In this episode, Ian and Mike delve into the multifaceted nature of learning, emphasizing the distinction between acquiring domain knowledge and developing essential consulting skills.

We underscore the critical importance of intentional learning, advocating for a proactive approach rather than passive consumption of information. This means that learning can go beyond just consuming online content!

The discussion highlights various pitfalls, particularly the tendency towards information hoarding, which can impede genuine learning and skill enhancement.

Listeners are encouraged to embrace the concept of the beginner's mind, which fosters a mindset conducive to growth and adaptability in unfamiliar environments.

We explore the role of collaboration and teamwork in enhancing learning opportunities, emphasizing that shared experiences can significantly accelerate individual growth.

Finally, we conclude with an affirmation that learning is a lifelong journey, one that is vital not only for career advancement but also for personal fulfillment and autonomy.

Foreign podcast.

You'Re with Ian and with Mike.

And in each episode, we're exploring a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants and happy and successful.

On the Consulting for Humans podcast, it's our mission to add just a little more humanity to the lives of consultants.

We also love bringing some of the skills and perspectives of consulting to human lives, too.

Right.

And if you're a consultant trying to be more of a human, or who knows, a human trying to be more of a consultant, then come a little closer because we think you're just our kind of person.

This week we're diving into a new topic, how good consultants learn.

And in addition to the desire to solve problems, which we talked about in prior episodes, what draws people to consulting?

One of the great benefits of being a consultant is all of the incredible learning opportunities and the opportunity to learn how to learn.

Oh, Mike, I think we're going to get quite meta this episode.

Looking forward to this.

So we are going to explore how, how consultants learn, how you can apply these approaches to your life.

And therefore, we're going to get into talking about the difference between learning domain knowledge and learning skills.

We're going to get into talking about pitfalls for learning and how they might be different at different experience levels.

And we're going to try and compile a list of tips for learners like you, learners who want to get past just consuming interesting content that enhances knowledge into actually enhancing skills, which is where we think the cool stuff lies.

Right, Mike?

Absolutely.

And, Ian, we've just come off of our Strategic Partner series where we were kind of making an explicit alter call to people who are not consultants but do consulting like things or can use consulting skills in their job.

This definitely is an episode that applies to all of us.

Absolutely.

And we're going to talk mainly about skills that we need for our consulting careers.

Lots of the same thinking, I think, applies to skills that you just have in life or skills, new skills that you want to learn.

Now, to take a very mundane example, the skills of getting around the place.

I was thinking about this and thinking about how the first time you go into a new environment, like the first time as a business traveler, you go into an airport and you've got signs to navigate and structure and places and people and processes to get around, you eventually go through that often enough that you realize that you've learned something about how to travel through airports and you realize that your knowledge is general.

So next time you go to a fresh airport, you've got a pretty good idea of where to go and where to turn and what to expect.

So adults in the modern world are pretty good at absorbing complex information and pretty good at turning it into skills and habits and behaviors that are helpful.

So, Mike, we want to talk about that kind of adult learning, because learning doesn't stop when we finish college, doesn't stop when we graduate.

It's something that's going on in our lives all the time.

Absolutely.

And hopefully, as it unfortunately happened with a couple of friends that I went to high school with, learning doesn't stop even when you get to college, but.

Learning doesn't stop even when you get sent to jail.

Right?

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Well, come back to that.

Well, most of us as consultants have been great at turning experience into learning.

There's that old saw about an industry.

We may have one year of experience four or five times over and over again, but in consulting, there's five years of experience in every one year.

Well, I'm sure that's dramatically accelerated on both sides of consulting and industry.

But how do we get faster and faster at absorbing information that's coming towards us?

And how can we do this purposefully rather than reactively?

Huh?

That's a good point.

Maybe we don't realize that we've been learning in all of the hectic overload of our jobs.

We've been absorbing and learning.

How can we be more intentional?

And, Mike, I was also thinking about recent history.

All of us, or most of us went through the COVID pandemic and went through an environment where, almost surprisingly, lots of people came out of the COVID pandemic with a new skill, maybe a professional skill, maybe a personal skill.

Like, yeah, people learn to be pastry chefs or jugglers or learn to play the saxophone.

So it's interesting in COVID 19, maybe with a little more spare time and a little bit more freedom taken back from the traveling and commuting that people then tended to opt out of in Covid, and maybe also because we had a stressful situation to deal with from which we needed a bit of displacement and a bit of relaxation.

It turned out that learning skills was one natural response for many people, for some of those kinds of reasons.

And so we've been paying attention to this, I think, in working life.

We've been paying attention to this in organizations.

These people who were responding to the COVID situation by learning, I think, also found that the Internet made certain kinds of skill building surprisingly available and fulfilling.

Like, Mike, we've been talking about you learning the piano some more again online, and lots of people have found new learning resources online.

Maybe they were there all along, but we've just noticed that they're there now.

They've certainly grown in volume.

And this learning thing in the context of COVID was refreshing.

It was fulfilling.

So I'm interested in this question of whether technology and flexible working and a new pattern to our day means that we can all now learn new skills, work related or otherwise.

Can we learn them effectively?

Can we learn them at low cost?

Is everything now there for us?

Is the learning of new skills something that's been given a new lease of life since the advent of online learning platforms like Udemy and Coursera and LinkedIn learning and since the pandemic, and by the way, since the arrival of AI tools that can distill the wisdom for us, Is it all now kind of there on a plate or is more still required of us if we want to learn something that's going to be interesting to get into?

Yeah.

And I think once again, this, it's really interesting.

And these aren't, as we're saying, just consulting skills.

They're human skills that make anyone more valuable in their role.

So consultant, product manager, functional leader, frankly, anyone who needs to understand complex problems quickly and add value really needs to be interested in learning and learning about learning how to learn better.

So we're going to talk about the different kinds of learning a little.

We're going to talk about some of the pitfalls facing consultants trying to learn.

We're going to talk about how we can get from content consumption, which is great all by itself, but how can we get further into positively intentional learning?

What do great learners do to supplement the content that they access?

Yeah.

And we're going to talk about having the power of a beginner's mind for those of you who are into Zen and a little meditation, you know, that may jump out there, but it's also this idea of when we're thrown into new environments or things are changing rapidly or there's uncertainty.

We'll talk a little bit about three circles or knowledge about perfectionism, pattern recognition and how to move on from just information hoarding.

A lot of what you were talking about, you know, a moment ago, I think is leading us into a new pitfall, which is information hoarding.

Yeah.

Now we're going to talk about how great learners use experience, feedback, teaching, coaching and teamwork to enhance their learning, gaining growth as professional consultants or professionals in whatever, whatever line of business and work you're in, as well as autonomy as human beings too.

So let's get into it Consulting for autonomous humans.

We missed a word out of the title of the show.

There you go.

So, Mike, there we go.

Before we dive in, I want to talk about a distinction between different kinds of learning.

And if you're a learning theory nut, you could probably go deeper than just these two kinds.

But I'm thinking about the kinds that I see most of our colleagues and customers working with week in, week out.

On the one hand, there's learning domain knowledge, especially knowledge about our clients business domains, understanding how pharmaceutical companies work or how supply chains are organized.

That's what I'll call domain knowledge.

And then there's consulting skill.

Knowing how to rather than just knowing about.

And knowing how to means all the stuff that goes into good consulting process.

How do we structure problems?

How do we facilitate difficult conversations?

How do we do lots of the things that you and I have been talking about as it happens on the show?

Yeah, I think that's a great and a really important, crucial distinction, Ian.

You know, when I'm learning a new client domain, I'm essentially becoming kind of a quick study anthropologist.

I need to understand, yeah, how does this world work?

What does this language mean?

Who are the key players?

What drives behavior?

Now, on the other hand, when I'm developing consulting skills, I'm really working on building repeatable capabilities that I'll use across many different contexts, many different domains.

Right.

And that gets us to an interesting point about the role and position of consultants for domain learning, for learning about context.

As you might say, consultants are actually at a disadvantage compared to people who are on the inside.

And Mike, this is throwing up something that came across strongly, I think, in those last few episodes about how to be an internal advisor or strategic partner.

If you're on the inside, you work in those domains every day.

You've got deep institutional knowledge that consultants don't have.

You've got the ability to recognize patterns in people and their behavior that are your colleagues that outsiders consultants don't have.

But as consultants have a few things up our sleeve to help us out here.

We have systematic approaches.

And if you look at the way it is supposed to that the big strategy firms work, it's all about a systematic approach and much less apparently about domain knowledge.

I don't think that's entirely true.

But that's the kind of story that we have.

And we have the ability, hopefully the intellectual horsepower to extract insights quickly to see things that insiders might miss because they themselves are too close to the problems.

So we've kind of got a Challenge.

I don't think we can take it for granted as consultants that our domain knowledge is up to snuff by the way of these two things.

Domain knowledge versus skills.

Domain knowledge is what AI is absolutely helping us out with.

AI is getting much better than the average human at synthesizing patterns and synthesizing certain kinds of domain knowledge.

And I can see big steps forward that will maybe rectify the balance a little bit for consultants in the future, if we're all lucky.

Yeah.

And if we're sitting here a little bit worried about AI and us, pay attention to the skills and to the learning, because that's a big differentiator here.

So, you know, I love that you mentioned about seeing things that insiders miss, because I think that's oftentimes where the real value comes from.

And when we start to think a little bit differently and learn a little bit differently and apply some of these skills, even when we're insiders, we'll find ourselves doing the same thing.

So one of the reasons that sometimes we find ourselves with clients, I know I've often had clients say, gosh, you know, I didn't realize you had all this experience in this industry.

And I say, you know, I really don't.

But what I do have is that beginner's mind that I talked about here.

And I've got some structured thinking tools that I can bring along.

I also have the ability to bring, as we'll talk about later, patterns and perhaps some innovations that are seen as innovations where I'm visiting now, but they're really just adopted and adapted from common practices in other domains.

So, you know, all of this ability to do this really important, easier sometimes to do by outsiders, but insiders learning these same tools and approaches can do the same thing, right?

Absolutely right.

And I like this phrase, the beginner's mind, because beginner's mind is not the same as a lesser mind or a stupid mind.

Like smart people take these kind of very, very kind of ground based approaches.

I remember reading the life story of physicist Richard Feynman, who was famous for being very good, not obviously a very smart person could do information exchange with technical people super quickly, but was very good at just sitting back and asking the apparently naive but penetrating question.

So it's going to help us if we can look for what's new and look for what's been missed.

It's also going to help us, I think, to have structure.

And Mike, you and I have spent half of our lives teaching people probably the same two or three different Little structural tricks over and over again.

So here's a variation on a structural trick.

If I'm trying to learn something about a domain and get it up to speed, I'm going to try and guide what I know into buckets.

I'm also interested in the intersection between the buckets and I call this the three circles method, the three circles of stuff that could be known.

Three overlapping circles.

I'm waving my hands in the air now, which makes really great content for a podcast.

I'm waving my hands with these three circles.

The first circle is the stuff that the client tells me about their world, but lots of that.

The client's a reliable narrator for some of it, maybe less so.

So I'm aware of bias, but stuff that the client tells me what their perception is, is just as important in a way as what it actually signifies.

The second circle is what external sources tell me about their industry.

And if I'm well informed and well prepared, I'll be smart in my choice of valid external sources.

And again, you and I have made some of our living over the years, Mike, by working for companies who are all about the valid external source, whether it's part of the consulting office.

And then the third circle, which I'm a big fan of as a consultant who likes to kind of be thoughtful, is just observing what's happening when people are making decisions, working through processes, doing their everyday work.

The power of being an independent observer is the third circle.

I guess the magic then happens in understanding the overlaps of the gaps, even the differences and the contradictions between these circles, because something that is true and represented the same in the world of what clients say, the world of outside sources and what I observe, that's okay, but it's not very interesting, doesn't generate any new inferences.

But anything I found that's in the intersection between these three circles can be super useful.

So, Mike, we've got some great ideas here for thinking about domain learning, thinking about being a naive learner, thinking about organizing and categorizing stuff as well.

We're quite well on the way with tools for absorbing domain knowledge quickly, but I've seen plenty of people slip up.

What do you think could be some of the pitfalls behind us as we try to be fast learners and consultants?

Well, I think you're absolutely right, Ian.

So first, we kind of talked about this in different contexts in the past.

In other episodes, it's the perfectionist trap.

And a lot of times, especially new consultants or people who are new to doing some of these Techniques, they want to read every report, interview every stakeholder before they form any preliminary views.

But actually really good consultants form early hypotheses and test them actively.

You learn more by being wrong quickly than by avoiding being wrong for a long time.

Trying to avoid it.

I'm going to get that, put on a coffee mug.

It's great.

I mean, it's been true for a long time.

It's the kind of thing that we took up with the world of agile and kind of rapid software development.

But failing fast has been an important thing intellectually for a long time.

I think that's great.

So, Mike, being able to learn and absorb and fail fast is really important.

There's a corollary to that, which is that sometimes we get stuck trying to absorb all the information and know everything there is to know before we take action.

I also see this with more senior people that we have the opposite problem.

We get over reliant on heuristics and pattern recognition, over reliant on what people sometimes label their gut instinct, which it turns out is a misnomer.

Somebody has been in Consulting for 10 years, 15 years, might see a new situation and be tempted to think, oh, this is just like the project I did three years ago.

This is just like the five times that I've done this before.

And actually that's a trap for us.

If we don't take the time to understand what makes the situation unique, then we're going to miss out on something.

So those young, inexperienced kids have got something to teach old soaks like you and me, Mike.

They absolutely do.

They absolutely do, Ian And I really love kind of being schooled in situations like that from time to time.

Yeah.

You know, pattern recognition is incredibly powerful, but it can be a trap if we're not careful, as you've been saying.

So, you know, I try to make it a practice to always ask what.

What makes this situation different from the similar patterns that I've seen before?

I just, you know, go carte blanche into familiar frameworks.

It's always that context.

We come back to this client in this situation, at this time, under these circumstances, with these objectives, that kind of thing to say even when it seems like it's the same old same old, every once in a while the world's changed and we got to spot that.

Right.

And we've talked quite a few times now about this dichotomy between being an insider, like a strategic partner of an advisor inside the company and being an external consultant.

And again, this is the same.

I think the Position is a little bit reversed.

If you're a colleague, an insider trying to give advice, the pitfall here is different.

You can end up so focused on your specific domain, your particular business unit, your particular piece of the rice bowl, that you lose that perspective of seeing connections, seeing things that are actually in common, that are there to be discovered and exploited.

The power of this thinking process, the power of being a consultant and being a learner in this way, is often in connecting things.

So, Mike, let's just make sure we've got that right.

If we're an outsider, if we're a consultant, we should not be too quick to see what's the same and connected.

If we're an insider, we should actually look a little harder than we might normally do for those things.

Yeah, well put.

Put.

And here's what I think applies to everybody, and that's, you know, we kind of alluded to it earlier, this information hoarding without synthesis.

You know, some people get really good at or very defensive about collecting a lot of information, but not developing the skill or taking the risk of turning that information into actionable insight.

You know, we become walking databases, rather strategic thinkers and doers.

Oh, Mike, that's a great segue into the next part of this show, I think, because becoming a walking database is peril, right?

You're going to be very welcome at pub quizzes, but you might not be welcome on consulting projects.

And this pattern that we've seen in the world of us absorbing lots of content because the Internet makes it all available for us and because AI to a certain extent digests it for us, is a huge opportunity.

But there are going to be some pitfalls.

As we mentioned right at the beginning of the show, people are gathering and absorbing new ideas by consuming online content, viewing videos, taking part passively in E learnings, even, Mike, even to the extent of listening to podcasts.

Right.

Oh, my.

This is a benefit for us.

But there are some traps here as well.

There's evidence that suggests the average person on the face of the planet in the developed world right now is consuming around 74 gigabytes of data per day.

That's roughly equivalent to 16 movies.

And even if 50% of that is memes and cat videos, our brains are trying to find their way through tens of gigabytes worth of new information.

And at the same time, the average attention span of a human dropped from just 12 seconds to.

Five now, right?

There's more and more content out there.

Some of it's fabulous.

But the work of absorbing it and making use of it and managing our attention around it is getting more and more challenging.

We've talked already about the information hoarding pitfall.

That's a big challenge if you're depending on online content for your learning.

Learning without application, I think, is also going to come into play here.

Now, this is all going to sound like we have a downer on online learning delivery, and I don't think that we do.

It actually transformed a lot of the way that some of our customers have done their learning.

Lots of us, myself included, have gathered new knowledge and new skills because technologies made them accessible for us.

But I think, Mike, consumption alone isn't going to be enough.

And maybe some of our listeners have already had that experience.

You consume content and you feel like you're learning something, but then you realize that you're not getting everything that you hoped for.

So we've got some tips for learners to help us get past just consuming interesting content that enhances our knowledge into learning in a way that enhances our skills.

We've got 10 ideas.

We've got some advice about identifying and overcoming the traps involved for us.

Mike, get us started with our list here.

Well, yeah, I think number one, Ian, is be active.

You know, we've been talking about sort of this passive learning.

We got to get active with our learning.

So we have to have experiences, put ourselves in situations where we're going to apply some part of this new skill, this new learning.

You know, the experiential basis for learning is vital for adults.

And lots of psychology tells us this and backs this up.

It's just as important, important to also expose ourselves to situations or people who will challenge us and disrupt our settled view of the world.

So both, you know, taking this stuff out, where this what with what we're consuming meets reality, as well as not just kind of staying along with the same, but being challenged and saying, let's look at a different point of view.

All of these are where learning really starts and really starts to become embedded here.

Right?

We've known this for a while.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, I think you and I have both had experiences, and I know we've got one friend who just come back from one of these, but it used to be.

I used to see it a lot more.

When firms would send their employees out on all these outdoor adventures, part of their learning was in the context of testing the limits of their comfort zones, building Trust kind of getting out there for more or less the same reason.

But we know you don't have to be lost in a forest to learn something, to learn something new.

Although sometimes some of that sticks with you pretty well here.

So what we don't want to do is fall into that online learner's trap that's building up ideas and especially strong opinions about methods before you've actually tried to do something.

Right.

Yeah, and I find myself here too.

You know, I'm all diving in between, am I going to use this, this productivity tool or should I use this productivity tool?

Well, let me see about what people say about this productivity tool.

And I go, maybe I should just try them.

Yeah, maybe that would be better before I put another 10 hours into learning them and hearing people talk about them.

So absolutely be active.

I think that's a great tip, Mike.

It's good for all stages of life as well.

The next tip, I think is about what comes almost before you start to consume the content and start to absorb the learning messages.

Get motivated.

Understand your why a little bit.

We spend a lot of time potentially learning how.

There are cookery videos on YouTube and there is the consulting equivalent of sitting watching cookery videos on YouTube.

You can get a lot of how rather than figuring out the.

The fine points of how.

It's super helpful as well to figure out why it is that you want the skill.

What are the positive consequences for you?

And I think sometimes, Mike, that comes from the experimentation that we talked about in our first lesson.

Right.

What do you want out of this?

How will you know where you've got there?

We've talked already about Simon Sinek and the power of why.

Like, start with your why.

You can hit a Simon Sinek video to get you started if you like.

Or you could just remember the words of Antoine de Saint Exupery who said, if you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work and give them orders.

Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

So we know that learning, including via online sources, is motivating all by itself.

We'll talk about the motivating, liberating power of learning.

But if you're going to learn something and you're going to get something out of it, you need to understand where it's taking you.

That gets to the intentional, active thing that we've been talking about already, Mike.

I like this idea of a trap for online learners, so I'm going to pull one out here.

I think the Trap for solely online learners is thinking that great content is the same as great learning.

So you should think critically.

If you find an amusing podcast with two witty presenters who come up with, you know, pithy anecdotes, that's great, but figure out what it's going to do to help you.

Where's your motivation to exploit the memorable content?

The content's great, but it's not sufficient.

Knowing your own motivation is what's going to help you to make more out of the content that you do consume.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely vital.

So we've got a why we want to be active.

And then number three is we want to continue to revisit that experience.

Or what we used to say in the old world is practice.

You know, maybe you don't have to do 10,000 hours of practice, but you do have to do enough repetitions such that you've done this often enough, you know, enough reps at being new at the skill, becoming bad at it, multiple repetitions to get better and get better.

So don't just practice until you get it right and then think, I've got this, I.

You've got this fluency illusion.

Practice until it's hard to get it wrong and actually become fluid.

So we really have to get past, ideally on something that's really important, really hits our why, past the level of just conscious competence.

And maybe that's a pitfall associated with the shortening of attention spans that we talked about earlier on.

Right.

Attention spans are a little shorter and we're also a little less patient with ourselves and with new skills and new.

Ideas and that, you know, it kind of leads us right into that online learners trap.

Try.

You know, I consume some content.

I tried it once.

I'm discouraged because the results aren't great.

So I'm going to go back, dive into something else, find a better method, a different tool.

I have done this, I've done this thought.

If I just actually gotten to master one, I would have been much further off than this over and over and over again.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we've talked so far, really, about the mindset of the learner, about things that we need to add on to our thinking process and the way our attention goes in order to get the most out of learning opportunities.

I also want to talk about the power of people that we can engage with.

We've got a couple of learning points here about people.

The first one is go find a positive exemplar and go find somebody who exhibits the skill that you are now motivated to work on.

Don't just look at what they said online.

Go talk to the person.

Go find out about how they absorb the skill and what it means for them.

Talk to a couple of different people.

Let's take an example.

In a work situation, you want to be better at presentation skills.

Then go talk to somebody who in your team is great at presentation skills.

Because talking through with them what they learned and how they learned it and what experience they went through can be super helpful.

And I find it very often crops up in training classes that I'm delivering.

Go find a positive exemplar and appreciate them for their skill and sit down with them and find out where it came from in their world.

So, Mike, the Online Learners trap, then to continue, the theme here is the trap is taking an inspiring video by a highly regarded expert, taking that as sufficient.

Actually, you need a conversation.

You need to go find somebody who's good at this thing and buy them a coffee and a slice of cake and get talking to them.

Now, there's a couple of interesting corollaries here.

One corollary is if you can't find an exemplar, then maybe this skill that you're contemplating isn't one that aligns with your current role or the organization that you're currently sitting in, which might be information that you could work with.

And a secondary point is I think the availability of positive exemplars is a really big feature of a positive workplace.

If I'm considering changing roles, then who is there that I can learn from?

That becomes a really important question.

If I can see that there are people I'd like to learn from, then that's great.

If I can't, then I think things are going to get a bit stale pretty quick.

So maybe that's going to influence my decision about where I go next.

Yeah, I think that's really good insight there.

Number five, Ian, I'd say, is to get some perspective.

And we'll call this Perspective Part one.

You know, observe others closely, you know, get that content.

See these, you know, exemplars, See these people who are top in the field, but then observe yourself executing the skill itself too.

I'm amazed at how many people, you know, you use presentation as an example.

How many folks, you know, watch so many people doing presentations but don't video themselves, right?

And we've got the technology to do that really well right now and resist the temptation to always say, you know, x does this the right way.

So I'm going to copy them, you're going to have to do this, yes, hopefully a better way, but it's also going to have to be your way.

Look at them, look at yourself.

And don't fall into that, if you will, online learner's trap of rating your own observation less highly than the observations of somebody whose content you consume.

I find this recently coming home in the barn, doing things in the barn and looking at the way certain people do things, like it's as silly as like just packing hay into bags to hang for my horses to consume and how people get it in there and how people tie these up and how they're done.

And I realized that I kept, you know, trying to copy, copy, copy, not accounting for the fact that mine were made out of different materials.

And so actually a little bit different technique was required.

That's a technique I had to learn by doing and not by beating myself up by, okay, I can't remember it.

I must not be doing this right.

Or something like that.

Silly example.

But bring it home.

Your own observation counts.

See yourself doing it and learn from that.

Because learning by doing also still vitally important.

Absolutely.

And Mike, while we're on the subject of getting perspective, it's probably an obvious step on from that first one, but let's talk about it specifically here.

Get some feedback or if you like, some feed forward like looking ahead to the experience.

This presentation skills one is a really, really good example.

Get somebody to give you some notes, take a look at the video of yourself, listen to audio of yourself.

Ask somebody who's in the audience, ask a colleague.

Get into asking feedback.

Expect that it should be constructive.

By which I mean to say it won't just be praise, but it'll have some directed suggestions for you about what you could do differently.

Good teams and good organizations have really got this.

Sad to say, Mike, there are still teams and organizations out there where really good quality feedback is hard to find.

And I think the more senior you get in an industry like consulting, the harder it is actually to get straight, honest feedback.

So go ahead, get some feedback.

You'll be amazed by how generous people are and how much you learn from the process.

The trap for us online only learners, I think here is to think that you must become good simply because you've learned a method and you've privately internalized it, thinking therefore that feedback is a distraction or is a discouragement and that you should avoid it and just keep going with practicing your method.

That's not the way.

Use the feedback to keep you questioning your method and paying attention to the way different Approaches get you different results.

So feedback is a great, great thing, Mike.

Yeah.

And Ian, you were talking about how sometimes it's harder to get feedback, especially as you're going up.

And that's where I love that you mentioned feedforward as well, that say, okay, if people are going to be a little funny about perhaps criticizing me constructively about what I just did, I can talk about what I want to accomplish going forward from here and have them talk about, ah, here are the things that they find are important or the way they do this, or so that we've kind of narrowed it down and looking ahead.

So I won't tell you, yeah, you didn't do that.

You did that wrong.

But I will tell you.

Done.

Well, it looks more like this than this.

Perfect.

Love that a partner of ours for years, Midge Wilker, used to look out in the audience of consultants that we'd be working with and say, I can already tell who the great consultants are going to be here.

And everybody was kind of guessing as to why she would.

How she was making that judgment so quickly.

She'd say, you're taking notes.

And I thought, whoa, this is interesting here.

And part of that note taking is to serve another purpose.

It's to become a teacher, a teacher to ourselves.

So construct your own materials.

Don't just take all the handouts.

Don't just take, you know, what's beamed up on the online content.

Go ahead and capture this as if you were going to teach the ideas back to yourself.

And don't let more than, say, 20 minutes of input go past without pausing and making some notes.

So you're not trying to do a transcript, you're not doing a verbatim.

You're trying to get the key things that are going to be important for you.

And then make yourself a list of frameworks, something that you will remember, teach it back to yourself, quiz yourself, and if you want to kick it up even further, then go start to teach it to somebody else.

Because that's when you.

And even, you know, I've now got it.

I could actually put my notes aside and go talk and you'll see where those gaps come real quickly here.

Sure.

So, Mike, it's funny.

We're getting back into learning from others or learning by being around others.

And I want to pick up on that in my next suggestion, which is about learning as a group.

Learn in a group, Learn for the group.

Learn with your group.

Working in teams is a really fabulous environment for learning and growth.

And it's one of the things That I think keeps people growing rapidly as consultants because we do lots, generally we do lots of teamworking.

However, it's worth thinking about this explicitly.

If you're already doing some of your work in teams with others, don't forget that that gives you an opportunity to learn from each other.

Getting some feedback, seeing things in different contexts, getting the benefit of other people's assumptions and ways of doing things differently.

Look for any chance that you can get basically to learn from the colleagues that you're with, because they'll be generous and they'll help.

And if you find yourself in a world where lots of your work is solo, then from a learning point of view, it might be smart to go contrive a little bit of teamwork.

Can you get yourself temporarily in a team context just for the sake of learning?

Because it's going to be more fun and you'll get more learning opportunities that way.

Can you even use your internal network to enhance your learning if you're not regularly working on teams?

I think learning with and from other people is a massive opportunity.

Yeah.

And I kind of building on that, I would say get yourself a teacher or a coach.

This is really driven home to me in years past here.

You know, a teacher or coach is a great fit if they understand you and your motivation.

They don't have to be advanced.

They don't have to be the greatest expert in the field.

They don't have to be, you know, have 20 million likes.

They just have to be honest and be able and willing to help you with the items that we talked about above.

If we kind of went one through eight, a coach can help do that.

I was working with a client at one point who was in the midst of a new.

The, you know, the, the big leaders, up and coming leaders in the firm from around the world.

And at the night before this session, when we were about to have the CEO come speak on a different topic, there was an unfriendly takeover bid for the company.

Well, boom, that was, you know, that had everybody all disconcerted.

And the CEO, to his credit, had, you know, he had to do a press conference.

He decided to do the press conference as part of the class for these up and coming leaders.

And, and he had them first asked their questions about the situation, that he had the press ask the questions.

And then he did a talk around what was going on.

And it was all clearly, you know, all done overnight.

I don't know when he was awoken with this news and how he dealt with it, but I was so blown away by how good it was.

And we actually filmed that session and then used that session as kind of the ideal presentations, passing a lot of great things that we've used in the past.

But I went and talked to him afterwards and said, boy, that your ability to present, to work with that group, to do all that was amazing.

Can you help me understand a little bit about what got you there?

And you know, that journey?

And what he told me was that he uses a coach or a teacher every year, at least once a year on these same skills.

I'm thinking, my gosh, this guy is so far better than most people I know.

And he said he has all through his career and he sticks with the same teacher or coach until he feels like he's gone as far as he can go with them and then he finds another one.

I thought, wow, that's great, that's a win here.

So by all means, teacher or coach?

Yeah, teachers and coaches are available at very reasonable rates.

Look online, you never know, there might be one sitting next to you right now.

Anyway, that's enough of the plug.

Mike.

Last of our list of tips here.

It's been a really, really great journey through.

How do you exploit the learning opportunities that are in front of you right now?

And the last one is kind of going back to the beginning.

We talked about motivation.

I'm going to say my top tip is get something out of the journey, out of the process of learning.

Some of us naturally enjoy this anyway.

Some of us need to be reminded of what pleasure we're getting from just learning something.

Remember, if you set out, let's think of an at home skill set.

If you set out learning how to grow bonsai trees, and if you discovered, after a year's kind of practice and development, actually my bonsai skills are irredeemably average then, huh?

Does that mean the year was a failure?

I don't think so.

Something will have made the experience worthwhile.

Maybe the people that you worked with, maybe just the pleasure of growing the new skill.

We've talked before about Stephen Covey's seventh habit, which is sharpening the saw.

Sharpening the saw isn't only beneficial for the lumberjack who wants the economic benefit of cutting down trees faster.

Sharpening the saw is beneficial for the lumberjack who wants to express their autonomy, wants to say, this is my saw and I'm investing in my tree cutting future and I'm making myself even more my own kind of lumberjack.

The three drivers of motivation, according to Dan Pink, are autonomy, mastery and purpose, and autonomy I think plays a bigger role in the pleasure that we get from learning than you might realize.

So we've talked in the previous tips about the trap for relying only on online content.

I'm going to finish on a positive note here.

I think there's a bonus from being a consumer of online learning content because working online, if you're smart about it and you're using the right platforms, brings you into a community of fellow learners that you can tap into.

And I think that's a really, really great thing about the people that I've seen experience in learning online.

And it's certainly been something that's been beneficial for me as well in some of my own learning journeys.

So, Mike, we've covered some great ideas about learning domain knowledge, about learning skills.

We've talked about how to supplement online learning with practical application.

Let's get some final thoughts on this whole topic.

Well, I'll tell you, I'll come back.

You know what strikes me about specifically the consultant style?

Learning isn't really about being smarter than other people.

You know, anybody who thinks they're the smartest people in the room should go read the Enron book again.

But it's, yeah, it's about being more systematic.

It's about having repeatable methods for turning information into insights and insight into action that creates value.

Fantastic.

So my closing thought here is I think that learning is a universal skill.

It's a universal mindset as well.

All of these things that we've talked about here, these approaches, these tips are useful regardless of your current role, even regardless of whether the skill that you're looking to grow is a professional one or a personal one.

If you're consulting professionally, if you're leading a team, try to be more strategic in your current position, just trying to be a better bonsai gardener, then becoming a better learner is going to accelerate your growth.

It's going to increase the impact of what you do.

And as we said a moment ago, Mike, learning, especially skill learning, is rewarding in its own right.

It's rewarding for the fulfillment that you get from the process and from the connections that you make to other learners and doers as well.

Yeah.

And I think at a meta level, learning to learn is a great piece of personal growth in itself.

And if you haven't thought about that, if you haven't been intentional about that before, it's never too late to start.

So here's our challenge.

Speaking of starting or continuing, choose one technique from today's conversation and commit to practicing it for the next two weeks, then, in true consulting fashion, teach it to someone else.

And.

And that's how you really start to master it.

Mike, I love that.

As a takeaway, thank you so much.

And thank you, listeners.

Thank you for being with us.

As we've talked about the power of learning and how consultants can learn more effectively, we'd love to hear how these techniques are working for you in practice.

You've heard our contact details.

You know how to reach us.

Tell us what you've been thinking about as you've been trying to learn.

Meanwhile, please join us again soon for another episode of the Consulting for Humans Podcast.

The Consulting for Humans podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting.