If you ask me, learning is pretty damn sexy. I am attracted to intelligence. The ability to learn in a myriad of ways is what makes us truly human. However, having spoken to numerous management consultants and C-suite executives, I have had to learn the hard way that there is still a terrible stigma attached to learning. Thousands of years of authoritarian teachers, the military origins of Prussian schools, and the industrialized, standardized production of graduates have left a bitter historical aftertaste. Seriously, how did this happen?

Market supply and demand is one answer. When Prussia needed obedient civil servants, schools were created to support the state, with little space for reforms and smart ideas. This is how Wilhelm Von Humboldt resigned in 1810. Look it up. When soldiers were needed in WWII, instructional design and behaviorism flourished. From the point of view of political systems, education served its purpose.

Even today, e-learning, for example, appears to many employees to be an unnecessary ordeal and, like school learning, it appears largely disconnected from real life, not serving any worthy purpose. Click and get certified! It’s dull.

To find out what’s fundamentally weird with learning, let’s take a step back.

Humans have developed a neat trick that sets us far apart from all other animals: We can create knowledge, bundle it into symbols (that we assume bear some sort of intelligence), and pass it on to the next generation, who can build on it. Over the course of cultural evolution, our tools and the organization of society subsequently become increasingly complex and even accelerate. Indeed, keeping up with change takes a huge chunk of our time.

Now comes the tricky part: As long as societies are of low complexity, traditional learning formats such as master and apprentice, leader and follower, in other words ‘classic’ Social Learning Theory, will hold true. Hierarchical social roles and ‘masterly content and skills’ are strongly coupled.

However, in a society where technology is moving fast and social groups are diversifying, this link is breaking down. Instead, it is increasingly the social heterogeneity of pluralized social needs and expectations that drives learning.

This is how social dynamics drive learning formats. The opposite is true as well.

I once had what I thought was a great idea with a colleague. We were teaching at different universities, my colleague in Göttingen and I in Oldenburg, and we brought our groups of students together via digital means during COVID. We shared the expectation that this would create a fantastic synergy between young people stuck at home. What happened? Well, not much. The experiment turned out to be a complete and utter failure. But how? The student groups were too similar: Similar subjects, same age bracket, almost identical everything. There was not much different information to pass on between the two groups. There was nothing new under the sun for them.

In hindsight, I called it the ‘information equilibrium’, meaning: When the experiences of two groups are highly similar, information exchange soon reaches a state of stasis. However, if groups can draw on significantly different experiences, the information exchange can be lively and highly productive. Again, it is social experience that builds learning potential and, ultimately, drives learning.

In this light, we can extend Bandura’s Social Learning Theory to the level of groups and teams: It is not only the self-efficacy of the individual that drives learning, but also the self-efficacy experience of an entire team or group. Furthermore, self-efficacy experience easily turns into a shared expectation of self-efficacy: “Yes, our team really can master this task! We can overcome this obstacle and we have full confidence that we can carry out this project!” One of the new emerging superpowers of the 21st century is context-aware, self-organizing teams.

Following in Bandura’s footsteps, we advocate a social view of learning. It is, e.g., very easy for an employer to dismiss L&D for his employees by stating that learning can wait ‘until the right time’. But an employer cannot argue that staff should wait for social relationships to develop. Social relationships is what we are made of!

We might dismiss learning, but we cannot dismiss social relations.