How Capability Is Really Built at Work

Much of what makes us capable at work is built through the work itself. The important question is whether experience is changing what we're able to do the next time around.

The 70–20–10 model has been part of the learning and development conversation for decades. In its familiar form, roughly 70 percent of learning comes through experience, 20 percent through other people and 10 percent through formal learning.

The percentages can make the model sound more precise than it really is. Its value, at least to me, isn't in the math. It's in what it asks us to notice about where capability actually comes from.

Much of what makes us good at our work is built while we're doing it.

The work is teaching us all the time

Think about something you're genuinely good at today. There's a good chance you didn't develop that capability primarily by sitting in a classroom.

You handled a situation you hadn't encountered before. You made a decision without having all the information you wanted. Something didn't go according to plan and you had to adjust. You worked with someone who approached a problem differently. You tried something, saw what happened and carried some part of that experience into the next situation.

Over time, those experiences accumulate. But accumulation alone isn't what makes us more capable.

What matters is what we take from one experience into the next.

Experience gives us the raw material

Two people can have very similar experiences and learn very different things from them.

A difficult client conversation might teach one person to prepare differently next time. Another person may come away believing that difficult clients simply aren't worth the effort. Someone else may not give the conversation another thought and handle the next one exactly the same way.

The experience happened to all three. What changed because of it may be very different.

That's an important distinction because we often assume that time spent doing something naturally turns into capability. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it turns into familiarity. And sometimes we simply become more practiced at doing something in the way we've always done it.

Experience gives us something to learn from. It doesn't decide what we learn.

Other people can change what we see

This is where the “20” in 70–20–10 becomes interesting.

Someone doesn't necessarily have to teach us in a formal sense to affect how we learn. A colleague asks a question we hadn't considered. A manager gives us feedback that changes how we understand what happened. We watch someone handle a situation differently and realize there was another option available.

Those moments can change the meaning of an experience.

I've had conversations where one question caused me to reconsider something I thought I already understood. The experience itself hadn't changed. What changed was what I could see in it.

That is one of the ways other people accelerate learning from work. They help us notice things we might not have noticed on our own.

Concepts give us something to work with

Formal learning plays a different role.

A useful model, framework or idea can give us language for something we've experienced but haven't been able to name. It can introduce an approach we haven't considered or help us recognize a pattern that wasn't obvious before.

But the real test comes when that idea meets the work.

Can I use it in a conversation? Does it help me make a better decision? Can I recognize something sooner because I now know what to look for? Does it change what I do when I encounter a similar situation again?

That's when information begins becoming capability.

The next situation is where learning shows up

Perhaps the most useful way to think about learning at work is to look forward rather than backward.

After an important experience, we often ask, “What did I learn?” That's a reasonable question, but it can produce fairly abstract answers.

A more practical question might be: What will I be able to do differently the next time?

Maybe you'll recognize the problem earlier. Ask a better question. Prepare differently. Involve someone sooner. Avoid an assumption you made the first time. Or perhaps you'll make essentially the same decision, but with greater confidence because you understand the situation better.

That's capability being built.

Pay attention to what the work is teaching you

The 70–20–10 idea is useful because it directs our attention toward something that's already happening. Every workday provides experiences, interactions and information that have the potential to shape what we're capable of doing.

The opportunity isn't simply to accumulate more experience. Most of us are getting plenty of that already.

It's to notice what we're carrying forward from it.

Think about something at work that didn't go quite as expected recently. Instead of only asking what happened, consider one additional question:

What will I see, understand or do differently when I encounter something like this again?

The answer tells you something about whether the experience has become learning—and whether that learning is becoming capability.