Exploring pathways to growing competence in the workplace.
The most cutting-edge technology won’t do a company any good if workers don’t know how to use it. This seems obvious enough—yet many companies fail to acknowledge it, implementing new systems, policies, or procedures, without giving employees the tools needed to operate them effectively.
The story of the lumberjack and the chainsaw is a humorous testament to this fact. This lumberjack spends years of his career using his trusty old ax—double-bladed, specialized steel, oak handle. He goes out into the woods, takes a few swings, cuts the trees, and gets the job done.
One day, the lumberjack notices his ax is worn out, so he goes to the hardware store. He tells the owner of the hardware store, “I need a new ax for cutting trees.” The hardware owner replies, “You should be using a chainsaw. You can cut down ten times as many trees in the same amount of time.” This sounds great to the lumberjack, who walks out of the hardware store with a brand-new chainsaw.
Two days later, the lumberjack is back at the hardware store. He tells the store owner, “This thing is useless! It took me twice as long to cut down one tree with a chainsaw as it did with my ax.”
The hardware store owner doesn’t understand the issue—he thinks the chainsaw must be broken—so he takes it in hand and starts it up to check. As soon as the chainsaw starts up, the lumberjack jumps and says: “What’s that noise?!”
As silly as that old joke might be, it demonstrates the point well: There’s no point giving someone a new tool if you aren’t equipping them with the knowledge to use it well. The onus is on organizations and the executives who lead to give people not only the tools but also the ability to effectively use those tools the way they’re intended.
However, basic ability alone isn’t enough. Ideally, workers will develop their competence, the skill to use the tools to their fullest potential in every situation, which is what organizations are really looking for. As the individual’s competence grows, the organization benefits. Having the ability to operate the chainsaw alone is one thing; having the competence that comes with optimally using the chainsaw in all different circumstances is another. If a person’s competence grows, they become better at dealing with the tasks at hand.
The question for organizations and leaders then becomes: How do you grow competence in your people? There are a few avenues to explore.
Ways to Grow Competence in the Workplace
Competence is made up of two things—knowledge and skill. Knowledge is what a person holds in their head intellectually. Skill takes that knowledge and applies it in practice—it’s what the person actually does. As these two things grow, so does overall competence.
There are many ways to grow competence. In organizations, the most common way is through trial-and-error. Most people refer to this simply as “learning by experience.” A person starts a job; they’re given some sort of elemental orientation; and then they’re expected to perform that job. In practice, their knowledge grows, as does their skill. That’s learning by experience.
Another way organizations grow competence is through classroom-based teaching. An individual—this could be either a new recruit or a long-standing employee—is put into a classroom setting. They’re taught some new knowledge or skill. The hope is that once they leave that classroom, they will apply what they’ve learned.
The next level involves giving people a chance to actually practice what they’ve been taught. Now, practice can be handled in different ways. For white collar jobs, training could involve taking part in role-playing scenarios or mock case studies. For a trade job, training could involve serving as an apprentice under a more senior professional. In either case, there is the possibility of learning-by-doing in a controlled environment.
Now, what if you want to guarantee absolutely flawless competence—100 percent perfection in performance? Obviously, this is rare in most fields. In others, it’s non-negotiable. An airline pilot flying a plane with 300-plus people on board doesn’t have room for mistakes. “Trial-and-error” and “learning-by-doing” aren’t options.
The solution here is to use simulation. Pilots are given a massive amount of knowledge. They’re then put in a simulator where they can safely gain massive amounts of experience by putting that knowledge into practice and improving their skills.
In a professional flight simulator, the person is sitting in a replica cockpit, set on hydraulic lifts. So, if they push the lever forward, the simulator drops, mimicking the experience of controlling an airplane’s movement through actions in the cockpit. The flight instructor can flick a switch to create different scenarios. One minute the student is flying into Narita Airport in Tokyo at night and the next minute they are approaching Heathrow in London in a heavy fog.
The flight instructor can also control the simulator mid “flight,” subjecting the student to unforeseen circumstances. They might flick a switch as the student “lands” the plane, causing the hydraulic lifts to drop, so that the “plane” jolts upon landing. That’s the student’s cue to realize: I landed too hard, and the front wheel broke. Through these simulations, the student learns how to register what’s happening with the plane and how to react. How do you land safely with the front wheel broken? Hopefully, it’s a situation the student never experiences—but they must know how to handle it in case it does occur, and that can be accomplished through a simulation.
A simulation is, by definition, an exact replica of the real world. The cockpit simulator is a precise example of simulations used for workplace training—and an effective one. However, simulation-based training elsewhere in the working world isn’t quite as impactful. When most companies think of simulations, they seek ways to simulate business realities. They might use computer programs to try to make this tangible. The student is given a scenario and must make a decision accordingly; once they input some data, they’re fed a result, such as a profit or loss. However, such “simulations” more imitate than simulate reality. The impact of the cockpit simulator is lost.
At one end of the spectrum, you have learning-by-doing. At the other end, you have simulations. There is a middle ground, a way that companies can grow workers’ competence effectively and safely: experiential learning, which is often more effective than typical tools such as role plays or case studies. These tend to emphasize “knowledge” growth, rather than improve competence.
Experiential Learning: Another Avenue Toward Competence
Many people conflate simulation-based learning with experiential learning—but the two are distinct. Experiential learning doesn’t involve creating a simulation of your world. It involves creating a metaphor of your world.
Metaphors are a phenomenally powerful tool for communicating with and teaching people. If I’m trying to demonstrate the importance of good leadership to another person, I could talk for an hour straight about how good leaders help people grow and achieve maximum potential and contribute to the organization and so forth. Before I’m done talking, the person listening to me will be bored to death.
What if I reach for a metaphor instead? I might say, if an organization is a tree, the leader is the roots—nourishing the tree and ensuring that the branches, the people, grow strong. Through an analogy, it’s much faster and easier to demonstrate the value of leadership—no lengthy speech needed.
Experiential learning is basically a sophisticated analogy or metaphor. It’s a vehicle that you can put people into, embedding the learning into the experience. An example from my organization, Eagle’s Flight, can demonstrate the value.
We have one space-themed experience called Rescue Orion. In it, several space stations are working together on various types of research to improve life on earth. One of them is the Orion station. Unexpectedly, the Orion station gets hit by a meteorite. The mother station, a million miles away, gets the emergency message from Orion, telling them they’ve been hit by a meteor and experienced loss and damages. They only have six days of life support oxygen left, with other problems looming.
The group at the mother station must undertake to rescue Orion. They have spaceships and oxygen and resources that could be used. However, it takes time to get these goods to Orion safely, and there are risks involved. There are other space stations involved who have both more information about Orion’s situation, and resources which could help. They also have to maintain enough life support resources for their own ship. If they send oxygen to Orion, will it be enough? Will they have enough? What if another space station needs some? Many questions arise.
The group’s job is to come together and come up with and execute a workable solution before that day six deadline. On day six, Orion runs out of life support and it’s all over. (In the experience, time is condensed, so the whole experience is more like two hours). If the rescue team spends too much time discussing and debating, and waits to take action, they may miss critical deadlines. Everyone in the team brings the competence they have—their knowledge and skills, like communication and problem-solving abilities—to the table to try to rescue Orion.
Afterward, there is a comprehensive debrief of the situation. The rescue team gets feedback and the opportunity to analyze their actions. Maybe they took the right action but waited too long to initiate it. Or maybe they had resources that they wasted or used up too quickly. Perhaps their judgment on relative priorities was flawed. The objective is to show them how they could have performed differently to get a better outcome.
Those possible changes in their performance, knowledge, and skills—in competence—are then translated to the working world. Each one of the principles discussed in the Rescue Orion experience can be applied to the job.
For instance, say the team discussed too long and missed the deadline to save Orion. This is an opportunity to highlight the issue of critical urgencies in the workplace. There are some problems, like a lack of oxygen, that need to be fixed before all else. The question then becomes, “What is a day six problem in your world?”
In this way, the whole metaphor comes alive for the participants. In just a couple hours, they see their approach to how they operate in business laid out in front of them, and then gain insights into how to apply what they’ve learned in rescuing Orion to improve their performance in their real-world job. Experiential learning builds both knowledge and skill, thereby improving competence. It uses a metaphor for work (e.g., a space rescue) that allows learning to be focused, compressed into a short timeframe, and, most importantly, be discovered through personal experience.
When people then ask, “Is this a day six problem or not?” everyone in the room knows what they’re talking about.
Experiential learning can be adapted to what you want to teach, and Eagle’s Flight has many different experiences, each designed to improve a key competence. Whatever the experience, as people engage with the learning, they begin by bringing their own self, and leave with increased competence. And it’s fun!