We spend a significant part of our lives learning – from classroom education, mentoring in our personal and professional lives, on-the-job learning, and beyond. The amount of information we have been exposed to is staggering. There is no way we are able to retain it all, and even more challenging than retaining, is turning it into a usable set of instructions that is pulled from during our daily encounters – influencing our behavior. Therefore, it’s critical to be able to distill out key bits of information that are the most meaningful to guide our future decisions and behaviors, then have a process by which to retain it – and ultimately ensure it is embedded sufficiently enough in our heads to influence our behaviors when we move on auto-pilot, as we do most of the time. Otherwise, when encountering applicable situations in the future, we are likely to repeat the same process we used last time – even if it wasn’t effective.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

How do we do this?

It’s actually not that complex, as we actually do it every day – but simply applied a bit differently. When encountering an important learning, you need to take a step back, and document it into a standard, or a principle, to solidify the information. It’s very similar to the concept of leader standard work, or a work instruction, but applied to thought processes, behaviors, and decision making criteria. There are several key reasons why the recording of these learnings are important:

1) The process of documenting forces you to simplify it into your own words, in a way that fits with your learning and retention style

2) Documenting puts it in an accessible place that you can periodically reference, helping reinforce the neural connections, sustainment, and automatic influence of future behaviors

3) This process of documenting the learning creates a standard. Once you have a standard in place, you have solidified your best known process at that point in time. Going forward, as you continue to develop your thoughts, you are able to continuously improve & document the improvement – driving sustainment and ability to compound learnings

I will explain each of these in a bit more detail below.

1) Documenting forces you to simplify learnings into your own words

I have found it is important to be able to simplify concepts into an elevator speech. This puts things in a simplified manner that you can explain to others, but more importantly, it acts at a litmus test of your understanding of an issue. If you are not able to simplify an issue into an elevator speech, your thoughts are likely still fairly fragmented and need more incubation to come together into a robust & usable framework, so you don’t get lost in the weeds when trying to apply.

Additionally, the process of documenting into your own words reinforces the connections in your brain, bridging together disparate concepts into a way that connects for you – rather than placing the concept in an isolated place in your head, unlikely to be pulled out automatically when you need it.

2) Documenting puts the learning into an accessible place – where you can periodically reference later to reinforce the learning process

One important part of learning and retaining information is frequency and repetition. The newer and less connected a thought, the more repetition is required. Over time, you can gradually reduce the frequency of referencing as the concepts and neural pathways are strengthened – increasing the likelihood of accessing the thought in the future, and increasing the longevity and sustainment of the connections. Principles, by Ray Dalio, does an excellent job of explaining this concept.

3) The process of documentation creates the standard that you can build upon, compounding your learnings into more and more advanced behaviors

Pay attention to the little failures around you – how often do you see others, and yourself, repeat the same mistakes that lead to frustration or loss? “Where did I put my keys?” “Why did I go all in during the poker tournament, when that’s never worked in the past in that situation?” Why do we continue to make the same blunders, rather than changing our behaviors to improve our lives moving forward? In manufacturing, quality, and various other aspects of our lives, a key tool is the documenting and creation of a standard, which should represent the best known method. This is important to prevent making the same mistakes, but just as importantly as new learnings or ideas come into play, you can build upon them directly – rather than trying to learn it again or start at a less advanced level. This is a key concept to help you develop mature, advanced, and robust thoughts and behaviors regarding complex issues in supply chain. This podcast by Farnham Street with Annie Duke does an excellent job of explaining this in more detail: https://fs.blog/annie-duke/.

These concepts can be helpful when leading a supply chain. Consider examples such as:

Giving presentations and developing messages

Driving organizational change

Supplier negotiations

Project management

Hiring and building teams

Supplier performance management

Any many more, of course.