Why Failure Fuels Success with Manu Kapur | The Power of Productive Failure

What if failure wasn’t the end, but the beginning of real growth? In this episode, Aidan McCullen sits down with Manu Kapur, author of Productive Failure, to explore how struggle, setbacks, and mistakes can actually unlock deep learning, creativity, and adaptability.

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why productive failure is the secret to lifelong learning

• How to turn mistakes into powerful growth mindset strategies

• Why even “good lectures” don’t always create deep understanding

• How leaders and innovators can use failure to adapt in a changing world

• The psychology of resilience, success, and transformation

 

Find Manu Kapur: https://www.manukapur.com

From a soccer career cut short by injury to becoming a global thought leader in education innovation, Manu shares stories and research that challenge how we think about failure. Whether you’re a teacher, leader, parent, or entrepreneur, this conversation will help you embrace failure as a pathway to success.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Before we start, I want tothank our sponsor Kyndryl.
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With a unique blend of AI poweredconsulting, built on unmatched managed
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smarter decisions, faster innovation,and a lasting competitive edge.

(00:20):
You can find out more at Kyndryl,com.
Today's book is a three-partdeep dive and shows us how to
design the experience of failing.
Research shows that repeated experiencesof intriguing, constructive failure
can help students and our own childrenand anyone we lead and us ourselves,
develop creativity and learn more deeply.

(00:41):
When carefully curated
failure can become a signal for learning,not the noise detracting from it.
result is learners who gain a lifelongreadiness to push themselves outside
their comfort zone using setbacks aslaunchpads for learning and innovation.
Our guests principles are not justfor designing, learning for others.
They're just as powerful taking chargeof and designing our own learning.

(01:03):
Maybe you want to learn new knowledge,language, sport, or a new skill.
And in part two of this series we'llshare how productive failure can be so
transformative for our own learning.
From setting up goals that get you out ofyour comfort zone to designing specific
kinds of tasks that push the boundariesof your current abilities to developing
a mindset that supports your growth.

(01:24):
Our guest describes a full set ofdesign principles to harness productive
failure for your own deep learning.
It is a pleasure to welcome the authorof this book, and I have two copies up
for grabs, one digital and one physical.
The author of ProductiveFailure, Manu Kapur to the show.
Thank you, Aidan.
It's lovely to be here.
It's great to have you on theshow, and I haven't told you this,

(01:46):
but we share a common background,which is the athleticism, the
drive to be a professional athlete.
I got a little bit furtherbefore I got injured.
You got injured early, and I say that fora reason because this apparent breakdown
led to a huge breakthrough for you.
So I'd love you to start withthe idea of the dots that started

(02:07):
connecting.one was soccer.
Yeah, exactly.
And I was in India.
I was, I was born in Indiaand I grew up in India.
And you know, as India, cricket is themost important game and the most popular
game, except I got into football andI got pretty good at it very early.
. And basically throughout myteenage years that's all I did.

(02:27):
And by the time I was in 17, 18, I wasplaying competitively and getting to
, the youth sides and so on and so forth.
And I think it was nine, I think it wasin 19 when I first got my ACL ruptured.
But it hadn't torn down completely.
And therefore the doctor said,we keep rehabbing it and every

(02:48):
season I would get injured.
And third season or so, it got fully.
And then he said, now we haveto repair it, reconstruct it.
And after that, very soon afterthat, I had to give up football.
It was devastating.
I was in my early twenties, 21 maybe, andit was like everything that you dreamed
of just suddenly comes to an end and yousay, okay, what else do I do with my life?

(03:09):
. ,That idea, Manu, for people who have maybe children or nephews or nieces who
want to be professional athletes, isone the big mistakes we make is actually
put all the eggs in that basket and notthink about other baskets beyond that.
So maybe a word of advice on that aswell, because you did get there, but
you got there because of your mindset.

(03:31):
yeah, mindset.
But I mean, it was tough still, right?
You know, especially as ayoung person, it's really hard
to focus on one main thing.
I was also just lucky that inaddition to playing football,
I was somehow good in math.
I could do math.
Math just came, somewhat effortlessly.
And so when I had to pivot toanother thing, I could, okay,

(03:53):
let's, what else can I do?
And I fell back on engineering asmy professional degree, choice.
And but not every athlete hasthat choice either, right?
And if you look at, especially postathletic careers, many athletes suffer
even if there's no injury, people sufferfrom depression and so on and so forth.

(04:15):
So battling all of that whiletrying to pivot that early in life
was quite hard, I have to say.
So I finished up engineeringschool and by the time I was done
there, , the heart was not in it.
I mean, I, I got a basic degreea professional degree, and I
think that just kind of laid thepathway forward for possibilities.

(04:36):
But yeah, my heart was not in it.
Then I went into the startup worldbecause that was the time you know, the
turn of the millennia, the internet boomvery quickly it became internet doom.
You know, both the startups failed.
Then I went into a consulting managementconsulting company again within two or

(04:59):
three months wasn't something that I do, Ithink I, I was at a space in my life where
I, you threw anything at me wouldn't haveworked because of, you know, the, the,
the, the, the trajectory that I was on.
But then, you know, I was literally broke.
After that.
And then I needed to, you know,have something to live my life on.
So an opportunity to teach camealong and I thought, okay, since

(05:24):
I like math, I will teach math.
You know, I knew nothing aboutteaching, but I, okay, let's,
let's, let's just teach kids math.
And yeah, that's when itkind of really clicked.
I enjoyed teaching and I also enjoyedteaching math in particular because math
is particularly hard to teach given itsabstract nature, you know, language.

(05:45):
I mean, things are hard to learn,but when, when things become abstract
and that's when kids really havea, a challenge, a challenging time.
Yeah, and then I enjoyed that and themore I got into it, the more I got
interested in mathematical cognition.
And.
to pull out one thread, which was yourmaths teacher, so that one was soccer.

(06:06):
Dots two was actually your mathsteacher, which led to , your love of
maths as well, but your maths teachergiving you challenges and letting you
sit with them, not, not helping youwith the answer because this sets us
Yeah,
for later on.
so that was actuallyan engineering school.
My final year thesis, I think you'rereferring to where to graduate you

(06:28):
needed to do an honors project.
And it's a year long project, andI remember going to my professor
and saying, Hey, look, I.
Mathematics.
So why don't you give me something thatis math heavy as my engineering project?
So he said, oh, okay, fine.
You take this set of differentialequations and you try and
solve them mathematically.
And you know, and I, off I went.

(06:48):
I tried for a month or soand nothing seemed to work.
I came back to him.
I went back to him and said,oh, this is what I've tried.
He said, okay, good, but haveyou tried this other thing?
Other method said, no, I have not.
So I went back and I tried that andto my surprise, that did not work.
So I went back to him and said, Hey,the method you said it doesn't work.
Said, oh, that's interesting.

(07:09):
Why don't you try this?
Yes, another method.
And this went on for a few months and wewere at halfway point six months down.
And everything that I tried, includingseveral of the suggestions that he'd
given me, had themselves not worked out.
And I was running out of timebecause my scholarship was
on the, on the line as well.

(07:31):
And I had to graduateby the end of that year.
And I said, look, I'm panicking here.
What should I do?
I mean, you've not made any progress.
And he looked at me and said, no,actually you've made a lot of progress.
Right?
Something to that effect.
I paraphrase and I said, no, no,nothing I've tried has worked.
Even the things yousuggested haven't worked.

(07:52):
And he said, no, no, no.
This was intentional.
Like, you know, I wanted youto understand the problem.
Now that you've tried many ways of,of solving the problem that have
not worked, you have a very better,very good understanding of what
the problem is and what the beastyou're trying to slay, so to speak.
And and I was obviously very,very angry, but I think on

(08:13):
hindsight, yeah, he was right.
I mean, the, then he told methat, look, the problem is not
solvable mathematically, it isnot tractable in that sense.
You have to computationally solve it and.
Then it was perfect.
It was just, I was done and dustedwithin a month of month or two week
six weeks of running the simulations.
And yeah, I got the highestgrade for it even so yeah.

(08:36):
But at the time it just felt awfulthat, you know, you wasted so much,
you wasted quote unquote so much time.
But yeah, that was deliberatelydesigned failure and it didn't, you
know, I, I didn't think back until Iactually started my research on topics.
So it was not that I wasconstantly thinking in that moment.

(08:57):
Oh, wow.
Though the professor did was amazing.
It was only 10 years later during mydoctoral studies and I was starting
to look back and connect the dots.
Oh yeah.
Actually that made sense at the time.
So perhaps a message to theaudience is yes, in the moment
you might not see the value 'causethe dots connect looking back.

(09:20):
Absolutely.
And as a parent you try and design thatfor your children all the time as well,
that you know that they're gonna hateyou in the moment, but it's the right
Yeah.
the, in the long run as well.
And I was thinking about , yourengineering teacher the fact that
the easy thing just to tell you.
It's like
That's it.
Thing is to just, I always use theexample of packing the dishwasher.

(09:42):
Just do it.
Do it yourself instead of getting the kid
Yeah.
and they make it a mess and they gothrough that period of making a mess
and you correct them, et cetera.
It's just easier to just get tothe short run and it's one of the
big challenges in society as well.
And one of the reasons I wanted to
Hmm.
the book, but there was all this, sothese redirections, these failures, if

(10:03):
we call them that led you to your fifthchoice career, I'd love you to share that
because this was the genesis of where youare today and the genesis of this book.
Yeah.
So I mean, it's really started by mythinking when I was teaching math.
I mean, I loved it.
And my students also, you know,we told me that I was a reasonably
good teacher pretty engaging.

(10:26):
But what I started experiencingwas a phenomena that went something
like, I could give a very goodlecture, explain things very clearly.
You have the students really engaged,asking interesting questions, et
cetera, and you think that you'vedelivered a really good, yeah, you
get a very, every teacher knows in theclassroom when they've, when that's

(10:46):
been a really good class, right?
You have that feeling bothbecause the energy is there, okay?
But then when you come out and you start,probing students, understanding, one finds
that on the things that were covered inthe lecture, students had no problem.
But the moment you deviate, themoment you create something a bit
more novel, you change a parameter.

(11:08):
You get students to applytheir understanding to
things that they're not seen.
It was as if they'd notlearn anything at all.
Right.
And so that's, I, that's whatI started wondering, why is it
that a, even a very good engaginglecture leads to poor learning?
And it was only in doctoral schoolthat I started define the problem.

(11:32):
The problem is not that we learn poorlyfrom bad lectures, the problem is that
we learn poorly from even very good ones.
And it's not the problem withus, it's just how the human mind
works and processes information.
And that was a turning point for me.
Like, okay, so now we've hit the problem.
And once you've just like an engineeringschool, once you understand the

(11:52):
problem, once you can define andunderstand the problem, then it becomes
a little bit easier to solve it.
I love your line and I I'm gonna,I'm not gonna take it away from you.
I love you to share thefirst job of teaching.
Yeah.
The first job of teaching is actuallynot to teach, it's to prepare
the learner for the teaching.
Yeah.
it's such an important line and I wantedto not take that away from you 'cause

(12:15):
it's one of those lines that just stickswith you in every facet of learning.
I do a lot of facilitation in
Mm-hmm.
change and
Mm-hmm.
you know, people launch into theirstrategy and it's like, you gotta prepare
them before that because if they go
Exactly.
you know, I found it so valuablefor lots of different things.
Before we start launching into thebook, I really wanted to share the

(12:37):
importance of the salience or intentionthat we give certain elements,
because this is key and you say it'sabout seeing the deeper structure.
I mean, if you want to learn anything newor if you want to understand something
deeply, you need to be able to see.
But it turns out seeing is notsimply a perceptual exercise.

(12:58):
It's not like I put samestimulus in front of you.
What you see would be verydifferent from what I see.
And , if, especially if you put thesame stimulus in front of an expert
versus a novice in the domain.
I'm no artist.
I don't have any training in art.
So if I look at a painting, I look ata painting and I don't have that wow
effect or real intricate understanding.

(13:20):
But if you have an expert lookingat the same painting, they'll see
things that are right in front ofme, and I still won't be able to see.
Math is the same, science is the same.
You know, it's not about, it's notjust about putting things in an.
Logically structured, entertaining,engaging way, you've got to let,
you've got to be able to see it becausewe see with not just with our eyes,

(13:42):
but with the knowledge that we have.
And that's why teaching is sohard to a novice because you to
understand something, a noviceneeds to be able to see that, which
is critical, the deep structure.
But seeing the deep structurerequires some knowledge.
And by definition, a novice doesn'thave precisely that knowledge.

(14:04):
And so you caught betweena rock and a hard stone.
How do you get out of it?
So fundamental, and that's one of thereasons why people don't learn well from
even very good lectures, because to anexpert, that lecture makes perfect sense.
It gives, and even to a student,it gives an illusion, but the
student is not seeing, I thinkthat's the fundamental takeaway.
The student, the novice is not seeing inthat amazing lecture what the expert is.

(14:29):
And so that's why the first jobof teaching is really not to
tell, but to prepare the novice.
The telling is important, butpreparing the novice for the
telling is the most important part.
the flip of that also came to mind becauseoftentimes if I'm doing a keynote or

(14:50):
even my own book, I've written it tohelp bring people to the same level.
But sometimes then you
Hmm
expert, you'll look at that and go,that's way below my paycheck in a way.
And, and they, they dismissthe content when there
mm-hmm.
be some learning in it as well.
Because I, when, we'll come to thislater as well, and I was telling you,
I, I write an article each week andI really zoned in on this, that the,

(15:14):
the opposite is also through, andyou can fall into the expertise trap.
Yes, yes, that is true.
I mean, and we, we have actually somefindings from my research where if you,
especially if you learn, if you developyour expertise by learning trajectories
that are more telling oriented, thenyou're more likely to fall into the trap

(15:37):
because your knowledge is then not encodedflexibly than you can think outta the box.
Whereas there are, and the Japanesepsychologists talks about it
Hatano and Inagaki, you know, hehas this idea of a routine expert.
You know, somebody who's trainedefficiently and they can do the same
thing or similar things within a narrowset of constraints very well, right?

(16:01):
But if you give them a new problem,a new situation where then where they
really have to adapt, they find it hard.
Yet they're up adaptiveexperts as well who are very
efficient, yet very adaptable.
And studies and expertise show thatthe learning trajectories of what
makes an adaptive expert versus aroutine expert are very different.

(16:22):
The learning trajectories ofadaptive experts are more productive
failure kinds of trajectories.
Whereas learning trajectories ofroutine experts are more, I would
say the direct instruction tellingand efficiency driven trajectories.
So there are kind of links between thelearning parts and the learning outcomes

(16:45):
that we are beginning to understand now.
There was a guest we did a series on fora long time with Gary Hamel and he, he
Mm-hmm.
thing that came to mind, whichis we are in a world that's
changing at a rapid pace.
Mm-hmm.
every generation changesfaster than one before.
I think we are experiencing that atthe moment, but one of the things

(17:07):
he said was that many people whobecome CEOs of companies were.
In roles that were stable, likea CFO role for the old world.
And then they come into CEO world and,and the, the, it's an adaptive world, but
they have been trained to that very point.
So I, I'd love to connectthat dot between that problem.
And this is why you do see some companiesand they hire failed entrepreneurs,

(17:30):
if we call it failed entrepreneurs,and they, they hire them because
they know that they have developedthat skill that you're talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's, that's the power of failure.
I mean, so let's go back,let's unpack adaptation.
That's one of the basic competenciesthat everybody needs to have
because of the pace of change.
And if you can adapt and if youcan adapt, well, then you survive.

(17:53):
You thrive if you don't adapt.
Yeah.
So what makes you adapt?
It's basically some, something thatis a mis misfit or a misalignment.
If everything is working according to, inline with your, you know, capabilities and
interests, and you don't need to adapt.
You're in the right contextwhere you're thriving, what makes
you adapt is as a misalignment.

(18:14):
Something that doesn't work,right, a failure of sorts, right?
So at the heart, if you want todevelop adaptation, you want to
give chances for people to adapt.
And what gives in effect, what thatmeans is you need to design failures.
You need to design.
Misalignments between capabilitiesand outcomes and goals and so on and

(18:35):
so forth, very intentionally so, sothat people can, you know, use that
failure in a safe way in productivefailure to build adaptive capabilities.
So you're still learning new knowledge,but you're learning by pivoting,
you're learning by failing, and,you know and, and the process of
learning from productive failure.

(18:55):
Therefore, you develop adaptive skills.
And we see that in our outcomes becauseproductive failure students are more
likely to be able to solve, you know,adapt their knowledge to solve novel
problems, which is exactly what one needs.
So and in the same way when if peopleare, people build their capabilities over

(19:16):
learning trajectories in which they'venot had the need to adapt as much, then
suddenly, if there's a lot of changeand they will not be able to thrive.
Right.
Because they have notbuilt that stable routines.
You know, if you build, you go you liveyour life in a stable country, you know,
you don't build that much adaptive.
And I've lived my life in India versusSingapore and Europe and you know,

(19:40):
the level of order and chaos arevery different in different contexts.
And it's really true.
You somehow tend to loseyour adaptive skills if
depending on where, whichcountry you're living in.
Now factor that into learning.
In learning you canactually design for it.
Yeah.

(20:00):
And if you design it well using failure,then you are building adaptive skills.
I'm, I'm going all over the placehere, but the travel part that you,
Yeah.
and, and Europe and now in Singapore,that importance of travel for children,
I always think about when they go andthey do their Erasmus year or they
go away and study abroad for year,that it's more than just the learning

(20:22):
in the college that they go to.
It's the hustle.
It's the struggle that they go tothat, that also builds this skill.
Yeah, I mean, new, it's avariation theory, right?
I mean, in a very general way,variation forces you to see
things that you did not see.
So when you go to a new place, anew culture, a new context, you

(20:45):
think that it's the difference.
It's you find d things aredone differently, people are
different, and so on and so forth.
But the only reason you see thatdifference is because you're
comparing it with what you have.
So it's that and that comparisonthat helps you actually see
yourself in a different way.
So to me, the best part of movingaround the world has been I have

(21:08):
come to understand myself better.
Because otherwise, you're fishin water and you never know
that you are a fish, you know?
Yeah.
So that's why traveling is absolutelyessential for so many reasons.
But the more broader principleis just variation, because
variation forces adaptation.
I'm gonna repeat thisfor our audience as well.

(21:29):
'cause the repetition's important as well,but also seeing it from different angles.
That thing that you talked about isthe seeing is actually seeing the gap.
And to see the gap, you have to actuallycreate the conditions to, for the
gap, which is traveling, or if it's aleadership team, it's trying to show,
look, this is where the world has gone.
This is where you guys are.

(21:50):
But
Hmm.
discover it rather thanbeing told as well.
I, I think that's what I loved aboutthis, and I'm linking this to your
friend, Alessio Figale, a Fields
Yes.
one of only 64, and his observationsthat helped you on this journey.
And you know, people think thatmathematicians and scientists in
general, you know because they'resuccessful and Alessio is immensely

(22:11):
successful, like he's at the top ofhis game historically as well, right?
So and people think, oh, these peoplemust be getting it right all the time.
You know, if you ask students andthe experts must be getting it right
all the time, and what they don'trealize that even at that level
you're making a ton of failures.
You're going down thewrong path all the time.

(22:34):
And it's even with that levelof expertise, because you're
constantly taking on problemsthat are unsolved, right?
So that's just bound.
You're constantly putting yourselfin that space where, you know,
you're taking on tough challenges.
So even if you have a high levelof expertise, you are just.
I have no choice but to try differentthings, invent different things, and

(22:56):
like, I think Alessia told me 95%of his attempts result in failure.
I mean, teach that to, I mean, amathematician teach that to a school going
kid and say, look, you think math is hard?
Well, you know, the fields medalist fails95% of his time trying to solve problems,
like you said, trying to recruit peoplefor your productive failure studies

(23:19):
you that where pe nobody wanted tobe involved with failure, what it was
actually being designed for as well.
We'll come back to that.
But the one thing I wanted tojust point out was, and this
is more on a human level, is
hmm,
if, if you go to embarkon something like you,
hmm,
in soccer, that oftentimes you'llbe discouraged by somebody.

(23:41):
one thing that emerged for me wasthat very dependent on who that
somebody is because of what you said.
That if they, their, their levelof learning or the level of
understanding is hugely important.
Because you said, forexample, if, if I'm watching.
A soccer game with a veryexperienced player versus a, a coach.

(24:01):
And particularly if it's, if it'sa, a youth level coach, that they
don't have the, they don't have thelenses to see deeply what's happening.
And if you have a scout for a player likeyou, for example, and you can see actually
it's not how many goals Manu scored.
It's not how many assists he gave.
It's what he
Hm.
the ball.
It's, it's the space he created.

(24:23):
It's the, the
hm.
the pass.
And I, I
Mm-hmm.
an important thing because wemiss potential in people in
Mm-hmm.
of life because of that differenceof the lens of the person
who's making the judgment.
And then we listen tothem not knowing that.
Yeah.
And I think the more, even as experts, wehave to realize that we have those lenses.

(24:45):
And when I work with teachers orcoaches, I mean, I tell them, you
are judging people based on a lens.
, Do you have the meta ability to reflectupon that and then be humble about
how you're judging people or be morereflexive about how you're judging
people because that's affecting thekinds of decisions they're going to make.

(25:06):
So there's a conseque, there'sa consequence attached to it.
Right?
So yeah.
I think, and this is somethingbasic research in human
cognition and learning, right?
And it's such a simple finding.
But if you all take it very seriously,then I think it, it has the capability
of making us all very humble andby consequence, more effective.

(25:28):
That idea of beginner's mind is.
It's something that also isso important in this book is
that the world will move on.
Oftentimes knowledge will move on, and
Mm-hmm.
I may have built my knowledge basefor a world that no longer exists,
and as a result I missed things.
And one of the things I thought abouta few years ago actually was, you know

(25:50):
how difficult it is, I lecture as wellhere in Trinity College, one of the
difficulties is correcting papers.
Right, right.
for me, it's more than just thetime effort that it is, it's
actually, don't want to get it wrong.
And so I have that kind of emotionalweight that that comes with it.
But also I used to kind of see itas a bit of a, oh, I have to go on

(26:10):
lecture, I have to go and correct thesepapers, a hundred papers or whatever.
but now I actually changed itto be a learning experience.
So am, the way I treat it now, isthere, yeah, there's gonna be some
that are very bland and repetitive,particularly now when they're using ai.
And we might talk about that actually,, the detrimental effect of using ai.
I'm not
Yeah.
the struggle, but what,I'm just plant that seed.

(26:33):
But,
Yeah.
now I look at it througha beginner's mind.
And actually when you do that, youstart to see differently and you
start to pick up little bits, littlenuances, maybe a phrasing or a
Mm.
that they mentionedthat you didn't know of.
And I'll go down the rabbit hole then
Cetera.
So, so there's a, there's a realimportant thing there for people.

(26:54):
Many Audi of our audience Manu areleaders, they run companies now in times
hmm.
change and indeed change makers.
And I'd love your observations on that.
one of the things that happens whenyou engage with novice thinking
is, A, you have to understand it.
And as an expert, it's veryeasy to immediately say,

(27:16):
well, that's just not correct.
Right.
But it's quite another to find kernels ofideas or thinking in that misconception
or naive idea that could still work.
Right?
And I give examples of that in the bookfrom multiple, in multiple contexts and

(27:38):
the, and as experts, if we can always getinto novice's head and say, okay, I know
this person is not quite talking aboutit correctly, but is there something here
that I can take away, something that Ican partner, something that I can use
that pushes your own domainknowledge to understand a student.

(28:00):
A novice thinking deeply actuallyrequires more domain knowledge.
Than to just call it a,something is incorrect.
And our tea, especially in education,when I've taught, when I, when teachers
have taught using productive failure, Isay, yeah, this is hard to teach because
I have to engage with students' ideas, Ihave to engage with students' thinking.

(28:20):
And when they de describe something,it's not immediately obvious to them
that if that the idea's not working,then they say, well, why is my idea not,
why is my idea not as good as yours?
Or, why is yours better than mine?
Yeah.
And the teachers would say, well,I can explain my idea correctly.
But it's very hard sometimesto talk about a student's idea
and say, why is this wrong?
Or why is this not working fully?
And that, to answer that question, yourdomain knowledge has to be really strong.

(28:45):
And so the finding that we havein our research as people, our
teachers are saying, Hey, look,even basic concepts in mathematics,
I now understand that more deeply.
Than I did in university.
I mean, these are mathmasters sometimes, right?
So these are basic concepts, butwe just took them for granted.
But now if I teach in using productivefailure, because I have to engage

(29:06):
student thinking, I have to see fromtheir lenses why it makes sense, and
then tell them here's how it works ordoesn't work, and so on and so forth.
Compared to what I know, Iunderstand the math better, right?
I, my domain knowledgeof math becomes better.
And I think that's how I connectwith experts in any domain.

(29:27):
I think the more you engage withnovice thinking chances are your
own knowledge or your expertisewould, would, would be different.
While I have it on top of mind, the useof ai, so you're seeing this, I'm sure
with students as well, and there's a hugetemptation, not just students, everybody
Yeah.
use AI to, to do the thinking for themor do the, the struggle work for them

(29:51):
and as a re as a result, like why botherlike you and I mean that more than.
It's not a judgment, it's justthat the brain cannot encode it if
you've given it to the machine toessentially do the struggle work.
The principle is the same, whichwhoever, whether it's the human or
the machine or the tool or whatever,whoever makes Putins puts in the
effort to make sense, actually learns.

(30:16):
You know, if you jump in a pool, Imean, there's no other way of learning
swimming by jumping and strugglingand try figuring out your strokes, you
cannot get on a robotic swimmer andthen that can take you across the pool.
And then, oh, I sw I learned how to swim.
Because the next time that thingis gone, that scaffold is gone.
You're gone.
You'll drown.
It's the same with anytool calculators to ai.

(30:39):
If the tool is doing the thethinking, then you are not.
, Let's put this out there and we,I'm jumping a little bit ahead, but.
Your view of this as a paradigm shiftin learning and teaching that, that
the shift to productive failure.
And I say that maybe I'll explain,so you were reading Thomas Kuhn's
work 1962, the revolutions, but also

(31:04):
Mm.
the shift from Ptolemy'sview to a Copernican view and
Yeah.
that was.
But, but also
Hmm.
thinking about difficultyin, in that change for you as
Mm-hmm.
I was thinking about , the QWERTY keyboard
Mm-hmm.
know, the shift from a QWERTY keyboardto a Vja keyboard, Aja keyboard.

(31:24):
For those who don't know, QWERTY is,if you look down at your keyboard, any
keyboard, Q-W-E-R-T-Y is in most English.
English spoken computers, but there'sactually a more efficient one because that
was built for a typewriter, yet nobodywould change because it's so encoded
to do it that way, and we become so
yeah,
it.
And I was thinking even

(31:44):
yeah.
the beginner's mind, the noviceview that you'd said there to go
back and to do that work is animmense cognitive effort as well.
We get bootstrapped or lockedinto certain ways of thinking.
And again, whether you'relooking at research on, you know.
Children playing with toys toQWERTY keyboards to to particular

(32:07):
mindsets, particular ways of thinking.
This is very well documented.
And again, it goes back to that ideaof how you came to learn that thing.
If somebody converged on a qualitykeyboard, having tried multiple different
ways, different keyboards, and thenfinally got into it chances are they will
be able to adapt to another situation.

(32:30):
It's like somebody, you know, if youwanna hire a programmer, software
engineer and they can do the languageof the day, the current language of the
day, and , they're experts in that andnothing else versus somebody you see,
oh, they've been able to over time learnmany different languages, and now they're
in the process of learning this one too.
Which one do you hire?

(32:51):
Right?
Because tomorrow the language mightbe different and you are the first
choice, may not be able to adapt.
Although today, that's the best choice.
Back to the idea, adapt, building,adaptability in your variation in your
learning trajectory and failure justis a wonderful way of forcing people

(33:12):
to adapt and learn in a safe way.
So let's set up, because I don't wannalose, I'm trying to be cognizant of myself
here and the audience learning with us.
And I highly recommend if you arelearning with us, read the book as
well, because you need multiple angles.
So for this book in particular,what I did was I listened to
the Audible and I read it.
So I, I would read and I'd listento the audible on my dropping my

(33:34):
kids here, there, and everywhere.
That type of work andit's really beneficial.
And then doing this isanother great way to learn.
And then Manu, one of the thingsI've always resisted is always get
people saying, Hey, I edit shows.
I do.
Show editing.
I take on that role myselfbecause it's another bite of the
cherry to learn from a different
Yeah.

(33:54):
'cause you're going throughand you're trying to master
the audio and stuff like that.
So I feel so privileged to getthese different angles to learn
the content and see it fromdifferent perspectives all the time.
And it always, something alwaysemerges during the editing process
Mm-hmm.
You're in a different brainwave state.
And actually you'll hear it differently.

(34:14):
But I, I teed this up, whichis the Copernican view, the
Jenga model, let's call it.
Let's set
Yeah,
before we get into theproblems of learning.
yeah.
So I mean, the idea is like, youknow the people have theories,
theories about the world.
Scientists have theories and theoriesabout the world, and I'll have to go
go a bit in a bit deeper into this toexplain, but, you know, people don't

(34:38):
change their mindsets as quickly.
And neither do scientists changetheir theories as quickly.
So if a contradiction you know, ifyou have a well-established theory
that explains what you think, itexplains the world or the phenomena,
then scientists are pretty tenacious.
Like you'll have to take, you'llhave to get a lot of evidence to.

(35:00):
Un undo before you startto rethink the theoretical
architecture or the theory itself.
And, and so that's what, that'swhat exactly what happens.
We usually think that theearth is at the center of the
universe of the solar system.
And you know, everything we couldexplain it, yes, explanations were
very complex, but every new findingyou know, slowly built up evidence

(35:21):
against it and to a point where peoplewere building ad hoc explanations
that were so cumbersome, so clunky
and that's okay for sciencebecause science should move only
when there's one, when there isreally compelling evidence that you
could, that you, you should shift.
And what Copernicus does was, well,you've got this entire delicate, and

(35:44):
that's what the Jenga tower is, right?
You've got the base, and as long asit's just, the base is pretty strong.
And on top of that, if you mount the thingand you say, oh, this thing doesn't work,
this find, this evidence is contradictory.
This is very proving,very hard to explain.
This is proving very hard to explain.
You can see slowly the, the theoretical,you know, foundation will still be there,

(36:07):
but you know, starting to be a bit wobbly.
What Copernicus does, what hesaid, well, at your base you
have the wrong assumption.
The whole thing is wobbly.
Not because the findings are youremoving pieces that are not working.
The problem is at your base thatyou're assuming that, you know,
the very basic assumption is wrong.
And I think oftentimes gettingto that part is the hardest.

(36:31):
But if you can, and there are very fewinstances in science where when you do
get to that, you have a whole revision of.
You know, a revolution.
That's why it's called the scientific,the whole whole revolutionary change
into how you think about the phenomenato now, to us now it's obvious sun
is at the center of the solar system,but that was not always the case.

(36:52):
And yeah, that's the beauty
And
of,
as well.
that's the difficulty.
I think Jeff Bezos said somethinglike, if you're gonna be an innovator,
you have to tolerate periods, longperiods of being misunderstood.
And it's one of the reasons I was so keento have you on the show to share this work
is because I'm sure you are and you're,you're, you'd be in some cases, reviled

(37:17):
and attacked by people because you'rechallenging their view of the world.
And maybe they've built a entire careeron that old model, that old foundation.
it also makes one think howmany more foundations are wrong
that we've built knowledge on,
Yeah.
history only goes back so far.
So we're basing it on historiesthat we don't even firsthand know.

(37:41):
And it's just so challenging.
And I, I wanted to just tip the hat tothe change maker out there who actually.
Is trying, is strugglingthrough a new paradigm shift and
Mm-hmm.
tee you up to maybe tell us, well,that's what productive failure is.
When my first experiments cameout, I tried to publish it.
It was very hard to publish.

(38:01):
You know, it took me two years toget my first paper into a proper,
decent actually a very good journal.
So it does take time, and I think atthe time you take it personally, but
if you look at it from a societal,from a scientific standpoint.
And if you are coming at it, ifyou're rubbing, you know people the
wrong way, or you have you know disconfirmatory evidence and you're

(38:27):
proposing a new way of thinking,then why should people believe you?
Just because you did a couple ofstudies and you showed something.
No, that's not how science, I mean,can you imagine if, if that's what
it is every day or every, you know,year, we'd be pivoting to a new model.
So that doesn't, that's not stable either.
So we, I think it's good forscience that we try to only change.

(38:47):
And even now, not everybody changes,but it only change when there's enough
evidence that has been gathered inmultiple contexts, in multiple domains
across multiple you know, fields andso on and so forth, multiple countries.
And that's when you start to say, okay.
Now it's not just one or twostudies that are talking about it.

(39:07):
There's a lot of study, a lot ofstudies that are talking about it.
And that's when you start to rethink.
So I think 20 years on from thatearly work that I did, yes, there's
more support for that, but it'sstill not completely revised.
I mean, I think yes, the dominant, thetraditional models that they're rethinking
the theoretical models that change ishappening, but change happens slowly.

(39:30):
, and
The difficulty for the changemaker to tolerate that.
Like, I mean, I think this happens on a,on a mi micro level in every organization
where somebody says, oh, our strategyneeds to change or We need to change
our business model, they all go througha version of that and it can be very
lonely and disheartening and they can.
Up very, very soon and

(39:52):
mm-hmm.
the company.
But I think that's an importantmessage, and I'd love you to
share your message of support.
Maybe your, your message of how totolerate those periods of encouragement
those periods of, of attack sometimes.
You know, again, I, they allfeel bad right in the moment.
They all feel bad.
And, but the good thing about learning,if you have a lot of learning through

(40:15):
productive failure over time, you cometo treat these attacks or discourage,
you know, discouragement and so on,so forth, as signals for learning.
So if I'm trying to do something, ifI'm a change maker and I'm, I just
put the problem on its head, right?
I suppose I'm, if I'm a change maker,I'm trying to change things, shake

(40:36):
things up, and nobody is, upset with me,right then, am I really a changemaker?
At least I've not done anythingthat is rubbing people in a way
that's forcing them to rethinka adapt, do things differently.
And if you're getting no feedback thatyou are making people uncomfortable

(40:58):
that you are making them think ina different way that people may be,
some people may not be happy aboutit and some people are struggling.
If you're not getting that feedback,A either you are an autocrat so
that, or b, you are really partof the system, that means you're
not really doing anything right.
So, over time, I think you just,you don't take it in a flippant way.

(41:21):
Oh, you know, you look at the feedback,you consider it seriously, but you
also take it as a signal that, okay.
That means I'm doing something.
I am, I'm really trying tochange the system, change the
process, change the structure.
And part of that is whatI call the failure signal.
It's, you know, I at times I go toinnovation labs or companies invite me

(41:44):
to the, after we've set up an r and dset up and we have so many projects,
would you come and have a look?
And there are times when you goand, you know, you visit, oh, it's
a nice set of 10, 20 differentprojects within a company.
And I say, oh, good, how many ofthese are actually working well?
And they say, oh, they're allworking really, really, really well.
All successful projects.

(42:04):
And I said, wait, did you callyourself an innovation lab?
He said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I said, no, you're not an innovation lab.
You are a safe success lab at best.
Because if you're really pushingthe boundaries, I would expect
there to be a failure signal.
I would expect people, you know,I would say, well, you know,
half of projects went nowhere.
Not because of laziness,stupidity, incompetence, but simply

(42:28):
because we challenged ourself.
We tried something to be creative.
And in that space, you'rebound to have that signal.
You can take it negatively or youcan actually turn it into, so my
work with organizations and, you knowleaders and managers is where is your
failure, failure signal in your teams?
Are you only seeing a success signal thenplease, you're not innovating at all.

(42:51):
So you, so it's like turning the mindset,turning to see the same information
coming in from a productive failure lens.
And then you say, wow,okay, that's happening.
That means something good is brewing here.
Exactly.
They're all steppingstones towards success.
Eventually.
There's a line I have for Manu, which isthe resistance you were saying about if
you're not getting that resistance, you'renot really doing any transformative change

(43:12):
anyway, that you treat the resistance tochange as a milestone, not a millstone.
Mm-hmm.
just the same thing whereit's like have to get that.
If you don't get that, you're notpushing the boundary far enough.
So I, I'm totally withyou on that one, man.
I'd love to
Yeah.
love to keep going ontothe problems of learning.

(43:34):
Your permission, can I sharethe diagram, the three, the
Venn diagram, the three circles,
hmm,
you to
hmm,
this.
So this, this, this sets us up thenwhen we get into solving for this.
But this is learning on in every aspect.
So for people who may think this isjust to do education, it's way beyond
hmm.
every aspect of encoding information.

(43:54):
I talk about three three problemsof knowing the, remembering, the
understanding, and the, and the transfer.
And we.
And it's remembering has to do witho obviously seeing things you can't
remember if you don't see them.
And we talked about seeing already, right?
And the way to remember things is tofailure comes, again, I talk in the

(44:16):
book about the theory of disuse, where,remembering is about both how well you
store, how strong the storage strength is,and how strong the retrieval strength is.
So just because you storedsomething well doesn't mean
you're able to retrieve it, right?
And these two are likeorthogonal dimensions.
And one thing that helpsretrieval, basically remembering
is a retrieval exercise.
You retrieve something from your memory.

(44:38):
One thing that helps retrieval is failure.
So, you know, if I go up to you andI say, Hey is, is your name Mark?
And you say, no, it's Aidan, I'mmore likely to remember your name
than if you would've told me.
If you would've told meupfront or I made right.
So, so remembering is getting peopleto store information in ways that

(45:00):
they're retrievable is one part ofthe problem that we need to solve.
And productive failure does that.
Second is understanding.
So even if you're in you understandingis a con, is a, is a function of how well
integrated new knowledge is with what youalready know, what your priors, and it
seems like a very trivial, obvious thing.

(45:20):
Oh yeah.
I integrate new knowledge with mywhole knowledge, but a novice and
an expert both do not know whata novice actually knows, right?
One definition of novice is thatthey know very little, another
definition of no novices, that theydon't really know what they know.
You know, I'm becomingrumsfeldian here, but I don't,

(45:41):
but you know what I mean, right?
So, and, and a big trick in solvingthis problem is to try to understand
how does a novice think about thisthing that they're about to learn?
And again, failure is a very importantmechanism to, you know, to to, to
make them pivot, make them adapt.
And each time they do,they uncover something that

(46:01):
they're about to learn, right?
So remembering and understanding,and ultimately it's transfer,
transfer is about have you learnedthings in a way that you can use
them, flexibility flexibly to adapt?
So, I mean, here example, give, you knowexample I give is playing with Legos.
So, you know, there are two ways inwhich you can play, you can, you can

(46:24):
play Lego with predefined assemblies.
You're making a car, or you'remaking a plane and you go
through the instruction booklets.
I'm sure your kids have played with it.
And you, you, you know from theoutset that you're gonna use this
set of Lego pieces to make a plane.
Okay?
Nothing wrong with that.
Or you can have Lego that.
It doesn't have a goal necessarily.

(46:46):
You can make a plane, but you can alsouse the same parts, reassemble them and
make them into a helicopter and so on.
Right?
And the question is, if the goal isto learn how to make a plane, then
yes, the first part seems very good.
But if later the plane needs to be turnedinto a helicopter using the same parts

(47:07):
it's not gonna transfer very well becauseof the way you got to learning about it.
And so transfer is again, just likeremembering, just like understanding
transfer is the, this flexibility inhow you encode that information so that
you can retrieve it and use it flexibly.
And so these are the three problemsthat you need to really solve.

(47:31):
And if you can solve them well,and my argument is failure is at
the heart of solving them well, ifdesigned in a safe way, then that's
how that leads to deep learning.
The Lego thing is more than just children.
I think it, it's a signalof society in a way that.
Everything's to a recipe, and ifeverything's to recipe, how can you,

(47:53):
can you explore outside the lines?
I, we had a guest on the show,Peter Campo, we spoke about this.
He, he wrote a book called TheEmergent Approach to Strategy.
And we, we used the example of Legoand said, the problem is that you
have the instructions, but whenyou're trying to build a, a company or
innovate, there are no instructions.
You're gonna have to just have the Legoblocks, whichever ones you have at your,

(48:16):
in your resources, it's a huge problem.
Sure.
You see, you have a, some typeof analogy you use for innovation
companies when you talk to the labs.
It's exactly that.
It's where are your Lego pieces and howhave you, how have you learned them?
Have you only learned to usethem in one particular way?
Or are they reassemble, repurposecan you repurpose them as well?

(48:40):
And most people find, and when we saypeople are stuck in a box, including
experts in a box, it's their Legopieces have been assembled in one way.
They've only seen one assembly,the correct assemblies.
Right?
They even know which piecesA wing and which pieces a
wheel and which pieces a nose.
They know all of it, but canthey take the wing and the nose

(49:00):
and the body and the wheels andrepurpose it into something else?
It's intuitively should bepossible, but it just doesn't.
Yeah.
I, I'm gonna throw this out to anyparents who actually, or maybe aunties
or uncles who've, who've bought a Legokit for their kids and then observed

(49:20):
them that sometimes it's you, the.
Err, he wants 'em to followthe instructions and build
it perfectly instead.
And they're, they have a desiremaybe just to build whatever.
And
Yeah.
things that happened in my life,Manu, is that , my older kid is, he
always had a propensity to be morein innovative or more creative, the

(49:42):
Hmm
guy would follow the rules.
And I, I kind of
Hmm.
the younger guy to break the rules.
Like he's a kind of,these teachers love him.
He never does that wrong, kind of.
And I'm like, I, I want a little bit ofrevel, a bit of deviance from, from him.
Yeah, yeah.
guy then, now sometimes, so they'vebroken their Lego kits, they had tons

(50:02):
of Lego, all Batman stuff all brokendown and now they just play free
play with the Lego every so often.
And it's, I love seeing that becauseI much preferred that yet my, my
Yes.
OCD and she wants everything reallyneat and tidy and she hates that.
Did you say your wife is oyou sleeping on the couch?
she don't worry man.

(50:23):
She definitely doesn't listen to the show.
So even when retrieval resultsin failure, you say it is still
beneficial for learning new informationthat that's the key takeaway here.
There's something I'd love you to shareas well, which is the dual index model of
our memory storage, strength and retrievalstrength and Bjork and Bjork's study.

(50:45):
And they call this the Theory of disuse.
This is an importantbuilding block I thought.
basically the theory is like,there are two, you can think of
memory as having two parameters.
One is a storage strength, theother one is a retrieval strength.
So storage strength is how wellyou've stored that information.
So your own birthday, your wife'sbirthday, I hope you know, and your kids'

(51:06):
birthdays and other information aboutstaff, your work, their domain knowledge.
These are things that have beenvery stored very, very well.
And they have very high storystrength and other things.
May have very low storage strength,like something you just heard,
but you know, you can't, youknow and that is not stored.
You've, you've, you've, you, you knew youyou had it, but you can't remember, right?

(51:33):
And, and then retrievalcould also be very high.
So that if I gave you examples of, youknow, your password for example, is
something, although people make mistakeswith that, but passwords are a typical
example where, yeah, you use it every dayand therefore your storage strength is
high and your retrieval strength is high.
Information about familystory strength is high.

(51:53):
Your native languagestory strength is high.
Retrieval strength is high, but therecould be things that are storage.
Strength is high, but retrieval is low.
So maybe the math you learnedin school, for example, yeah.
At the time you reallylearned a lot of math.
Maybe you did very, very well inmath or pick any other subject.
I don't care.
Right?
So the storage is there, butnow if I ask you to do some

(52:14):
differential calculus, you're goingto struggle a little bit, right?
But if I give you a chance toud, you will pick it up, you
know, reasonably well because thestorage is there, you reactivate
it, you learn how to retrieve it.
And then, yeah, so high storage,but low retrieval right now.
Then of course, let's cover the case wherethere's low storage and high retrieval.

(52:36):
Something that we just talked about.
You know, we, you know, we just hada Lego joke or I always remember
that your wife is OCD, who doesn'tlisten tomorrow, you ask me,
you know, so, again, haven'tstored that information, but
retrieval is high in the moment.
And then there's stuffwhere there is low storage.

(53:00):
So this is an example of low storage,low retrieval, and then there are
cases where it's low storage and highretrieval, which is again, things
like you know, memes or somethinglike that, that you may come across.
So the.
The storage strength is okay.
One Munk can store a lot of information.
And in our long-term memory thatthat capacity is almost in finite.

(53:22):
The interesting thing is in the retrievalmechanisms, you know, so, you know, if
you don't use something, you lose it.
So there's decay and how else?
So we, we, we studied all of that, but itturns out that when you learn something
and you allow for some forgetting, okay?
You allow some decay andthen you try to remember it.

(53:44):
And if, when you remember it, and ifyou fail to retrieve that information,
that is actually a learning event again,because if you get feedback on it, right?
So, you know, , we had a conversationtoday and then maybe a week from
today, we allow for some forgetting.
And then we say, did wetalk about this issue?
And you might say, well, Idon't remember if it did.

(54:06):
And you try really hard to retrieveand then later on said, No, remember
this segment that we talked about it?
Ah, yes.
Now we did.
It turns out that I've just made thatinto a learning event and your retrieval
failure actually set up the conditionsfor you to then encode this information
even strongly, more strongly, right?
Thereby increasing both yourstorage and your retrieval strength.

(54:29):
So failure of retrieval, again, as yousaid to your, to the audience earlier
is, is a really powerful mechanism.
We should not be worried about it, but ifyou can use it, can hack it in a way that
you allow some decay in your rememberingthings, and then you reuse retrieval
practice, especially that leads tofailure and then you get feedback on it.

(54:52):
That is very powerful.
I was thinking about that fromsay organizational learning.
So get beyond the learning environmentslike at university or school and go,
okay, people who have establishedcareers now and we're like,
organization must be more innovative.
, Do a half day course, and they dothat half day course and that's it.

(55:14):
And they expect them thento be more innovative.
And
Yeah.
is the big problem in an agewhere we're in an adaptive age and
Hmm.
there has to be consistentinvestment on that to happen.
And again, to your point, I lovedhow you phrased this, we tend
to think of forgetting as bad.
It turns out forgetting can be.
Good.
We must remember to forget so that

(55:35):
Yeah.
Yes.
forgetting to remember.
I love how you said that,
Yes,
forgetting you call it.
Exactly.
on an adult learning basiswhen people need to re-skill
And relearn is so important today.
Yeah.
But in, I think in an adultsituation, it shouldn't, the, the
forgetting should happen even faster.

(55:59):
'cause you, you're, you, you'rethinking about so many things.
I mean, there's so many thingsin your plate, life, work,
family, et cetera, right?
So if you are learning a new skill,you're going to a new class, I don't
know, pick up some ai skills or, youknow, or culinary skills or, or linguistic
skills or whatever you're learningin your, in your, as an adult because
there are so many demands on, on your,on your capacity, on your cognitions

(56:23):
that, you know, whatever you learn isbound to fade faster than as a child
who just thinks about that one thing.
And then, you know, they canremember all hundred types of
dinosaurs effortlessly, right?
Whereas adult, it'll be very really hard.
So, so so I think we just need to,as adults, we need to understand
that there is a power of forgetting.

(56:45):
Provided we then use retrieval.
So so if you're learning skills or, ornew knowledge, then try to use that.
And I describe this in the book.
This is a hack that you could use.
We think that, for example, you know,just mass practice is very good, but
actually mass practice, practice withsome forgetting and then practicing again,

(57:09):
some for, these are robust techniquesfor you to get on a faster, more flexible
trajectory for learning new things.
Your friend's analogyof, of walking a path.
. That's the idea.
Like if you just take one path all thetime, it's very clear and, you know but
o over time you have multiple meanderingparts that creates a different kind of

(57:32):
but then that also creates different waysto retrieve , that information, right?
I thought we'd share as well thedifference between, and this is where
we talked about the expertise thing.
We teed this up nicely earlier on.
In 1946, Adrianne the Groot was thefirst to demonstrate the difference
between grandma chess playersand lesser skilled chess players.
I'd love you to share this.

(57:52):
This really brings it home.
It basically shows how you, weuse knowledge to see things.
That's what experts do.
So this is very simply, you know,if you, and that study is very that
compares expert chess players with notas expert chess players, but still very
good expert with chess players, right?
And the point of that study was to showthat, you know, if you give expert chess

(58:17):
players a chess configuration, right?
And to memorize it, and then yougive the same configuration to a
less expert or a novice, if rememberthe differences in memory would only
appear if the configuration that youasked them to remember was actually
a proper play configuration, right?

(58:39):
If both were given a randomconfiguration, that makes no sense
from a, the chest standpoint, both.
Grandma and less than grandma willappear equally bad in their memory
or equally good in their memory.
So that, and several studies haveshown since then, and, and they've
kind of nuanced the findings,but basic idea is still this.

(59:02):
If you give domain based information thatmakes sense because of your expertise,
you can remember a lot of it, but thatdoes not mean that your memory is actually
better than a a novice in that domain.
What's making you appear to have very highmemory is your domain knowledge, because

(59:23):
that allows you to structure informationin ways that you can effortlessly deal.
A novice does not have that,but they still have the basic
capacity on average to be able to.
To remember things.
So again, knowledge, domain knowledgeand memory capacity kind of interact.
And that study was phenomenal becauseit disambiguated, you know, because

(59:44):
we tend to feel if to be chess,you have to have a perfect memory
or something like that, right?
And there are extreme cases where peoplehave photographic memories and, but
for the mainstream, I think this, thisstudy was quite, quite a, quite a good
one, that you need domain knowledge.
We use domain knowledge to structureinformation and remember it.
I thought about that actually when,the very, the famous story where IBM's
computer beat Gary Kasparov, and Iwondered, was it a little bit of that

(01:00:08):
because you were like, well, it, they'll,the chess masters will see recognized
regular plays, but some crappy play wmight actually catch them off guard.
I thought actually about how, you knowthis from soccer, sometimes playing a
crappy team from a crappy league willbeat the professional team because they,

(01:00:31):
Yes,
to the same way that you play andthey, they might do stuff differently.
You're kinda going, whatthe hell's going on here?
They play to a different playbook.
that's right.
That's right.
And yeah, I mean that'sit is exactly right.
I mean, I, I, nothing further to add.
That's a very good example where youcan, you can trick your high expertise
high expert or a better opponentinto, and, and teams do that, right?

(01:00:55):
I mean, even in football teams do that.
They deliberately break, go on astrategy that tries to destroy the
flow of the game or things like that.
So teams do that to, to put that togood use, at least in terms of outcomes.
certainly the business environmentand certain leaders in the world
are doing that to everybody today,

(01:01:15):
cer certain coaches.
But there's a great line here, seeing the, upon what we know.
use our knowledge to see things.
The exercise is not merely perceptual,it's also a cognitive one, and it is
seeing the deep structure that leadsto understanding and powerful learning.
In the context of learning somethingnew, we quickly run into a paradox.

(01:01:36):
If you are learning somethingnew, you are a novice with
respect to that target knowledge.
So you give the beautiful example ofstopping by the woods on a snowy evening
by Robert Frost, the beautiful poem.
And the idea again is like you, you canread a, a poem and if you are a novice
if you don't have the training as a poetor a literary training, if you don't have

(01:01:59):
the cultural context or if you've livedin a. I don't know in Greenland all your
life where there are no forests to beginwith, or maybe there are, I'm sorry, maybe
the desert where there are no forests tobegin with, then you would have a tough
time understanding what the poem is about.
'cause you just don't have theknowledge to even interpret the reality.

(01:02:19):
Right.
For the poem, poem is talking about, letalone the, the devices, the linguistic
and other devices that the poet istrying to use to make some sense.
Right.
That's, it's, it's in that sensethat I, I said that we are seeing
is a function of knowledge.
And experts would see verydifferent things from novices.

(01:02:41):
And it's not just a poem, it could bea piece of art, it could be a proof
in mathematics, it could be a diagram,an an engineering diagram, it could be
anything watching football, anything.
And, and that the same logic holds.
I thought we'd mention a coupleof more building blocks, which was
, Schoenfeld’s, paper, Alan, Schoenfeld’sDaniel Schwartz, and Bransford's Paper

(01:03:02):
as well, because these were reallyimportant, the paper, a time for telling.
And then of course, as youalluded to earlier on, when good
teaching leads to bad results.
Yeah, so Schoenfeld was you know, hewrote the seminal piece in the late
eighties where he went into math classeswell taught math classes, and he studied
the lectures and how they were teaching.

(01:03:24):
And by all accounts, theywere very good lecturers.
The same experience that I hadas a teacher, maybe I would've
my you know I also thought thatI was a very good lecturer.
And you know, sometimesyou got that feeling.
And then you also asked studentsif they were understanding the
material and they said yes.
And but when they, when you probeunderstanding after the concept,
after the lecture, that's when hefound the understanding to be weak.

(01:03:46):
And that's exactly led to thedefinition of the problem.
It was the problem.
Why are people learning sopoorly from well taught courses,
well taught lectures and.
The problem is that we learn poorly frombad good ones, you know, not, we, of
course learn poorly from bad ones, butparticularly from very good ones even.
And Bransford and Schwarz, Schwarz,Bransford Shortz and Bransford paper,

(01:04:09):
time for telling basically then saidthat, you know telling it doesn't
mean telling is not important, right?
Because you could take Schoenfeld’swork and say, well, even good
telling is not, it doesn't work.
So why do we bother?
Right?
But I think what Schwartz and Bransfordsaid was telling is important and
the reason it's not working theway it should be working is because

(01:04:31):
you're not preparing for the telling.
Right?
So , how do you get your novices?
You give them enough background knowledge,enough activation of their priors.
What protocol, what methods do youuse to get the knowledge in, get
the novices into a state where.
The telling works.
The analogy's like growingcrops, farming analogy.

(01:04:52):
You know, if rain falls on farmland,something would grow, hopefully, right?
Something would grow.
But in preparation for the rain, ifyou till the land, you do everything
you virtualize, you prepare, sow theseeds in the right in sort of random,
you so them properly and do allthe prep work, and then rain comes.

(01:05:16):
It'll grow in a different way.
In a more effective way, you'remore likely to have a good crop.
That's that year andyou know, is rain then?
Not important.
Good, good.
Rain is not good.
Rain is important, but you haveto do the prep work before so
that you derive a bigger bang forthe buck from the same good rain.

(01:05:36):
And this is a big problem, isn't it?
Where, where time a pressure when,for example, you know, the teacher
themselves or the lecturer themselvesdon't want to put that time in or
don't or have the cognitive dissonanceto go you know, , they listen.
If they would listen to this showand they go, actually I suffer from
that, where it was a perfect lecture,but I don't want to then go and ask

(01:05:59):
the students did they understand?
Because I don't wanna know.
'cause I want to keep moving.
, I need to get home.
I have a soccer match to
Yeah.
Right.
human challenges behind all of this.
A couple of
Yeah.
I'd love to finish on was the importanceof context, situational context, so
situation situ cognition where it'sencoded with the physical area as well.

(01:06:22):
This, this was a, tough one for mebecause I was thinking about how in my
work, often I'd get the, the executiveteam outta the building so that they,
Hmm.
that they think differently straight away.
That they're in a new environmentand they're in a novel environment.
So the informational will encode better.
But then the other thing was, I was like,and well, that, that's a, that's a kind of

(01:06:44):
a challenge to the whole idea of situatedcognition or the home advantage effect.
There's a, there's a lot in here.
Maybe you'll give us an overview of this.
Yeah.
So maybe I start with the HomeAdvantage effect just to explain
the idea of situated cognition.
And that is, you know, teamsgenerally tend to perform better on

(01:07:05):
home grounds than on away grounds.
Is you, are you, you're havingthe same set of skills and
knowledge that are at play.
You're applying similar, you areused to all the tactics and you
everything yet given the same team.
On average, they perform better athome because they train at home.
And when you train at home, you'renot just training the particular
skills, you're training the angles,you're training the scenery, you're

(01:07:26):
training the sight, the smells.
You get used to the dimensions andangles of your perspectives in, and the
stadium that you are training in, thatyou expect crowd and crowd sizes and
all of these things are being encoded.
So the next time you, you know, you takea shot from outside the penalty box,
the angle is exactly, you've seen that.

(01:07:46):
Day in, day out, and you canexecute that because everything
comes together to execute that.
It's same, same chap in a differentstadium, which is you go once or
twice a year to, to an away ground.
Everything looks different.
It's the same free kick, it's the sameangle, but just appears very different

(01:08:07):
because the lights, the sound, the people,the dimensions, perspectives, everything's
different, not just the team is different.
So, and this is what leads tothe idea that knowledge is not
independent of the context withinwhich it was learned, right?
It, it gets tied to this.
So you're encoding everything around it.

(01:08:28):
While you're learning math,you are encoding everything.
While you're learning science orwhile you're playing football,
you're encoding all of it.
And when you need to use this knowledgethat you've learned, if the context
is very different from the context.
In which you learned it, then thisknowledge is gonna, you're gonna have a
harder time execute or retrieving it orusing that knowledge at the same level of

(01:08:52):
fluency that you want to use right now.
This may at first seemcontradictory, right?
So you would say, well then how dowe get people to encode flexibly?
So if the goal is really to optimizeif the training context and the
performance context are exactlysimilar, if you know that, then you

(01:09:14):
optimize by making the training contextexactly like , performance context.
But if you know that this knowledgethat you're learning how to train
is going to have to be used to goodeffect in a number of contexts, then
you have to train this knowledgein some variable context as well.
So your question about your executives,if what you're training them needs to

(01:09:37):
be applied only in the context of theirorganization or in the company, in the
same building, whatever, you better trainthem in exactly where they need to work.
Like if they're on a production line,train them on the production line.
Don't take them to a new productionline and then, you know, come back and
say, oh, well this looks very different.
Right?
But if you want this knowledgeto be flexible, then you want

(01:09:59):
to take them out to the woods.
You want to take them out to another, youtake them out to another company or show
them different things, talking about thesame thing, discussing the same issues.
Take the map to the point isthen the information gets encoded
in a bit different way and it'stied to different contexts.
So that given an entirely new context.

(01:10:20):
You know, they have multiple pods toretrieve it, multiple ways to access
that information and use it somehow.
So that's, that's the,
Brilliant.
I know it's a bit of a acounterintuitive notion, but
actually.
So the, the getting outta the buildingidea is actually works in that respect.
If it's cognitive, ifit's flexible knowledge.

(01:10:40):
But if it was, say, safety training thatyou might, might want to do an onsite.
That's really, really helpful.
I thought we'd share as a finalmessage to thought, experiment
and maybe test the audience here.
So this is.
Imagine you're a child andyou love playing with toys.
I'll let you tee it up and thenwe'll give the, give 'em 10 seconds.

(01:11:01):
Not 10 seconds.
'cause that'll feel liketwo minutes on audio.
So
yeah.
set this one up and thendeliver what the moment is here.
Right.
So I mean, people have studied childrenat play because, it's a good indication
of the kinds of capacities you're bornwith and develop very early in life.
Try to explain how we grow.
Okay?
So, you know, toddlers at play,children, small children at play,

(01:11:24):
and children love to play with toys.
So they're experiments in this broad genreof experiments that I, I would generalize
to these two categories, two groups.
Suppose you're a child who, who lovesto play with toys, and I come to
you and you decide yourself, whetheryou're in group one or group two, okay?
So if you're in group one, I come to youand say, Hey kid here's a new toy here.

(01:11:45):
You've never seen it.
You've never played with it.
Do you want to play with it?
And then you say, oh, okay.
I want to play with it.
So I, I said, okay, here's a toy.
Play as you like, you know, as youlike, and I observe how you play.
And then I go to, if you're in grouptwo, I come to you with the same
toy, you know, and same instruction.
I say, well, okay kid, this is a new toy.
You've never seen it.
You've never played with it.

(01:12:07):
Do you wanna play with it?
I said, yeah, I also want to play with it.
I said, but wait, you've never, youdon't know how to play with this toy.
You don't even know how this toy works.
So let me first teachyou how this toy works.
Watch and learn how to play with this toy.
And then I show you, if youpress this button, this happens
and you turn it around, thathappens, and so on and so forth.
I show you how to play with it, but thenI say, now that you've learned how to play

(01:12:30):
with it, I want you to play as you like.
Like you still free toplay as you like, right?
And I observe both the groups.
The question is you know, if youcompare the two groups, which, which
child in group one or group twowould be more engaged with the toy?
Now, which child in group one orgroup two would invent more strategies

(01:12:53):
to figure out how the toy works?
Which child would be morecreative in that process?
Now, which one would youchoose if you're the audience?
Is it group one or is it group two?
Your time's up.
Yeah.
And, and, and, and, and in most cases,I mean, I've given this, I, I've given
talks on this several times, and formost people it's very, very intuitive.

(01:13:18):
And that's exactly what happens.
It is the group one kid who does not,who's not been given the canonical
knowledge about how to play with atoy, yet they're the ones who are more
engaged, more creative you know, almostperforming, like acting like scientists
to figure out how the toy works.
Yet when we think of, you know,new ideas and new knowledge and

(01:13:38):
things, we want to teach people.
We don't give them the groupone kinds of experiences.
We tell them, well, you don't know this.
Let me show you how to do this.
And then you learn and guess what happens?
Yes, they learn that thing, but thenthey're not creative with it because
you've got them in that box very early.
And what productive failuretries to do is not group one.

(01:14:00):
What productive failure triesto do is it designs a, a failure
based activation system and throughexploration and idea generation,
but it doesn't just leave it there.
It then times it withconsolidation and instruction.
So it's a combination of explorationfollowed by consolidation and repeating
these cycles again and again and again.

(01:14:22):
And this combination is what resultsin deeper learning and creativity.
And that, by the way, Manu is such abackbone of this show, is the idea that
we're we're designed, we're encodedfor exploitation of an advantage.
rarely for exploration.

(01:14:43):
And actually the explorers are morethe deviants in society because
of the education system as well.
'cause we're, we're trainedfor factory work really.
And this is why I'm so happy to shareyour work and get it out there because.
We need this, and we need thisat a, at an early level in life.
And it does probably happen naturallyat an early level in life like the
Exactly,

(01:15:03):
but,
exactly.
it away, you know, I think Einsteinsaid, you know, I, I, I, I, I
survived the education system,
System.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
your work in Singapore, I was impressed bythe fact that it's been encouraged there.
You know, I hear the Singapore system isahead of many other parts of the world,

(01:15:24):
so it just shows you that they lean intothe future and they're very much on point.
Yes, I, I think one of the advantageshere in Singapore, the policy makers
look at science and they reallyconsider the science behind it
science does have a seat on the table.
I mean, science is not the onlything that informs decisions because
policy decisions are obviouslymore complex than just one factor.

(01:15:46):
But at least science hasa good seat on the table.
And for anybody else who wants aseat at the table of this book,
don't forget there's one up for grabswith our newsletter on Substack.
I have thoroughly enjoyed this.
I learned so much, and I took a longtime to actually encode this knowledge.
I'm delighted to get another wayto encode another medium to encode

(01:16:06):
it with the author of that book,Manu, for people who wanna find you,
where's the best place to reach out?
Well you can go to mywebsite, manu kapur.com.
The book productive failure.com.
It's also available onlineon most booksellers.
You can view my talks and everything.
So yeah, multiple modalities inwhich you can access the work.

(01:16:28):
It's all out there.
his own cooking as well.
Author of Productive Failure,unlocking Deeper Learning through
the Science of Failing Manu Kapur.
Thank you for joining us for Part One.
Thank you, Aiden.
I enjoyed it.
Thank you so much.
I want to thank our sponsor Kyndryl.
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(01:16:49):
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