The Learning Edge
While the learning essentials of sequence, continuity, structure, and similarity are critical to infant learning, they continue to be necessary as we grow through childhood and teenage years into our adult lives—as anyone who has studied music will attest. As adults, however, there are additional pressures and considerations to learning.
Children are innately wired to learn. This is clearly an evolutionary-driven capability. Since humans are born with a relatively low level of instinctual DNA-stored knowledge, they need to learn a lot in order to survive. The paucity of instinctual survival knowledge is one of the reasons why human offspring have such a long maturation process—they need time to acquire the necessary knowledge. But once the children have grown into adulthood, this pressure might well ease. Certainly, it has been well recorded that adults generally find it harder to learn than children. We address several reasons for this later, but one is that children don’t have existing structures that might conflict with or impede learning new things—to them everything is “new.” Adults, on the other hand, will have a lot of existing knowledge, perhaps some that has proven useful. They may know things which make them expert in various fields or disciplines and this can mitigate against acquiring new knowledge and skills, or at least reduce the necessity for it.
Learning and Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.”[1] In this book he describes a model of learning as it relates to competency in and difficulty of tasks. In this model, when the difficulty of a task exceeds an individual’s competency at the task, the person will tend to be ineffective. The ineffectiveness—apart from being a function of the lack of knowledge or skill—is usually compounded by a certain level of anxiety[2].
At the other end of the scale, when a person’s competency at a task is much higher than the difficulty[3], they can become bored and inattentive. This will tend to make the person less effective overall, though they might still be displaying their competency. Certainly, as Csikszentmihalyi pointed out, this now rather boring task will tend to feel unrewarding.
Between these extremes—in the “Competency Zone”—the person’s abilities and the requirements of the task are in sync—the job is not so easy that it doesn’t require effort and attention and not so difficult that it causes anxiety.
When confronted with a wholly new task, a person’s journey might look like this:
Overwhelmed: Initially, even though the intrinsic difficulty of the task might be quite low, the relative difficulty as experienced by the person could be high. This might induce some anxiety. Example: someone learning to play tennis might simply be unable to hit the ball or get it over the net, even if the ball is gently thrown. In addition to the clear lack of ability (knowledge/skill), an adult operating in this zone may well experience significant anxiety. As adults we tend to be allergic to obvious displays of inadequacy, particularly if these displays are public. This anxiety will tend to further reduce ability in a reinforcing loop.
Competent: Assuming the person sticks to the task and learns, they will enter the Competency Zone where they start to be able to complete the task at some level of acquired ability. Example: provided the tennis player is playing against someone of relatively similar ability, they can both get progressively better and have a reasonable and satisfying game.
Easy: If the person continues operating at the same level of difficulty but gets better and better at it, eventually the task will become easy and relatively effortless. Example: the tennis player, after much practice, becomes a lot better while the competition stays at the same level. When this happens the game becomes less competitive and generally less satisfying. Additionally, in playing against clearly inferior competition, the player has little need to learn.
Too Easy: Unless the difficulty is increased, the task becomes too simple and generally quite unsatisfying. Example: now the tennis player can beat the competition without breaking into a sweat. Certainly, in this zone, little new knowledge or skill is acquired simply because there is no pressing need.
Once in the easy or too easy area, in order for the task to continue to feel rewarding, the person must increase the difficulty, perhaps (in the tennis example) by playing against better competition. However, if the competition is too good, the person may well find themselves back in the anxious zone.
In an earlier published article, I extended this model. [4]
The Comfort Zone
I identified the lower portion of the Competency Zone as the Comfort Zone. The name is apt; it is in this area of difficulty/competence that someone can expend the least energy, still retain some modicum of interest and engagement, and almost effortlessly display competence. It is comfortable. Humans, like most dynamical systems, often choose to operate at the lowest energy output and the Comfort Zone provides an environment for that.
The Learning Edge
At the other side of the Competency Zone lies the Learning Edge. It is here, and to some extent only here, that true learning actually occurs. Within the Competency Zone, most learning is practicing the initial skills acquired when entering the Competency Zone to become increasingly adept. In the Comfort Zone, learning is mostly focused on continuing to reduce the energy required by becoming more efficient in exhibiting the competency. It is not learning, it is learning to be lazy.
Arguably, if we are truly competent there is little reason to learn. Certainly, there is much less pressure to acquire new knowledge and new skills than when it is manifestly obvious that we haven’t a clue. So the Learning Edge, almost by definition, lies outside the Competency Zone. This is, again, where the challenge in adult learning occurs. As adults, we usually prefer to play to our strengths, to effortlessly exhibit our skills, to openly display what we know. Acknowledging that we do not have skills, that there are important things we do not know, that we are incapable of performing certain tasks, is difficult for most of us.
Accelerated Learning
This area lies on the outer edge of the Learning Edge. It is as far as we can go into the anxiety zone without breaking down. It is here that we learn the most, most quickly, and usually most profoundly. However, it is often psychically and physically difficult. People have displayed amazing examples of intensely rapid learning when confronted with extreme situations and, rather than shutting down because of the pressure and anxiety, they are able to transcend their normal learning modalities and perform amazingly well[5].
It is this state that Professor Csikszentmihalyi called the state of “Flow.”
FOOTNOTES
[1] Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2008
[2] This is an area where adults differ considerably from children. Children are not expected to be competent, they are innately wired to learn, they learn quickly (depending on the task), and they are relatively unfazed by being unable to do something. In adults, the anxiety caused by publicly displaying low competence can be paralyzing.
[3] That is, difficulty with respect to the person’s ability
[4] Phillip G. Armour in Communications of the ACM June 2006, Vol 49. No 6 The Business of Software: The Learning Edge
[5] For example: on the flight deck of United Airlines Flight 232 which crashed in Sioux City, IA on July 9th 1989 as related in Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival by Laurence Gonzales (2014, W. W. Norton & Company; ISBN 978-0-393-24002-3)