Dolphin flight instructors
THE RUB
I've interviewed dozens of top performing sales people, trying to deconstruct what it is that makes them so great. The challenge with most is that they are naturally gifted and while they work hard at what they do, they can’t deconstruct how to sell because they haven’t constructed the skills to begin with. They’ve never NOT known how to sell.
George Bernard Shaw’s maxim, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches” has always bothered me. While he wrote the line as satire and not as career advice, I usually hear it quoted as a putdown on teachers.
Lee Shulman’s version is more practical, “Those who can, do; those who understand, teach.” He argued that the best teachers have an understanding of how to make a specific subject learnable. Good teachers can break down a topic and make it easier to absorb.
I’ve wrestled with this issue of deconstructing mastery into bite-sized training my entire career, and last week I learned a simple way to illustrate it.
THE FRAMEWORK
Kaelynn Partlow in Life on the Bridge, captures this challenge with a delightfully absurd analogy contrasting dolphins and eagles.
“Saying that some autistic people are good at teaching social skills might sound a little like saying that some dolphins make good flight instructors. Despite their inherent navigation skills, dolphins aren't even remotely familiar with the concepts of aerodynamics, flight planning, or aviation safety. The crucial components of being a pilot are completely foreign to them.
“In the imaginary world of analogies, what if there were a handful of dolphins who had an interest in all things aviation? Through dedication and hard work, perhaps a few of these dolphins could obtain a commercial pilot's license. If that happened, and if you ever asked a dolphin pilot to teach you about aviation, that dolphin could back up their flight knowledge with personal experience because they so intensely remember what it was like to learn that information.
“By contrast, if you asked an eagle about aviation, they'd be more likely to just stare at you blankly... Eagles begin to fly by fourteen weeks. Aside from general pointers, an eagle probably can't mentally deconstruct how to fly because they've never had to construct it in the first place. They have little or no memory of not knowing how.”
Eagles have innate flying skills. Dolphins have to struggle to learn to fly, and struggle is a raw material of learning.
THE PRACTICE
This framing gave me three challenges for how I create training.
Find the dolphins. Stop interviewing the eagles and look for the grinders who were mediocre and got good over time, those who built the skill on purpose and can still remember not having it.
Interrogate errors not methods. Since eagles can't answer, “How do you do it,” stop asking how and start asking about error. “What do beginners always get wrong?” “What did you get wrong for years?” Mistakes are the visible seams of a skill. They show us where construction happened. An eagle can't tell you how they fly, but they can often tell you about a bad landing.
Capture my own construction.The great news is I'm a dolphin in many of my endeavors. My current struggle is to address my runner's lean — a sideways tilt caused by back muscle fatigue. I don't have an answer yet. I'm still constructing how to solve the issue. As I do, I will become the documentarian for my learning, so that I can share those lessons with other runners on my site runnerslean.com.
“Tower, this is Delta Dolphin holding short of runway one niner...”