5 Lessons A Startup Mentality Can Teach Us About Learning

Improving the way we learn, regardless of who we are or what we do.

After entering startup life, reading book after book, watching interview after interview and hearing from people who innovate left, right and centre, I believe the lessons learnt reveal the greatest disruption of human potential; the way we think about problems.

Here are 5 key reasons that I feel the ‘Startup Mentality’ can be leveraged to improve how we learn, regardless of industry or specialism.

Just for the craic, I’ll correlate it to the traditional learning process.

1) Improved Outcomes

• Startup: Mistakes are the root of success
• Traditional: Mistakes must be mitigated

Startup Process

Failure is essential. Get out of the office. Investigate the area of interest, build assumptions, validate, have a go, see what happens, learn from it and retry.

Oh, and do this as quickly as possible.

A study by David Bayles and Ted Orland called the Art and Fear, shows that with practice, not only can you get more done but also that quality improves. Building up a methodology for the ‘perfect’ attempt is usually an inferior process compared to those who simply learn-on-the-job and fail quickly.

Success comes by developing our strengths, not by mitigating our weaknesses.

Traditional Process

Traditional learning is about reading and regurgitating information to be examined and evaluated over decades of assessment, before an individual can be trusted to apply this information to the “real world”.

I understand some jobs need a degree to create a basis of knowledge, like science or mathematics, but a lot don’t.

While many people feel that college was a worthwhile pursuit, 44% of graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a degree. The share of underemployed recent grads in low-wage (below $25,000) jobs rose from about 15% in 1990 to more than 20% today.

More on that here —

Are We Risking Our Children’s Futures and Our Own?Education is vitally important; the current role of education is not. medium.com

2) Improved Efficiency & Productivity

• Startup: Just-in-Time learning
• Traditional: Just-in-Case learning

Startup Process

Startups must adopt a Just-in-Time learning approach rather than the traditional Just-in-Case approach.

Elon Musk refers to a startup as,

“Staring into the Abyss (the unknown), while chewing glass (doing things you don’t like).”

Startups don’t know what’s ahead of them (much like life), so as they hit problems, they must solve them as quickly and efficiently as possible.

People within a startup must use their abilities to problem solve, persevere and be creative in navigating the obstacles that stand in-front of them. This is about solving issues that exist in the imminent future, not wasting time predicting too far in advance, which is unknown.

The ubiquity of information, its incredible availability, alongside our ability to connect and communicate across the globe instantly, means this process of information acquisition and dissemination can happen in real-time.

So, in a world of great uncertainty, politically, economically and socially, just-in-time learning learning is not just effective but it’s a pretty sensible way to prepare for the future (whatever that is).

“Now, more than ever, you cannot lock down the future.” — Jonathan Fields

(Author of Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance)

Traditional Process

The traditional approach follows a “Just-in-Case” learning style.

Let’s read and absorb as much as we believe humanly possible in the hope that it will be of value to someone eventually. Oh, and let’s assess and grade the worth of those individuals, based on their ability to memorise it all.

Rory Sutherland, Executive Creative Director of Ogilvy & Mather’s, a century old International advertising agency, proposes an interesting perspective on the placebo effect of education.

“Education doesn’t actually work by teaching you things. It actually works by giving you the impression that you’ve had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence, which then makes you very, very successful in later life.” — Rory Sutherland

An interesting watch for understanding human behaviour.

Manufacturing Perceived Value

3) Improved Creativity

• Startup: How well can we apply information?
• Traditional: How well can we retain information?

Startup Process

The human mind is great for creativity and problem solving, not for repetitive processes. There is a saying in the tech world, that if something requires your efforts more than once — automate it.

Peder Domingos who is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering talked at a Google conference about machine learning and AI.

Peder explored where knowledge actually comes from and discussed how each of these resources actually uncovers information far quicker than the one before it.

• Evolution
• Experience
• Culture
• Computers

What this says about information acquisition is that it will be hyper-charged by computers, far greater than humans can process it.

To illustrate this further:

In biochemistry there is an enzyme called Kinase. There are over 240,000 papers that mention one or more of 500+ known human kinases in their Medline abstract. An avid reader capable of absorbing 10 papers per day would need 70 years just to go through this relevant literature.

Although Pedro’s hypothesis may seem a touch extreme, for me, the role of the human brain will be best utilised in interpreting the information and data that it’s presented with. Our ability to be creative with that information to solve the problems we face as a global society, will be the true value of the human mind.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination. — Albert Einstein

Traditional Process

People should be assessed on how well they can memorise information, so that it can be recited at an event in the near-future, where they’ll have a limited amount of time to complete a series of random questions that will determine their “future”.

Their worth to society will be graded and assessed based on their ability to adopt these techniques and we should communicate a message to society that this is the BEST way of determining their “intelligence”.

There are 9 different types of intelligence and with the emergence of technology, machine learning and AI, the requirement of ‘memory’ may quite simply be eroding.

In reality, the traditional approach has also been found to teach creativity out of people — making them afraid of failure (the essence of learning).

You must have watched Ken Robinson’s famous Ted Talks on schools and creativity!? But if you don’t trust Sir Ken, then reading about George Land’s longitudinal study on creativity and children may reveal some interesting points about the darker side of formal “education”.

Our value is not in acquiring information, but in imagining what we can do with it.

4) Improved Teamwork

• Startup: Teamwork makes the dream work
• Traditional: Working together is cheating

Startup Process

In a startup, it’s vital to be completely realistic about one’s own strengths and seek to surround yourself with others who are excellent at the other elements that make up a business.

A business, however, is simply an organisation of people who come together for a mutual purpose. You’ll find this arrangement in any walk of life where people come together to create value:

• Football (Soccer) Teams
• Surgical operating theatres
• Home developers
• Cancer researchers
• Road maintenance
• Etc, etc, etc

In essence, the ability for people to come together and work towards a goal or purpose is what spearheads the advancement of our societies, our countries and, ultimately, of our species.

Traditional Process

In schools, the activity of coming together, discussing and assisting each other is referred to as cheating.

I wonder what possibilities would exist if group work was just part of the norm?

There is evidence to suggest that a host of intangible qualities are developed from team-learning, where learning in general improves through things such as, diverse perspectives and accountability, which ironically also may lead to improved overall college success.

Even taking the classroom outside has implications that it can improve the learning experience for students.

While there have been some improvements, most classrooms haven’t changed for quite a while.

21st Century Classroom vs 19th Century Classroom

Teacher at front, chalkboard, rows of desks and 30 young people

Shocking really

5) Improved Understanding

• Startup: Learn, unlearn and relearn
• Traditional: Well, it’s always been done this way

Startup Process

Coming from a marketing background, I know how important it is to have an understanding of your audience, your customers and other key stakeholders in the creation of value.

Due to the IOT, communication improvements and technological advances, we now live in a time where our understanding of people and problems can be quantified and qualified in richer ways than ever before.

It’s become far easier to discover and understand human behaviour but, for the same reason, our lives have also become much more complex.

As Avivah Litan, an analyst from Gartner describes it

“The problem is humans can’t keep up with all the technology they have created. It’s becoming unmanageable by the human brain. Our best hope may be that computers eventually will become smart enough to maintain themselves."

The need for Black Box Thinking has never been more important.

When we live in a world of such uncertainty and complexity, the need to relearn what we have learnt is imperative for progress.

Matthew Syed describes where Black Box Thinking originates from and how it’s coinage describes perfectly the process of advancing knowledge by learning from mistakes of the past.

Traditional Process

An unwillingness to see the failures or issues at hand and a blind acceptance of what has always been will always be stagnates progress.

You see it in politics, where lies and unvalidated logic dictate policy and agendas or in medicine, where inefficiencies and neglect go without reform.

As Matthew Syed describes, the medical industry hasn’t even come close to adopting Black Box Thinking. It is an industry so in need of improvement that avoidable medical errors are the third biggest killer of people, after cancer and heart-disease.

400,000 people in America die every year from preventable medical errors.

In light of the narrative above, I’d like to highlight that I’m eternally grateful for the democratic society that I live in, which provides me with this platform to openly create this sort of discussion and challenge conventions.

I think the right we all have to an Education and its ability to elevate society is an incredible achievement. I respect the teachers who strive to ignite passion and hope into young people and when it comes to the industry, I primarily want to put forth an argument to suggest that role of education should change. It was created in the 19th Century and it must adapt from its archaic model if we are to progress.

I think the medical system (in the UK at least) is on the whole, an exemplary service, where illnesses that would normally kill people can now be treated and moderated. It’s a wonderful concept and service that should be nurtured and fashioned to serve more people. Again, I have the upmost respect for those who work such long and hard hours for the benefit and provision of others.

Ultimately, I sit here humbled, typing as one of the most privileged members of a global society, simply highlighting the work still to be done and proposing how it may be achieved.

Liberty is about our right to question everything.

Let me know how you feel. Comment or discuss below and hit the green clap if you feel this conversation should be seen by more people.

I’m always interested in hearing from people about how they’re going after their ambitions and passions. Email me on [email protected] and let’s chat.