The Hidden Costs of Overcomplicating Learning

We’re blessed with so many great innovations today.

But sometimes, you have to go back to basics to get stuff done.

A decade in L&D has taught me so much. I’ve seen the good, the bad and the terrible. I’ve learnt so much from them all. A standout lesson has been the sheer volume of complications, of our own making, that sabotage us.

Especially with our buzzwords, methodologies and frameworks.

No one at your company cares if you used ‘this’ methodology or ‘that’ assessment framework to build an experience. This approach kills the brand and trust in L&D teams quicker than anything I’ve experienced.

I once sat in a room where my manager told a senior stakeholder we’d use a “digital learning framework” and assess outcomes in “a performance-based system”. They looked back in silence for a deathly 2 minutes. I wanted to gouge my eyes out.

Let’s avoid that event for you.

“What would this look like if it were easy?”

This is the question I come back to daily.

It might seem like a simple question on the surface, yet it has a much deeper meaning (as all the best questions do). I picked it up from a book by Tim Ferriss, but I’m sure it has been echoed throughout time by others.

Let’s be honest, we all overcomplicate life at times.

Society is littered with examples. Such as the impending New Year’s fitness boom. Couch potatoes the world over will set audacious goals and believe they need to spend a lot of cash on food, equipment, supplements and advice from some jacked-up fitness influencer.

They don’t recognise their context and, as such, overcomplicate what can be a simple process.

If you’ve never had a physical fitness practice before, you’re (probably) better off going for walks, drinking more water and eating a bit healthier versus spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on the above.

The L&D industry is no stranger to this plague of over-complication.

Key insights

• Don’t make acquiring knowledge harder than it needs to be.
• Focus on what’s useful, discard the noise, and embrace “good enough”.
• Your business doesn’t care about fancy industry frameworks

Learning, at its core, is incredibly simple.

It’s biologically programmed, too.

So you don’t have to do much, if anything at all, to activate it. Yet, we (as in the industry) spend stupid amounts of time debating methodologies, frameworks and taxonomies.

I care not for any of them.

At times, we make learning unnecessarily difficult, almost as complex as creating dark matter in the Hadron Collider.

There are only so many 50-page dossiers on how people learn with fancy diagrams that one person can read without thinking  you are making this far more complicated than it needs to be!

In the context of a busy workplace, our role should be to make things simple.

You’re sabotaging success

If something is failing, then we have flaws in the system.

The root cause of some of these flaws comes from the often outdated ideologies and methodologies of global education systems.

Most workplace L&D teams, whether you’re aware of it or not, inherit these through both the way an employee views the function and the way the organisation positions it within its culture.

They class workplace L&D as the equivalent of education for work.

But we both know that’s wrong.

I’m biased though, because I hated school.

The game of favouring memorisation versus practical application and critical thinking as an assessment of intellect still annoys me. Alas, that is another conversation for a different time.

For long-time readers, you know I’ve spent a lot of time with tech companies.

I’ve been around a lot of people who move fast, think deeply and act on meaningful data with every decision. These groups embrace learning as a core pillar of success.

It is not a ‘nice to have’. It is key to the next product or feature breakthrough.

Software engineers, in particular, taught me the importance of problem-solving and breaking apart complex tasks into moveable puzzle pieces.

I learnt how to move pieces to see what makes sense, which parts work best, and what won’t work for a specific environment.

Many years later, I came across what I would call a proverb from the legendary martial artist and philosopher, Bruce Lee that embodies this.

To this day, this is the only type of learning philosophy I live by.

It is also the secret (if I have one) that enables me to move at pace, be adaptable and take action in my work.

A design for life

I’m sure there’ll be those who will say, “We need more detail on how to do these things.”

❌ You don’t.

The only way for you to understand what is useful, what is not and how to fuse that with your skills is through experience and experimentation. This is what we’ve lost with most L&D guidance. We’re too focused on tools and methodologies that will ‘guarantee’ success.

But you can change that.

When designing any learning experience 99% of your audience needs to know:

• The useful context and application for their work
• What is not useful for them based on their context and work
• How can they connect this to what they already do?

That’s it.

Everything else is just noise.

You can thank me later for saving you millions of dollars and your most precious resource, time.

Why you should aim for ‘good enough’

The constant desire for more is a universal human challenge.

• Every time you get that once unbelievable salary increase, you want more.
• The day after the promotion, you want the next one.
• The minute you buy that sleek pastel mint game controller, you want the peach version too.

Okay, that last one is probably just me, but you get my point.

‘Enough’ is hard to define because it is a deeply personal metric for each of us.

Dan John, a pioneer of Kettlebell fitness training and weightlifting, has the best take on ‘good enough’, imo.

I like Dan because he keeps things simple.

Much like the world of L&D, Kettlebell fitness communities are filled with people endlessly debating perfect form and workout routines. These people often spend so much time debating, they never actually do anything.

Workouts really don’t need to be complicated. So many people spend so much energy looking for the perfect program, when it’s much better to get “good enough” workouts a few times per week for the next 30+ years.

Dan John

This is another philosophy that can help our work.

Perfect doesn’t exist for performance. Good enough is well… good enough. This applies to strategies, experiences and your products.

Learning is evergreen. It’s not a problem you solve.

Final thoughts

So, as we’ve explored, over-complication can lead to unintended consequences.

Instead of chasing after the next trendy methodology, ask “What would this look like if it were easy?”

Challenge your thinking by looking through the eyes of your audience:

• What is useful context and application for their work?
• What is not useful for them based on their context and work?
• How can they connect this to what they already do?

And finally, accept ‘good enough’ in all forms.

The world of workplace learning and life might just be a better place for it.

Before you go… 👋

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