Why Speed to Learn is the Backbone of your Competitive Advantage

TLDR: In the "Adaptation Economy," "speed to learn" is the key competitive advantage. Traditional learning is too slow for rapid change. The post highlights four learning layers (individual, team, organizational, cultural) that must align for true learning velocity. AI significantly accelerates learning by offering personalized, just-in-time training and constant feedback. The article provides a toolkit with actionable advice for improving learning speed at each level, emphasizing that making learning integral to hiring and role design builds a sustainable "learning advantage."

Speed to Learn

In my post on the Adaptation Economy, I mentioned that there are three core pillars that orgs need to pay attention to. The first of these was “speed to learn” and that’s what this post will be about. As we discussed, everything is changing faster than ever, and AI is speeding up that rate of change. In such a chaotic environment, what makes companies defensible is their ability to adapt and thrive in new conditions. Organizational learning expert Arie de Geus argued that "the ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage." Part of adaptation is taking in the new, and that’s our topic for today.

Formal teaching and learning has not changed much for thousands of years. Aristotle (our company is named after Aristotle’s school) lectured to his students much the way I still lecture to students. You explain a concept, break it down into pieces, answer questions from students, and call it a day. The vast majority of human teaching takes some form of this. You have an expert who explains concepts to non-experts and maybe does a hands-on demonstration if the knowledge is practical or skill-like (“techne” if we’re sticking to our ancient Greek!). This model exists for a variety of reasons. First, it mostly works. Sure, it’s not ideal for everyone, but by and large it has very much stood the test of time. Secondly, and more importantly, I’d argue, is that it matches the human scale and distribution of knowledge and expertise. If there’s only one expert, how does that person spread their expertise? By talking to large crowds, and eventually writing their knowledge down and publishing books. As technology advances you get audio and video thrown into the mix. But it’s still the same model. One expert, many learners. 

(This is definitely what I look like when I’m lecturing. Trust me)

The core problem with this approach is that it’s very slow paced in terms of knowledge dissemination, and it does not function well when what counts as expertise changes rapidly. If the laws of physics changed every year, we would very quickly start teaching physics differently. We wouldn’t waste our time writing textbooks or rehashing the same lecture that we gave last year to another group of people. The textbooks and lectures would be out of date by the time we made them. In the Adaptation Economy, we need to embrace new approaches to learning lest we trap ourselves using methodologies that were designed for a different time.

Why Learning Speed Matters More Than Ever

Understanding is a prerequisite to successful adaptation. Unless you know about the environment that you’re adapting in and you understand the conditions that are driving that environmental change, you can’t adapt properly. Unlike in the natural world, we can’t just let genetics take the wheel. Understanding also snowballs. The more you know the easier it is to build more knowledge on that base. Understanding always builds on prior understanding. This means that companies that learn faster are able to compound their advantages over time. Every pivot and adaptation makes it easier for the company to pivot and adapt in the future, as part of what you learn is how to learn. Learning content is great, it’s important, it’s how your company stays competitive. However, the real value is that the process of continually learning makes your company very good at just that, at learning. That’s the real competitive advantage.

The data backs this up dramatically. Organizations that achieve rapid learning and adaptation—what McKinsey calls "highly successful agile transformations"—deliver around 30 percent gains in efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance. More importantly, these organizations are three times more likely to become top-quartile performers among their peers than those who haven't prioritized learning speed.

Improving your learning speed will create longterm benefits. You end up with a sort of learning dividend where small differences in learning speed create massive advantages over longer periods of time. Companies that have cultures of continuous experimentation are always prepared to adapt to the changing tides and part of that is due to the fact that they culturally embrace learning and have spent time improving their learning speed. Netflix is a great example of this, moving from mailing DVDs to streaming to creating original content to now engaging heavily in gaming. Is gaming going to pay off? Beats me, but I’m pretty confident in Netflix in the long run because even if it doesn’t, they’ll be ready to pivot, to learn, and to grow with whatever the next thing might be.

I find it interesting that in most science fiction of the past there was some object that contained all of the information in the world and that object was always some utopian invention that led to the flourishing of mankind. Meanwhile, our use of the internet has some people doubting that vaccines work. We live in an age with nearly unlimited information and yet we often do nothing with it. This is also true in corporate settings. We have more learning resources than ever, but orgs aren’t learning any faster. Part of this is because we’re still using the old model that I mentioned above, but part is also because of our value system. Right now we value expertise, we value the person who knows it all. They’re the subject-matter expert that we turn to. Instead, we need to embrace the learn-it-all over the know-it-all. The know-it-all still has blindspots and knowledge gaps and often struggles to overcome those very specifically because their value is tied to their expertise. Why learn when I’m valued for what I already know? The learn-it-all helps us overcome some of the hidden costs of slow learning but a culture that values the learn-it-all also has a better talent retention rate. Your know-it-all expert defends their turf because being wrong means potentially losing their job. Your learn-it-all readily admits when they don’t know something because it’s another opportunity to learn, and thus doesn’t feel threatened about their job. There’s always room to grow because you’ve established a culture of learning.

The Four Layers of Learning Speed

It’s important to note that learning speed isn’t just individual, much as we can discuss the learn-it-all. Learning speed is systemic. True learning velocity happens when we have four layers that are all working together to drive the org forward: individual learning, team learning, organizational learning, and cultural learning. You need to speed all four areas up in order to be an org with a good speed to learn.

Individual learning speed is what we’re probably all most familiar with. We’ve all learned things in our lives, some more quickly and some more slowly. In order to speed up individual learning speed we have a set of well researched techniques like spaced repetition, active recall, practice, etc. But beyond those practices we also need to promote metacognition and autonomy in our learners. People learn more quickly when they are thinking about why they’re learning and how their learning progress is going just as much as when they are inherently motivated to learn, as Mike wrote about last week. Growth mindset is a phrase that’s tossed around a lot, and it’s something I think we should all live by (just ask anyone who has played League of Legends with me!). Here, though, growth mindset is paramount. If you want to increase your individual learning speed, you must maintain a growth mindset.

Team learning speed is a bit trickier, but still something that we’ve all hopefully experienced. Teams can learn faster than individuals due to specialization within the team. You don’t need every team member to know every aspect of some new system, technology, process, etc. Instead, you just need the team to collectively learn the new thing. However, team learning speed requires team trust. Your team has to trust you to pull your weight and you have to trust them to pull theirs. Within a team, then, you want to make knowledge sharing explicit and rewarded. You want to create space for experts to exchange their knowledge and points of view, and you also want to create space for psychological safety. Teams need space to admit ignorance and experiment, and ideally these spaces all align. Having dedicated time where teams share what they’ve learned, admit what they don’t know and would like to understand better, and can collectively determine their own learning goals and needs helps to improve team learning speed.

Organizational learning speed is embedded in our systems. How does our tech stack, for instance, enable rapid skill acquisition? What infrastructure is in place for our employees to learn and upskill? While autonomy is a good, providing structured learning opportunities and having learning be embedded in your org is a necessity for your organizational learning speed to improve. This isn’t just about how the org supports the individual, it’s about how the org ensures that the whole org is constantly moving forward, adapting, and learning. At the org level we need to be capturing and distributing lessons learned. 

Finally we need to think about our cultural learning speed. What sorts of values or incentives are in place for your employees to learn and grow. Having a professional development fund is good and fine, but that shifts learning to an individual opportunity and not a company culture. How is learning embedded in the day-to-day of your employees? What sort of experimentation (an important part of learning!) are your employees encouraged to engage in and how are they rewarded for trying new things? Are your leaders being good examples of continuous learning, experimenting, and failing fast?

Each of these layers impacts the others and thus you get a multiplication effect as you improve these things. Improving one layer accelerates the rate of improvements in others, but the counter is also true. Having a weakness in one area can bottleneck the entire system.

AI As Your Learning Accelerator

This blog started with us examining the old method of teaching and learning. This method existed because it could scale with numbers and expertise. However, it’s not fast and it limits learning and adaptation in a number of ways. AI fundamentally changes this. We move from a one-size-fits-all approach to one where every learner can have a personalized learning experience. In today's AI era, skill building is no longer simply a perk for employees—it's a priority for organizational success. AI enables every learner to engage with content at an expert or beginner level, to put that content into the right context, and to ensure that all questions are answered. AI is tireless, adaptable, personalized, and can be focused on the exact context that a learner needs. 

Every learner being able to create a personalized learning path for themself improves the individual learning speed. An AI that adapts to the learner’s concerns and questions all while dynamically adjusting the curriculum to the learner’s needs allows learners to rapidly gain competency in new content. This approach also allows for just-in-time learning, which is quite difficult with the legacy model of learning. If a company launches a new product, or a new regulation comes out, or a new technology disrupts a market pattern, people need to learn about that new thing right away in order to properly adapt. AI can engage with learners about new content the second that content comes out. These AI-driven learning opportunities don’t require you to pull your expert off the floor, develop a training, and deliver that training to a bunch of people who you’re also pulling off the floor. Learning can become a natural part of an employee's day, something they do constantly. 

AI also enables a constant feedback loop where learners, instructors, subject matter experts, and managers are all able to see where they are excelling, where their blind spots and skill gaps are, and then use that data to immediately fill in those gaps or blind spots. AI accelerated learning creates exponential improvements over traditional methods because of the scale with which content can be personalized combined with the pace at which it can be engaged with, analyzed, and iterated upon.

The Learning Speed Toolkit

So you want to improve your learning speed in order to gain a competitive edge? Great! Here are some ways to do just that, broken down in three of the categories I introduced earlier:

Individual Learning Speed:

A friend that I’ve worked with for a few years introduced me to the 80/20 rule back when we first met, and I’ve long since embraced it. It’s not always applicable, but it often is. As you’re trying to learn and improve, ask yourself: “what 20% of skills or knowledge is driving 80% of my results.” It is likely the case that a small set of skills drives your success or will drive your future success. You don’t need to learn everything, you should instead focus on just the skills that will likely drive success. Are you not sure? Great! Experiment rapidly. Learn something, apply it, measure if it’s working, and then adjust. Don’t go through this experimentation process monthly, do it daily. Learn about a new skill or process, put it into action over a day or two, and see how it goes. Many skills are complimentary so while one specific skill might not have an impact, you might see how a few new skills, when used in concert, make a huge difference. But you’ll only be able to see that if you’re constantly learning and trying new things, as otherwise you won’t have a big enough skill bank to examine. Finally, and this one is easily overlooked but I think it’s quite valuable - document your learning. Just spend a tiny bit of time reflecting and metacognating on what you’ve learned and tried and jot down a few notes. It will help you realize what’s working, what’s not, and where opportunities lie.

Team Learning Speed:

Teams don’t learn in a vacuum. Your team learning speed doesn’t improve by pushing the individuals on your team to learn by themselves. Instead, create dedicated time blocks for collective skill acquisition. Make space for team members to work together to try new things, to learn from one another, and to experiment as a group. Brown bags, peer teaching, demo days and the like are great, even if they aren’t nominally connected to your business. Run regular demo days where team members showcase what cool stuff they’ve been learning or building. Also, cross-pollinate your teams! Bring in team members from one team to show another team what they’ve been learning. The differences of perspective help teams think creatively about problems and challenges and then empower teams to tackle new concepts from unique angles. Finally, as with individuals, you have to make space to reflect. Again, create dedicated time for a team to analyze what they’ve learned, why it took them as long as it did, and to figure out how they can learn faster next time. Iteration is key to improving your learning speed.

Organizational Learning Speed:

At the org level what’s becomes important is data. What metrics are you tracking in terms of learning velocity? How are you determining when your employees have developed knowledge or skills (and hopefully it’s not just checking a box after they sat through a webinar.) Beyond metrics though, you also need to make sure that from a policy perspective that employee experimentation is protected. If employees don’t feel safe to try new things, they will never be motivated to learn. This touches on things like performance reviews and other formal systems you have in place. Employee evals should be learning-focused and thus should include an evaluation of learning goals alongside employee output goals.

Finally, your Cultural Learning speed should improve when you tackle these other things. By building these pieces you’re building culture!

Building Your Organization’s Learning Advantage

There are a few things that you can do to build an organizational advantage by improving your learning speed. We’ve covered some things above, but this is an additional list that didn’t really fit easily into the above categories. First, you should consider how learning is a part of your hiring decisions. Try to make learning ability integral to how you evaluate candidates. Ask interview questions that require the candidates to demonstrate agility and flexibility in thinking in order to solve unknown problems. Establish short trial periods with candidates where the real test is how quickly they can learn and get up to speed with your company. Prioritize growth mindset individuals over people who have spent decades solving the exact same problems, and along those lines, value candidates with diverse backgrounds and experience sets as those are likely evidence of learning ability. 

Also, try to design roles that maximize learning. That will require many of your roles becoming cross-functional. You want employees who are dangerously competent in many areas, not who are experts in one (n.b. This isn’t always the case, you sometimes need that very specific expert because there is a very narrow problem that is integral to your business operation. However, that is less common than you might want to otherwise think). Put learning goals into your job descriptions. Build roles that are intentionally going to stretch and change over time.

Finally, take very seriously how you’re measuring learning. What are your time-to-productivity metrics? How are you measuring the impact of learning investments on employee productivity? How do you know if your employees are actually learning? Make it an organizational goal to lower the time it takes for a new hire to be an effective team member. Beyond the individual metrics, how are you evaluating your organizational learning speed? What success indicators will you see at an org level when your speed to learn improves? 

Conclusion

Your learning speed is your advantage, and it’s one that compounds over time. The faster you learn the more you can adapt to the current situation, but also the faster you’ll be able to learn next time. This advantage eventually creates a sizable competitive moat. When adaptation is a requirement, being able to learn quickly is what allows you to win. Orgs that learn faster don’t just adapt to a change that already happened, they’re part of the change as it happens. 

So for your next steps, assess your learning speed across your four layers. You need to identify your biggest learning bottlenecks so that you can make quick changes (figuring out how to create a learning culture at your org is itself a learning experience!) Start with quick wins that can demonstrate the value of learning velocity such that you can peddle that forward and build learning speed into your organization's DNA. 

We want an org where learning is as natural and continuous as breathing, where every employee is constantly growing, and where change becomes opportunity rather than threat.