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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

Almost all of us have been exposed to 'learning styles' at some point in our lives. Usually at school from a teacher or classmate. The theory tells us that there are different ways of learning - visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and the most recent addition of reading/writing - and that each of us is best at just one of them. The belief that we're only good at one style of learning can stick with us into adulthood - but research (lots of it) shows this belief to be incorrect. People don't learn

Imagine you start a business. You sit on the street and solve a Rubik's Cube in under 20 seconds. Passersby stop to watch, they're amazed, then they give you money. In the first month you do well for yourself, but you want your business to grow. So you hire your friend, Ruby, to sit on the adjacent street and do the same thing. She arrives on her first day and you tell her what she needs to do. But she can't do it. So you show her how to solve

1) Identify a performance problem There must be a problem with how the business is performing. If there's nothing to improve, don't waste time trying to improve it. 2) Create/Identify a business goal How do you know there's a performance problem? Something's falling short of your expectations. Turn your attention to what the desired performance looks like. Define it as accurately as possible so it's clear to not only you, but those around you. 3) Understand the root cause of the problem Loop back to the problem, but this time look deeper. Identify why the