The Elephant In Skills Training
The critical element we ignore in teaching
No, no, no. I’m not talking about that elephant. The elephant I’m referring to is actually from the book “Switch: How to change when change is hard”. The book compares the two systems in our brains. The emotional yet driven daily worker part of us is compared to an elephant. The rational, long-term decision maker that is prone to analysis paralysis as the rider. The elephant that I’m talking about, is well the absolute absence of appealing to the elephant in us.
This concept of the elephant and the rider is an ancient idea dating back to Socrates and is supported by science. And I witness it daily affecting the growth of my team members. Some are too hasty, while others are too cerebral. And I find myself nudging them to a better balance.
One of the places the dynamic of the elephant and rider makes itself obvious is in leadership skills. So I have a confession to make. As a leader, I’ve struggled with growing leadership in others and even in myself. The problem with leadership is you read books on leadership and convince your rider. But leadership is not exhibited by the rider. It is exhibited by the elephant. The tests of leadership are all taken by the elephant. The next time you have to have a difficult conversation it will be extremely charged emotionally and to instill confidence you’ll need to say the right thing at the right time. It has to be from the elephant because only the elephant can react fast enough. Or when someone does something well you need to have the presence of mind to tell them a job well done. The challenges of leadership require the elephant to be onboard.
It’s not just leadership though. It is also technical problems. In my article “The Skills Gap: Part 3” I talk about the importance of having an intuitive handle on the situation. And the intuitive grasp works because over time and repetition it gets the elephant and rider in harmony. The elephant is able to do its job at heavy lifting allowing you to do the bulk of the work. Because over time the elephant has learned to recognize its role. But when the new problem comes in that the elephant doesn’t recognize, instead of trying to address it the only way it knows how, it brings in the rider. The rider solves the problem and sets the elephant straight.
This journey of training the elephant is what we usually call experience. This is why it is impossible to gain through a simple lecture or training. Because lectures are deliberate and rational. The elephant does not care about that. Instead with the elephant we need to go small, simple, and develop habits.
In the corporate skills training world we are missing this aspect. We give people the baseline knowledge, but we wait for years before that turns into practical experience. Even after that some times we fail to break patterns on how people think, diagnose issues, design solutions, collaborate. The truth is a lot of what we train, we train because it is easy. Rather than because it is what is needed.
What We Don’t Train
This is where the big indictments of education start. The world we are headed towards is full of uncertainty. It requires creative solutions. It is by definition not a knowledge problem, rather a problem solving skills problem. And that is not a piece of knowledge you can acquire. Rather it is changing the way you act, approach problems, balance action with planning, manage risks.
Building A Culture
One of the most effective strategies for bringing about change in people’s behavior is changing the culture. The culture determines how people act and the values they hold dear. The elephant seeks the path of least resistance. And one of the biggest resistance we have is going against the crowd. This is why every leadership book talks about culture. With some books even going all the way in saying that the primary job of the CEO is building the culture of the organization.
Be Deliberate
We talked about how the problems are continuous. And how it requires changing who you are to be able to address them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be deliberate to change who we are. One of the best examples of being deliberate is canonized by the airline industry in their use of checklists. An amazing read on this topic is, “The Checklist Manifesto”. Using the model of the elephant and the rider. The checklist is a simple tool that allows the rider to control the elephant without overriding the elephant.
Create The Right Environment
With my background in DevOps this is something we regularly saw. In essence the entire field is about creating the right environment to foster the right behaviors. At Flux7 we expressed this with the maxim “make it easy to do the right thing, and make it hard to do the wrong thing.” In DevOps this shows up as setting up tools and workflows to ensure best practices are being followed and errors are found early and reject changes that don’t meet the standard set. But we see this being dome more and more. We have workplaces offer morning meditation to help their employees start the day grounded. Modern devices are made minimalistic to make it easy and obvious to do the most common functions. We enforce roads with curbs to make sure the boundary is observed. These are just some of the examples of environments being created to support desired behaviors.
Repetition And Habits
One of the keys to motivating the elephant is to build habits. Habits have a special place in how our brain works. The elephant recognizes habits. Even complex tasks that would normally engage the rider once turned into a habit can be handled by the elephant. Perhaps this is why one of the most successful self-help book is “The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People”. It recognizes that achievement requires guiding the elephant with a sustained effort.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit” — Will Durant
One of the most successful movements we see in software development that promotes good habits is Agile. Everything about the events in Scrum for example are about creating good habits for focusing on delivery, outcomes, and continuous improvement.
Gamification
There has been a lot of interest behind gamification. We have gamified giving praise to each at work using HeyTaco. Anyone remember how Google trained their AI by creating a free game that people played and enjoyed? If habits are about creating a set and familiar routine to control the elephant better. Then gamification is about redoing the rulebook by tricking the elephant into following the course you want it to follow by making it seem like play.
When we’re talking about education or training or any kind improvement this model gives us two things. First, it gets us out of the model where we teach everything through the model of the lecture. Right off the bat it tells us how the lecture is not an appropriate model for learning many essential skills. Because while we can rationalize and share what is needed, succeeding in them requires acceptance by the elephant, not the rider. Secondly, we are able to use the mechanisms for reaching out to the elephant so we can develop these skills.
