Leadership Today - Practical Tips For Leaders
Business:Management
Variety may be the spice of life, but it also helps with personal development.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to episode 140 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we discuss how variety can help with learning and development.
You may have heard the expression that variety is the spice of life, but variety also turns out to be important for development and learning. Research shows us that learning in a broader and more variable setting ultimately helps us to do three things:
It helps us to better identify which elements are relevant
It helps us to make broader generalisations
It forces us to reconstruct memories - getting us out of the ruts that might otherwise trap us
Let’s take an example from the research. If an infant is learning what a dog is as a category, it’s quick and easy to just show them one type of dog. Show them that exact dog, and they will tell you that it is a dog. It takes longer to learn what a dog is if we expose that same infant to multiple types of dogs, however they’re then much better at generalising that learning to a new type of dog. If I’ve only ever seen one type of dog, I may not correctly identify a new type of dog as a dog. If instead I learned what a dog is by seeing lots of different examples, I’m much better able to correctly identify a new type of dog.
The same principle applies for adults learning a new sport. One option if I’m learning tennis would be to practice one shot over and over again. Another way could involve learning and practicing lots of different shots. The second way takes a lot longer to get us to the point where we can hit the ball over the net, but it is going to be much better in the unpredictability of a tennis match than the first approach to learning.
So variety and variability in learning is harder, but it leads to better generalisation.
The researcher Raviv highlights a great example of this relating to face recognition.He shares that “face recognition is affected by whether people grew up in a small community (fewer than 1000 people) or in larger community (over 30,000 people). Exposure to fewer faces during childhood is associated with diminished face memory." So even in social skills like face recognition, we’re better off learning with variability and variety.
Other research highlights that even incidental exposure to something new primes us to learn more about it. There’s something about allowing ourselves to be exposed to new experiences and things that sets us up for learning.
So how much variety is there in your job? How often in the average week are you trying things for the first time?
We all know that learning is hard - it takes effort. But if we want to maximise our learning and ability, it’s important to remember that variety is the spice of development.
REFERENCES
Limor Raviv, Gary Lupyan, Shawn C. Green. How variability shapes learning and generalization. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2022.03.007
Layla Unger, Vladimir M. Sloutsky. Ready to Learn: Incidental Exposure Fosters Category Learning. Psychological Science, 2022; 095679762110614 DOI: 10.1177/09567976211061470
Growing Gratitude Challenge - Day Three
Growing Gratitude Challenge - Day Two
Growing Gratitude Challenge - Day One
Growing Gratitude Challenge - Introduction
Replay - Turning Criticism into Feedback and Growth
Episode 116 - Exercise Reduces Stress and Stress Reduces Exercise
Replay - The Four Best Ways to Learn at Work
Episode 115 - Eight Steps to Effective Delegation
Episode 114 - Who Said Showing Emotion Doesn’t Pay?
Episode 113 - Leading Remote and Hybrid Teams with Gina McCredie
Episode 112 - Is Your Smartphone Killing Your Dreams?
Episode 111 - Can You Overdose on Mindfulness?
Replay - Four Ways to Build Hope
Replay - How to Avoid Micromanagement
Episode 110 - Productive Failure
Bonus - (Re)Building Trust Webinar
Episode 109 - The Single Best Question to Build Community
Episode 108 - Three Keys to Dealing with Defensiveness
Radical Reflection Challenge - Day Five - Reflection
Radical Reflection Challenge - Day Four - Gratitude
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Commercial Edge: Unleash the Power of People
The emPOWERed Half Hour
HCI Leadership Revolution
Human Capital Leadership
The Power of Music Thinking
BusinessWISE
Business Wars