In a rapidly changing world, it’s the only effective way to learn
Almost three decades ago, I was running an industrial training program in a factory that was then implementing just-in-time manufacturing (JIT). It occurred to me that the principles of JIT — now called lean manufacturing — would apply to learning as easily.
Flash forward to 2013 and I’m teaching again, this time a 12-week “immersive” web development course for General Assembly. The pressures of the intense workload were stressing the students out considerably, and I again applied the principles of just-in-time learning, telling the students:
Never learn anything until you have to.
Put another way, learn only what you need to know exactly when you need to know it — no more, no less, no sooner, and definitely no later.
Unlearning how to learn
The most difficult part of teaching humans how to learn just-in-time is overcoming our deeply-instilled belief that we need to know everything.
To overcome this I often would ask how many of my students could drive a car. Invariably, every hand went up.
Then I’d ask one at random to come up and draw a diagram of an automatic transmission and explain how it worked. I’d ask another to explain the coefficient of friction and how different tire compounds affect it. To a third, I’d ask about fuel-air ratios and their relationship to barometric pressure.
Typically, none of the students could answer any of these questions. But they could all still drive (uh, more or less).
Knowing about transmissions, tire compounds, and fuel-air ratios might make them better drivers, but were they really trying to become expert drivers, or were they just trying to get somewhere quickly? If the latter, then the information I requested might have been fun to know, but it was utterly superfluous to the task at hand.
And still they struggled. The belief that we need to know everything is a powerful one, and not easily discarded.
Expertise is highly overrated
We’ve been taught from an early age to revere expertise, where expertise is generally assumed to mean knowing almost everything about a subject. But the truth is that in day-to-day life, we rarely need to know more than a small subset of that knowledge.
And in a world where knowledge goes obsolete almost as fast as we can learn it, trying to maintain skills and knowledge “just in case” is an expensive hobby. Don’t we all have better things to do?
Just in time, not just in case
One alternative to just-in-time learning is just-in-case learning. Just-in-case learning means learning skills or knowledge we don’t currently need just in case we might need them in the future.
But when we do need them, will we remember them? Will they be current enough? Will they ever be needed at all?
Worse, when we learn well ahead of time, then it’s difficult to guess exactly what we need to learn, whereas just-in-time learning means we know what’s required — we need it now — so we can learn most efficiently.
Just in time, not just too late
The other alternative is to wait too long and then not to have the necessary skill or knowledge at the moment it is needed. This causes unnecessary delays and can be quite expensive and even painful.
I often find that people are confused when I talk about just-in-time learning and assume that we don’t begin the learning until we need to use it. Hello! That’s just too late! Obviously, we need to anticipate our needs and plan our learning accordingly. And it’s a good idea to add in a fudge factor — a safety margin — to be cautious. This is not as easy as it sounds and takes practice.
But that’s not the same as learning everything right now, just in case. Yes, learning just in time is a skill, and like any skill it requires correct and regular practice. But it can be learned, and it will pay lifelong dividends if learned well.
Learning how to learn
There’s much more to say on this topic, so I’ll be posting more in coming weeks. I’m also writing a book on my full methodology for learning, of which just-in-time learning is merely one of many methods. Look for sample chapters as they become available.
Image source (CC BY 4.0)
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