Developing a learning culture has significant benefits across all parts of an organisation, yet it can be difficult to genuinely drive openness and engagement to make it happen. Over the coming months, we are going to share some of our ideas about how we can support a strong learning culture in our organisations.

Creating a Learning Culture

Well, it’s not exactly lazy, but the human brain is constantly looking for ways to be more energy efficient. A recent study published in Current Biology found that volunteers walking on a treadmill would automatically adjust their gate to burn fewer calories, great for our ancestors who were around in times of feast and famine, but not so good when we are looking to grow new connections in the brain.

This natural, hard-wired reality can encourage us to engage in what is known as surface thinking. Surface thinking is like channel surfing; just skimming along and occasionally stopping to look at something shiny. The opposite, deep thinking, is all about analysis and interrogation of the topic to fully understand it. In deep thinking, we are influenced by arguments and data, whereas in surface thinking we are influenced by cues.

Cues give us a quick indicator of how we should ‘engage’ with something or someone. For instance, the comparison cue triggers us to join in with what others are doing around us, otherwise known as social conformity. Another cue, which was made famous by Stanley Milgram in 1963, is known as the Authority Cue. It suggests that credible authority is a significant influencer of our behaviour.

While the concept of authority is often linked to formal leadership, it also extends to include people who have authority based on their perceived knowledge or expertise in an area, for example, taking advice from our GP on a health concern, or from our accountant in preparing a tax return. What becomes scary from an organisational perspective is that we are also easily influenced by people who present as experts, or claim to be experts, especially when we are in surface thinking mode. There is often a strong association between the confidence of the speaker and the credibility of what they have to say, which can create a big challenge for learning in organisations: sometimes we listen to the loudest voice, not the most informed.

In 1999 David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois published a research paper Unskilled and Unaware Of It: How difficulties in Recognising One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments. The concept they described became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect and essentially highlights that people who have low competence tend to overestimate their abilities, whereas people who have high competence tend to underestimate their abilities.

Their initial study found that students who scored in the bottom 12th percentile, on average, rated their abilities as being in the 62nd percentile (top 38% of students, or above average). They also found that even when these students were shown the work of high performers, they did not adjust their self-assessment. The authors concluded that the students’ incompetence meant they did not have the knowledge or capability to correctly identify ‘good work’ and therefore left them unable to assess themselves accurately.

Consider what this means for an organisation. If we are prone to saving energy and deferring to ‘expertise’ and yet we associate self-confidence as reflecting that expertise, are there times when we run the risk of following the loud, incompetent voice and ignoring the quiet and informed? And if we are, what can be done to shift that dynamic?

As a starting point, we have got a couple of suggestions:

Don’t ask for ideas from large groups: if you want ideas from a large group of people, hand out a bunch of post-it notes and get them to write them down. This gives everyone a chance to think, and put ideas forward, rather than inviting the loudest opinion.

Use questions to get curious: when someone expresses a thought or an opinion, drag yourself and the group into deep thinking mode by asking ‘what’s your evidence for that?’ or ‘how do you know that?’ or ‘is there another way to look at this?’ Dig under the surface to enable learning.

Promote competence over confidence: set the tone for a culture where genuine knowledge and skills are valued and be wary of self-promotion as an indicator of leadership potential. Humility is often a much greater indicator of knowledge and or leadership potential.