I don’t know

Despite its honesty, the humble phrase “I don’t know” is widely feared.

From the fake-it-til-you-make-it mindset of consultants to the face-saving responses of executives, we puny humans are psychologically conditioned to have all the answers – or at least be seen to.

Of course, demanding all the answers is the premise of summative assessment, especially when it’s in the form of the much maligned multiple-choice quiz. And our test takers respond in kind – whether it’s via “when in doubt, pick C” or by madly selecting the remaining options in a quasi zig-zag pattern as they run out of time.

But that’s precisely the kind of behaviour we don’t want to see on the job! Imagine your doctor wondering if a symptom pertains to the heart, kidney, liver or gall bladder, and feeling content to prescribe you medication for the third one. Or any random one in the 15th minute.

Of course my comparison is extreme for effect, and it may very well be inauthentic; after all, the learned doctor would almost certainly look it up. But I’d like to reiterate that in a typical organisational setting, having all the information we need at our fingertips is a myth.

Moreover, as Schema Theory maintains, an efficient and effective worker quickly retrieves the knowledge they need on a daily basis from the network they’ve embedded in their longterm memory. We can’t have our contact centre staff putting our customers on hold every 5 seconds while they ask their team leader yet another question, or our plumber shrugging his shoulders at every tap or toilet he claps his eyes on until he reads a manual. Of course, these recourses are totally acceptable… if they’re the exception rather than the rule.

And notwithstanding being a notch or two less serious than the life and death scenarios with which doctors deal, it wouldn’t be much fun if your loan or lavatory were the subject of a blind guess.

So yes, we humans can never know it all. And what we don’t know, we can find out. But the more we do know, the better we perform.

Thus we don’t want our colleagues gaming their assessments. Randomly guessing a correct answer falsely indicates knowledge they don’t really have, and hence the gap won’t be remediated.

So I propose we normalise “I don’t know” as an answer option.

Particularly if a recursive feedback approach were to be adopted, a candid admission of ignorance motivated by a growth mindset would be much more meaningful than a lucky roll of the dice.

I don’t mean to underestimate the shift in culture that would be necessary to effect such a change, but I contend the benefits would be worth it – both to the organisation and to the individual.

In time, maybe identifying your own knowledge gaps with a view to continuously improving your performance will displace getting it right in the test and wrong on the job.

Approaching perfection

I’ve never understood the rationale of the 80% pass mark.

Which 20% of our work are we prepared to do wrongly?

It might explain the universally poor state of CX that companies are evidently willing to wear, but it’s arguably more serious when we consider the acronym-laden topics that are typically rolled out via e-learning, such as OHS and CTF. Which 20% of safety are we willing to risk? Which 20% of terrorism are we willing to fund?

There has to be a better way.

I’ve previously contended that an assessment first philosophy renders the concept of a pass mark obsolete, but went on to state that such a radical idea is a story for another day. Well my friends, that day has arrived.

Recursive feedback

Back in 2016, the University of Illinois’ excellent mooc e-Learning Ecologies: Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning for the Digital Age piqued my interest in the affordance of “recursive feedback” – defined by the instructor as rapid and repeatable cycles of feedback or formative assessment, designed to continually diagnose and remediate knowledge gaps.

I propose we adopt a similar approach in the corporate sector. Drop the arbitrary pass mark, while still recording the score and completion status in the LMS. But don’t stop there. Follow it up with cycles of targeted intervention to close the gaps, coupled with re-assessment to refresh the employee’s capability profile.

Depending on the domain, our people may never reach a score of 100%. Or if they do, they might not maintain it over time. After all, we’re human.

However the recursive approach isn’t about achieving perfection. It’s about continuous improvement approaching perfection.

Way of working

While the mooc instructor’s notion of recursive feedback aligns to formative assessment, my proposal aligns it to summative assessment. And that’s OK. His primary focus is on learning. Mine is on performance. We occupy two sides of the same coin.

To push the contrarianism even further, I’m also comfortable with the large-scale distribution of an e-learning module. However, where such an approach has notoriously been treated as a tick & flick, I consider it a phase in a longer term strategy.

Post-remediation efforts, I see no sense in retaking the e-learning module. Rather, a micro-assessment approach promotes operational efficiency – not to mention employee sanity – without sacrificing pedagogical effectiveness.

In this way, recursive feedback becomes a way of working.

And the L&D department’s “big bang” initiatives can be saved for the needs that demand them.