Moving from "Faking It" to "Making It"
Recognise the Signal & Provide the Experience
For two decades I held a rigid belief that every learning experience must go through the Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy lens. And to that credit, the clarity and classification is a wonderful tool for codifying the learning process across many stakeholders.
Yet learners still got stuck. They could talk it the right way, but didn’t know how to do it in the messy real world. They were faking it until they made it.
But do they ever make it?
In my hundreds of conversations with facilitators and coaches, learners will talk about what they learned in the right way, understand the models and stories, take actions that they feel align to the model, and simply do the wrong actions.
So they do change, but they change to the wrong thing, getting inferior results.
I recently differentiated knowledge and competency to help us make change stick with this quote as the major takeaway.
Emphasizing knowledge will run into the limit of insufficient grounded experience to make the next mental leap.
Emphasizing proficiency will run into the limit of entrenched habits without the metacognition to challenge them.
Don’t get me wrong, we must have knowledge, and it’s a good thing to have clarity in that process. But as team leads and change agents, we need to recognize when people are in the “fake it until they make it” modality, and introduce the grounded experience they need.
In this infographic, we first see the Stage, which represents Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy and helps distinguish levels of knowledge.
The Knowledge Gained represents a simplified but key expectation for how a person at each stage can demonstrate that knowledge, on paper at least. This is well established. The verbiage is simply my translation of how that shows up in the workplace environment rather than the academic audience originally intended.
Let’s walk through the insights that I’m providing, which are the Faking It Signals and Experience Needed.
Remember Stage
This first stage is disregarded because a typical work environment has the first level of knowledge reasonably assumed before hiring or can be handled implicitly on the job if it’s a new skill.
Understand Stage
Learners who are faking this stage are unable to see the new idea differentiates from ideas they already know. This results in relabeling their prior concepts with the new words of the new concept. The cure for this is to show them concrete examples that is different in the new concept. Stories and demos are useful ways to execute that.
Apply Stage
Learners who are faking this stage are unable to translate between a concept and action. This results in continuing old behaviors or taking actions that can feel random to the coach or trainer. However, the person performing those actions will explain them as following the model. The cure for this is to provide concrete action steps with reflection and correction. Pairing, ensemble, and laboratory work are all useful ways to execute that.
Analysis Stage
Learners who are faking this stage don’t have a sufficiently diverse body of experience. They need to have seen multiple ways to succeed as well as ways to recover from failure. This results in locking into the classic “one true way” with distrust towards any other innovative ideas. The cure for this is to provide experiences where that one true way can’t work, forcing innovation. This can’t be done in a lab setting because those all have clear recipes. It’s the messiness of real world experiences that elevates this knowledge.
Evaluate Stage
Learners who are faking this stage are usually in a position of leadership or wanting to move into thought leadership, but their pattern realization has gotten ahead of their grounded experience.
As an example, I remember my own experience with the pattern realization / grounded experience gap so clearly as I moved out of my leadership roles in university program design and into corporate coaching and mentoring. I had always felt there was something missing in the knowledge only learning taxonomy and tried to fix it several times. All of those fixes failed (see here as faking it without realising!). Later, I watched software engineers learn developer skills on the job and then I realised the necessary interplay between knowledge and proficiency for real skill acquisition. I still had failures, but at this junction, I knew what I was trying so each failure was critical new information, leading me to the Green Path Model that I created that has been successful these years.
Another way that it can clearly show up is when a leader always goes for the simplistic solution. Note simplistic, not a simple solution that has been distilled from complex. A simplistic solution is a surface solution that everybody knows won’t solve the root issue. A simple solution is a deep solution that has taken enormous time and energy to create. A clear signal that it is properly simple is when the solution solves the essence of the problem each time it’s applied while allowing everybody to adapt it to their context. This is the quintessential example of complexity getting distilled for broader application.
Create Stage
This last level is also disregarded because it’s typically irrelevant to the skill acquisition process within a workplace environment. In fact, it is often misunderstood as an activity to demonstrate a skill, when the original intention for this level was advancing a field in academics, such as post graduate work.
Come to my webinar on Meeting People’s Skills Where They Are At to learn how to recognize and diagnose competency levels!