The Joy of Juggling and Learning to Learn

In less than 20 hours, you can significantly increase your learning skills.  The general method applies to a wide range of skills and competencies. The specific approach, learning to juggle, has life-long benefits.

How Do We Learn a New Skill?
I often use juggling to get people to think about how we learn and then discuss what learning methods are most appropriate for different types of skills and competencies.

You can first ask people how they would learn to juggle and they will typically come up with a list like the one below.

• Find someone who knows how to juggle and can teach you.  You might be able to tap into their tacit knowledge. (ask the experts, get feedback)
• Watch some YouTube videos of juggling acts (observe the experts)
• Watch YouTube videos of juggling instructions and/or search for visuals that explain hand movements and ball patterns, find a "how-to juggle" book or DVD... there's probably an app for it too. (locate explicit knowledge)
• Buy a set of juggling balls and just try (1) (experiential knowledge)
• Join a juggling club (experiential knowledge + social learning/feedback)

You might start with one approach, encounter failure(s) and turn to another approach based on what you discover through your initial attempts.

A Great Way to Learn Quickly from Failure
Juggling offers so many opportunities to learn from failure -- I'm only half kidding here.  Failure is inevitable in learning to juggle and it's quite prevalent at first. Unless you're learning to juggle with clubs or knives, it's not dangerous.(2)

Juggling makes us learn from failure whether we like it or not.  With immediate feedback and a very quick cycle of trial and error, the learning curve is steep.  Deliberate practice makes us learn faster (see Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers) but I'm convinced that simple practice through repetition of the most basic elements of the skill also builds the muscle memory needed to focus on more difficult elements of the skill.

Easily Measurable Progress
Juggling is within everyone's reach.  It's like riding a bicycle. Everyone can learn to ride a bicycle and everyone can learn to juggle.  It is therefore a great tool to help nurture a growth mindset in people (See Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success).  A key advantage to juggling is that progress is very easily measured.  It is only frustrating in the first five minutes of practicing a new skill when you're missing almost all the balls.  Once you've accomplished a single pattern (one cycle of throwing and catching all the balls), you can increase the count and learn variations and new skills.

I'm now reasonably proficient with the three-ball cascade and two-ball fountain with each hand individually.  My next challenges are the four-ball fountain pattern and the three-ball shower.

Learning the Next Skill
This morning, I made my first attempt at the three-ball shower.  While I had seen it done, I had no understanding of the pattern and whenever I tried, my hands reverted to the cascade pattern.  Finally, I searched for a visual on the web that would show me in slow motion what was supposed to happen. Once I understood what it should look like, I was able to deconstruct it.  The lateral passing of one ball from one hand to the other without throwing in the air was the new movement I was struggling with.  So, I practiced that movement with just one ball.  I think it took me a full five minutes, which is ridiculously long when you realize that you're just throwing one ball from one hand to the other. Somehow I wasn't catching it.  Once that was mastered, I picked up a second ball.  Within a few minutes, my brain recognized a nice circular pattern created by the two balls and it became instantaneously easy.  Now I still have to figure out how to add the third ball to the shower.  I read that more height is required than for the cascade. (3)

Learning to Deconstruct - Deconstruct to Learn
The larger point is that like in juggling, many skills can be learned relatively quickly when they are deconstructed carefully (that is the basis of Josh Kaufman's claim that you can learn anything in 20 hours).  It looks silly to practice the basic element of a skill  (one ball throws), but that's how the body and brain learn to do it easily so the focus can be on other challenges. When you learn how to drive, you have to pay a great deal of attention to everything,including the amount of pressure your foot is putting on the accelerator and brake pedals.  With practice, you no longer have to constantly think about that and you can concentrate on other things, like keeping a close eye on what other cars are doing, not just controlling your car.

Notes
(1)  Tennis balls can be a little too big for a beginner.  Their main disadvantage, however, is that they bounce and they roll,  As a beginner, you will spend a lot of time running after dropped balls and therefore tennis balls are not ideal.  One way to deal with this challenge is to practice by the side of a bed, facing the bed so that balls drop on the bed and not to the floor.

(2) Since you're likely to bend down to pick up fallen balls regularly, warming up your calves and hamstrings beforehand might help or you'll just be a little sore the next day and you'll wonder what you did. That won't happen if you give up after five minutes but if you insist and you practice for 30 minutes, be warned. Of course, if you do 100 squats on a daily basis, this won't affect you that much.  If you don't squat to pick up the balls you will hurt your back, which is worse.

(3) Update:  Using the learning strategy of spacing learning, I came back to my practice with three balls later in the day and managed up to five counts. Within a week of starting to learn this skill, and focusing on it daily, I was able to consolidate it and consistently manage 10 counts, with a record of 30 by the end of the week.

Resources

• "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens  Tesch-Romer, Psychological Review, 1993. 
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck.
• The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast, by Josh Kaufman.

Learning from Success and Failure (a follow up)

I am tired of reading statements like "We learn best from failure" and "We learn best from success." No. We learn best when we pay attention to what happened, how it happened and why? Whether it was a success or a failure doesn't make a difference in terms of our capacity to learn from an event.

A caveat or two:

• The organizational culture and existing processes within an organization may make it easier or harder to systematically learn from either success or failure.
  
  
• There may be a natural propensity to learn from failure (simply because it hurts and we don't want to do it again). Even if that can be demonstrated, it certainly doesn't mean that we can't learn from success. If we choose to learn from success and we put the right processes in place, there's no reason we can't do it.
  

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• Defining Success and Failure, Managing Risks (knowledgefordevelopment.com)
• To innovate, you need to fail (marsdd.com)

Defining Success and Failure, Managing Risks

When I started working as a NASA contractor more than a year ago, I quickly noticed the differences between NASA and international development. No kidding! I didn't expect much in common but I wasn't sure at all what to expect with NASA.

NASA's daily routines, all the hard work that gets missions into space, revolves around minimizing the risk of failure. Risk management is a big deal. You build a spacecraft that costs a lot of money, you can't afford to have it blow up or become floating space debris. A lot of attention is paid to ensuring success by analyzing every possible failure mode and coming up with mitigation strategies when there is a residual risk. There are methodologies and full time risk manager positions handling all this.

Failures tend to be obvious, even when they are not catastrophic. Either something is working as planned or it is not. You can have a partial failure but you know exactly what is and what isn't working. It's not something you can hide.

As in the transportation industry, catastrophic failures are studied extensively to understand the causes of the failure and to make sure that this particular type of accident isn't repeated. NASA tries very hard to learn from its failures. Accidents in the human spaceflight program may get the most public coverage, but all accidents and failures in space and on the group are dissected to understand root causes. Ensuring the lessons learned from such detailed studies are embedded in project routines to avoid repeat failures is a more difficult task. Many of the contributing factors to a failure are soft issues like team communications that don't have an easy technical solution ready to apply uniformly across missions.

On the success side, the typical discourse sounds very much like PR and has little to do with trying to understand what when right when a mission is successful. There is little attention being paid to all the factors that made it possible for a particular mission to succeed. Success is defined as the absence of failure and doesn't seem to require extensive "study." Success is normal, failure is the anomaly to focus on.

I should add that success is defined very clearly and early on in a mission's development. How that success is defined early on has important implications on how the mission is designed and the types of risks and mitigation strategies that are developed, including what gets chopped down when the budgets are cut.

Turning to the field of international development, it's as if all of that is reversed. Failure is something projects / donors hardly ever admit to because they can get away with it. Failure is often far away, relatively invisible, easily forgotten. Success and failure are not clear cut because, among other things, projects (and their multiple stakeholders) often fail to come to a common understanding of what will constitute success. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) meant to document progress and, eventually, "success" is underfunded or not funded at all, as well as very difficult to execute in a meaningful and unbiased way. There are no incentives to openly talk about failures and why they happen.

There is no "risk management" beyond perhaps spelling out some assumptions in the early design of a project. In a NASA project, risk management is an ongoing process, not something handled during the project design phase.

Writing the statement above about the absence of risk management in international development prompted me to go check. I discovered that AusAID, the Australian development agency, does talk about "risk management." See AusGuidelines: Managing Risk. And this turns out to be very timely since the Australian Council for International Development is doing a workshop on the topic July 29th in Melbourne and July 30th in Sidney.

My previous experience in international development circles has been that few project managers have been trained as project managers and are aware of or applying project management methodologies such as those promoted by the Project Management Institute (PMI). That's just not how international development projects are designed and implemented. I did see a trend, especially in IT-related projects, where more sophisticated project management approaches were becoming a requirement.

So, if NASA needs to learn how to analyze its successes as much as it analyzes it failures, I would suggest that the international development community needs to pay more attention to defining what success and failure mean for any given project or program, and start applying risk management principles more systematically. Risk management methodologies would need to be adapted to existing international development practices and requirements and to the specifics of different types of projects.

See also:
Charles Tucker, "Fusing Risk Management and Knowledge Management," ASK Magazine, Issue 30.