Power Up Your Mind: Learn faster, work smarter

you will see in the next chapter. There certainly are many times

when things do suddenly fall into place like this, but on the whole

learning is much more messy.

Mellander’s model is really helpful in pointing up one of the

most powerful ways in which learning helps individuals and orga-

nizations to be successful. This is by capturing the tacit and, there-

fore, hidden knowledge that has been learned, which will be of only

limited use unless it can be shared.

Another way of looking at Mellander’s model is to think of

any experience of learning as having four different stages. I have

used the example of making an omelette to illustrate this.

Know what:You recognize an omelette and have eaten one

Know how:You have read a recipe and tried cooking one

Know why:You know why it is important not to get egg shells into the mix and why

the butter should not be too hot

Care why:You care about why it is important to have good quality of ingredients and

how omelettes fit into a balanced diet

See if you could draw a model or diagram of how you think you learn.

Different types of learning

It is very easy to end up thinking so generally about the concept of

learning that you fail to notice that there are very different ways of

doing it.

Think of a typical working day in your life. Using the chart overleaf, work out how many dif-

ferent types of learning you experience. For each of the categories, see if you can come up

with at least one example. Now, think about all of your last month’s learning. Can you cate-

gorize it using these headings? Are there any others you can think of?

86 Power Up Your Mind