At a consulting engagement at the corporate university of a global communications company, Reshan had the chance to apply lessons he learned in school settings to business. A quick description of the assignment, its challenges, and the emergent solutions offers a clear picture of how to apply a teacher's mindset to a corporate problem.

Though not dealing with elementary, high school, or university students, he was still dealing with learners, our most common human name, and this allowed him to focus his thinking and, ultimately, advice in a way that would best position the recipients of the training to acquire the skills and habits that they would need to thrive. In short, it allowed him to flip the traditional approach to training, which is often trainer‐centered rather than learner‐centered.

The leader who had hired him needed insight on the design of a 16‐week, cohort‐based work program. Entry to the cohort was highly competitive – it consisted of 10 people yielded from a 0.1% acceptance rate. So, for everyone accepted, there were 102 rejections. Think Harvard, only more difficult to get into.

And think Harvard, only with more potential. Thinking about the group in advance, Reshan could only imagine what they could accomplish if they were truly inspired, truly unleashed, truly empowered. Sure, they might learn some of the broad brushstroke skills and understandings and mindsets of a typical employee at this company, but a group like this also had the potential to pull the ship itself – to rethink the way things were done. What a gift to them; what a gift to the company; what a gift to the industry.

Unfortunately, though, the “classroom” was not optimized for learning and therefore would not be anyone's idea of a gift. It was optimized for what teachers call “coverage,” which is the idea put forth and mastered by Steve's first mentor and many teachers before and after him: that is, “We're going to cover this material regardless of the students in the room. Some might be ahead and want to move faster; some might be behind and want to move slower; but my job is to move the entire class at the same pace.”

A teacher's job is actually not that at all. It is actually to help students make sense of material and then make meaning of the material. Though we often cannot teach one‐to‐one, with every student having one teacher and a completely personalized curriculum, we can teach with an intent to ensure that each student finds personal relevance in the material and uses that relevance to make meaning of it. Not everyone can do that at the same speed.

Reshan listened to more of the description of the cohort and training program. It was for recent college grads. Eighty percent of it was “delivered” via lecture; 20% of it happened in the field, where students could test the material gleaned from the lectures, somewhat catch‐as‐catch‐can, in their sales jobs.

He felt like there had to be a better way. In fact, he had seen a better way, designed a better way, looked at research that supported a better way. Luckily, the person who hired him had a similar hunch, and as he described the class, it became clear that he was not pleased with its current form. In fact, he ultimately defined the problem for Reshan in simple, businesslike terms: he wanted to be able to prove that this meticulously curated, highly talented group was not spending 80% of its time, for 16 weeks, sitting and being lectured to and listening to information that may not have been relevant in the moment. In more educational terms, he did not want them to have an experience that would allow them to hit a rut and stop, one that would allow them to go through the day passively, one that would teach them that corporate life was about keeping your head down and not getting much done.

After understanding the issue and the goal, Reshan proposed the idea of totally inverting their original model – layering it over a bed of immediacy – so as to make the instructional time more relevant, active, and challenging.

He suggested using 80% of the time to allow cohort members to collaborate, apply their learning, and demonstrate their understanding. The cohort members could then use the remaining 20% of the time to view video content – from a curated video library of proprietary videos – to supplement, emphasize, or deepen what they were learning.

In order for the learner's role to shift, though, their instructor's role would also have to shift. Instead of lecturing, he or she would facilitate and offer expert insight and coaching, helping the cohort members to develop the kinds of immediacy instinct that would help them to better serve clients. How? The instructor would help individual cohort members figure out what kinds of resources they needed to pull and digest – from the video archive or elsewhere – to fulfill a certain job at a certain time. The instructor would help to train their instincts, in other words, for what they needed…and when.

There is a saying in the teaching profession: Whoever is working the hardest is learning the most. Too often, it's the teacher. So, if the students were preparing to do a sales call with a dry cleaning chain to sell them some new phone products, an effective facilitator, one who was an authentic and masterful practitioner himself or herself, would help them understand what information they would need to know to be best ready for the call. Then, he or she would let them work to figure it out. With enough practice, throughout the cohort experience, with enough effort and engagement, the students would return to the “real world” of work with a new way to approach that work, a new way to do that work.

They would thrive in that real world because their training brought them as close as possible to the real world – with a just‐in‐time rather than a just‐in‐case learning experience.

There would be no need to look at security products and sit through two‐hour lectures on the company's security offerings when the next assignment they were going to complete, learn from, and on which they would be assessed had nothing to do with that information. They would need that lecture – or, rather, parts of that lecture – when they were going to engage with a client, colleague, or manager in need of insight or information about security products.

Another teaching insight is that practice doesn't make perfect; only perfect practice makes perfect (Lemov, 2012). Reshan was proposing perfect practice, which would help the students, or in this case, salespeople, learn by doing, picking up habits and mindsets that would allow them to continue to grow, innovate, do, adjust, be agile, and be active participants in solving novel, emerging, or changing problems for the company. If you don't want people to be passive “on the job,” then you cannot allow them to be passive during the training for the job. Likewise, if immediacy is a required skill, then immediacy has to be part of the training. It has to be foundational (McGhee, 2012).

Train People to Be Immediate

We spoke with a colleague, Damien Barrett, who for many years led an apprenticeship program for middle and high school students interested in becoming Apple‐certified Mac technicians. His job with this group was to prepare them to work the physical help desk at a school that deploys approximately 1,000 laptops to a range of people, ages 9–70‐plus, with a range of technical know‐how. Mac techs in this setting not only had to receive machines and deal with confused, rushed, and often frustrated people, but also they had to work on and under the hoods of these machines. In other words, they had to solve problems, both human and technical. No two shifts were the same, and often a solution that worked one day didn't quite work the next day, as changes and updates in Apple's technology were ongoing.

To become certified for such work, they had to pass a test; Damien prepared them for both the test and, more important, the work that followed should they pass the test. We had heard that his training approach had at one point shifted dramatically – from one of coverage to one of facilitation. He had to shift from trying to figure out how to cram information into human brains to helping his proteges figure out how to find information for themselves, at the moment when they needed it.

The shift was one he was grateful for, allowing the training itself to be more like the real‐world work environment in which Mac techs found themselves each day. It was precipitated by a shift in Apple's assessment strategy (in the test). The test was no longer divorced from the ways in which a real tech would work. The test, in other words, was no longer “closed book.”

In Damien's own words:

The program [now] actually encourages open book and open notes when taking the test at an accredited testing center. This did not used to be the case, but they changed their policies to reflect how “Mac Geniuses” actually worked at the stores. There was now a greater focus on the soft skills and interpersonal skills and knowing how to look up an answer rather than memorization. (Barrett, personal statement, 2018)

Make Room for More Learning

Steve's early mentor, a maximalist if ever there was one, did a lot – more than his students most days. He was meticulous in his planning, rehearsed his lectures, and wrote easily gradable assessments, which meant putting in a great deal more work up front. If you write a multiple‐choice test, it takes a lot of time to write, but very little time to grade. If you write an essay test, with one or two questions, it takes far less time to write the assessment than it does to grade it.

However, as Damien's story illustrates, modern teachers, facilitators, and trainers almost seem to be trying to do less. There are compelling reasons for such minimalism.

Doing less, though, is probably the wrong way to characterize it. Doing less of the student's work. Doing less of the thinking and problem‐solving oneself. Doing more to restrain oneself from swooping in and helping the student or group along, when the muddling through, the effort, is what is essential. These are the moves of the master teacher operating in the “new now.”

Reshan, as described in his Startup 101 class (see Chapter 8), worked hard to restrain himself from giving all the answers, from writing tests that could narrow the scope of learning, from opening all the doors for the group who would then not learn how to open doors for themselves.

In education, we used to describe teachers as the “sage on the stage,” something akin to the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets' Society, arms akimbo and charisma to spare. It's no longer seen as necessary or even productive for a charismatic teacher, clearly moved by the beauty and elegance of his own discipline, to deliver the gospel to the onlookers. Short lectures can stimulate learning, sure, but they have to be woven in with other very intentional strategies. It's not that lecturing can't work; it's that it doesn't work as well or as often as we think it does. You give a great lecture, you often feel great. You feel like you've done your job. But you have no idea what happened in the brains of your students (those black boxes described in the first section of this book).

David Hessler, one of the most seasoned teachers we know, describes his own evolution in very relevant terms:

For many years I was under the impression that entertaining students was an important part of getting them to buy into the education process. However, [my work with] a master teacher helped me see a path I could take which would elevate my teaching and therefore improve the students' learning experience in my classroom. The influence happened when I came to study the martial art of judo under Yoshisada Yonezuka. I learned a great deal about judo and earned my second‐degree black belt under him. It took me several years to realize that although I was paying for judo lessons, I was also learning how to improve my teaching by observing Yonezuka in class every day. And what was he teaching me? That mastery in teaching is really about subtle adjustments to each individual student. Sensei demonstrated in every class that too many words can confuse students or lead them in the wrong direction. That instruction by the teacher has to be at the right moment when a student is ready to hear it and take action in response to the teacher's instruction. Basically, I learned the skill of timing and also how to be more economical with my guidance. I learned that every student's judo style would depend on his/her mindset and physical qualities, much like my own classroom students'. (Personal statement, 2018)

In teaching, especially for teachers who are still insecure in their craft, filling classroom time is a common survival mechanism. Only as teachers become more comfortable, and student centered, are they willing to ask a question and not call on the first hand that is raised (this is called “wait time”) or simply fill the void with their own masterful explanation. This is also why masterful administrators, when watching a class, will often watch the students instead of the teacher. It's not that the teachers' actions don't matter. The students' actions simply matter much, much more. What are they doing? How are they filling their time in the classroom? How are they making meaning of the material? How are they showing their work and their thinking? How are they constructing their own knowledge so as to be able to port it out of the room and apply it in other classes and their own lives?