Fun, Engagement, and Perseverance in Scientific Thinking

There is a lot of talk these days about how manager/coaches should not bully their learners and instead make things fun for them.

We learn as we struggle to reach the challenge.

Certainly, if a coach bullies or humiliates the learner, the learning experience suffers, but I don’t think it’s a given that fun automatically increases learning. In fact, it may work in the opposite direction if making it fun means reducing the learner’s struggle. What is critical is creating an environment where people feel safe to fail. Without that, it doesn’t matter how much fun you bring into the process, the learner will not try things that are out of their comfort zone and there will be little to no learning. Remember, we learn the most when things don’t turn out as we expected them to, and we figure out why.

Fun may play a role in making the learner feel at ease and increasing their engagement. If that happens, then fine, but it’s not fun we’re looking for, it’s engagement and willingness to try new approaches. In fact, fun can be present without contributing to learning at all.

I experienced this first-hand while advising Zingerman’s Mail Order (ZMO) on their Lean journey for more than 15 years. Zingerman’s is a collection of food businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that makes and sells high quality artisanal foods. ZMO sells these and other foods by mail. Their people-centered culture makes it a good and fun place to work. Yet, when we started, there was no systematic learning and little engagement in improvement. It was through Lean that the managers became engaged in systematic learning and improvement, and it was Kata that expanded that to the rest of the workforce.

ZMO’s people-centered culture plays well with Lean and Kata and it is, without a doubt, an enabler for learning. Theirs is a fun environment even when you’re struggling to achieve a difficult challenge. Does that make suffering through problems more bearable? Perhaps. But I think it’s mostly because people feel safe and supported, not necessarily because they are having fun. At ZMO the winning formula seems to be a supportive, people centered culture, combined with Lean structures to surface problems, combined with practicing scientific thinking in an environment where it’s safe to fail, combined with the perseverance to keep trying until succeeding.

Which brings me to the next point. Besides contributing to learning, struggling through problems also builds tenacity and resilience (or perseverance, as Toyota calls it), which needs to go hand-in-hand with scientific thinking if we want to achieve challenging goals. If you have the perseverance to keep trying, you will figure things out, even if your scientific approach is not perfect. On the other hand, if you give up easily, even perfect scientific thinking will not get you very far.

So, in my opinion, the job of the coach, besides teaching scientific thinking, is to create an environment where the learner feels supported and safe to fail, and to keep the learner engaged. If making it fun for the learner contributes to either of these, then fine. But fun is not the only way to do it. Personally, I’m much more engaged by a hard challenge than by a ‘fun' activity.

What do you think?