Why are (some) people complacent about learning?

This article was first published in the September edition of People Matters Perspectives.

Picture a team that's in need of upskilling. The HR lead works with managers to draw up a list of required skills, finds some courses that could help the team members develop those skills, and with considerable effort, gets a small budget approved. They proudly announce it at a team meeting. 

And at the back of the room, an enthusiastic voice says:

"Great! Let's go for cooking classes!"

This awkward scenario has played out at least once in most organisations. It's even played out at national level: when the Singapore government launched its SkillsFuture movement in 2015 to encourage working adults to future-proof themselves, a noticeable amount of the funding disbursed - slightly under 10% according to a 2020 estimate by the Minister of Education - turned out to be used for classes related to personal interests rather than people's actual professions.

Fortunately, most HR professionals who encounter a misunderstanding like this can quickly resolve it. But should we look deeper into why people miss the mark around learning in the first place?

The urgency (and understanding) gap

The point of learning and upskilling is to help people better navigate change. But learning and upskilling outside familiar boundaries is in itself a change for the individual - who is not necessarily open to stepping outside their comfort zone.

In Kotter's 1996 organisational change model, resistance to change is equated with complacency, which other research in turn traces back to lack of awareness around contemporary needs and situations - people are not motivated to learn certain things because they don't understand why the learning is necessary.

More recently, one 2023 case study conducted by a researcher from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology attempts to define some of the psychological mechanisms underlying complacency, and highlights various types of disengagement and unawareness as the cause, including:

• Lack of group involvement and communication;
• Lack of collaboration with people working on other aspects of a project;
• Lack of understanding of other people's (or other teams', or even the entire organisation's) needs;
• Lack of understanding of what is perceived as important.

Another, 2020 paper by the American Society of Safety Professionals pinpoints habit as a cause of complacency, and further suggests that complacency is a "state of decreased external awareness and reduced sensitivity to hazards" caused by the natural inclination of the human brain to fall back on what is easiest and most comfortable to do.

Are we hardwired to not want to learn?

Neuroscience shows that the brain has in fact evolved precisely to be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn. The degree of efficiency and complexity of that learning is what differentiates a human from a fish and a fish from an amoeba.

But the catch is, learning is a resource-heavy activity, which is why the brain has also evolved to use schema - patterns of thought and behaviour that can be automatically run without any conscious attention, the origin of habits. It takes a significant deviation from the norm, ideally one with shock value, for the schema to be changed. Hence the truism that you remember what you felt: we are hardwired to most easily learn what directly affected us the most.

This understanding, and the awareness that today's learners are already carrying a heavy cognitive load simply due to their daily work activities, is why learning methods today have branched away from the classroom roots and moved into concepts such as microlearning, learning in the flow of work, and even AI-monitored learning intended to give instant feedback.

However, these brain hacks don't necessarily address the urgency and understanding gap. That needs to come from the environment in which people are expected to learn, even before they get to the learning itself.

Where the 'culture of learning' comes into play

The idea of creating a learning culture has been around for quite some time, with much of the focus placed on removing technical obstacles: providing employees with extra downtime specifically to be used on learning, implementing tech tools to make learning easier, offering access to a wide range of courses, coming up with increasingly innovative ways to deliver knowledge and skills to those who need it.

A second aspect, however, focuses more on communication and collaboration, very similar to the psychological mechanisms identified in the Norway study. For example: actively educating employees about why learning is needed for their work (and occasionally imposing penalties for not doing so, such as making certifications necessary to continue in a job). Making learning a group activity rather than individual time. Educating people on what their team members are doing and what skills that involves, or even educating them on what other, different teams are doing. 

Making the connection between employee skills and the macro environment, or what the organisation as a whole, or just their function as a whole, requires.

Does all this keep people from excitedly trying to use the department L&D budget for flower arrangement classes? Not necessarily - but hopefully it does help them realise, before HR has to intervene, that this wasn't a good idea.