Know Can Do!

Put Your Know-How Into Action

Ken Blanchard, Paul J Meyer, Dick Ruhe

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781609944292
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Attempting to better themselves—learn new skills, break bad habits, realize their potential—people read books, attend seminars, take training courses. And companies pitch in too, spending billions of dollars every year on professional development programs aimed at helping their employees become more effective. But in spite of what people sincerely believe are their best efforts, all too often their behavior doesn't change. The fact that it seems to be so hard to make new learning stick is an endless source of frustration for both individuals and organizations. For years Ken Blanchard has been troubled by the gap between what people know—all the good advice they've digested intellectually—and what they actually do. In this new book he and his coauthors, Paul J. Meyer and Dick Ruhe, use the fable format Blanchard made famous to lay out a straightforward method for learning more, learning better, and making sure you actually use what you learn. This engaging story identifies three key reasons people don't make the leap from knowing to doing and then moves on to the solution. It teaches you how to avoid information overload by learning "less more, not more less." You'll find out how to adjust your brain's filtering system to learn many, many times more than ever before, ignite your creativity and resourcefulness with Green Light Thinking, master what you've learned using spaced repetition, and more. At last, an answer to the question, "Why don't I do what I know I should do?" Read this book and you will!

REASON 1:
Information Overload

“You mentioned that the first reason we don’t do what we know is that we suffer from information overload,” said the author. “We simply have too much knowledge. How does spaced repetition affect that?”

“Good question,” Phil said. “Information overload leads to some real problems. It immobilizes us.”

“That’s painful to hear,” said the author. “I just experienced that very thing recently at a golf school. I’m a golf nut, so I decided to go to a three-day school to improve my game. But I got the opposite result—I got worse.”

“Really?”

“Yes. They taught me too much. When I got back home and tried to play, I was awful. I had paralysis by analysis. I was working on so many things at the same time I became immobilized.”

“I’ve heard about that,” said the entrepreneur. “It must have been discouraging.”

“Given what you know about information overload, what good is it to read one book after another or attend seminar after seminar?” asked the author.

“There’s nothing wrong with reading books and attending seminars,” Murray replied. “These are fundamental learning tools, and we need them. The problem comes when we expose ourselves to new knowledge all the time with no pause for integrating our new know-how and putting it into action. If we continue to expose ourselves this way, we become brain cluttered. This is why so many people are drowning in a sea of information.”

“So what’s the answer?” asked the author.

“Let me answer your question with a question,” said Phil. “Why doesn’t a fish drown when it is constantly swimming in a drowning environment?”

“Interesting question,” said the author with a smile. “Could fish be smarter than we are?”

“Not really,” said the entrepreneur with a laugh. “But they do have a built-in monitoring system that helps them take from the water only what they need and nothing else. Something we as human beings could use when it comes to dealing with the overwhelming amount of information available to us today.”

“It sounds like a matter of focus,” said the author.

“I think you’re right,” the entrepreneur replied. “We have to decide what we need to learn to help us perform better and then go about it with vigor.”

“It’s interesting,” said the author. “A friend of mine, Denny, went to a golf school recently that was very different from the one I attended, and he’s playing much better.”

“That must frost you,” said Phil. “What was the difference in the two schools?”

“Exactly what we are talking about,” said the author. “The difference was focus. The first day they analyzed all parts of his game on video. Then they picked three or four learning goals for him while he was at the school, and they would not teach him one more new thing until he graduated.”

“Graduated?” asked Phil.

“To graduate from a learning goal, he had to hit ten shots. On each shot, he had to tell one of their pros whether he was doing what they had taught him or not. If he wasn’t, he had to tell them how he needed to correct his error for the next shot.”

“Good example,” said the entrepreneur. “They made sure he could use what they had taught him. Daniel Webster, the originator of Webster’s dictionary, said that he preferred to totally master a few good books rather than read widely. To drive the point home, to totally master something, I think it’s imperative that we bathe in it until we saturate our entire being. We must slowly chew and digest it until it becomes a part of us.”

“I think that’s a little over the top, but I get the point,” said the author. “You’re emphatic about that. It sounds like our friend, spaced repetition.”

“It sure is,” said the entrepreneur. “It’s been said that your mental constitution is more affected by a small amount of material thoroughly mastered through spaced repetition than by twenty books you read only once. The habit of attending a seminar only one time or reading a book once, while exposing yourself to new information, just builds the habit of forgetting. We are training ourselves to know and not do. It’s really the exact opposite of what we should be doing.”

“Could you tell me more about the habit of forgetting? I do have a tendency to forget a lot of what I read and hear.”

“The human mind—everyone’s, including yours and mine—is in the constant process of doing one of two things: it’s either learning something new or forgetting. If we neglect something, we soon forget it. When we focus on something with spaced repetition, we remember it.”

“Does that mean there’s no value in attending a good seminar just once?”

“Of course there is some value,” said Phil, “but attending the same seminar a number of times with a pen and notepad would be better than just once. It’s one way you can escape the ‘forgettery process.’ The same has also been said about a book. Read it again and again, underlining it, highlighting it, and writing down key ideas. Then review your learnings again.”

“So it sounds like you don’t do the same thing when you read a book or go to a seminar a second or third time.”

“Absolutely,” said Phil. “The first time I read a book I decide I want to learn from, I just read it straight through to get a sense of it. The second time I read it and underline the key concepts. The third time I might take notes. The fourth time I could choose to read it with a learning partner. And it is important to do all this over a period of time. We all have to develop our own strategy to keep our interest and zero in on what we want to apply and use in our lives.”

“Is all that really necessary?” asked the author.

“Unfortunately, yes, from my experience,” said Phil. “To truly master an area, people should immerse themselves in a focused amount of information, rather than be exposed to a large amount.”

“And they should do it repeatedly, is what I hear you saying,” said the author.

“Yes,” said the entrepreneur. “People should learn less information more often, rather than learn more information less often.”

“Do you mean, for example, that rather than reading a large number of books, people should read a smaller number of books more times?” asked the author.

“Yes,” said the entrepreneur, “spaced repetition is the key, and

People Should
Learn
Less More
And Not
More Less

“How has knowing this impacted the way you train people in your companies?” asked the author.

“Why don’t you go to our office and talk to Dwayne Harper, our director of training and development, and find out? Turn right coming out of our driveway and go about five miles. The corporate headquarters for our company is on the left. Evelyn will make an appointment with Dwayne for you.”

Phil Murray sent the author off with a firm handshake. “Come on back after you’ve met Dwayne, and we can have lunch together.”

“Will do,” said the author.

APPLYING THE LESS-MORE PHILOSOPHY

When the author arrived at Dwayne’s office, he found an elder statesman who had been working with the entrepreneur for many years. Dwayne had an easy style and grace that was inviting. When he smiled and told the author to have a seat in the discussion area of his office, the author felt privileged.

“So Phil’s been talking to you about closing the learning-doing gap,” Dwayne said.

“He sure has,” said the author. “I’ve seen how people—including myself—have a real challenge closing that gap. Phil says that people have to learn less more.”

Dwayne smiled. “That philosophy drives everything we do in our training, development, and educational efforts in all the companies that the entrepreneur owns.”

“What do you think about that philosophy?” asked the author. “Does it really work?”

Dwayne nodded. “Before I started working with Phil, I was the typical training director. I spent more time looking for the next new management concept than I did following up what I’d just taught our people. I would help design a tremendous training program, run everybody through it, and then look for the next new training idea. The way I judged my effectiveness was by attitudinal evaluations that participants filled out at the end of a seminar about how they liked it. We always got high grades, but the trainings weren’t all that effective. People didn’t really apply what we were teaching them.”

“How did you change that?” asked the author.

“When we learned from Phil that less learned more is best, we began to concentrate on a few key concepts we felt people should learn. Spaced repetition became our motto. Now we teach important concepts over and over again, until they become ingrained in the way people think and behave.”

“So you’re spending more time following up training than creating new training programs?”

“Yes,” said Dwayne. “We spend significantly more time on follow-up than we do designing, organizing, and delivering our training. And we think our people are better trained than anyone, anywhere.”

It sounded good, but the author was skeptical. “Could you give me an example?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Dwayne. “A number of years ago, we decided that we wanted to create legendary customer service. We didn’t want to merely satisfy customers—we wanted to blow them away. When you deliver legendary service, customers are so excited about how you treat them that they want to brag about you. They become part of your sales force. We decided this would be an ongoing effort. We would drill deep, teaching less more, and repeat the teaching again and again.”

The author raised an eyebrow. “So how’s that working for you?” he asked.

“We’ve seen measurable—and sometimes dramatic—results in both customer and employee satisfaction. We’re constantly training and updating our people on new ideas about how to give legendary customer service. If any new concept comes along in customer service, we integrate it into what we are already doing, rather than sending our people off in a different direction.”

“That’s interesting,” said the author. “I gave a speech at a company recently, and they had a big banner behind me on the stage that said, ‘The Year of the Customer.’ When I saw it, I laughed and said, ‘What’s next year?’ After talking to you, I’m sure you know why I said that. It seemed to me that every year should be the year of your customer. After talking to you and Phil, I guess the way you make that happen is to reinforce the message year after year through spaced repetition.”

“Absolutely,” said Dwayne. “That’s why we’re constantly pushing our people to get better at delivering legendary service. Rather than a Book of the Month Club, we give our people a few books for the whole year. We pick out the best customer service books we can find and have everyone read them several times, continuing to cull useful information from them. We want to apply what we read if it makes sense to us.

“Everyone also goes through a two-day legendary service training program every year. The concepts we teach are the same, but we teach them differently each year. We also bring in some new concepts but make sure they are well integrated into what they learned last y...