations across the globe?

Brad Staats: It's a great question. I think it's understood; I think the challenge is often how well is it responded to. So I think if you said that to most business leaders in global organizations that are out dealing with the environment, there would be a nod of the head after thinking about it a little bit.

Yes, we could walk through the trends that have led to this – globalization, and the fact that there's so many more competitors than there once were; the ability to take advantage of information technology, hence we can scale what we're doing; that specialization has gone further than it ever has before. This means that we need to get very deep but also pull back and connect everything together.

I think the challenge when I talk to organizations is less about understanding the idea than doing it, and that's really where organizationally we run into trouble. I think that's what, as you mentioned, inflamed my passion about this topic, that I had spent time in industry.

I'd been in investment banking, in strategic planning, in venture capital, and seen individuals and teams that I thought had the resources, that I thought had the knowledge to do what needed to be done, but really struggle over time. And I came to appreciate it was the story of learning, and that that's what dragged me back to academia, and really over the last almost 15 years now has had me trying to understand why don't we learn, why do we get in our own way.

Rachel Salaman: And in the book you champion the idea of being a "dynamic learner," that's the phrase you use. What is that, exactly?

Brad Staats: So, in my mind a dynamic learner really consists of four parts, and we think of them as the four Fs: that you're focused, you're fast, you're frequent and you're flexible.

What do I mean? The first, with focus, is that you have targets, that you know what you're working towards in the moment, because when we try to do everything we end up typically accomplishing nothing.

And second, we're fast. Acceleration matters, that this isn't something… when we talk about the dynamic learner, I don't really want the image of the thinker frozen in time. There's a role for reflection but we're doing things, we're taking that approach of the ready, fire, aim, to get things out there as we move forward.

That it's frequent, and this is a kind of a recognition that it can't be every second of every day, that we actually need to sometimes use what we have and get things done, but that there is a rhythm to it, a kind of attack time to it, to make sure that it's happening repeatedly.

And that finally it's flexible. There's a recognition that while we may be focused on something today, that might not be what we're focused on tomorrow. And so back to the acceleration idea: we can accelerate up as we start to move towards something, but we're ready to decelerate and move in a different direction once we realize our idea, that needs to change.

Rachel Salaman: Your book is built on eight essential elements of a dynamic learner against that backdrop that you have just described. What kind of person or role or profession did you have in mind when you were putting together that list of eight?

Brad Staats: As I was thinking about it, I think it can apply broadly, but in my mindset it was that mid-career professional, somebody who has had success as they're moving along but also realizes, hey, what I've done to get to this point isn't necessarily going to be what I can do to continue to move forward, and that I need to shift.

And it's somebody that likely does some of these things well, some of the eight well, but on the other hand there are elements that are some weaknesses, and if we were to take a test that each of us would grade out differently across the eight. So it's a chance to dig in, understand those that are strengths but also where there are some areas that maybe, if one wants to be successful in the long term, need attention.

Rachel Salaman: And your book can be used at all levels of the hierarchy, can't it?

Brad Staats: Absolutely. I think one of the things that I've really enjoyed, and this is something that I've been teaching on for many years, working across organizations, working with individuals, that from the most senior levels of the firm in the C-suite there are absolutely elements that apply down to the front lines, that you're the store clerk in the retail store or even applying these to our family lives with our children and how we do things.

I think the other piece is while there's the strong individual component to it, there's also a bunch of organizational design principles here as well, thinking about how can we set the organization up for success, not just ourselves.

Rachel Salaman: The first element of these eight elements is valuing failure, and in the book you note that this is really hard to do. Why is it so difficult?

Brad Staats: Absolutely. I think failure is one of those vexing issues, this is another one that if you talk to people, how important is failure to learning, you'd get the head nodding. But the real challenge is in the action. We tend to have a fear of failure, we're afraid for things to go wrong, and why is that?

Some of that is evolutionary, that our body actually responds similarly to failure at work as it does to physical pain, so that little "urgh" that we feel as we get ready for that feedback to come our way is our body responding as if it almost got punched.

There are a number of ways that we make it even worse, so one of the key ideas of the book is that when it comes to learning in general, we are our own worst enemy. And so we absolutely see that as we start with failure, that we don't take risks that often would be good ideas for us, that if we look, if we calculated and expected value, if you were to put it into a spreadsheet you'd say absolutely, that pays off, but then we're not willing to take that step.

And at least part of the challenge is that we tend to focus on the bad outcome, so bad overpowers good. The other really key issue is even if we're willing to try things we may not see what's going on around us. We end up convincing ourselves when something has happened that maybe it wasn't as bad as folks thought, that we come up with other comparisons.

That inability to see failure is something that research has shown over and over again, and it means that once we get out and practice and try to do it we end up struggling quite a bit.

Rachel Salaman: So what are some strategies to help us learn from failure better?

Brad Staats: Part of it, I think, is recognizing that failure is a regular part of the process. The name itself is problematic, and I'm not suggesting we change the language, but we really want to think about how do we destigmatize failure.

I love the story of a company that I was working with, a fast-food company that sells burgers and fries, and I won't go through the whole story but I talk about it in the book that the CEO launched a new product that he was convinced was going to work. Lots of other people in the organization didn't believe in it but he still pushed forward with it and eventually, it didn't work.

But he recognized that he'd had this failure. He had to stand up in front of the organization and explain to them what happened and basically own it. Afterwards he made the point that if it's not illegal, immoral or unethical, you're allowed to make any mistake once, but you've got to make sure that your next mistake is something new. And so, I think there is that element of recognizing this is part of the learning process: failure is necessary, both for ourselves and for others.

Then there are things we can do, like turning to the data. Pixar talks a lot about how the data is a neutral way to understand what's going on, and so if we can approach it from that perspective, that failure is necessary to move forward. I've seen some organizations target a failure rate, and so it's not what's our success rate, it's if our failure rate is too low then that means we're not pushing the boundaries nearly far enough.

Rachel Salaman: So, it's just a reframing, I guess?

Brad Staats: Yes, absolutely.

Rachel Salaman: The second element of a dynamic learner is somewhat related to that; it's focus on process, not outcome. Can you explain how that approach helps people learn?

Brad Staats: Yes, so the challenge is, any time we're engaged in an activity, whether that's trying to decide who we should hire, eventually an outcome is revealed. We did it, it worked out well or it didn't, and unfortunately, we focus entirely too much of our time and attention on that outcome.

The challenge, of course, is, if you think about the sales process there are other people that are trying to sell to that client too, so it's not that it's a 98 percent chance we get the deal and a 2 per cent chance we don't, so if we don't get the deal we must have done something wrong. Rather it's probably tight, it's probably 55-45, or whatever it might be for your individual company and industry.

And so what this is trying to get at is we have to separate out what eventually happens from how we got there, and if we're going to learn we have to focus on that process. We have to understand what are the steps we take to create a good proposal, how do these pieces fit together, who do we need to have in the room. And if we can learn those elements then that can actually get us to eventually have greater success.

Rachel Salaman: The next element you talk about, about becoming a dynamic learner, is asking questions. Of course, this is an age-old way to learn, but you've identified some challenges to it. Could you share some of those?

Brad Staats: It's obvious that if we're not asking questions then how are we going to learn, how are we going to see that things maybe are going wrong. There are a handful of reasons. Part of it is impression management, that we think when we ask a question that it shows that we don't know something and that people will actually think less of us.

What's interesting is the research suggests it's just the opposite. Now if we ask a question then it engages us with the party on the other side; one of the things it does is it lets them be an expert and share their perspective with us. We all value people who come to us and offer that. Now of course we can't take that too far, it's not that we're trying to shirk the work, it's that we're truly trying to understand what's going on.

The impression management piece tends to be wrong, but the other piece is that sometimes we don't realize that we need to ask questions, that we become so focused in what we're doing, so convinced that we know the answer, that we end up engaging a number of cognitive biases. We do things like, for example, when our attention is focused right in front of us that we're likely to miss those things on the side.

When we think, as an example, that we know the answer already, we don't see that there's actually a threat over here that's connected. Or perhaps we go out and as we collect information we engage is what we call the confirmation bias – we're looking for things to support our view. So, we're asking questions but in a very flawed way that's not going to lead us to better outcomes. We miss different pieces that could actually help us do much better.

Rachel Salaman: So what are your best tips for us then, if we want to ask better questions and better handle the answers that we hear?

Brad Staats: I think the first approach. Bob Sutton at Stanford has a line I love, that we need to have strong opinions weakly held, and so as we approach to begin with our environment with the appropriate humility that there are things we know, things we don't, and so as new information is presented it's not that it's an inherent threat to us but rather – guess what – it's new information, there's things we didn't know. And so now with that weakly held view we're going to be able to move on from it.

The second step is, as we approach the work we're doing, we really need to have what is called a falsification mindset. A good scientist is out with a hypothesis and in the scientific method you try to falsify it, you try to show why it's wrong, and so in the same way you may want to move the company and set up your operations in India, and so you want to think about not only why that's a good idea, but spend a lot of time asking questions around why that might be a bad idea, why might I be wrong.

I think the other piece that's incredibly important in asking questions is an obvious one, but it's listening. Unfortunately, sometimes we fall prey in that you actually ask the right question but we're convinced we know the answer, we're filtering what's coming in, instead of really sitting down and actively listening, being aggressive and listening to the person on the other side of the table, of what can I learn from this individual, how can I come away from this with better insight towards whatever the strategic action I'm trying to take is.

Rachel Salaman: In a way, that leads us on to the next element of dynamic learning, which is reflection and relaxation. Reflecting is something that you do hear about in the learning environment these days, but relaxation not so much. So tell us how relaxation helps and how the two work together.

Brad Staats: I think that as we look at both of these they go hand in glove. With the relaxation point I think what the research, both my own and others', has shown recently is how incredibly important it is that we are rested, as an example, that we think that we need less sleep on average than we do, that when we aren't getting enough sleep it's often the equivalent of making decisions when we're drunk – we end up missing key things and we don't realize that we do.

So, as a really simple example, we did some research with my colleagues around hand washing in healthcare, so it's incredibly important, it reduces hospital-acquired infections, and we just looked at how hand washing, this secondary activity changed over the course of a nurse's 12-hour shift.

What we found is that from the start to the finish it dropped about nine absolute percentage points and that the nurses didn't realize this was happening. And so this is good for us to take in to the broader decision-making environment, that we don't realize as we're tired over the course of a day, as we're tired over many days without recharging, that the quality of our decisions, the actions that we take, all start to degrade. You're not going to be able to make good decisions in the moment and you're certainly not going to be able to learn more broadly.

Rachel Salaman: You do, in the book, include some really helpful tips for building reflection and relaxation into our lives, however busy we feel we are. Could you share a couple of those?

Brad Staats: I think the first element is really that we block time for it, that we truly take it seriously. I think that not only do we need to block the time and be responsible about protecting it, but then when we do break, whether it's reflection or whether it's just to recharge a little bit, make sure that we really are breaking.

Too often, and I fall prey to this as well, I say it's lunchtime, I'm going to stop working for a little bit and I'll just keep staring at my computer and check social media or something like that, and there's certainly a time for that. But what we find is, depending on what your role is, that getting outside, going and talking to somebody else, having a different kind of interaction, we underestimate how recharging that can actually be.

And the same applies as we think about getting away from work, making sure we create some boundaries so that we're not on email at 11.30 before we go to bed, but rather we put it away, we let our mind have a little bit of a slowdown time, and recognizing through all of this that as leaders we owe it to our team members to take that same approach, that we are setting them up for success if we're making it clear the importance of taking these breaks, and taking care of oneself in order to be your best at work.

Rachel Salaman: The fifth element of dynamic learners is being yourself. What do you mean by that, and how does it relate to the suggestion in the subtitle of your book that we should reinvent ourselves?

Brad Staats: What I really mean in this element is being your authentic self, and it ties with the next element, which is looking at playing to one's strengths. But the idea is that all too often we feel like we need to be someone else. We join a firm, let's say, and we're trying to make sure that how are things done here, how do we talk, how do I dress, how do I fit in?

I think what we see is that as a learner we really need to stand out, we really need to do that which we do well and rebel a little bit in the whole process. Unfortunately we work against ourselves and so that's a great point of what do I mean by reinvent yourself.

It really is this recognition that we are all likely to have multiple careers within our working life. The activities we do right now may not be the activities we do 10 years from now, and what we're passionate about may not be the same now and later. However, what's important is that we are pursuing that and it's so vital that we don't cover up ourselves in the process, in part because it motivates us.

I think the other element that's incredibly important is around positivity. So there's a broader set of work in positive psychology that's spent a lot of time trying to understand what's the negative, the downside versus the upside and how does it change things.

The work of folks such as Barbara Fredrickson have highlighted that the positive side matters quite a bit, because actually, evolutionarily, we learn in a different way, we learn in what she calls this broaden and build, that when we're experiencing positive emotions we're likely to see more of the picture, we're likely to bring things together, and so if we're our authentic selves then we can kick ourselves into that positive mode.

Rachel Salaman: So to link it back to the reinventing ourselves point, is it that we reinvent ourselves as our best authentic selves, something like that?

Brad Staats: Yes, in the moment, if we're not playing to our authentic selves then there's an opportunity to do that, and then I think there's this opportunity to change in interesting ways who we are. I've yet to meet the person who at 20 was identical at 60, and pick whatever range you want, some amount of our authenticity is a little bit of this evolution and that looks different across various people for sure, but in being who you are that we can let that play out.

Now recognize of course what I'm saying, be your authentic self at work, we certainly can take that too far, we want to make sure that people know Brad for who I am. But that doesn't mean that you're working in an office so everybody wears suits and you're going to suddenly show up in T-shirt and shorts, or you're just going to say I'm not going to come in any more. There are some basic rules within the environment that we want to play out and follow.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned a little earlier that this links to the next element, which is playing to our strengths. What happens if we're asked to learn something that we're not very good at – if we're forced to play to our weaknesses?

Brad Staats: I think this is a fascinating area for me to try and understand, and I think that some of it has to do with a longer-term perspective on our learning journey, and the best analogy I can give is let's step back for a second and think about organizations, and think about someone like the great clothing retailer, Zara.

And so Zara, for its long-term success, created this fast fashion space of: we're going to identify what the trends are, we're going to figure out how to get those trends into our stores quickly, so instead of having to predict a year from now what's going to be popular, we're going to predict six weeks from now, we're going to see it, put it in the store, and we're going to help push it.

And so to do that as a company it made a bunch of different choices. For example, it said it's going to leave its manufacturing in Spain and Italy rather than putting all of it in China, so that it can be responsive. Also, it's going to use materials that are of acceptable quality but aren't going to last for three years because our average customer is going to wear it five or six times and then want to move on to something else.

And so there's a recognition in that Zara model of we're not going to be good at some things, and if somebody comes and says I really want you to use higher quality materials, well that will drive the cost up and nobody is going to want it on the other side. I think how this ties to our own learning journey is being very thoughtful about weaknesses, but that unfortunately we tend to look at all things under the sun that we're not good at and then we try to address them.

So we have our annual review with someone, and it's: let me tell you what you're bad at a little bit, I'll give you a little bit of good to make you feel OK, and then I'll give you a whole bunch of bad and then a little bit of good to leave on the other side. Kind of a classic feedback sandwich.

But we end up demotivating people and focusing on the wrong things, so what I would say is, if somebody comes to you and they want you to fix a weakness, there's a question of is this a critical weakness, is this weakness necessary for me to do the job, for me to thrive and succeed. And if it is, then great, I need to decide do I want to fix it or should I actually go look somewhere else.

Now obviously, in the moment, if you're someone with a boss who is saying, "Brad, you have to fix this," then you're given the book and say, "Ha, he tells me I don't have to," but I think the broader picture here is when we play to our strengths it really lets us differentiate ourselves, it really lets us learn at faster rates rather than trying to fix things that we're likely never going to be that good at.

Rachel Salaman: And that links slightly to the next element, which is specialization and variety. In the book you say that when we become too specialized we see what we want to believe, rather than what is actually there. So, counter-intuitively, expertise can prevent us from deepening our expertise. So could you just explain that idea?

Brad Staats: Absolutely. So it's a little bit like the classic "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail." And unfortunately sometimes it's not a nail, maybe it's a screw, and we need a different tool. And so as a learner we have to strike this balance between we need specialization, we need to get deep enough in order to actually have knowledge, but that variety helps us avoid seeing what we want to believe and instead seeing what's there.

And I think we see organizations starting to take this more seriously, starting to recognize that a long-term development plan involves a portfolio of experiences, and so how do we manage that and how do we track it. This is where the fact that we have so much HR data at our fingertips in a way that certainly 20 years ago we didn’t, lets us analyze that data, but also make sense of it as organization to create some paths towards this for folks.

Rachel Salaman: Moving on to the final element of a dynamic learner, which is learning from others, what are some powerful ways to do that?

Brad Staats: I think what's interesting is with individual learning we often focus on that individual piece, so my learning is a function of my activities, and it certainly is, there's a lot that we can do for ourselves, but others play a key role in that process, too. In some of the things that we might immediately think of, others can be motivating to us, and so when we're working with folks who are also challenging us, that helps keeps us focused, that helps us move on.

I've done a fair number of studies around this, looking at the role of what are called team familiarities – so individuals' repeated shared work experience, so as we have a team that functions together over time they end up doing quite a bit better. Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it breeds better learning and performance.

And why is that? We start to learn what others know and then we can go to them to get help, we start to trust others' knowledge that they have so we're willing to listen.

Others are in a position to push back on us, they feel comfortable to point out what's wrong. I think the other thing that we saw with learning from others in a separate set of studies was the value that comes in that interaction is not just me getting their knowledge, but me sharing my knowledge.

It turns out that when I teach, when I share with somebody else, it's not just doing them a favor, but I actually understand, I actually learn more effectively. Why is that? Well, because to share I'm taking what's in my head as an idea and I'm forced to quantify it, I'm forced to really get into it in detail, and sometimes maybe they push back with me on questions but even if they don't, that process ends up being incredibly valuable and incredibly important.

Rachel Salaman: Looking at everything that you've told us, could you give an example of how a manager might implement some of these ideas with his or her team?

Brad Staats: I think when we look at what are those important actions that we can take, what I would start with probably is around failure. Essentially, how do you make it safe for people to take risks? There's great work around this idea of psychological safety, that individuals feel comfortable and I'm taking a risk and sharing what's going on, and the problem is if we don't have that kind of safety then we're likely just to sweep things under the rug or not even try what's going on.

So how do you make it clear to folks what are the boundaries that they get to play in, what are the risks, that if this goes awry I've got you covered, or myself, if I'm thinking about just me, how do I understand where I get to play and how to move forward with that. And so I think that would be the first step.

I think the second step would be both mixing the process and the reflection, of taking the time to really understand what's happening and why is it happening, and so making sure first that we set up our environment so it's a safe one, so people take risks.

Second, we take some time to understand after we've taken these actions, what's happening from it so we can close that loop for learning. Then that gets us off on the right foot and helps us start to build things out even more.

Rachel Salaman: Brad Staats, thanks very much for joining us today.

Brad Staats: Thank you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Brad's book again is "Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself and Thrive." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.