Why Do You Need To Know About Lightning Learning?

We may not have noticed it happening, but a tipping point has just been passed:

“The ability to rapidly learn a new skill has now become a more valuable employee asset than knowing a skill, for the majority of companies around the world.”

Many in the newest generation of workers innately possess an understanding of how to learn rapidly. Now is the time that we begin to understand how they do it and  to help all workers to “re-learn how to learn” if they haven’t already done so.

We call this new type of learning “Lightning Learning”. Ignore it at your own professional and business peril!
Lightning Learning and the Matrix

You may remember a scene in the movie “The Matrix” where Neo (the hero played by Keanu Reeves) is trapped on the roof of a tall building with his sidekick Trinity. The bad guys are rushing up the stairwell, and will likely burst through the doors in a matter of seconds. Searching frantically for a way to escape, Neo spies a fully fueled and operational Bell 212 helicopter sitting just a few meters away.

Neither Neo nor Trinity knows how to fly it:

Neo turning to Trinity: “Do you know how to fly that thing?”

Trinity: “Not yet.”

Trinity smiles knowingly and dials up (on an actual phone) headquarters for help.

Instantaneously, the knowledge of how to fly the helicopter begins downloading directly into Trinity’s brain. In the nick of time, she gains the necessary knowledge. Moments later she is flawlessly flying the helicopter away from the bad guys.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if your employees could learn that rapidly? How valuable would it be if your company could move swiftly after new opportunities with a highly educated and nimble workforce?

Though the learning technology in the Matrix movie doesn’t yet exist, we are nonetheless making great strides in our ability to learn rapidly.

Like a flash of lightning that is both brilliant and instantaneous, I’ll optimistically call this new phenomenon ‘lightning learning’.

How does lightning learning differ from traditional learning?

Lightning learning differs from what we’d think of as more traditional learning in a number of ways:

1. it is fast
2. it is immediate
3. it is focused on just what you need to know
4. it may be useful for only a short time

In the case of the Matrix, the most important thing about the learning was that it was just in the nick of time and that it was fast.

In reality however, there will be some tradeoff between quantity and speed.  To accommodate the required speed, lighting learning focuses only on what you need to know now, and cuts out extraneous learnings that might slow you down.

The philosophy of lightning learning also accepts that you won’t remember things forever. If you no longer need to know something, then it is forgotten. For instance, if you only need certain knowledge for one particular project then it is ok if that knowledge leaks out of your brain when the project is over (much the way a waiter perfectly remembers an order up until the time that the patron pays the bill).

Velocity of change is driving the need for lighting learning

Lightning learning provides a change in the way we think about learning that is required today in order to keep pace with the speed at which new knowledge is being produced. This is especially true for those who work in industries driven by data technologies like data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Our world is in an unprecedented spin up of more data, more knowledge and constantly changing methods of communication. IDC Research predicts that global data stored will go from 50 to 150 zettabytes (a zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes) in the next five years. That’s roughly a terabyte of information produced for every human family on the planet. 

We can also see this unprecedented change occurring in the non-technical world when we look at some of the things that we no longer need to know (like cursive handwriting). Even human language is changing and disappearing at an unprecedented rate. The Unesco world language atlas reports that in the last seventy years nearly 250 human languages have gone extinct and been replaced with new ones.

The languages of data technology are changing even faster. For example, few people who graduated from college twenty years ago with a degree in AI would have the specific skills required to program today. They would have had some deep and important knowledge about algorithms and the math required to implement those algorithms, but they would have been trained on programming languages like LISP that are rarely used anymore.

We look to eLearning and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) to help us keep up with this rapid pace but they are not completely successful.

Elearning systems are not working

Workers today need to refresh their skills in a rapid and focused way. But our best solutions in educational technology are letting them down.  Common Sense Media reports that nearly a third of educators are not able to use the educational technology they have purchased because they lack the training.

If educators are having trouble using today’s best learning technologies, then the rest of us will probably need some help as well.

Guess who’s good at lightning learning?

There is hope. The practices of lightning learning are probably already beginning to occur within your company. While the kind of super rapid learning that Trinity experienced in learning to fly the helicopter is still science fiction, nascent forms of lightning learning are second nature to some of our workers. The current generation of our most productive workers, the Millennials, are already adept at a form of lightning learning.

The Millennial generation and their successors the iGeners (or Gen Z) have been raised on iPhones and video games and are already lean-mean-learning machines. They are already able to quickly discern valuable new information from distraction and consume complexity with a new kind of “just in time” approach to learning.

Lightning learning is the superpower of the Millennials

I was sitting at Thanksgiving dinner last year with my Millennial children and we were discussing the bad rap that Millennials often receive. They are often unfairly accused of suffering from new ailments like: “helicopter parenting”, “errand paralysis”, “decision fatigue”, and generalized “fear of adulting”.

These types of criticisms are nothing new as the incumbent generation always takes shots at the up-and-coming generation. Most Millennials shrug them off with an eye roll and a softly muttered “ok boomer”, but one area where Millennials are excelling well beyond their baby boomer predecessors, is in their expectation of and ability to learn rapidly.

I have seen this first hand in the high-tech business world. As an example, my company regularly hires undergraduates from MIT as interns. Having had only a year or two of college under their belts, there is a lot that these students don’t know. But they learn quickly. Perhaps it is from all the hours they’ve spent playing video games where rapid acquisition of game rules is critical to game success. I often find myself in a Keanu Reeves moment when interacting with them.

I might ask: “Hey do you know how to put that school data into an interactive map with Google?” and it’s like Trinity is responding to me:  “Sorry I don’t know how to do that, but let me figure it out tonight…”.  By the next day these undergrads had often acquired enough of the new skills to be productive on the new task.

Lightning learning is already an expectation of the Millennial and post-Millennial populations. That needs to be true for everyone in business today.  Got it boomer? 

The next generation has different expectations

One of the reasons that the Millennials and the iGeners are so successful at rapidly learning new topics is that they benefit from a general change in viewpoint in what it means to learn. I’ll go into more detail on this in some follow up articles, but for now consider the differences between the expectations for traditional and lightning learning:

This change in thinking is perhaps the most important thing that you should try to propagate at your company. If you do you will see immediate benefits at greatly reduced costs of dollars, time and resources.

Lightning Learning provides many benefits

Lightning Learning is not a panacea. It must be applied with common sense and the quality implementation. For instance there needs to be a balance between the frenetic acquisition of micro-skills and the building of deep knowledge over time. Both can be accommodated through the utilization of best practices and I’ll show how it helps with “deep work” in the next article.

Once implemented with supporting elearning infrastructure, lightning learning provides tremendous advantages to your company:

1. Lower costs - Lightning learning is almost always individualized, self-paced and online. These types of programs are much less expensive than those half day internal seminars or weeklong offsites.
2. Happier employees - Most employees value job satisfaction more than compensation and they recognize that if they aren’t moving forward in their skills that they are at risk in their careers. Providing continuous learning opportunities makes them feel stable and valuable.
3. Increased market value - The most valuable asset for many companies today, especially those in tech, is their employees (just look at the increased valuation for companies built on W2s (employees) versus 1099s (consultants)). Well informed employees are valuable. Employees who are continuously and rapidly learning are really valuable.
4. Improved competitiveness - Companies that know what they are doing are likely to outcompete their rivals.
5. Speed of pivot - With the recent economic upheavals caused by the pandemic, previously stable industries (like airlines and hotels) are now being challenged to react and pivot as rapidly as much smaller companies. Successfully pivoting is much faster and cheaper if you can train existing employees rather than recruiting new employees with the needed skills.

With all these benefits it is imperative for senior management to begin to support the mindset of lightning learning within the corporation.

Four years from now

Four years from now, corporations will be measuring their value based on the skills and knowledge of their employees. I expect this to be standardized in some way and become part of the formal valuation of a company’s worth. It will become a leading indicator for future corporate health and even IPO valuation.

The days of corporations strategically investing in employees are gone and will probably never return, as the pace of business has increased and the tenure of most employees continues to drop. Corporations will have given up their notions of the ‘well-prepared employee’ and replaced them with the recognition that the ability of employees to rapidly learn new skills is the most important skill. Required knowledge and skills will become more like just-in-time inventory and less like stored value in a warehouse.

This change will filter down to the employee and challenge them to show, not how much they know, but how quickly they can learn. Those workers that keep learning will stay valuable. Those that teach are even more valuable. Those that are satisfied with their knowledge (even if they know a lot) will fall behind.

Within four years we will begin to see colleges and K-12 schools re-evaluate what an adequate curriculum looks like that will best prepare their students for this 21st century.  Learning will move from the strategic to the tactical, from a slow dawning of enlightenment to flashes of brilliant lightning as individual new skills are acquired.

The age of lightning learning is upon us.

Read Part II: Welcome to the Age of Learning 

Related articles: 

Don't Underestimate the Power of Stupid Artificial Intelligence Algorithms

Commodity AI and the Next Best Experiment

State of the Machine Learning and AI Industry: https://www.kdnuggets.com/2020/04/machine-learning-ai-industry.html

References: 

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

Python leads the 11 top Data Science, Machine Learning Platforms: Trends and Analysis. Piatetsky. KDnuggets. 2019.

“How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”. Petersen. BuzzFeed. 2019.

“The five pillars of edtech procurement”. Krueger. Empowered Learner.

Definitions of generations from the Pew Research Center:

Greatest Generation: Born 1901-1927 (93+ years old)

The Silent Generation: Born 1928-1945 (75-92 years old)

Baby Boomers: Born 1946-1964 (56-74 years old)

Generation X: Born 1965-1980 (40-55 years old)

Millennials: Born 1981-1996 (24-39 years old)

iGen, Gen Z, Post-Millennials: Born 1997-Present (0-23 years old)