🤗 A Kind Learning Environment

A longer one, but worth it. Ties into the second, shorter, point.

When I ran my first real business, the first brewery in the world to specialise in ancient recipes, I had a pretty good grasp of how things were meant to work.

I had a degree in Management and Marketing from the #1 university for that course in Europe, a family member who was a maltster, and two self-made multi-millionaire mentors one who had made their money as a major investor in FMCG businesses and the other as the founder of world-renowned brewer of Hobgoblin Wychwood brewery. Things looked good.

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that things in real life don’t necessarily work how the theory suggests.

Theory is often based on ‘perfect information’, a clear knowledge of what the current situation is. In business, the information we have is often murky or missing.

While most theory didn’t help, a theory did actually help me solve the problem. Meet “Kind Learning Environments”.

Kind learning environments have 4 criteria:

1. Relevant data is available

   
   

2. Relevant data is trustworthy

   
   

3. The rules don't change

   
   

4. Feedback is available quickly

   
   

Chess is a very good example of a kind learning environment. The rules are fixed, it happens in front of you in reality, and you know relatively quickly whether the move you made was good or not.

Unfortunately, business is a “wicked learning environment”. Rules change, incorrect or missing information is common, situations don’t repeat, feedback is delayed, and data can be ambiguous and misleading.

So how did knowing the theory of kind learning environments help me?

Like most things in life, whether the learning environment is kind or wicked is a spectrum. We can make the business environment much more kind by using data.

I might not be able to get perfect information, but I can certainly improve my access to timely trustworthy relevant data. I can regularly request feedback, and make it easier to obtain feedback quickly. I can help establish fixed rules by focusing on one small area at a time.

I always use data to inform my decisions, and actively encourage clients to improve their access to data. It takes a bit of set-up, but improving your learning environment makes it much easier and quicker to improve.

ACTION: Write out your data points (10 minutes)

Where do you currently get data from? What data do you have available? Is that data trustworthy? Is it quick? How can you make your data better?

Better does not necessarily mean more. A few key metrics tracked properly is better than an overwhelming amount of data that takes hours to collect and collate.

The first step to solving any problem is building awareness. We need to start by knowing what data you currently have access to. We can build from there.

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: hhttps://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-february-28

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