How Talking to Strangers Can Make You More Creative

Today’s talent demands more from employers, with learning being a top priority. According to Gallup, 87% of millennials and 69% of non-millennials consider “professional or career growth and development opportunities” crucial to their job satisfaction. However, research shows that 74% of workers feel they are not reaching their full potential due to a lack of development opportunities.

While traditional training has its advantages, experiential learning and reflection practices can lead to true behavior change and top performance. To explore this further, Quartz at Work has turned to a book excerpt from September’s Next Big Idea Club must-read list. The author, Eduardo Briceño, who wrote “The Performance Paradox,” shares his expertise in developing a culture of learning and high performance.

The Experiential Learning Cycle

People often use the phrase “learning by doing” to express the idea of becoming skilled at something through practice. However, this can be misleading as simply doing something does not guarantee learning. It only leads to improvement while we are still beginners. Once we become proficient, this approach no longer works. We need to incorporate a learning zone alongside our performance zone. Learning while doing, rather than learning by doing, serves as a reminder not to just go through the motions.

Educational reformers such as John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and David Kolb, who championed experiential learning and learning while doing, understood this concept. They emphasized the importance of not only performing tasks but also developing hypotheses, testing them, and reflecting on the results. They represented this process as a cycle. While there are different versions of this cycle, they all involve the following steps:

1. Try something new and observe its effects.
2. Reflect on your observations.
3. Develop a hypothesis based on your observations.
4. Create a plan to test your hypothesis.
5. Repeat the cycle by trying something new again.

This cycle differs greatly from simply doing because, as Dewey pointed out, “we do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”

Learning While Doing at Starbucks

Traca Savadogo, a speaker and relationship strategist, developed her own version of the experiential learning cycle early in her career as a barista at a busy Starbucks in Seattle. As a sleep-deprived barista, Traca often struggled to remember orders during the morning rush. She frequently had to ask her colleagues for reminders, which was frustrating for them. Her mistakes resulted in waste, redoing orders, and longer wait times for customers. However, as she needed the job for health insurance and a regular caffeine fix, she devised a solution.

Traca came up with the idea of having her colleagues write drink orders on the sides of the cups instead of shouting them over the noise in the coffee shop. This not only solved her problem but also helped her coworkers remember orders better and created a quieter and calmer environment. “We were the only store in the chain that did it,” Traca said. However, when Traca started working at other Starbucks locations, she faced resistance to her suggestion.

Other employees were hesitant to adopt the practice as it went against Starbucks’s established procedures. Additionally, writing down orders seemed like an unnecessary extra step to them. Traca now explains that the extra step helped her remember orders, but at the time, she was reluctant to share what felt like a weakness.

Fortunately, Starbucks is a learning organization that values feedback from staff and customers. Traca decided to speak up because she believed in the company and wanted to contribute. She had data showing that the practice was effective, thanks to her experiments and clear results. Over time, Starbucks refined and improved on Traca’s idea, and now they print order information on cups globally. Regardless of how the order is placed, every cup carries detailed instructions.

If Traca had simply focused on performance without seeking innovation, she would have continued making the same mistakes and possibly even lost her job. However, by pioneering a new practice, she thrived in her role, helped her colleagues, and improved efficiency and calmness in Starbucks locations.

5 Ways to Embrace Learning

Traca’s story provides insights into how to prioritize learning even in high-pressure situations where there seems to be little time for problem-solving:

1. Identify the problem: When you notice something isn’t working, consider entering the Learning Zone.
2. Create a simple experiment: Try a new approach to address the issue. Pay attention to whether the new strategy produces positive outcomes.
3. Maximize the impact: After obtaining positive results, share your discovery and suggest that others adopt the practice.
4. Overcome resistance to change: Even if others resist your idea, persist if you have evidence of its success. Don’t ignore valuable lessons.
5. Maintain commitment to performance: Continually innovate and improve while focusing on meeting the needs of customers.

Let Go of Tradition

Traca Savadogo’s simple experiment serves as a powerful reminder to managers that clinging to tradition can hinder creative problem-solving and the enhancement of the customer experience. Insisting on doing things a certain way without exploring better alternatives turns employees into mindless robots merely following instructions.

By empowering staff to challenge the status quo, ask questions, and run experiments, we not only improve the customer experience but also foster creativity and curiosity in employees. This ultimately increases their commitment and sense of ownership.

Many of us focus solely on crossing off tasks on our to-do lists, neglecting the opportunity for improvement. Shifting our mindset to prioritize improvement alongside completion involves asking questions, trying new things, seeking feedback, and paying attention to new information.

This article is an excerpt from “The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action” by Eduardo Briceño. Eduardo Briceño is a global keynote speaker and facilitator known for his work in developing cultures of learning and high performance. He co-founded Mindset Works and has given TEDx Talks that have garnered millions of views.

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