Read Part I: What is Lightning Learning?

If you work in a large company today you may have some difficulty motivating senior management to provide resources and investment for learning. It can be frustrating because you know that knowledge is key to competitive success yet learning is not viewed with the importance that it deserves.

A good learning culture and infrastructure produces many benefits to a company, such as reducing employee attrition and keeping the company competitive, but its value can be hard to attribute and measure.

This inability to correctly value learning investments is about to change. We are now moving into an era where learning will be considered the most valuable asset at employee-centric companies. It is strange to think of learning as a corporate asset but companies are beginning to view it that way. This is a subtle but important change from valuing knowledge to valuing the acquisition of knowledge.

To see how we arrived at this new “Age of Learning” I’ll provide some historical perspective on how the drivers of corporate value have changed over time. And why learning is now the most important driver of value.

In the old days, the land was the value

In 1626 Peter Minuit “bought” the island of Manhattan for $24 worth of trinkets. Today that same land is estimated to be worth nearly $2 trillion. Not a bad investment.

Land, the right land, can be immensely valuable.

But as valuable as Manhattan real estate is today, there is now something the Brookings Institute believes to be much more valuable: the people who live there.

In recent research, they reported that the cumulative value of real estate in all U.S. cities was around $25 trillion but the value of the people in those cities and their collective knowledge was worth $240 trillion.

The value of the people and their skills is now nearly ten times greater than the value of the land.

Businesses undervalue knowledge and learning

Unfortunately, most businesses don’t yet think that way about the value of knowledge. They don’t report employee knowledge as an asset on their five-year pro forma or track it as a key performance indicator. Top and bottom line metrics dominate with a sprinkling of value attributed to goodwill and intellectual property.

Yet to be competitive, corporations and governments are going to need to take knowledge and its acquisition seriously. Consider the decrease in valuation of Microsoft, Google, or Facebook if all their employees decided to walk out the front door and not come back (or never again sign on to their Zoom calls from home during the great shutdown…).

The historical drivers of organizational value

Over time, the way we have valued an organization has changed (see figure 1). As recently as the early 1800s, when agriculture dominated commerce, the wealth of an individual or the perceived value of a company or city was tightly tied to the land that that individual or organization owned.

Figure 1: The driver of organizational value has evolved over time.

Later, as the industrial revolution progressed, the ownership of land became just part of the valuation equation. Machines and factories grew in importance and companies that could efficiently process the resources provided by the land became the most successful, not just the ones with the most land.

By the early twentieth century, effectively managing the labor that ran the machines that made the land and other raw materials valuable, became the dominant driver of value. The workers became a critical part of a successful company and unions began to exert control.

By the middle of the twentieth century, production tasks were still fairly simple and even complex tasks could be broken down into simpler subtasks thanks to the division of labor and the production line. But over time, complexity grew.

This increase in complexity, in turn, drove the need to find, maintain and nurture employees who could understand the required complexity. Thus, knowledge held by its employees became a critically important component of the overall health and valuation of the organization. This was the information age. College degrees and PhDs became required entrance tickets to new jobs. Knowledge was critical to personal and corporate success.

Today, business is getting more complex at an ever-faster rate. Consider that an iPhone today is a far more complicated object than a 1962 Chevy Impala. To keep up with these changes, organizations and their employees must now do more than know. They must continually learn and learn rapidly.

We have entered the “Age of Learning”.

To see how things have changed, consider the impact that the rate of increasing complexity has on hiring. Today it may not be possible to hire new employees with the required skills in the latest technology, such as data science or artificial intelligence. To be successful, organizations must instead utilize existing employees who may possess only 70% of the required knowledge. To keep up, employees must be able to learn rapidly.

Rapid, just-in-time learning is the standard today

Learning is important, but you can’t spend your entire workday just learning new things. Learning itself must accommodate the quantity and rate of change of today’s knowledge requirements.

Remember that in the futuristic movie “The Matrix”, the character Trinity saved the hero Neo by quickly learning how to fly a helicopter. Note that she didn’t come pre-loaded knowing everything she’d ever need to know. Instead, she learned how to fly the helicopter only when she needed to. Just-in-time learning.

We call this new type of rapid, focused, just-in-time learning, “lightning learning”. To be feasible in the real world it relies on two important bounding principles that make learning manageable:

1. It’s ok to not know everything.
2. It’s ok to forget what you learned when you don’t need it anymore.

It’s ok to not know everything

To appreciate the first principle of lightning learning, consider that in the days of Socrates (circa 400 B.C.), many great thinkers believed that, if you were smart and disciplined enough, that you could learn everything that there was to know in the world.

This viewpoint of possible human omniscience persisted throughout the middle ages, the renaissance and right up to the 21st century. Remnants of this thinking remain today in colleges and universities that deliver degrees that don’t provide jobs to their graduates and in K-12 education where we teach skills that are unlikely to be of immediate economic value to the student. For example, teaching calculus to children who have much greater need for more practical skills like personal finance or basic accounting.

And of course, there is always a tradeoff of being too commercially focused. Like when Steve Jobs took a design course at Reed College, which in turn encouraged him to make engaging fonts an important part of the first Macintosh Computer.

It’s ok to forget what you learned 

Today you can’t know everything. There’s just too much. But it’s actually a little bit worse than that. What you do know becomes quickly outdated, especially when it comes to technology (e.g. remember Hadoop was the biggest thing on the planet five years ago). Rather than fight this trend, the lightning learning philosophy encourages the learner to forget and replace knowledge once it is no longer needed. Consider my uber-accurate hand-drawn graph in figure 2 showing how knowledge in the past remained viable for long periods of time but today dissipates and expires rapidly.

Figure 2: The value of knowledge dissipates more quickly today.

Summary

Historically the foundational value of various organizations, whether they were cities or companies, lay in the land that they owned or controlled. Over time, that value shifted from land, to machines, to people, and eventually to knowledge. 

Today it is shifting again due to the quantity and pace of change of required knowledge.

Some companies get it and we are beginning to see a reprioritization in importance away from having knowledge and towards acquiring knowledge. To be competitive, organizations need to embrace the principles of lightning learning and recognize that the ability to learn and to learn quickly is now their most important asset.

Four years from now

In four years, we will look back and see that we have made very rapid progress in valuing learning within the organization and implement the principles of lightning learning. Here are some other predictions:

Training costs will decrease. A hidden benefit of lightning learning is that it will be much cheaper than current training methods. Small investments in learning will result in big payoffs in company valuations.

Employers benefit in hiring. Employers will be able to quickly look at a candidate’s academic record to see how much they know and how quickly they can learn and how active they are in learning new skills.

Employees will benefit from career advancement. Employees will recognize the benefits of lightning learning and be more and more willing to individually invest in improving their skills for business.

The ‘Age of Experimentation’ is next. If we are to keep up with AIs that infuse our society with new levels of complexity, then it will not be possible to just learn quickly from existing knowledge bases. It will be incumbent upon us to also be able to learn inchoate technologies when no one yet exists that we can learn from. So, the next step will be the requirement to not only learn rapidly but to experiment rapidly to both learn and create the knowledge at the same time. Perhaps we will call this the ‘Age of Curiosity’ or the ‘Age of Experimentation’ but it will likely be most applicable to only an elite sub-segment of the population while lightning learning will be a requirement for almost everyone.

Read Part III: ELearning is Still Broken

Related articles: 

What is Lightning Learning?

Don't Underestimate the Power of Stupid Artificial Intelligence Algorithms

Commodity AI and the Next Best Experiment

References: 

https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/04/what-manhattans-land-is-worth/558776/

“Talent-Driven Economic Development”. Parilla and Liu. Brookings Institute. 2019.

 https://www.journals.elsevier.com/regional-science-and-urban-economics/