Today, we see a lot of leaders talk about learning acceleration, and I thought it’d be helpful to spend a few minutes thinking about this, in depth.
How do you define "Learning Acceleration"?
Having been a physicist, I need to say that learning acceleration involves a time component, and it should be properly defined as the how fast the learning velocity changes.
But that is not really transparent and best understood with an example: it’s fairly obvious that human beings learn new things very fast as children and as they grow older, learning slows down.
So let’s stick with something more understandable: how fast you learn new things. That should suffice.
Note that the learning doesn’t necessarily have to be one dimensional – for example, acceleration in sales techniques, etc. Learning is in general, multi-dimensional.
In today’s world, multi-dimensional learning is just as important as learning something very deep. More and more disciplines like biology, physics, chemistry, math, computing, geology, environmental sciences etc. require learning in multiple disciplines to arrive at a deeper understanding of natural phenomena.
Why is "learning acceleration" important?
Learning Acceleration has become important with the rate of technological changes afoot. Learning acceleration has always been important from time immemorial.
It has been the difference between leaders and others i.e., leaders need to learn faster to be at least on par with their peers, if not ahead.
But “Learning Acceleration” has also become important for companies to think about and start to worry about. One way to calibrate learning for an organization is to take the Learning Culture Survey (LCS) periodically and measure movements – say for teams, departments and organizations as a whole.
How do you "accelerate learning"?
We’ll visit this topic in my next blog topic as this is a whole field in itself. In the meantime, it will be helpful if you could share how you are accelerating learning in your organization..
I look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Balasubramanian Krishnan, Ph.D.
