We want to grow. It's human. Growth is our default setting. And yet we don't grow. So says Whitney Johnson, award-winning author, CEO of talent development company Disruption Advisors and one of the 50 leading thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50.
Why is this? According to Johnson there are oppositional forces preventing us from growing. “For most of us that muscle of doing things differently, changing it up, is very well developed when we're children but it gets increasingly flaccid the older that we get because we can insulate ourselves from doing new things,” explains Johnson.
Fear is just one of the oppositional forces holding us back. “One of the major emotions that's at play here is fear. If we try to grow and our attempts are somehow thwarted, that will have us feel like we ourselves are vanquished in some form or fashion,” says Johnson.
Overcoming these forces is necessary if we are to grow – ourselves and our organisations. And the good news, says Johnson, is that growth happens in a predictable way, which means we can understand where we are in our growth and chart a way forward.
Johnson uses a simple visual model that shows every new skill learned and new challenge faced as a distinct learning curve. Her framework, the S Curve of Learning, is broken into three phases: the launch point, sweet spot and mastery. Each phase has two distinct elements to it. Using the framework we can discover why it is so hard to start something new, how to gain and maintain momentum once we do start and why, once we are good at something, we often feel like we can’t keep doing it.
In this video Johnson talks to The People Space’s editorial director Siân Harrington about how the S Curve of Learning can help growth, explains the different phases of growth and offers advice on how to get started on your growth journey
Listen to the whole interview on our podcast episode We're not getting enough opportunity to grow at work.
About Whitney Johnson
Whitney Johnson is CEO of the tech-enabled talent development company Disruption Advisors and one of the 50 leading thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. She is an award-winning author, a regular keynote speaker and a frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School’s Corporate Learning.
A frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, Johnson is author of several top-selling books including Disrupt Yourself and Build an A Team. Her latest book is Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company. She is also host of the popular Disrupt Yourself podcast, with guests including Brené Brown, Simon Sinek, Susan Cain and General Stanley McChrystal.
Transcript
We want to grow, it's human and yet we don't grow. What prevents us? Let's start with individuals. I think there can be a number of elements at play. There can be laziness. Things are fine as they are and that certainly happens to all of us at some point in our life.
Sometimes we're ignorant, meaning it doesn't occur to us to do something new. We're just on automatic. Sometimes we're not sure how. We think I want to grow but we're not sure what it looks like.
And for most of us that muscle of doing things differently, changing it up, is very well developed when we're children but it gets increasingly flaccid the older that we get because we can insulate ourselves from doing new things.
And then I think one of the major emotions that's at play here is fear. If we try to grow and our attempts are somehow thwarted, that will have us feel like we ourselves are vanquished in some form or fashion.
And so while we do want to grow and it's absolutely an animating force for us there are some oppositional forces that prevent us from doing so.
Now, even if we ourselves are saying, OK, I'm going to overcome all things. Yes it's fear. I feel a sense of fear. I feel a sense of thrill, so I'm going to do it anyway. Then within an organization, what can happen is, I may say, OK, I'm going to disrupt myself. I'm going to do something different. But then if the people around us ,their sense of self-preservation kicks in and they don't want to disrupt themselves and they don't want to do something different, then the ecosystem itself can work toward quashing you and saying no, no, no you don't do things differently. We do it like this here.
And so if you think about this notion of if we ourselves grow then people around us will grow then you're going to help an organization grow. But it's always going to start with the individual.
Now psychologists have said that any period of severe stress, like a pandemic, is often followed by tremendous growth and they call it post-traumatic growth. And so I think one of the gifts of the pandemic is it created these conditions where we saw ourselves grow. And now that we have seen ourselves grow, we want more growth.
What is the S Curve of Learning?
Let me talk you briefly through what the S Curve is or the S Curve of Learning, as I call it. So it was popularized by the sociologist Everett Rogers and it helps us understand how groups change.
We then applied it at the Disruptive Innovation Fund that I co-founded with Clay Christensen. And as we were investing, I had this insight, this aha, that the S Curve could also help us understand how individuals change, how we learn and grow.
And so what is it exactly? It's very simple. There are three major parts to it. There's the launch point, there's the sweet spot and mastery. And what's happening in your brain when you start something new is it's running this predictive model of what is it going to take for me to go from the launch point to mastery from the bottom to the top of the curve.
And at the launch point most of those predictions are inaccurate. And so dopamine, the chemical messenger of delight, it drops. So you can feel discouraged, overwhelmed, impatient. And it's not that growth isn't happening. It is. But because it's not yet apparent. It feels slow, it feels like a slog, which makes it difficult to start something new.
In the sweet spot your dopamine, your predictions, are increasingly accurate and so dopamine starts to spike. You feel emotional upside surprises. You feel exhilarated. Growth's not only fast it feels fast, so it's easy to keep going.
Then in mastery, which is the third major part of the curve, what's happening here is that your predictive model is accurate. The program now works, it is debugged. So there's a little dopamine but not a lot. And so growth is in fact, slow.
And what the S Curve does is it, you can think about it in very simple terms, slow, fast, slow is a model for how you grow. And it's a very simple visual model of what growth looks like. It traces the emotional arc of growth. And when you understand what it looks like it makes it easier for those of us who are thinking, I'm not sure what it looks like, this gives you a model to think about growth. And when you know where you are, you know what's next.
How the S Curve of Learning can help you and your organisation grow
So one of the things that I've done with the S Curve of Learning is there are three major phases. There's the launch point, the sweet spot and mastery. But then I break those down further. And so in the launch point there are two different phases. There's the Explorer phase and there is the Collector phase.
Launch: The Explorer
The Explorer phase is you think about yourself. I've landed on a new S Curve. Maybe I chose to be here, maybe I chose not to be here, but alas I am here. And so you're now in that place of exploring like a desert island. Do I want to be here? And you can ask yourself questions like, if I stay here is this something that I feel is doable? And even if I don't know if it's doable but I believe I can get to the point where I believe it's doable, do I feel like the reward is worth the cost? Is it in sync with my values? Is it aligned with my why etc. And so this is the Explorer phase of I'm here but do I want to stay here? And so you're asking yourself a number of questions. If the answer is yes, I think I do want to explore, I want to stay here a little bit longer you're going to go into the Collector phase.
Launch: The Collector
The Collector phase is where you're collecting data. It's going to be quantitative data of can I actually gain momentum? Can I get the resources that I need to be successful here? So think about it, will the ecosystem support me to be here?
And if you do want to do this, you're collecting that quantitative, qualitative data. You're starting to see some momentum. You've collected it. You've said, OK, let's do this and at that point you're going to tip into the sweet spot.
What happens in the sweet spot? There are two phases there. There's the Accelerator phase and the Metamorph phase.
Sweet spot: The Accelerator
Accelerator phase is exactly what it sounds like where you have tipped into that sweet spot that Malcolm Gladwell popularized but it's for you personally. So growth's not only fast, but it also feels fast.
So if you think about at the launch point you have to be very deliberate, in the sweet spot you have to still be deliberate, certainly in the Accelerator phase, but it's becoming increasingly automated. So that's Accelerator.
Sweet spot: The Metamorph
Then Metamorph. So that's the top part of that sweet spot. Here it's almost becoming not out there but part of who you are. Metamorph is exactly what it sounds like. You are metamorphizing, and I didn't say that very well, and you are changing.
And so this is the place where if, in order for that change to happen for you to go into mastery, what you really need here is focus because you're going to have so many opportunities because you're so capable at this point you can get derailed very easily. And in mastery, there are two phases as well.
Mastery: The Anchor
There's the Anchor. This is the place where it's this thing that you wanted to do. Whether it was I wanted to learn five songs on the ukulele, I wanted to be successful in my role, I wanted to learn how to do lookup functions on an Excel spreadsheet - whatever it is, you are now at the top of the mountain and you've done it and it's become you. It's become part of who you are. It's become part of your identity.
And this anchoring place is also an important place to celebrate what you have achieved and honour what you have accomplished. Then you move into mountaineer because you can't stay here forever. We know that mountain climbers will tell you that any altitude above 26,000 feet is known as the death zone. You're so high up your brain and body will start to die. It's the same when you're at top of the S Curve. You can be happy that you're at the top of the mountain but if you don't continue to grow, if you don't continue to develop, your brain will stop wiring new neural pathways and it will literally start to die.
Mastery: The Mountaineer
So then you go into the Mountaineering phase and this is the place where you either jump to a new curve or you're saying, I'm at the top of the curve. This is going to be the base of the mountain for my current curve and I'm going to keep climbing and the cycle repeats again.
So you've got Explorer, Collector, which is in the launch point, then you tip into the sweet spot where you're going fast - Accelerator, Metamorph - and then you tip into the mastery phase where the growth starts to be slow again. This is the Anchor and the Mountaineer and the cycle begins anew.
Three ways to get started on growing using the S-Curve
- So for everybody who's listening and thinking, alright, I want to do something, what do I do now? I would say number one is remember slow, fast, slow. It’s a simple, visual model of what growth looks like. And that's going to help you understand why it's hard to start something new, why it's easy to keep going once you do start, and why you can be really good at something and feel like you can no longer keep doing it. So that's your starting point, is just understand this model and framework because it demystifies the process of personal growth.
- Number two, I would say, is understand if you are in the workplace, which probably everybody listening to this is, understand where your colleagues are. Where your people who report to you are. Where are they on the S Curve? And where is your team collectively on the S Curve? Because once you understand where people are, then you understand the experience that they're having. I might be discouraged. I might be overwhelmed, even though I'm excited. Things are feeling really good right now. I might be bored. Once you understand that you can start to solve for the emotional jobs that work is meant to do, not just the functional job. So plot where your team and colleagues are on the curve.
- And then number three, what I would say is once you've plotted where people are and you've decided to have this conversation with people, have just one conversation. One conversation with a colleague and say, alright, so here's the model. Here's where I think I am. Where do you think you are? And just have a conversation then so it starts to be a part of your language that you can use for yourself, for your team etc.
And that is where I would start, by just understanding it, by plotting where people are and then by having a conversation. And then once you get started, as we said earlier, it will be easy to keep going.
About the author
