Learning by Happenstance

This weekend, I had my first “finished two books” weekend in a long time—really, since starting my current job. The novelty of it prompted me to revisit the spreadsheet that tracks my reading, and I’m on pace for my lowest number of books read since 2019.

This weekend's reading was made possible by unique circumstances: the English Premier League was on an international break, and because Michigan's football team is mediocre, I only wanted to pay half-attention to the game. And the specific books I read—Danny Meyer’s What Could Possibly Go Right? and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower—both came to me by chance. I happened to catch an interview with Meyer on YouTube, and a friend recently mentioned Butler’s book.

The insight: I’ve let work make me forget to set a learning agenda and devote enough time to it. And when I don’t have a clear learning intention, learning happens by happenstance rather than by design.

That pattern echoed something from earlier in the week.

My primary effort at work this week was facilitating an after-action review of our first-day-of-school readiness—a significant project that requires a ton of cross-functional collaboration.

When designing the review, I was mindful of how easy it is for that kind of event to identify clear opportunities to improve and still lead to little action. In my experience, a primary culprit is that it is easy to agree on what we need to improve, but hard to decide what I'll stop doing to make room for it. That second part is where individual leaders face the real tradeoffs between what’s already on their plates and taking on something new.

Because of that, I encouraged the group to focus on root causes and ruthlessly prioritize our improvement ideas. I was trying to acknowledge that taking action wouldn’t be worth it unless we were committed, focused, and realistic about what’s possible.

Still, when it came time to pick a specific initiative, we collectively hesitated. The instinct to stick with the existing agenda weighed heavily on us.

As I reflected on the meeting the next day, I was reminded that teams with a clear learning intention have an easier time avoiding the hard tradeoffs that come with taking on a big, new initiative because a shared learning intention helps everyone ask, “How can we get 1% better?” all the time.

A shared learning intention might have even changed the nature of the after-action review. For some of the issues identified, the team said blame got in the way of problem-solving. You dropped the ball. 

However, if everyone shared a belief that we should always be getting better, those moments might have sounded like, “What about the way we set this up led to the issue? How can we get better?” And they might have had micro-learning routines that would have helped them resolve issues right away, rather than letting them fester. There’s no reason an issue should last two months when it could be fixed in two weeks. By the time we reached the after-action review, we’d be examining the solutions we already put in place rather than the problems. 

Learning by design, rather than happenstance. 

After all that, I realized I need to apply that insight to myself. For example, the first draft of my Q4 objectives doesn’t include an explicit learning agenda, meaning I need to ask, “What could I learn this quarter that could set me up for more impact?” 

And even more importantly, I need to ask, “What can I do to help the team create a shared learning intention?” That’s where we’ll avoid the trap of sacrificing improvement initiatives because we’re too busy. 

It will feel right when we approach those micro-learning moments as just the way we do things.