Latest / The Innovation Show / The Power of Productive Failure with Manu Kapur (Part 3 Finale)

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The Power of Productive Failure with Manu Kapur (Part 3 Finale) · The Innovation Show

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  Before we start, I wanna thank our sponsor Kyndryl, who run and reimagine
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  Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for smarter decisions, faster
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  innovation, and lasting competitive edge.
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  You can find Kyndryl@www.Kyndryl.com and they have just launched
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  the Kyndryl Institute.
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  Many of the authors and speakers from this show have been on that.
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  They've written brilliant pieces, long form articles.
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  You can find that at Kyndryl.com/institute.
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  I was just telling him off air.
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  I was delighted with the extra time to read his book and listen to it.
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  I bought the audible book.
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  I took his lessons about multiple ways of listening to it.
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  It is a fabulous book, and it's a pleasure to welcome back for part
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  three, our finale, the author of Productive Failure, Manu Kaur.
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  Welcome back.
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  Thank you.
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  It's a pleasure to be.
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  I thought we'd cover three things today.
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  Affect assembly and then for so many listeners of this show were ongoing life
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  learners and some of the hacks that you can have on yourself to push yourself.
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  Beyond the zone.
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  Let's tee it up that way.
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  So let's start with affect and I have a little tee up here for you, a little
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  quote you said, when we fail to solve a problem correctly, in spite of
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  trying multiple times to solve it, it creates something like a cliffhanger,
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  just like you would see in a movie, a cognitive and effective cliffhanger.
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  Having invested in the problem, we are eager to solve the correct solution.
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  So we all know that somebody disturbs us when we're in the
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  middle of doing something.
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  We have an unfinished task and we have loads of things we finished, but
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  we remember that on a finished task, it bugs us like a buzzing fridge.
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  So tell us what's at
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  Well,
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  What's going on inside our brain?
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  It is really that, I mean, it's we have the human psychology is, wired
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  in a way that you want to close the gaps, especially the ones that
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  you've invested a lot of effort into.
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  The memory trace stays with you and both cognitively and affected cognitively.
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  Like you have the conception of you that, you have an awareness that there
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  is something I wanted to do and I do not.
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  And I did not accomplish it.
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  Precisely the nature of that thing, but also more effectively in terms
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  of how you feel in that moment.
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  Right?
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  So there is this unfinished business feeling like, that
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  something is not complete yet or something is not fully closed.
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  And I think that's the affective component, the emotions coming in
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  we've talked about this on the show before, but your, interpretation of it
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  was really important in the learning aspect, which is the Zeigarnik Effect
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  Yeah.
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  so, the Zeigarnik effect, a very long time ago was, studying in the
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  context of, a waiting staff who would, , seem to forget , all the
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  orders as soon as they completed them.
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  But the ones that, were still unfinished.
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  Those are the orders that would.
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  You know, very easily remember, and these are not simple orders.
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  These are, these could be orders.
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  A lot of people ordering all different kinds of stuff.
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  And I think that's the sparked off this line of research.
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  Why is it that things that are, that remain incomplete actually spur us
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  to remember remember them better and then hope to complete them
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  . . And the same thing if you apply for learning, it's like hacking
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  that psychology into and that's what productive failure does.
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  It hacks that psychology into saying, okay, you try this task, you, you're
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  not gonna be able to complete it fully.
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  But then this, the Zeigarnik effect is gonna kick in.
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  And then you're going to, you will remember it better
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  and you'd want to close it.
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  . It's so counterintuitive to go, well, first I'm gonna actually
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  create a gap of my knowledge.
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  Maybe read back of a book and kind of go, I have no idea what that's about.
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  Or launch into a course or take the paper as you say, discover what your
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  gap is, and then this kicks in, this gap closure effect, the Zeigarnik effect.
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  But in the book, you talk about affective boost levels
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  . And I'd love you to give us at a high level each of them, loss aversion,
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  endowed progress, goal gradient,
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  Okay.
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  So yeah, there are these four hacks that you could do.
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  I mean, we've all heard of loss aversion, and that's Kahneman's Prospect theory.
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  Basically the idea that if you've held onto something for long you're more likely
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  to, you'll be more averse to losing it.
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  So, for example, we hold onto our losses, whether it's in
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  investments or relationships for much longer than we actually should.
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  And with profits, we are not as care, we're not as we don't
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  stick with them for so long.
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  And we tend to give them up.
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  So the idea and loss aversion is a. A very well researched effect.
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  And it's often seen as a negative thing because people are holding
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  onto their losses and therefore they should let them go.
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  In the context of learning you can hack, you can turn it into a hack when by
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  saying, okay, if you just try a problem, you invested enough time in the problem
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  and you still haven't been able to solve it correctly or canonically, right?
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  That's from a loss aversion standpoint, that's a loss.
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  That's a failure, right?
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  And instead of saying, well that's something you should let go.
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  Productive failure says no.
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  That's something you want to keep.
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  And it's a good thing that in some situations there is loss aversion
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  especially like productive failure because that keeps you in the game
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  and then it prepares you then to receive instruction or learn from
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  it as the when that happens, right?
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  So that's the first level.
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  So create your own loss aversion for in the learning
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  context, knowing very well that.
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  The correct explanation or an expert or some feed that there'll
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  be some feedback for you to learn.
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  But the knowledge of that has is important.
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  In other words, you need to know that something is there that will
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  help you, but then you will derive greater benefit from that help if
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  you create your own loss aversion.
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  Right?
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  So that's the first step.
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  hack the loss aversion.
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  I just got a coffee, Manu.
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  And the coffee shop gives out a loyalty card and I was thinking exactly I told the
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  owner about the endowed progress effect.
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  So let's tell our audience about that one.
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  Yeah, so I hope.
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  Thanks.
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  Thanks, Aiden.
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  So I hope the, you know, the, your loyalty card, is that, is it blank
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  or does it already come with a couple of stickers as a loyalty?
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  on it, but more than that, they also give you two for your
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  first coffee you buy with them.
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  There you go.
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  So that's the endowed progress effect that at play, where basically
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  they figured out how to hack your motivation and affect in general.
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  So if they were, had they given you an empty card with say you know, five or
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  eight slots to go, eight empty, and then you get a free drink and in your case you
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  know, they gave you two extra free, in other words, and maybe it's, 10 slot card.
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  In both cases, you have the equal, an equal number of, you know, purchases
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  to make before you get to the free cup.
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  Right?
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  In the first case, you have you know, eight to go.
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  And the second case also you have eight except in the first case you have
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  two, two already printed out of 10.
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  And the psychology says that because you already have those two.
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  You are more likely to complete the eight after the two that have already been
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  endowed upon you as opposed to starting from scratch and just doing eight.
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  Right?
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  And I think that's what, in the learning context in addition to loss aversion,
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  this is why I call it on top of loss aversion, you've already un endowed upon
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  yourself a certain amount of effort.
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  You've already made a certain amount of progress, al albeit small.
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  But even that is enough for us from an affective standpoint to spur on
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  and say, well, I'm gonna try and go and I'm more likely to go the distance
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  and complete this wherever it takes.
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  . I read this, I didn't know this until I read it in your book, was the guy
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  who did the research on that in 2006.
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  Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze.
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  They, the Joseph Nunes is a great, his, his brother is Paul Nunes, who many people
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  who listen to the show will know well, he's a regular contributor to the show.
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  Brilliant, prolific author as well.
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  So shout out to Joseph Nunez for doing that research on the car
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  washes, which was where the study came from about endowed progress
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  and then endowed progress actually.
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  Links beautifully into goal gradient.
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  'cause they go gold gradient, which they go together so well.
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  Yeah.
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  And, and, and, and you know, one of the ways in which I hack and doubt
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  progress and make it into, turn it into gold grin, and I'll get into
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  that is, if you, because of a bad knee, my main exercise is swimming.
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  So I go to the pool and I try to do my laps and and there are days after
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  a long day of work, you really don't feel like getting into the pool, right?
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  It's just like, I'm not gonna go.
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  And so that's when I tell myself, look, I'm just gonna go in and do one lap.
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  And if that's all I do today, I'm gonna get out of the pool
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  and say it's a success, right?
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  And so that's my and doubt progressive hack.
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  Basically, I tell myself one lap is enough.
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  I get into the pool, I do my one lap, and guess what happens?
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  Then end doubt progress kicks in.
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  I said, oh, I'm already here and now I might as well do another and another.
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  And that's when the goal gradient starts to kick, kick in.
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  And that's the idea that the closer you get to the goal of completing.
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  So if your target was 10 or 20, the closer you get to the goal the more
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  motivated you get to achieving that goal.
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  Right.
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  Or to completing that goal or, yeah.
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  And I think that's what you want the kick in.
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  So both to get started with something to endow yourself
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  very quickly with some progress.
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  And when that hack kicks in, converted into a goal gradient and with the goal
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  gradient, I think and you might also, there's another related hack where you
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  can move the goalpost, you know, so if the goal is too far, then it becomes
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  hard for you to, the gradient is much very steep and therefore it's hard to go.
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  So you may wanna tell, okay, I've already done one or two labs today.
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  Let me just get to five.
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  When I get to five, I'll see what happens.
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  So again breaking it down, you know, moving the goalpost, making your goal
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  smaller and then hacking your way along.
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  So assuming, then that you've hacked the endowed progress by shifting the
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  goalposts smartly, you've you've gone into benefiting from the goal gradient
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  and say you're closer to completing.
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  And there is this beauty of complete completion itself,
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  like at the very last bit.
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  That's why you see athletes and, you know, performers, they just find this some
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  energy from somewhere in the last lap, the last two laps, where you just go, I
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  don't know where they get that burst from.
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  And of course, part of it is training, but part of it's also affect, and
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  that's what we're talking about.
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  It's like you, there is this affective charge that you really want to
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  complete when you're very close to it.
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  And same in the context of learning.
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  Investing something gives you the, you, you are more likely to,
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  just to summarize it all right?
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  So before learning something if you invest effort into, , designing your own
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  exploration first even if you don't get to the right answer, then you are you.
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  That investment creates a loss aversion in a good way.
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  It also gives you an endowed progress because you've invested something, right?
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  You want to carry on, you wanna complete the affect.
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  And then the more you do that you, the closer you get to the goal,
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  you get the goal gradient effect.
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  And when you're right there, when you're, very close to learning how to
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  kiss all the problem correctly, the joy, the affect, the emotions, and
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  just completing that last bit in and of itself is the final sort of hurdle or the
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  hack that really helps you get past it.
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  thing to do as well, Manu.
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  So as a, I've coached kids and adults before in, rugby, but also my own son.
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  So my son now is winning BJJ, Brazilian Jiujitsu and MMA , , , but
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  A while,
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  years ago, he was not athletic at all and I actually, unbeknownst to
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  myself, used these different things.
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  It's nice.
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  To be able to put a label on them and see what they were.
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  But it was stuff like, let's go for a jog.
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  one, we just put on our runners and walked around the block, you
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  know, and they too just jogged to
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  the
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  Corner.
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  And then when we get there, it's like going, we've got here, why don't
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  we just do one more and just build,
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  exactly,
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  And you,
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  exactly.
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  kind of do these things not knowing what they are.
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  And I think knowing, and, and this is again, you do in this
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  book is you put a label on these things, you be able to see them.
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  in doing so, then you actually, you get a dopamine and a serotonin hit because
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  you're like feeling achievement about, I actually follow that form and it works.
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  the reason I say that
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  Yeah,
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  bring up a child, for example, is there's an important aspect then as
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  well, which is the growth mindset.
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  And I, we won't go deep into that because I hope a lot of our audience
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  know about the growth mindset.
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  But let's mention it here as well, because it's such an important aspect to.
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  To get through with all this, to go through with all this, and then we'll talk
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  about the importance of curiosity as well.
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  yeah, no.
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  So the growth mindset is an idea that's been around for a very long time,
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  and is the idea that effort matters?
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  Yes, people have innate abilities, individual differences in innate
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  abilities, but effort matters, effort can drive competence, and
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  effort is ultimately about action.
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  Action is within your locus of control.
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  Your inborn ability or whatever individual differences that those
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  are not within your control.
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  That's your lottery, so to speak.
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  But effort is within your control.
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  And if effort matters, if effort can change and help you grow and develop,
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  then having that kind of a mentality or a mindset actually helps you.
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  The question is how do you develop this kind of a mindset?
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  And again, there's a feedback loop.
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  The affective feedback loop from all these hacks is you see that effort
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  that if you can hack your effort and you then you derive benefit
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  from that, and you say, oh, wow.
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  , I didn't, at the start, , I couldn't see myself doing this, but I came this far
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  and then I felt like doing a little bit more and then, hacking the rest of it.
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  And then you said, oh, effort really matters.
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  So the next time, I'm in that kind of zone where I'm thinking maybe
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  I don't wanna do this, or maybe I don't wanna put in the effort.
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  You actually have action proof that you've been there, you've
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  done that, and that it works.
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  And that just increases the likelihood and the more you do it,
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  the more cycles you go through it.
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  You know, that kind of action actually builds the mindset.
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  So it's really action driven.
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  I think that's the point.
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  It's not something you can't tell it to somebody that you should think.
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  Yeah, you can, I mean, obviously you can, but what really works is action drives
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  affect and then affect drives more action.
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  So the primacy of action is key.
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  I found the book so helpful.
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  Like you as a retired athlete and having put so much into being an athlete
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  and then having to start at zero at a much later stage than everybody else.
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  And it was the first time I ever did this.
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  I actually, I went and looked at where I was now, I was looking at
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  the gold gradient and I love this, I read it somewhere, this story of
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  if you're swimming across a channel, most people will look and go, look
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  how far we have to go and you're gonna go, look how far you've come.
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  This was their
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  Yeah.
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  in my life.
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  I actually did that.
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  And I went, oh, I've actually.
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  I've come such a long way since 2009, where, which was a terrible
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  time to retire and to, from a
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  Yeah.
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  but in a way there was so much water, you know, under the
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  bridge and, and that I'd covered.
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  And it was really helpful to actually, to do that.
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  And I, I think that was such an important part of the book.
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  And and it made me realize, actually it's one of the reasons I do this show
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  and, why I am so attracted to this book because I, I really do believe , in
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  human progress , and personal progress, , I'm so surprised all the time to see.
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  So many people not believe that they can do it.
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  And I think reading the
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  Hmm.
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  and hopefully listening to us as well, that's what I do.
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  A little bit of executive coaching, but it inevitably turns into this where
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  it's going, why don't you do this?
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  Why don't you write a book?
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  Why don't you do something that is, I can see there's something
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  in you, there's a seed in there that you're not tapping into.
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  I, that's what I love
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  about What you've done here, and we'll talk about that.
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  I'm leaving that as a hook.
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  We're gonna finish talking about hacking you
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  and per using productive failure on yourself, because
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  you can absolutely use that.
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  And we're gonna, we're gonna conclude with that, but let's,
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  we better keep going on this.
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  But one of the things I thought was
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  so important
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  was children and uncertainty and the studies by Elizabeth
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  Bonawitz, for example, where.
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  We're in a time of extreme uncertainty.
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  I think we always were as humans, but we've been spoiled for the period since
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  World War II , until a few years ago, put it that way, but we lost that change
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  muscle or that uncertainty muscle.
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  But we inevitably, , we inherently have it.
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  And that's what I learned from these studies.
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  I'd love you to share the importance of children and
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  uncertainty and some of the studies.
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  the basic idea, of studying children is that, during childhood we experience
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  our steepest learning curves, right?
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  And if you could study what drives the mechanisms that drive these steep learning
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  curves, then perhaps we can also hack them and use them throughout our lives.
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  And of course, yes the patterns are different, but they're instructive.
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  They're they're interesting to see.
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  So, the broad class of studies I would describe is as this
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  suppose, and to your audience.
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  Imagine your kid love, who loves to play with toys, right?
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  And if I divide you into say, two different, two different
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  kinds of group in group one, I say, well, hey, here's a new toy.
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  I show you some random object.
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  I say, here's a new toy.
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  Hey, would you like to play with it?
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  You've never seen or heard about this toy.
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  You've never, would you like to play with it?
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  And, you know, and you say, yeah, I wanna play with it.
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  And I say, okay, here's the toy.
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  Play with it.
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  Try to figure out how it works.
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  Play as you like.
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  Okay.
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  And that's group one.
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  And then group two, I say, well.
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  Same question, same toy.
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  Do you wanna play with it?
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  And you say, yeah, yeah, I wanna play with it.
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  And I say, well, hang on a second.
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  You've never seen it, you've never played with it.
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  Let me first show you how to play with it, and then you can
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  figure out and play as you like.
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  So I show you exactly how to play with that toy, right?
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  And then after that, you watch and learn.
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  And then I give you the toy and say, Hey, figure it out as you,
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  like, play as you like, you know?
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  And so both groups of same toy, same instruction in terms of, you know, play
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  as you like and try to figure things out.
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  Except in group two, they have more knowledge about the toy because it
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  was, they've been told exactly how the toy functions, right or works.
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  The question is, when you're, when people are given, the children are given
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  these toys to play with, which group, one or two spends more time figuring
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  out the toy, which one is more engaged?
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  Which one tries to invent scientific strategies almost.
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  To figure out the causality of how the toy works, which group is more creative?
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  And if you answer one by one, if you answer these questions,
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  invariably the results show that it's group one that is more creative.
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  Right?
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  And so there's something about playing and tinkering in the context of
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  things that are puzzling or uncertain that need to be figured out that.
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  Hack our attention.
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  They keep us in the game.
• 19:33
  They make us almost behave, even though as we are children they make us behave like
• 19:37
  many scientists trying to do, hypothesis testing to figure out how the toy works.
• 19:43
  And all of it is really the curiosity that's driven by uncertainty
• 19:48
  that's placed upon us as long as we are in that safe space within
• 19:52
  which, we can play and have fun.
• 19:54
  And so I've always found these sets of studies to be really interesting because
• 19:58
  then one could start to think of, when you think of concepts or ideas or knowledge,
• 20:03
  these are not like physical toys, but you can start to think of conceptual toys.
• 20:08
  And we all want to be, deeply engaged with knowledge and ideas.
• 20:11
  We want to be, to be able to experiment with them.
• 20:15
  We all, we want to be able to be creative with them and all of these things that
• 20:18
  we say are important for learning.
• 20:21
  When we design learning, we do the exact opposite of that.
• 20:24
  We basically go to group two and says, this is something
• 20:27
  new you've never learned.
• 20:28
  Let me first tell you what it is.
• 20:30
  Let me just teach you.
• 20:31
  Nothing wrong with that per se, but we deprive the students and ourselves
• 20:38
  of the opportunity that Group One has.
• 20:40
  . And that's the idea that curiosity is.
• 20:43
  Yeah, of course.
• 20:44
  Part of it is what we, there are individual differences in curiosity,
• 20:48
  but a part of it is also driven by the uncertainty within, in the context
• 20:52
  within which we find ourselves.
• 20:54
  I thought I'd share a couple of things.
• 20:55
  I just wanted to tell you as well, I lecture as you know, in Trinity College
• 20:58
  here in Dublin, and I use this, , I actually looked at my lectures,
• 21:03
  'cause I'm coming, it's coming up in November now, in my lecture series.
• 21:07
  I was like going, I'm not doing a lot of these things.
• 21:09
  So I've actually rearranged it, put in new slides, starting with some questions
• 21:13
  to ask people to go, if you had to take the test now, what would you do?
• 21:18
  And it's, I'm looking
• 21:20
  Yeah,
• 21:21
  to practicing it.
• 21:22
  And now I'm able to go, this is not me, this is a guy who studied this and.
• 21:27
  blame it all on me if it
• 21:29
  no, but it's great, man.
• 21:30
  I'm looking forward to actually putting into practice.
• 21:32
  Last thing before we move on to
• 21:34
  Cool.
• 21:34
  which is the fourth.
• 21:35
  A, and just to remind you, we, we covered
• 21:38
  Yeah.
• 21:38
  two as last day is I thought it was important to mention.
• 21:43
  So here we've talked about curiosity.
• 21:45
  So raising the curiosity, which is also stuff like you
• 21:48
  go and figure it out yourself.
• 21:51
  Achievement goals versus performance goals, I thought was
• 21:54
  an important one because we see this in organizations sometimes.
• 21:58
  I'm flabbergasted When I went from the sports field to the business field,
• 22:03
  couldn't believe how
• 22:04
  Some people just figured that the, the task done was enough.
• 22:09
  And I was going, but it's terrible.
• 22:10
  It's like, it's terrible work.
• 22:12
  Like, how can you be proud of that?
• 22:15
  And I realized actually, this
• 22:16
  Hmm.
• 22:17
  something to do.
• 22:18
  Achievement versus mastery.
• 22:19
  And again, this is where the job done.
• 22:22
  Is that enough , and there's some people like I would definitely think
• 22:26
  I'm one of them, where it's not just enough to do the thing, you
• 22:29
  wanna actually be really good at it.
• 22:31
  And this is why I love doing the show about it, like reading the book,
• 22:34
  getting to interview the author, listening to the audio book, and then
• 22:37
  I actually edit it myself because it's another learning experience for me.
• 22:42
  So let's share these ideas because you'll see yourself here.
• 22:45
  in every learning situation we bring in certain goals that
• 22:49
  sometimes are implicit or explicit.
• 22:51
  And, people have tried to study what these goals that people have and
• 22:55
  having and the nature of the goals, it itself influences how you are engaged
• 23:01
  in the task or your learning task.
• 23:03
  Broadly speaking, there are achievement goals and mastery goals.
• 23:06
  And achievement goals are the, like, where I just want to complete it.
• 23:10
  I want to get to the end state, I want to be able to solve the problem and so on.
• 23:15
  So this would look like, if you're given a task, you complete the task.
• 23:19
  If you are on an exam, you wanna pass the exam, you wanna do just enough
• 23:23
  so that you, you get on with things.
• 23:26
  Whereas mastery goals are where you really start to.
• 23:29
  We want to understand why you're doing what you're doing.
• 23:32
  Why do things work the way they are?
• 23:34
  What if something could be the other way around?
• 23:36
  And what if I change something, if you, so those are the real deep understanding
• 23:42
  and mastery oriented goal goals.
• 23:45
  And so why these are important in the context of productive
• 23:48
  failure is what failure does.
• 23:51
  In addition to the ales, they are the four a affective boost levels.
• 23:56
  It gets you into this orientation where having invested the effort and still not
• 24:03
  having completed or got to the solution.
• 24:07
  When you get to the, a situation where a teacher or an expert, or you have
• 24:11
  access to the solution or feedback, you're in the zone as to, you're
• 24:16
  in the mastery orientation where you really want to, you're not just
• 24:20
  satisfied with getting the information.
• 24:23
  You want to understand why is it that way?
• 24:26
  What was I doing that was either incorrect or suboptimal?
• 24:31
  And how does that strategy compare with this expert strategy so that
• 24:35
  it is in the contrast and it's in, in asking the why about the contrast
• 24:41
  that I start to begin, I begin to understand, ah, this is why it works.
• 24:45
  The aha kind of a moment.
• 24:47
  I could still just, okay, all right, I tried this way, and the the
• 24:51
  professor or the teacher is trying the other way, , the correct way.
• 24:54
  I can learn it, but it's the invested effort that really
• 24:58
  drives a mastery orientation.
• 25:00
  Whereas if you don't have that initial investment in that in productive
• 25:04
  failure, then you just go into this learning situation, say, okay,
• 25:07
  I'll learn something new today.
• 25:10
  Maybe I'll try to understand what it is, but yeah, my goal is to achieve
• 25:14
  that and then get on with it, and I think that's an achievement level goal.
• 25:17
  And then throughout our lives, it's not to say that everything
• 25:20
  has to be about mastery, because I don't need to understand the
• 25:23
  chemistry of how eggs are made.
• 25:25
  I just want to get some scrambled eggs for breakfast.
• 25:27
  Right.
• 25:28
  So, okay.
• 25:29
  I don't need mastery there.
• 25:30
  Unless you're learning to be a chef, then maybe you do want to, my point is
• 25:34
  not to denigrate one kind of from the other, but really in cases where you want
• 25:39
  deep understanding, of some the things you're about to learn, it's, it actually
• 25:43
  helps to have a mastery orientation as opposed to simply an achievement one.
• 25:48
  my kids ask me questions that I don't know the answer to.
• 25:51
  And I like stuff like that.
• 25:53
  Like, why, you know, why is the eggshell that way?
• 25:55
  And I go, let's ask ChatGPT, which is great.
• 25:59
  Now, you know, before we had to go to the, if you had one Encyclopedia
• 26:03
  Britannica and go through that pain.
• 26:05
  But now it's so simple.
• 26:07
  But , I love because they'll ask stuff that take for granted a lot of the time,
• 26:11
  and I actually don't know the answer to.
• 26:13
  I dunno.
• 26:14
  go, that's a great
• 26:15
  Yeah,
• 26:15
  Let's see.
• 26:16
  And then share it with them.
• 26:17
  , And I'll do the
• 26:18
  yeah,
• 26:18
  ones.
• 26:18
  So they'll have, they'll listen to it with me.
• 26:20
  So it's a, it's, it's a great way
• 26:22
  yeah,
• 26:23
  to learn from their curiosity.
• 26:25
  keep moving.
• 26:26
  And
• 26:26
  yeah.
• 26:27
  up was the last of the A's, which is assembly.
• 26:30
  I shared this on LinkedIn with a small post, and it went viral because people
• 26:35
  love this idea of somebody proposes something, you slam the idea and you
• 26:41
  talked about the key keynote, for example, with the physics professors.
• 26:46
  And the answer is
• 26:47
  yeah.
• 26:48
  or no, right or wrong, black and white.
• 26:50
  And you kind of go, no, there, it can't be there.
• 26:53
  There's Lego blocks, there's, there's, hints
• 26:57
  Yeah.
• 26:57
  answer in there if you take the time to go looking for them.
• 27:00
  So that's the tee up.
• 27:01
  But even before that, you talked about Prims, and this was proposed
• 27:07
  by Andrea diSessa, sent me down a rabbit hole, checking out his
• 27:10
  work as well, by the way, man.
• 27:13
  But let's, I've teed you up there with loads.
• 27:15
  Take us away.
• 27:16
  So basically the idea is that through our lived experiences, we develop
• 27:20
  intuitive conceptions about things that are reduced to a point where
• 27:26
  they're just angiomatic in nature.
• 27:28
  I don't, they don't need any more explanations.
• 27:31
  They are self-evident in, for example, if I drop something,
• 27:36
  it'll fall, like it'll fall, right?
• 27:39
  Or if I go near a heat source, I will feel warm, you know if things are moving.
• 27:47
  Something must be making them move, like inanimate objects don't have will, right?
• 27:52
  So, so these kinds of things, right?
• 27:54
  And, and this is what Andrea Desa, who's the the scientist or the scholar who
• 28:01
  really came up with this idea is that we have all these, what he calls self-evident
• 28:07
  axiomatic conceptions about the world that he calls phenomenological primitive.
• 28:14
  So they're primitive to the point where in describing or making sense of a
• 28:18
  phenomenon, hence the phenomenological, primitive, and children come to
• 28:23
  classrooms, or in any, and adults too, learning in the learning situation
• 28:27
  come into learning situations with all these conceptions, right?
• 28:31
  And oftentimes these conceptions are incorrect, or in the context
• 28:37
  they are incorrect, right?
• 28:39
  So for example.
• 28:40
  If you ask people what, what makes seasons, right?
• 28:45
  The summer and winter, most people will use the p prim or the idea that, oh,
• 28:50
  it must be summer because we should, we are closer to the sun, to a heat source.
• 28:55
  It's so intuitive, right?
• 28:58
  When in fact's the opposite.
• 28:59
  That's true.
• 29:01
  You know, from a, from a planetary standpoint, motion standpoint what
• 29:05
  makes seasons actually the, the tilt of the, of the, of the earth.
• 29:10
  And, and so the idea is that in some contexts, these, these
• 29:14
  conceptions don't work in other contexts, they actually do work.
• 29:18
  So if you're around a fire, you know, you don't want to be, you know, going
• 29:23
  too close or else, you know, or, or if you want heat, you want to go close
• 29:26
  to, it's in those contexts, the same conception actually works very well.
• 29:30
  In other contexts, it does not.
• 29:33
  And hence the idea that in any learning situation, if a child presents an
• 29:37
  idea or makes a claim, from an expert standpoint, you may very well go and
• 29:43
  say, well, that just doesn't work.
• 29:45
  Sorry, that's a wrong idea, right?
• 29:48
  And the alternative is to say, well, actually, let's hunt for contexts
• 29:53
  within which that actually works, and then contrast those contexts with
• 29:58
  other contexts where it does not work.
• 30:00
  Now, imagine that is really powerful, right?
• 30:04
  And that's what we want to do not just for learning, is to try to, productive failure
• 30:10
  tries to uncover these intuitive ideas and concepts that people bring into there.
• 30:17
  Into a new learning situation.
• 30:19
  And instead of dismissing the whole concept, you say, well, is there
• 30:23
  something about what the person is saying that could actually be used?
• 30:28
  And that's where I call this components, right?
• 30:30
  And I treat them as Lego blocks.
• 30:32
  So the moment you make a claim about something, you try to find, okay, this
• 30:36
  claim has three Lego blocks, you know?
• 30:39
  And I say, instead of dismissing this assembly of three Lego blocks
• 30:42
  as a whole, because it doesn't work, say, okay, some of it doesn't work,
• 30:46
  but maybe there's something there.
• 30:48
  And hence the, my classic example is, you know, the object moving
• 30:51
  on a frictionless surface.
• 30:53
  And if you ask somebody, if you ask people, even adults, right?
• 30:56
  You know, , if the object has a force that's making it move, most
• 31:00
  people would say, yes, the object is moving, therefore there's a force.
• 31:04
  That's, and any physicist would say, no, that's not true., There's no force.
• 31:09
  And so instead of dismissing that, you can then say, well actually
• 31:13
  the intuitive idea that the object has some physical property is true.
• 31:20
  It does have it and it's called momentum.
• 31:21
  And you were just calling it force, but it's actually momentum.
• 31:24
  There is a momentum in the direction of emotion, but there's no force.
• 31:28
  And then you can start to just compare and contrast, you know, and I think
• 31:31
  those are the ways in which we want to treat children's ideas or naive
• 31:36
  conceptions or initial conceptions, initial intuitions that people
• 31:40
  bring into new learning situations.
• 31:43
  And the more you can do that, it creates more opportunities to compare and
• 31:46
  contrast and drive deep understanding.
• 31:49
  In interest of time, I thought we'd
• 31:50
  move on to the power of comparison or contrast.
• 31:53
  We had a show a few years ago, a guy
• 31:55
  called Patrick Ron Voer, a French guy who wrote about , the
• 31:59
  concept of neuro marketing, which is marketing to the brain.
• 32:03
  And he talked about how important it was to in marketing, he said, so say you have
• 32:09
  a weight loss drug, and you show somebody who's overweight or unhealthy besides
• 32:13
  somebody who's really fit and lean.
• 32:15
  And that the brain just understands contrast.
• 32:18
  That's why you have like red and green and these kind of things together because
• 32:23
  they just speak straight to the brain.
• 32:25
  But you bring that a step further here with productive failure.
• 32:28
  Contrasts are key.
• 32:29
  I mean you know, the Imagine Alien lands on Earth, and we want them to
• 32:33
  understand what a dog is, and you just show them a picture of a dog.
• 32:38
  Here's a dog.
• 32:38
  Try to learn what a dog is, or you want another example.
• 32:42
  Let me show you another example of a dog, and this is dog.
• 32:45
  How much would they learn, or how many trials would it, would they
• 32:48
  need to learn what a dog is, right?
• 32:50
  Like probably many.
• 32:51
  And still, they would not get a full understanding or a fuller understanding.
• 32:55
  Imagine now I put a dog and a cat and something that is not something
• 33:00
  that's entirely different, right?
• 33:02
  Maybe a mouse said, study these three and figure out what a dog is.
• 33:08
  This is a dog, by the way, but figure out what makes a dog.
• 33:11
  Now that kind of a contrast, which is designed in a way for
• 33:14
  you to notice the differences.
• 33:17
  Between objects, so between things and the differences or the critical
• 33:22
  things that you need to notice is something that we pick up very quickly.
• 33:27
  I think from an evolutionary standpoint, one could even make the argument that
• 33:30
  if in our field of vision something changed, we have more desire to pick
• 33:34
  it up because that could mean life or death if you're out hunting, right?
• 33:38
  Whereas if I give you five different things and I say what is similar
• 33:41
  across all of these things, or, that is a lot of effort that goes into
• 33:45
  thinking about similarity, whereas differences, we are very quick to
• 33:50
  bootstrap or pick up and bootstrap.
• 33:51
  And so the hack there for learning is why don't we let differences drive
• 33:56
  our attention to what is critical?
• 33:58
  Because we can design for them and then have students or learners pick that up.
• 34:03
  And that's where contrast come in.
• 34:05
  You design contrast to be similar , in particular ways, but
• 34:10
  different in the ways that you.
• 34:12
  Things to notice.
• 34:13
  So if you want to notice the hair color you put two there and one with black and
• 34:20
  the other with blonde then the people with, oh, hair color is an important
• 34:24
  difference between the two, right?
• 34:26
  So whatever it is that you want people to notice, that's what you want to create
• 34:31
  the contrast in, and they will pick it up and then you take it from there.
• 34:35
  you talked about the learning through metaphor or case studies, for example,
• 34:40
  and I took a lesson in that because this chapter actually taught me a lot about
• 34:44
  how I learn, which is , a lot of it's like reading the book, interviewing you,
• 34:48
  listening to it, then editing it, but then
• 34:51
  Hmm,
• 34:51
  about it loosely.
• 34:53
  So some hook,
• 34:54
  hmm
• 34:55
  the zy effect or the idea of gold gradient or something.
• 34:58
  I'll lean on that.
• 34:59
  Or some study that you mentioned.
• 35:01
  I'll go, actually, that's just like this.
• 35:04
  And then I'll
• 35:05
  hmm.
• 35:05
  it from there.
• 35:06
  And then I'll use a case study from business to go, well, this happened in
• 35:09
  business, but I don't always use two.
• 35:12
  And actually that was something I learned from you.
• 35:14
  That one is effective, but two was way more effective.
• 35:17
  And here you talked about the example of the general.
• 35:20
  Maybe you'll give us that at a high level.
• 35:24
  People have studied this quite a lot.
• 35:26
  And then this was a study in transfer where , suppose you have a general who
• 35:30
  wants to conquer a fortress, right?
• 35:33
  And the fortress as fortified obviously, right?
• 35:36
  And you want to find out, and there's a there are many ways you can conquer it.
• 35:41
  One is to go down one path and send his entire army through one path,
• 35:46
  but say that path is not sustainable, or maybe there's not enough to
• 35:50
  send the entire army through that.
• 35:55
  So what does the general decide to do as an alternative strategy?
• 35:59
  So that's the main goal.
• 36:00
  Now in the context of say surgery or medicine, you know, suppose
• 36:06
  you have a tumor in your body.
• 36:08
  Right.
• 36:08
  And you want to kill it with radiation, right?
• 36:12
  And so you want to, you have several options.
• 36:15
  You can have radiation directly on that, but if the level of radiation
• 36:20
  power needed to kill it will actually damage everything above it as well.
• 36:25
  So you don't want that, right?
• 36:27
  So how does a surgeon go about killing the tumor without killing
• 36:31
  everything or yourself in the process?
• 36:34
  Right?
• 36:35
  And so, structurally, if you think about these two problems
• 36:39
  they're very similar, right?
• 36:42
  Yet if you give these problems to people, they are often
• 36:45
  unable to solve it, alright?
• 36:48
  But if you give one problem and they're unable to solve it, and
• 36:52
  then you tell them actually, what if the radiation comes from multiple.
• 36:56
  Sides so that each power is less so you don't damage it.
• 37:00
  But when they converge to a point, boom, that's enough power to kill the right.
• 37:04
  And suppose you get this and then you get to the, the general problem.
• 37:09
  The general's problem, the war problem turns out more people are
• 37:13
  able to transfer from the radiation problem to the war problem.
• 37:20
  Because of the contrast, they're able to see, ah, okay, yes, the context are
• 37:24
  different, but maybe so the general should go down, attack the fortress
• 37:28
  from multiple, parts and converse the force in one on the fortress,
• 37:33
  that way, exactly like a radiation.
• 37:36
  So again, that's the power of contrast.
• 37:38
  That contrast, they cue us.
• 37:41
  And this is the issue that the contrast in comparing and contrasting,
• 37:45
  you understand the similarity.
• 37:49
  And within the similarities, you pick up the differences that
• 37:53
  then cue you to transfer this from one context to the other
• 37:58
  You said in, in the studies that they did, that , the researchers gave the
• 38:02
  radiation question or query or a case.
• 38:06
  And then they gave the general case that there was only like 9% of people got it.
• 38:11
  And they were like going, what the heck?
• 38:13
  And then they were
• 38:13
  Yeah,
• 38:14
  they spelled it out.
• 38:14
  You know, you know when you watch a movie or a series on TV and they spell
• 38:19
  out the obvious plot and you're like going, you didn't have to do that.
• 38:21
  I got it.
• 38:22
  But actually a lot of
• 38:24
  yeah,
• 38:24
  get it.
• 38:25
  And what I found really interesting
• 38:26
  yeah.
• 38:27
  You said in that study when they added a second case of transfer,
• 38:31
  Yeah.
• 38:32
  Up to like 40%.
• 38:34
  still that's not a lot, , but transfer is generally very hard.
• 38:36
  But yes, the idea is that contrast can cue you.
• 38:41
  And that's why learning from a single case is so hard.
• 38:43
  That's also illustrative in this example.
• 38:46
  We all use it all the time expecting people to learn from a single case, but
• 38:50
  really just learning from a single cases.
• 38:52
  But if you learn from two contrasting but analogous cases,
• 38:56
  you drive up the transfer effect.
• 38:57
  Yeah,
• 38:58
  When somebody's more expert or leans into mastery more, I always
• 39:01
  think about how, say you were writing this book, I'm sure you had.
• 39:06
  Many times where you're like kind of going, do I have enough information here?
• 39:10
  You know, the Dunning Kruger effect where the more you know, the more
• 39:13
  you think you don't know, which is true, which is I'm reminded of every
• 39:16
  day with that library behind me
• 39:19
  the more you lean into mastery, the more you realize what you don't know.
• 39:23
  And that, that you just see the size of the well of knowledge
• 39:26
  and you just go, wow, I,
• 39:28
  No.
• 39:28
  much to learn there.
• 39:29
  No.
• 39:30
  And there has to be a moment where you just do a code freeze and you go, I
• 39:33
  cannot take on any more knowledge here because I need to write this thing.
• 39:37
  And, I think that actually freezes a lot of people.
• 39:40
  And the reason I say that was you too.
• 39:43
  Everybody has imposter syndrome you talk about a way
• 39:47
  Hmm.
• 39:48
  with imposter syndrome, which was great wisdom from your father.
• 39:51
  Yeah.
• 39:51
  That's how we grow really.
• 39:53
  You know, I think to save our face, we say that, you know, we are okay.
• 39:58
  And, but actually the imposter syndrome is a very common phenomenon
• 40:01
  at all levels, in all domains.
• 40:04
  And my dad used to say, well, your ambition should always exceed your talent.
• 40:09
  And I'm sure other people have said this in different ways, but the basic
• 40:12
  idea is that if you're always doing things that are within your current
• 40:15
  skill sets and abilities, then.
• 40:17
  Yeah, that's great, but you're being very safe and you won't learn or
• 40:21
  grow much if you stay in that zone.
• 40:23
  Right?
• 40:23
  So, and so it's really, you need to go and take on challenges that you
• 40:27
  knowingly, very knowingly, that are beyond your current skill sets and abilities.
• 40:33
  And that's where you end up in a zone where you'll struggle
• 40:35
  and you'll question yourself.
• 40:37
  And, you find yourself even saying, do I belong here?
• 40:40
  I went to ETH Zurich as a professor when I was 40 and, , ETH, Zurich Math,
• 40:45
  my university where my professorship is, the likes of Albert Einstein and,
• 40:49
  Pali and, 30 other Nobel laureates have roomed the same other doors.
• 40:54
  And really you go there and say, do I be, do I belong here with these?
• 40:58
  Right?
• 40:59
  And, but that's the whole point, like, yes belonging is a function of your
• 41:03
  efforts and growth and but you need to put yourself out there to be able to do that.
• 41:10
  . Gonna come to that next, for those people who want to go,
• 41:12
  well, what does this mean to me?
• 41:14
  Last thing I just wanna mention on this, because it's important, which is some
• 41:18
  people, if you think about, say the idea of imprinting Conrad Laurens the idea
• 41:23
  that, the first thing you learn during a critical window of learning sticks.
• 41:27
  And it's very hard to erase that once that happens.
• 41:30
  But you're talking about productive failure at a later level.
• 41:32
  Although children do it naturally all the time.
• 41:35
  But one of the criticisms that comes up is.
• 41:38
  Concerns about learning the wrong things and that they are imprinted.
• 41:41
  But luckily you tell us pruning and promoting are two
• 41:45
  things that take care of that.
• 41:47
  So maybe you'll deal with this.
• 41:50
  In the early years we know that you know that you are born with
• 41:53
  many more neurons than you need.
• 41:54
  And over time, based on as you learn there's a lot of pruning that goes on
• 41:59
  and you over time then you have a, you.
• 42:03
  The number of neurons actually decrease because you're
• 42:04
  learning and so on and so forth.
• 42:06
  And even in adult settings or throughout our teenage years and adults, we've
• 42:10
  come to believe that yeah, if you learn the wrong thing, it, stays with you.
• 42:16
  And therefore people are critical of things like productive failure.
• 42:20
  It say, oh, what if they do this wrong thing first because they
• 42:22
  don't know the correct thing.
• 42:24
  What if they do the wrong thing first?
• 42:25
  And then when you're trying to, they have to, correct that.
• 42:27
  And now one way to do that is one way to say that, oh, this
• 42:31
  problem is merely empirical.
• 42:32
  Let's just test it.
• 42:34
  Right?
• 42:34
  So if you test it and you find that, okay, even if you had the wrong
• 42:38
  conception first, when it got corrected with feedback, people have the ability
• 42:43
  to actually correct it and then learn the correct one, especially.
• 42:47
  And we see that in empirical evidence that's exactly what happens.
• 42:51
  It also matters how you correct it.
• 42:54
  So you know, one way of correcting it is to say, as you talked about,
• 42:58
  well, that's just wrong entirely.
• 43:00
  As opposed to there's some parts of it is correct are useful.
• 43:05
  Let me build on that, to teach you the correct conception.
• 43:08
  So that's the right way of, oh, the more powerful way of correcting
• 43:12
  and giving somebody feedback and assembling that into canonical
• 43:14
  knowledge and the correct knowledge.
• 43:16
  So if you do that I think what we find is people are actually able to
• 43:22
  overcome their, or, build upon their misconceptions and naive conceptions and
• 43:26
  non correct conceptions on top of it.
• 43:29
  Now, if you don't do that.
• 43:31
  People may display in certain contexts the correct ideas, but the moment those
• 43:35
  contexts are very different, they go back to their all naive ways of thinking.
• 43:39
  And also studies show that even in top colleges physics students,
• 43:44
  when, again, back to seasons, they can answer the questions in physics
• 43:48
  and get good marks in an exam.
• 43:50
  But when you go back to asking them what to explain, seasons, they go
• 43:53
  back to, oh, actually it's how close you are, which is, you know and so
• 43:59
  the reason why we are, we worry about misconceptions or wrong conceptions or
• 44:03
  wrong ideas, is that we don't really engage with them in a way to correct
• 44:08
  them so that they persist over time.
• 44:11
  this
• 44:11
  Yeah.
• 44:12
  us up beautifully for using productive failure for our own
• 44:15
  growth, learning and harnessing the productive failure design principles.
• 44:19
  We didn't cover that in depth in this show because there's a chapter
• 44:23
  dedicated to designing for other people.
• 44:25
  So if you're a corporate trainer.
• 44:27
  If you're a lecturer, if you're a teacher designing productive
• 44:30
  failure design is absolutely key.
• 44:33
  'cause you can't get it wrong.
• 44:34
  You hacked productive failure and you said the way to hack productive
• 44:38
  failure to red team, it is, well, if you get the design wrong, you're
• 44:42
  in trouble with productive failure.
• 44:44
  So it's really important
• 44:45
  Yeah.
• 44:45
  and I didn't want to go there because I really wanted to
• 44:47
  focus on us, the individuals.
• 44:49
  So let's talk about that because productive failure on a personal
• 44:53
  level includes things like feedback.
• 44:55
  So a group, a trusted learning group that you lean into something
• 45:01
  together, participation, social,
• 45:03
  Mm-hmm.
• 45:04
  mind setting, all these things are really important.
• 45:06
  I'd love you to take us through this for
• 45:08
  Hmm.
• 45:08
  to go, here's how I would deal with it myself.
• 45:12
  And then I also have the diagram, Manu, that I could share
• 45:16
  that maybe you could speak to
• 45:17
  Sure.
• 45:17
  So, so the idea really is when you design productive failure for yourself,
• 45:21
  is to think in three nested layers.
• 45:25
  You know, if, whatever you're trying to learn, whether it's tennis or
• 45:28
  scrambled eggs, or learning how to you know, learning some math, the
• 45:33
  idea is the same, the three levels.
• 45:35
  The first level is the task.
• 45:37
  How do you design the task itself that you're about to learn with?
• 45:41
  What features must this task have?
• 45:44
  And the more features
• 45:49
  the more the task has certain features, it is likely to work
• 45:52
  better as a productive failure task.
• 45:54
  And then once you've got the task design, you've gotta think about,
• 45:57
  okay, how do I work on this task?
• 46:00
  Do I work individually by myself?
• 46:02
  Do I work with other people?
• 46:04
  When do I and what do I do with the kinds of ideas I come up with, right?
• 46:10
  And what do I do with those ideas?
• 46:11
  So I think that's the participation layer that, you know, you design the task.
• 46:15
  How do you then work and interact with the task and the, the, the biggest
• 46:20
  layer where you deal with, you know, your culture and values and mindsets.
• 46:24
  It's what I call the social surround layer where you've gotta design your learning.
• 46:28
  Like you, you've gotta be mindful of setting the kinds of learning
• 46:31
  goals valuing effort you know, feedback and so on and so forth.
• 46:36
  So, I. It's a coordination across these three levels.
• 46:42
  And in the, in the first instance, it can be quite daunting to be able to want
• 46:46
  to do so many things at the same time.
• 46:48
  So my advice usually is to, you know start small, get a couple of these things
• 46:54
  going, and then slowly add features as you go along and become more, more and more
• 46:58
  used to productive failure for yourself.
• 47:00
  I'm gonna leave on the screen for those people who are only listening to us.
• 47:05
  I recommend looking at this.
• 47:06
  So it's around 50 minutes into the show on YouTube.
• 47:11
  If you go there, you'll see the.
• 47:12
  Diagram, let's put it in practice here, because you give an example.
• 47:16
  You say here, and I'm gonna pick this one, learning a new
• 47:19
  project management software,
• 47:21
  because so many of us will have to learn new skills in an age of ai.
• 47:26
  So a decontextualized way of learning would involve consulting a manual or
• 47:30
  a series of generic training videos.
• 47:32
  That's what most people do.
• 47:34
  An organization might go here, you can go onto our LMS or
• 47:38
  learning management software.
• 47:39
  You can go on there, you can learn how to use AI or whatever.
• 47:43
  But that's not as effective
• 47:44
  as learning in the context of actual use.
• 47:47
  So I'd love you to tell us about this, because I think this is
• 47:50
  so important in today's world.
• 47:55
  Yeah, I think again, it depends on the learning goals you have, right?
• 47:58
  If the goals are to learn this new piece of software, the management system
• 48:02
  as opposed to just use it as told or blindly or just go through the procedures
• 48:09
  those are two different strategies.
• 48:10
  So provided the goals are learning goals, right?
• 48:13
  I think one would really want to have the time and the space to actually play with
• 48:18
  , the tool or the software or the system in the context of your regular work.
• 48:24
  And chances there are that you will make certain errors or you will go around
• 48:28
  about things or do things in not the most efficient ways of using the features
• 48:34
  for productivity and so on and so forth.
• 48:37
  But you may try some interesting things as well.
• 48:39
  And the idea is that once you've played with the system, explode
• 48:42
  the system tinkered with the system, gone through the, more
• 48:46
  non-efficient paths through the system.
• 48:50
  If you just did that for a bit and then somebody told you, okay, well
• 48:54
  you wanted to do this activity or achieve this through the system,
• 48:58
  well this is how you actually do it.
• 49:00
  Or this is one way of achieving it the most efficient ways.
• 49:03
  Now that contrast, again, we spoke about contrasts between how you tried
• 49:07
  something and how how the system was designed to work efficiently.
• 49:12
  I think it's that contrast that helps you understand, oh, I tried it this way.
• 49:17
  Well, actually this is indeed a more efficient way or not.
• 49:20
  Maybe you've discovered something that even the experts haven't, right?
• 49:23
  So it can happen.
• 49:25
  So again, so that's the idea that, you know designing safe spaces for
• 49:30
  people to explore and tinker with systems and tasks and challenges, and
• 49:35
  then providing them with the knowledge and the skills or toolkits that
• 49:40
  guide them through the correct path.
• 49:41
  I think that creates deeper learning.
• 49:44
  , We talked about
• 49:44
  affect and.
• 49:46
  I don't know if we gave enough of , a description of what affect is,
• 49:50
  but maybe affective draw, I thought, is a good way to describe what
• 49:54
  affect is because people will often get in touch with me and go, Hey,
• 49:57
  I'm thinking of starting a podcast.
• 50:00
  You know, I, I go, well, what are you interested in?
• 50:02
  Because that's where you're gonna keep at it and keep doing it, et cetera.
• 50:06
  I'd love you to tell us about this, 'cause this is such an important
• 50:09
  thing that if you're gonna go after something to master or lean into a
• 50:14
  new skill, affective draw is key.
• 50:16
  Yeah, I mean, as you said it, Ian you know, start with something that you
• 50:22
  like or find a window into something or pathway into something towards
• 50:27
  a goal through something you like.
• 50:29
  If you wanna study statistics and you love football or rugby, well go after
• 50:33
  the tables and statistics and data in football or rugby, you're more likely
• 50:37
  to be engaged in that as opposed to accounting numbers from a firm.
• 50:41
  Same, it could be the same numbers, same statistics, but really, yourself
• 50:46
  and, just hack your way into learning something new through something that.
• 50:53
  You are automatically engaged with the idea that you will stay in it.
• 50:57
  You'll presume more likely to persist in it for much longer than in other contexts.
• 51:01
  And that's the idea of an affective draw.
• 51:04
  When you're designing for others, you have to know what others want,
• 51:07
  and then you design it for them so that you increase the likelihood of
• 51:10
  them staying in the game for longer.
• 51:13
  But in the case of designing for yourself, well, you know yourself and
• 51:16
  then you go finding of, okay, I'm gonna learn this, but let me go, go, go by by
• 51:21
  this route that I am very sure about.
• 51:23
  things in both context, so designing furthers and designing for yourself
• 51:27
  is to minimize computational load.
• 51:29
  This one is vital.
• 51:31
  This is just the idea that initially you want to focus a lot of effort or
• 51:35
  most of the effort on sense making.
• 51:38
  And not so much on computing stuff.
• 51:40
  So if the language is hard to understand or there's too much technical stuff
• 51:43
  involved initially, or, you know if you're learning addition or if you're learning
• 51:49
  statistics against of or comparing, say, performances of two firms, the
• 51:54
  profit in one firm is, 5,400,674, and the other one is 5,300,000, da da da da.
• 52:03
  Oh, okay.
• 52:04
  That's a high computation load.
• 52:06
  Whereas if you're for sense making, you just want to know, okay, here the profit
• 52:09
  is greater here is not as great here.
• 52:11
  The revenue's greater, here's not as great, and so forth.
• 52:14
  You want just simple numbers, simple information, non-technical
• 52:19
  stuff in the initial learning and focus much of your effort in.
• 52:23
  Really making sense of that information as opposed to computing
• 52:27
  on it, because that, that's where you get lost in in the details and
• 52:32
  you lose the forest for the trees.
• 52:35
  Now of course, such complexity, authentic complexity is
• 52:39
  important, but it can come later.
• 52:43
  It can come later after you've learned the underlying context, the ideas,
• 52:46
  the concepts, then you can take on any complex, authentic context.
• 52:51
  Then your load can be high, and that's fine because you already
• 52:54
  have the knowledge to deal with it.
• 52:55
  But when you're about to learn something new, it's always good to keep things,
• 52:59
  or at least the computational aspects, both in terms of language or any language
• 53:04
  mathematical otherwise, both in terms of representations, visuals are everything
• 53:09
  really simple so that the learner is really focusing on making sense of the
• 53:14
  information and not lost in computation.
• 53:16
  This is why I use LLMS in particular, is some paper that's written academically
• 53:23
  is often very d. Difficult to understand 'cause you're like, what
• 53:26
  the heck are they trying to say here?
• 53:28
  And I'll often take a passage and put it into chart GPT and go,
• 53:31
  tell me this, what this means.
• 53:33
  Like I'm 12.
• 53:34
  it will describe it.
• 53:35
  And as a result, then I'll actually compute much better.
• 53:39
  We better wrapping up.
• 53:41
  The last one here that I'm gonna pick out is self facilitation via hacking.
• 53:47
  So this, I thought this is so
• 53:48
  Yeah.
• 53:49
  not only for yourself, but also say for example, you're an innovator and you're
• 53:52
  trying to describe a new idea to an organization or present it as something
• 53:58
  the organization should invest in.
• 54:00
  I thought this was a great tip.
• 54:02
  Yeah.
• 54:02
  So there are two ways to take your ideas further.
• 54:05
  First is simply to learn how to explain that idea right.
• 54:09
  So explana, and chances are, as you explain ideas, as you stand in front
• 54:13
  of a mirror and talk to yourself or explain to yourself what the idea
• 54:17
  is, you'll find ways of improving upon the explanations, making it more
• 54:22
  more succinct and even maybe even end up changing those explanations and
• 54:26
  finding new ways to explain things.
• 54:30
  And so that's the basic layer with which you actually, we, all of
• 54:32
  us have to and children do that.
• 54:35
  Actually, if you think about children the idea that they talk to themselves a
• 54:38
  lot is something that, and we as adults kind of, it becomes our inner speech.
• 54:43
  But I think in terms of learning, if you can externalize it again it
• 54:48
  becomes an object to reflect upon, to interrogate and so on and so forth.
• 54:53
  So I think explanation or externalizing your ideas is an important skillset
• 54:59
  that one needs to develop more and more.
• 55:02
  The second bit is about.
• 55:04
  The second hack that you really want to do is to what I call the counterfactual.
• 55:10
  Right, and that is you want to ask yourself, when would my idea not work?
• 55:16
  Can I think of a situation or a context where my idea as it stands as I'm
• 55:22
  explaining it, would really not work?
• 55:25
  And that is something that really pushes thinking, counterfactual thinking.
• 55:29
  That's what we do in science that in fact, that's one of
• 55:33
  the most important questions.
• 55:34
  What drives science to generalize and create more and more powerful
• 55:38
  ideas is to ask the question, when does this idea not work?
• 55:43
  How can I fail this idea?
• 55:45
  How can I, you know, because it's, it's in asking that question
• 55:50
  that you're really pushing the boundaries of your own thinking.
• 55:52
  And when somebody that question as an innovator and you go, brilliant question.
• 55:58
  I've thought through it, and then you have a
• 56:00
  Yeah.
• 56:00
  on it, is nothing better when that happens.
• 56:03
  Exactly.
• 56:03
  Exactly.
• 56:04
  Exactly.
• 56:05
  And it shows that you've done the groundwork, right?
• 56:07
  That you've, you've been your own, as you call devil's advocate to prove your idea.
• 56:12
  Manu,
• 56:13
  I have a final quote that I love that I'm gonna finish on.
• 56:17
  I'm gonna finish on that in a moment, and then I'm gonna ask
• 56:19
  you just to wrap up our series.
• 56:21
  But at the end of the book, you give the four big takeaways from the book.
• 56:26
  I'd love you to give us those at a very top level.
• 56:28
  The four big ideas, the four biggest takeaways from the book are, first
• 56:32
  is we need to think about failure as an important mechanism for learning.
• 56:36
  We are not used to thinking about that.
• 56:39
  And if you are not using failure deliberately to design
• 56:43
  for learning, then you're not optimizing your learning, right?
• 56:46
  So , that's one.
• 56:48
  Productive failure is all about deliberately designing and
• 56:51
  bootstrapping failure for learning.
• 56:53
  So that's failure as mechanism is an important idea that we need to learn.
• 56:57
  Second is failure signal.
• 56:59
  And this is the idea that oftentimes when you look at your portfolio or
• 57:05
  what you've done if everything that you're doing is a success right, then
• 57:12
  one could really question whether you have been brave enough or courageous
• 57:18
  enough, adventurous enough to try things that are beyond your skill sets.
• 57:23
  So obviously we don't want everything to be failure although
• 57:27
  that happens as well when you're really in a new, new situation.
• 57:31
  So what we want is to start looking for in your life, in your work, in your learning.
• 57:36
  Where you're getting the failure signal, right?
• 57:39
  The idea that, oh, maybe these are the places where I'm really pushing
• 57:43
  my boundaries, where I'm really pushing and growing as long as that
• 57:47
  failure is not because of, you know, stupidity, competence, and laziness.
• 57:51
  And those are not the failures, but really the failure that comes
• 57:54
  because you are pushing the envelope.
• 57:56
  You're really going after challenging things.
• 57:58
  And you need to be aware, both whether you're managing people
• 58:01
  or teams or organizations, but also personally your own stuff.
• 58:05
  Where is your failure signal?
• 58:08
  As long as, again, that failure is not due to something incompetence
• 58:11
  or stupidity or laziness, right?
• 58:13
  That means you need to know that because that's telling you
• 58:16
  where you're growing, right?
• 58:18
  So first, use failure as a mechanism.
• 58:19
  Then use failure as a, as a, as a, as a signal.
• 58:23
  Learn to look after people, and this is very hard for people to do both for
• 58:27
  themselves and what they are, you know, designing for others or leading others.
• 58:31
  Then the third bit is failure as a feature.
• 58:34
  And this is the idea that
• 58:38
  you know, we treat, we tend to, when failure happens, we tend to treat
• 58:41
  it as a bug, something went wrong.
• 58:43
  Whereas if we treat it as a feature, we say, well, this is its natural byproduct
• 58:48
  of us or you or teams or organization trying to go after challenging
• 58:56
  innovation and so on and so forth.
• 58:58
  So when you start to think about failure as a feature,
• 59:01
  you start to build a culture.
• 59:03
  That is supportive of treating such kinds of failure as the
• 59:07
  norm rather than the exception.
• 59:09
  So make failure the feature.
• 59:11
  And what that would do is it'll help you drive the design for
• 59:15
  failure as a mechanism better.
• 59:17
  It'll help you also look for failure as a signal because you're in the safe
• 59:22
  space where failure is a feature of the system that you're creating, right?
• 59:26
  And so once you do these three things, mechanisms, signal and failure as
• 59:30
  a feature in a synergistic manner, then over time you find yourself
• 59:35
  in, in, in a kind of a where, where failure becomes a mantra of a life.
• 59:40
  It doesn't matter what context, where you are and what you do,
• 59:43
  it just becomes who you are.
• 59:46
  And I think that's the ultimate transformation
• 59:48
  that somebody could aim for.
• 59:51
  To find that place where it just becomes themselves.
• 59:56
  . Manu, for people who wanna find you, where's the best
• 59:58
  place to find you in the book?
• 1:00:00
  you can google me, my website, manukapur.com, the books landing page
• 1:00:04
  productive failure.com, but also in any bookseller like Amazon and such.
• 1:00:09
  Yeah.
• 1:00:09
  Thank you.
• 1:00:10
  I have a lovely quote here that I just thought encapsulates it and also
• 1:00:14
  entails a contrast, which is nice.
• 1:00:17
  I'm going to quote that and I'm gonna hand over to you to sign off on the series.
• 1:00:21
  You wrote that in traditional classroom settings, and I
• 1:00:24
  would argue here, universities.
• 1:00:27
  Executive learning and boardrooms.
• 1:00:31
  norms and expectations often revolve around the acquisition of correct
• 1:00:35
  answers and the avoidance of mistakes.
• 1:00:38
  Students or executives are often rewarded for quick, accurate recall
• 1:00:42
  of information and penalized for incorrect responses leading to a fear
• 1:00:46
  of failure and a reluctance to take on challenges and intellectual risks.
• 1:00:51
  Such an environment which Manu calls social surround can stifle
• 1:00:55
  creativity, discourage deep understanding, and inhibit the
• 1:00:59
  development of critical thinking skills.
• 1:01:02
  failure stands into stark contrast.
• 1:01:04
  It adopts a new nor it.
• 1:01:06
  It adopts new norms and expectations that embrace the value of failure and mistakes
• 1:01:11
  while taking on challenging risks.
• 1:01:14
  on challenging tasks, the importance of effort and the process of
• 1:01:18
  learning itself becomes essential in fostering a more effective and
• 1:01:22
  engaging educational experience.
• 1:01:25
  This shift requires a fundamental change in how students, executives
• 1:01:29
  perceive what is expected of them, their role in the learning process,
• 1:01:33
  and how they interpret the suc, their successes and their failures.
• 1:01:38
  I thought that was beautifully put and is the cherry on top for me.
• 1:01:43
  I, I absolutely love talking to you.
• 1:01:45
  What's your final message?
• 1:01:46
  Why did you write this book?
• 1:01:48
  Well, why did I write this book?
• 1:01:49
  Well, you know, it just came, you come to a point in your career where you
• 1:01:54
  feel that the message you wanna bring across to the world or your contribution
• 1:01:58
  to the world has to be encapsulated in ways that people can understand.
• 1:02:04
  And science is one thing, but communicating that is another.
• 1:02:07
  And so that's how this whole effort came about.
• 1:02:10
  Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, author of Productive Failure, Manu
• 1:02:14
  Kapur, thank you for joining us.
• 1:02:17
  Thank you, Aidan.
• 1:02:17
  It's been a pleasure throughout this series.
• 1:02:19
  Thanks again to our sponsor Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology
• 1:02:23
  systems that drive advantage for the world's largest and leading businesses.
• 1:02:28
  With a unique blend of AI powered consulting, built on unmatched
• 1:02:32
  managed service capability.
• 1:02:33
  Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for smarter
• 1:02:37
  decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge.
• 1:02:41
  You can find Kyndryl@Kyndryl.com and you can find the Kyndryl.com/institute
• 1:02:48
  where you'll find many of the authors and guests from the show
• 1:02:51
  who have written long form content.
• 1:02:53
  It's a brilliant resource, free resource, and you can download the Kyndryl app
• 1:02:57
  or go to that website slash institute.