What's The Best Way To Transfer Knowledge? (You Can't Learn Surgery By Watching)
While some lessons can be learned by watching—a parent’s reaction after touching a hot stove can be a good lesson for a youngster on dangers in the kitchen—other lessons are harder to learn through observation alone. No matter how many times you watch a surgeon perform open-heart surgery, chances are you won’t ever learn how to pull off a triple bypass.
And yet, in business, companies routinely expect employees to pick up new job knowledge through vicarious learning—through reading descriptions of tasks in knowledge-management databases or by observing colleagues from afar. “The predominant analogy for vicarious learning is the photocopier,” says Christopher G. Myers, assistant professor of Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School. The idea: Watch what other people do, make copies of the good things and dispose of the bad things, and we are good to go.
But good knowledge transfer doesn’t quite happen that way, and organizations that practice watch-and-learn vicarious learning run the risk of undertraining their key employees, says Myers.
He challenges the theory in a new working paper, “Coactive Vicarious Learning: Towards a Relational Theory of Vicarious Learning in Organizations,” in which he argues that observation and imitation are rarely the best ways for employees to learn on the job.
“There are some realms of life where that is true, but for the most part, problems in business are more complicated,” says Myers.
The limitations of traditional forms of knowledge management come from two sets of assumptions, he argues.
The first assumption is that the most important elements of a job function are observable, ignoring the crucial tacit knowledge that can influence how someone carries out his or her job. “I could watch a colleague challenge a student and I could think that’s the way I should teach, but what I miss is the backstory, about why he is doing it in that particular case.”
Perhaps even more crucial, those systems assume that the person undertaking the learning wants to duplicate exactly what the other person is doing—despite the fact that they may be perpetuating mistakes made by a predecessor or simply following procedures that may be a bad fit for a person of a different personality and skill set.
Instead, Myers envisions a model of coactive vicarious learning.
“The major shift theoretically is moving from a language of transfer, of taking fully formed knowledge and passing it from one person’s head to another, and instead talking about co-creation and building it together,” he says. “What that means practically is vicarious learning must be more interactive. Both the learner and the sharer of knowledge bring things to the table and together create something new.” Myers was inspired to study the topic based on his own experience as an outdoor wilderness instructor, an area in which the cost of failure is too high for people to learn only from their own experience. “Trial and error is not the way you want to learn rock climbing,” says Myers.
When Acquiring Knowledge Is Life Or Death
In his own research, he has spent hundreds of hours studying a similarly fraught industry—high-risk medical transport teams—to learn how they acquire knowledge that can literally mean the difference between life and death. He found that much of their vicarious learning occurred not through studying procedural manuals, but through informal storytelling in the downtime between missions, in which team members related past incidents. “They would dig in with each other and dissect prior cases a little bit, asking, ‘Why did you do it this way, and not that way?’ It’s happening in these more discursive kind of ways.”
By contrast, Myers argues that many companies employ knowledge management systems that favor more independent, rather than discursive, learning. “They say, ‘I am going to write everything down and everyone who wants to know anything about the industry can have that document at their fingertips,’” says Myers. Except this system often doesn’t get used.
Source | Forbes
While some lessons can be learned by watching—a parent’s reaction after touching a hot stove can be a good lesson for a youngster on dangers in the kitchen—other lessons are harder to learn through observation alone. No matter how many times you watch a surgeon perform open-heart surgery, chances are you won’t ever learn how to pull off a triple bypass.
And yet, in business, companies routinely expect employees to pick up new job knowledge through vicarious learning—through reading descriptions of tasks in knowledge-management databases or by observing colleagues from afar. “The predominant analogy for vicarious learning is the photocopier,” says Christopher G. Myers, assistant professor of Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School. The idea: Watch what other people do, make copies of the good things and dispose of the bad things, and we are good to go.
But good knowledge transfer doesn’t quite happen that way, and organizations that practice watch-and-learn vicarious learning run the risk of undertraining their key employees, says Myers.
He challenges the theory in a new working paper, “Coactive Vicarious Learning: Towards a Relational Theory of Vicarious Learning in Organizations,” in which he argues that observation and imitation are rarely the best ways for employees to learn on the job.
“There are some realms of life where that is true, but for the most part, problems in business are more complicated,” says Myers.
The limitations of traditional forms of knowledge management come from two sets of assumptions, he argues.
The first assumption is that the most important elements of a job function are observable, ignoring the crucial tacit knowledge that can influence how someone carries out his or her job. “I could watch a colleague challenge a student and I could think that’s the way I should teach, but what I miss is the backstory, about why he is doing it in that particular case.”
Perhaps even more crucial, those systems assume that the person undertaking the learning wants to duplicate exactly what the other person is doing—despite the fact that they may be perpetuating mistakes made by a predecessor or simply following procedures that may be a bad fit for a person of a different personality and skill set.
Instead, Myers envisions a model of coactive vicarious learning.
“The major shift theoretically is moving from a language of transfer, of taking fully formed knowledge and passing it from one person’s head to another, and instead talking about co-creation and building it together,” he says. “What that means practically is vicarious learning must be more interactive. Both the learner and the sharer of knowledge bring things to the table and together create something new.” Myers was inspired to study the topic based on his own experience as an outdoor wilderness instructor, an area in which the cost of failure is too high for people to learn only from their own experience. “Trial and error is not the way you want to learn rock climbing,” says Myers.
When Acquiring Knowledge Is Life Or Death
In his own research, he has spent hundreds of hours studying a similarly fraught industry—high-risk medical transport teams—to learn how they acquire knowledge that can literally mean the difference between life and death. He found that much of their vicarious learning occurred not through studying procedural manuals, but through informal storytelling in the downtime between missions, in which team members related past incidents. “They would dig in with each other and dissect prior cases a little bit, asking, ‘Why did you do it this way, and not that way?’ It’s happening in these more discursive kind of ways.”
By contrast, Myers argues that many companies employ knowledge management systems that favor more independent, rather than discursive, learning. “They say, ‘I am going to write everything down and everyone who wants to know anything about the industry can have that document at their fingertips,’” says Myers. Except this system often doesn’t get used.
Source | Forbes
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