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Information doesn’t solve problems; action does – Cathy Moore

Cathy Moore’s book, “Map It”, puts into words so many intuitions I had about corporate learning. It outlines a fundamental difference between learning in schools and in businesses, which shattered my long-held beliefs about what makes workplace learning effective. At the heart of it lies the difference in organizational goals.

A school’s main metric for student success is test scores. Instruction follows the ‘tell then test’ model: present information then administer a test to see how much was understood (or, in many cases, how much was remembered). The student’s goal is to pass a test once the course has ended. 

Tests don’t matter to businesses. What matters is that people make good decisions that contribute to the success of the company. It’s about solving real-world problems. The employee’s goal is to do things to help the company thrive.

So why is it that most workplace training presents information and then tests you on it? This model was copied and pasted from the education world where, as we just established, the learning goal is vastly different.

Knowing this, what can we do differently to improve performance?

The alternative to telling then testing is to provide opportunities for team members to practice doing the tasks that are required to solve a particular problem. This leads us to believe that information and knowledge acquisition alone isn’t beneficial to a business. What’s important is changing the actions and decisions that people make. And how is that done? Well…through practice. Cathy Moore put it perfectly: “Information doesn’t solve problems; action does”.