In The New Year: Learn More, Not Less

Think you can’t learn less? Close your eyes, plug your ears, hold your nose. See, already you are learning less: less about what’s going on around you; less about your partners and less about yourself; and, in addition, you look ridiculous. Who would imagine doing such a thing? 

Now, metaphorically, think about how often we do just this in the organizations that we are part of, and in our own professional lives, as well, when we fail to look at the edges of our industry, where new ideas are most likely to appear; when we fail to listen to our colleagues who, while lower on the status ladder, have better access to action in the marketplace; and when we fail to sniff-out weak signals regarding our continued relevance in a fast-changing world.

Learning less is, unfortunately, everywhere these days. Most spectacularly, in the face of a spreading global pandemic, we have seen large numbers of people, including national leaders, willfully choose to learn less; to reject the lessons of medical science, to shun the advice of experts, to reject material facts, and to instead engage in an ostentatious orgy of ignorance while hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens fell victim to the covid-19 plague.

This recent assertion of learning less has happened on such a scale that one might even conclude we can no longer assume that learning is an instinctive response to unforeseen challenges and opportunities. But, surely, the goal is to learn more: more about what’s going on that could pose opportunities or challenges, more about what works for us, more about the magic of the world around us, practices that lead to better health and well-being, what makes us feel fulfilled and what we need to know to propel our career. Learning is good for so many reasons, and absolutely essential for future success.

As is traditional in these early days of the new year, there is an opportunity to consider changes we might make to reestablish the primacy of learning more to move our organization, our society and ourselves forward into an increasingly uncertain future. It is a perfect time to turn that time-honored, but widely neglected, slogan of life-long learning from being merely an aspiration into becoming a real verb; to consider how we might change our own learning behaviors, and to see what it would it take to become activist learners! But, all of this requires not only intentions, but an awareness of what we presently rely upon as sources of wisdom, and how well they are working for us?

In fact, there is an explosion of learning opportunities taking place around us, as a result of the working at home phenomenon; online courses, zooming discussion groups, podcasts and a wide-range of alternative media. Just this past week, Estelle Metayer published a survey of newsletters, blogs and other forms of self-publication, which are increasingly themselves becoming a tidal wave of learning opportunities via platforms such as Substack, Medium, Ghost and LinkedIn. This is the democratization of expertise, but when Estelle asked me to share with her which of these I was following, I struggled to even think of how to respond; I simply had not been paying attention. What I discovered, much to my surprise, is that I actually do subscribe to a whole bunch of these, and while they are presently on the periphery of my learning portfolio, I can see them becoming increasingly relevant in my hunt for new ideas, if only I make sure that I work them into my learning behaviors on a regular basis. This is an excellent time to consider how our own learning portfolios are changing, and what it will take to keep-up.

Putting one’s self in a position to learn more from others is probably the easiest path of opening our eyes to new insights. A particularly powerful example is that of the nineteenth century, modernist painter, Edouard Manet, who engaged the younger, and, at that time, less successful, Claude Monet, for an introduction to impressionism, when they and their families summered together in 1874. This is an amazing story of Manet, one of the most accomplished artists of his time, subduing his ego and opening his mind to insights from Monet, who represented a challenge to almost all of the conventions that had made Manet successful. Similarly, the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, creator of the famous Tintin series, under the nom de plume Hergé, and approaching the apex of his fame, sought-out Zhang Chongren a young art student studying at the time in Belgium, to learn more about Chinese history and painting techniques, an act which forever changed Hergé’s approach to his craft. Of course, such a willingness to seek out a coach who defies traditional stereotypes of such a role is reminiscent of former legendary CEO Jack Welch advising his GE colleagues to adopt reverse mentoring by seeking out the youngest and brightest people they knew and inviting them in to tutor experienced managers on the mysteries of the then clearly approaching internet age, for which they were largely unprepared. Such reverse mentoring provided a fast, and effective means of correcting Welch’s earlier contention that the internet was a passing fad.

Collaborating with a novel partner might also be a good way to learn. Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh sojourned together in Arles, France, and agreed to a number of creative experiments, including Japanese painting and trying new materials. Miles Davis’ uncharacteristic willingness to be the opening act for The Grateful Dead, at San Francisco’s Filmore West, in 1970, in order to test his ideas in front of an unfamiliar audience, is another example of profoundly different artists working together in the pursuit of learning. The result of this encounter was that both Davis and the Dead admitted to learning from each other as a result of his taking this opportunity. Not surprisingly, Davis was known for pursuing something new every night; not a bad description of his reputation as an activist learner.

The beginning of a new year is also a good time to reflect on what we hope to achieve once we regain normalcy: What aspirational goals do we have, and what do we need to know more about to achieve them? What new behaviors will help us reach these goals, and how might we invest in ourselves to increase the likelihood that we will succeed? (1)

With all of this in mind, and with the new freedom that working at home has provided, I am adopting as an innovation new year’s resolution for 2021: to learn more, not less in future; and in the process to become a more activist learner!