Recently Valve, a gaming company, published their new employee handbook online. I found it to be an absolute blast to read; it just reeked of the same dystopian, quirky, and ultimately delightful style that has become a hallmark of their acclaimed library of games. Yet more interesting from a cultural perspective was how Valve manages and perceives its most valuable asset - human talent. Per employee, in 2011, Valve ranked as one of the most profitable companies in the entire world.
To do this, Valve relies on the principle of T-Shaped employees popularized by David Guest and later Tim Brown of IDEO. An employee must have a deep area of speciality (say, business chops or 3D modeling), but should also have a broad set of complimentary skills that help them collaborate and empathize with their peripheral teammates. This allows for the team to interlock and problem-solve in ways that complex, shifting knowledge-work demands. This makes sense. If you have an engineer thinking about the recently delivered user research as she codes, she likely will better understand the implications of certain implementations.
For this reason, I’m always interested in the nitty gritty of learning, because I have always found the broader my toolkit of skills, the higher I perform as a teammate. I gravitate toward the “100 hour rule” which dictates "For most disciplines, it only takes one hundred hours of active learning to become much more competent than an absolute beginner.” This has allowed me to pick up non-trivial skills as broad as basic mixology, cooking, coding, designing, and quantitative analysis.
But learning new stuff is tough. Charles Scalfani notes in his article “Why Experts Make Bad Teachers,” leaders in their field often create abstractions to digest and synthesize information as it comes to them. Most educational materials insist on skipping the construction of these abstract mental models and instead teach the final conclusions. It’s the difference between memorizing a physics equation by studying notation versus running experiments and measuring outputs. The student who can see the cause and effect in the laboratory constructs their own mental model for what they observe, giving them a stronger grasp of the material.
Kalid Azad of Better Explained proposes a solution to this problem - use an analogy to understand a problem first, and then slowly refine it as time goes on. This ensures that the student constructs his own mental model to lean on quickly, but accounts for adding new information as it comes in. Azad explained it best by saying you should “progressively” load your knowledge rather than “baseline” load i.e. start with a full, but fuzzy, picture and get clearer rather than try to ensure every starter nugget is precise.
On analogies, the best one for continuous learning comes from Kent Beck, a technical coach at Facebook. He says some of the best professionals he has met fit into a category he calls “Paint Drip People.” Similar to paint drops running down a canvas after a fresh stroke is applied, prolific learners take up new projects and run with them as far as they keep the learner’s interest. Some paint drops run down the entirety of the canvas, filling up the allowed vertical space. Others stop almost immediately. Nonetheless, new paint drips appear as the painter pulls his paintbrush across the canvas. "In any case, the brush keeps moving. Eventually the last drip stops and a new one starts."
As I consider Valve’s T-Shaped employees, I think about the effort that goes into each person becoming the enterprising collaborators that creative consultancies like IDEO covet. Versatile, experimental, curious, and evolving. These are the traits that make great creatives, and one can only do that through a refined, deliberate learning process. I look to Scalfini’s article and he declares “the hard way is the only way,” noting that a learner must assemble his own set of concrete examples that lay the foundation of an abstract model. Analogies help in short-changing that modeling approach, as Azad notes, but perhaps the best learning tool is just getting your hands dirty a la Beck’s Paint Drip people.
In a world where teaming with others is so critical, it’s nice to have a simple, but effective analogy to encapsulate how true lifelong learners operate. It certainly has become part of my own creative process - picking up new endeavors and taking them as far as they allow but always looking for the next paint drop to begin its gentle descent down the canvas.
