A Gradient of Continuous Learning

Like other workplaces, our workplace has many kinds of higher level organizational issues. According to me, lack of continuous learning is one of the more fundamental ones. I might be wrong in the particular context but I wanted to think more about what I mean by continuous learning.

Usually, my approach has been to think about a few methods of learning in isolation and try to make sure all of them get good coverage among ourselves. Here are the methods¹:

1. Reflect
2. Improvise
3. Prepare
4. Practice

The terms themselves should have obvious enough interpretations so we won't try to define them right now.

The question for me is to see how they are all connected. And my hypothesis is that they form a gradient (in the same order as the list). A particular person or entity lies at one single point in this gradient and everything above that is obvious and below that is oblivious. Consider an entity at a value like 1.10 (just below 1 but above 2). This entity realizes the importance of post-hoc reflection but struggles to find similar learning opportunities in improvisation, preparation and practice. An entity at something like 3.5 understands everything about preparation but won't be able to comprehend how deliberate practice is going to help.

If this idea is true, then we can't just ask people to pick one of these methods in isolation since it might be out of their current bounds and the exercise will not sustain. For example, consider training a person to run a planning meeting. If the person is at a 1.x, the hypothesis says that you can never make them go through a process of deliberate practice for planning meetings in a sustainable fashion. Instead you need to first let them cross the hurdles of improvisation and preparation.

A few more thoughts.

• This gradient doesn't imply difficulty of methods, just a sort of connectedness and dependence.
• Putting more examples and case studies might be helpful to make things more clear.