10 Questions About Learn/Do

The Top 10

In our last newsletter, I gave an insider view of the work we are doing at BillionMinds, focusing on the what, why, how and who of our business.

Several of you wrote to me at paul@billionminds.com with follow-up questions, so first of all, thank you! Interestingly, the question I received most was about the specifics of our learn/do method we’ve developed – the sub-10-minute experiences that are the core of everything we deliver. So, for this edition, I’ve decided to take the top 10 questions we get about this and answer them, all of course, in less than 10 minutes.

Whether you are responsible for L&D in your organization or an employee trying to learn efficiently yourself, you should find it helpful.

Let’s dive in!

10) What really is Learn/Do?

We call our experiences Learn/Do to capture one of the most important aspects of durable (soft) skills development: that it involves not just theory but a particular type of practice—where you discover how to implement the lesson in a way that makes sense to you.

But in reality, Learn/Do, as we define it, involves six elements:

• Experiential learning – where you combine theory and practice to embed a new behavior
• Atomic learning – where you break down the development into the smallest possible part so the concept is grasped and embedded more effectively
• Embedded learning – where the act of learning happens in the flow of work, so you can recognize the concept soon after you learned it
• Cumulative learning – where the concepts build on each other over time
• Personal learning – where you learn to apply the concepts in the context of the unique individual that you are
• Social learning – where you learn from the approach of others, and learn how to apply the concepts in a group setting

All of these elements are important, and leaving any one out will inhibit the effectiveness of training programs you implement.

9) How do you know it works?

Fortunately, over the last 30 years or so, there has been an ever-increasing body of research about how people learn and grow. We’ve seen this backed up in our own work. When we began developing programs, we deliberately used longer forms of training, such as offsites of 1-3 days. We wanted to understand how much information was retained, and how that resulted in changed behaviors. Our experiments backed up prior studies. 70% of the information was lost in a week – close to 90% in a month, and within six months, almost any behavior change was lost.

By contrast, Learn/Do acts by continuously reinforcing learning and development, meaning that new behaviors are embedded with minimal effort. This is not rocket science—the principle is found in everything from traditional apprenticeships to learning the piano.

8) So, is longer-form training useless?

Actually, no, but it’s important to understand the situations where it is most useful, particularly when developing human skills.

The first application is to create awareness and a desire for change. It turns out that dedicated longer-form training is probably the gold standard for accomplishing this, provided you have the right message and messenger. You will have felt this if you saw a great speaker or attended an amazing workshop and wanted to change your entire approach to life as a result.

But if you are familiar with organizational change management (specifically ADKAR) you will know that awareness and desire are only part of the story. Knowledge, ability, and reinforcement come through a combination of learning, practice, and support. That is where Learn/Do experiences and an organizational support structure come in.

The second important use of long-form training is to create a forum for social learning, where learners understand their approach in the context of others and figure out how to apply their skills in the context of a group. This typically takes longer, but it is important to supplement an individual’s learning and development journey.

This is why, even though 90% of BillionMinds experiences are very short, we build awareness and desire for the program in longer form, and offer longer group sessions to supplement the learning journey.

7) Is this type of learning and development for everyone/me?

People absolutely have different learning styles, and any diverse organization needs to accommodate those learning styles if it is going to achieve the end goal of developing its people.

That said, the fundamental approach of Learn/Do should apply in almost every case. The differences are not in the elements themselves but in the specifics of how they are applied. For example, you may find that a written lesson is more suitable for you than a video or audio lesson. But we’ve yet to find (for example) people who retain more when ten concepts are presented to them in an hour with no opportunity to apply them in their own lives. You may be more used to that style, but it doesn’t mean it will result in more change over time.

6) Why 10 minutes specifically?

10 minutes is a balance, and in reality, 15 is most likely fine. However, here’s why we landed on 10 minutes specifically.

• Almost any single concept can be explained in less than 4 minutes
• A simple practice will typically take no more than 5-6 minutes
• 10 minute experiences result in more regular engagement than longer experiences (creating the cumulative effect)

Basically 10 minutes is the number that works best over time, which is also why platforms like DuoLingo and Simply Piano use it.

5) What if there isn’t something to do?

Isn’t some learning, just learning?

Well we used to think that, but over time we’ve realised that there is always a “do” element, even if it is as simple as “what do you believe the author’s motivation was here?”. The point of “DO”, is to allow the learner to make the concept real in the context of their own life. This helps ensure the concept is embedded, and is more likely to result in a changed behavior. It doesn’t always FEEL useful, but it almost always is.

4) Do learners get frustrated?

Often, yes, at least initially, and this is one of the bigger challenges of this type of learning. We’ve found the main source of frustration to be its apparent inefficiency. When you break any learning down into tiny parts, every individual part can seem obvious, and it can feel like no learning is happening. Not only that, but a simple practice exercise that involves (for example) nothing other than reflecting on how you’ve done something in the past can seem pointless.

In our research, we’ve seen that it typically takes 15-20 sessions for this type of learning to “click” with people. It’s at this point that they realize that something is actually happening, rather like when the person who commits to going to the gym daily typically starts to see results after 3-4 weeks.

3) How often should people be learning and doing?

Initially, we recommended between 5 and 18 learn/do experiences a week. But we’ve refined this over time and found that for most people, 3-7 is the optimum range weekly, ideally with no more than one experience per day. We typically manage this by throttling experiences to no more than five days per week, knowing that some people will choose to “cram” the experiences.

2) For this to work do the experiences have to be engaging?

For this to work WELL, yes. Over the past few months, we’ve been adding visual elements to our learn/do experiences. Even though the learning elements are typically no more than 3 minutes, we’ve found better results when visual stimulation and the voice is more naturalistic. So, even though it’s a bit more expensive, it’s worth putting in the extra effort to improve quality. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on updating all our experiences to this new format.

1) Is this approach needed just because kids cannot concentrate any more?

There is a lot of debate over this, and the research is very mixed. I’ve looked into this a lot, and my opinion is a qualified no. Here’s why.

• We’ve seen many older people struggle to maintain attention as much as younger people
• Studies dating back to the 1970s showed that human attention spans often lasted no more than a few minutes in lectures

Absolutely, a proportion of society has specific attention deficit challenges, and those challenges need to be respected and addressed. But it also seems that throughout history, the human brain has always been looking for something more interesting to do than what is in front of it right now. Our phones give us so many options to scratch that itch, and realistically, they are not going anywhere. So the only practical solution is to provide learning and development in a form that works for the world we live in today.

So there you have it! If you have any more questions, please do reach out to me. As you can probably tell, I love talking about this stuff!