Every now and then I’ll hear someone (usually a leader) say something to the effect of “they need to learn how to think critically” or “they aren’t interested in learning”. Well, here’s a fun fact – people do not need to be taught how to think, nor do they need to be taught how to learn (or for that matter to be told that they aren’t learning properly, about the right things or anything like that).

“I think – therefore I am.”

This Descartes statement, a fundamental element in western philosophy, can possibly be very crudely understood as the very existence of our ability to reason and indicates to us that we exist. If extrapolated upon, it could possibly also flow that to be human means that we think. We don’t teach babies to walk or talk, nor do we teach them how to learn. If you have ever had the privilege of watching a baby grow and develop, they are so attuned to the world around them that the essence of their existence is that of a learning presence. They watch their caregivers’ facial responses and learn what flies and what doesn’t. They recognize sounds and then assign meanings to those sounds and try to test them out on their own. If you’ve ever watched a toddler in action outdoors, their instinct is to explore. They will pick up a leaf, crinkle it, stare at it, smooth it out, flip it over maybe even smell it – all in the name of learning.

To think is to learn, and to learn is to explore.

I’ve recently become very interested in Peter Senge’s seminal work on the learning organization, and the influences of W. Edwards Deming on Senge’s own work. The following quote comes from Deming’s correspondence with Senge (as recounted by Senge in the 5^th Discipline). Deming was 90 at the time of writing them in 1990, though these words are still as relevant today as they were over 30 years ago.

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university. On the job people, teams and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division cause further loss, unknown and unknowable”  W. Edwards Deming

A Father of Modern Management Thinking

Aside from being a statistician, the father of total quality management and one of the greatest management thinkers of all time, Deming was a humanist who saw that people at their core did not need to be managed, and that all that management was doing was killing their innate interest, curiosity, and motivation. While Deming’s work has been often quoted and so much management philosophy seems to have been built upon it, the core message that Deming advocated for seems to truly have been lost to time.  

Deming was a systems thinker and he believed that because everything is interconnected and inter-dependent, we cannot reduce the whole to the sum of its parts and pretend we know anything at all. It’s perhaps because looking at the system as a whole is significantly more challenging than the linear thinking we gravitate towards (analysis, breaking things down into micro elements only to put it all back together to “understand” the whole) that we’ve somewhat lost the plot a bit.

Organizational Thinking and Learning

In a previous life, I was once engaged to run a training session for a team that tried to get to the bottom of how to think critically about the work we get asked to do. The problem as the client saw it was that their team was too quick to action, without thinking critically about what they were being asked to do, and the value (if any) that it held. As a good consultant usually does, I got curious about why this was the area of interest for the client. I personally couldn’t get past desiring to know the driving force for this team needing critical thinking training to begin with. To do that blindly would simply be putting a band aid on a symptom of a systemic issue prevalent in many, if not most organizations today.  

What we hear when we are told that people aren’t thinking, aren’t learning or aren’t innovative, is that there is no space for people to think, learn or be innovative. We can surmise that there are likely any number of systemic issues related to strategy, prioritization, delivery processes and culture at play, and that individual people are often the least likely culprit.  

It’s easy to demonize the client here, but they really were acting on the best of intentions. They were looking to invest deeply in the success of their people and teams because they identified that something was wrong, and they knew they could do better. We use this story as an illustration of a brave employer reaching out for help, and to showcase that behaviour is a function of the environment and the person (this formula is known as Kurt Lewin’s behaviour formula and is denoted as B=f(P,E) for those who are interested).

We’re Responsible For The Outcomes We Get

Isn’t it interesting that children seldom come to us with ready-made solutions to their woes? It could be suggested that they haven’t learned them yet, or it could be seen that jumping to solutions often skirt past the underlying ill and our kids really want to fix the problem.  

Isn’t it also interesting that once people reach the working world managers don’t want them bringing problems but rather coming up with solutions instead? But isn’t it also interesting that our solutions are often half-baked quick fixes that often make things worse?  

Behavioural Economics and Systems 1 and 2

Daniel Kahneman, a famous psychologist, and the father of modern-day behavioural economics talks about our two thinking systems – system 1 and system 2. The quick fix solutions come from system 1, which is our autonomous, not a lot of cognitive energy, been-there-done-that system. It’s the one which is filled with biases and heuristics, and although fast, can be erroneous. System 2 thinking requires us to slow down and shift out of system 1 thinking to be present. System 2 is inherently more energy intensive, and when we don’t have a lot of time to think because we have deliverables, priorities and pressure coming down at us, it’s the one we do away with. Knowing that these two systems exist and are competing (but not really, because system 1 usually wins), and that employers might want to see more of system 2 thinking (to get the innovation, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning they hired us for) then we know that we need to challenge said employers to give us space to think.  

Context Switching and Cognitive Load Theory

In agile we talk about prioritization and limiting work in progress, and while it’s a known saying in the agile world “stop starting and start finishing” we say this because we know that the more we add to our brain, the less space we have in it to execute on the critical thinking our jobs sometimes require. It feeds from context switching and cognitive load theory that when we’ve got one thing going on at a time, we can dedicate 100% of our capacity to it. When we add a second thing to our plate, only 40% of our productive time goes to each task, and we lose 20% of our capacity and time to waste (context switching). If we were to add a third thing, then we are only giving 20% of our capacity to each thing (60% capacity total) and 40% is going to waste. It only gets worse from here on out.

We reference a study published in the book “Quality Software Management” by computer scientist and psychologist Gerald Weinberg where he sought to learn how much productivity is lost by juggling multiple tasks at the same time.

And yet, what more do we know to be true? We know that we never get any chance to ever work on only 1 or two or even 3 things at a time. We’re most often juggling between 5 or 6 tasks, and then add in the interruptions (which we know when they occur, it takes us on average 23 minutes to get back on task according to this study from 2008 at UC Irvine) and it’s no wonder that we spend our days in an endless but exhausting loop of running on a treadmill and getting nowhere.

So to bring this all back to the point I laid out in the start of the article: Dear leader, your people don’t need to learn to think or don’t need to learn to learn, or need to learn better or about different things.  

We just need to give our people the space they need to do the thinking required to do their best work, ensure they know they have permission to speak up and share the outcomes that they get from thinking critically, and accept all the other feedback that we might get from them when we truly open it up for feedback.  

We at IncrementOne are experts at driving people towards focused change, and whether it’s an efficiency push, or an effectiveness push, we’d love to help. We offer custom training and facilitation, as well as down to earth and actionable leadership and organizational consulting and coaching.