What Are You Learning From Your Work?

We tend to measure work by what we accomplish. But work also develops what we are capable of doing next. Tim Gallwey’s QUEST framework offers a useful way to notice the learning that can otherwise be easy to miss.

Most of us know what we're expected to accomplish at work.

We know the project that needs to be finished, the revenue target, the client commitment, the patient outcome, the production number or the deadline. Performance has a way of making itself visible. There is usually something we can point to and say: this is what I need to get done.

Learning is harder to see.

In a 1997 article in The Systems Thinker, Tim Gallwey made an important distinction between performance and learning. Performance, he argued, takes place on the outside. Learning represents a change within the individual. His wonderfully concise distinction was: “Learning is an increased capacity to perform; performance is the evidence that the capacity exists.”

That distinction matters because we often describe learning goals using the language of performance. I want to increase sales. I want to get promoted. I want to become more productive. Those may be worthwhile goals, but they describe outcomes. They don't necessarily tell us what capability is being developed in the process.

Gallwey offered a simple framework for thinking differently about this. He called it QUEST, an acronym for five kinds of learning goals: qualities, understanding, expertise, strategic or systemic thinking, and time.

Q — Qualities

What qualities are you developing through the work you are doing? Patience, judgment, confidence, curiosity, resilience, the ability to listen, the willingness to challenge an assumption? Some of the most valuable capabilities we develop at work will never appear on a course syllabus.

U — Understanding

What do you understand today that you didn't understand a year ago? Perhaps you understand your customers differently. Maybe you see how decisions actually get made in your organization, recognize patterns in your industry, understand the needs of a particular kind of client, or have learned something about yourself and the conditions under which you do your best work.

E — Expertise

This is perhaps the form of learning we recognize most easily. What knowledge and skills are you developing? What can you do now that you couldn't do before? Expertise matters, but QUEST reminds us that it is only one dimension of learning.

S — Strategic or Systemic Thinking

Are you becoming better at seeing connections rather than individual events? Can you recognize consequences further downstream? Do you understand more clearly how your work affects someone else's work, how one decision influences another, or where leverage might exist in a complicated situation?

T — Time

Are you becoming more capable of deciding what deserves your attention? This is more than conventional time management. Gallwey described it as developing the capacity to optimize what we do with time. In a work environment filled with competing demands, that may be an increasingly important capability.

Learning That Travels With You

There is another important feature of QUEST. Gallwey argued that good learning objectives should help with the performance challenge immediately in front of us while also being useful across future performance challenges.

That changes the question.

Instead of only asking, “Am I succeeding in this job?” we can also ask, “What am I becoming more capable of because I am doing this job?”

The difference is significant. You can be performing well while learning very little. You can become extraordinarily efficient at delivering what is expected of you while gradually narrowing rather than expanding your capabilities.

Gallwey described a related phenomenon as “performance momentum”: becoming so absorbed in activity and results that we lose sight of the larger purpose of the activity and neglect learning and the quality of our experience.

A Wider View of Work

This is one reason Learning sits alongside Performance and Enjoyment in the Work Frame.

Performance tells us something about the results we're producing now. Learning asks whether the work is expanding what we are capable of doing next. Enjoyment asks something different again: whether the experience of doing the work provides enough energy, meaning, connection, fit and purpose for the work to remain worthwhile.

Gallwey's original Work Triangle made essentially this larger argument in 1997. He proposed that performance, learning and experience are interdependent, and warned that emphasizing performance at the expense of the other two eventually undermines performance itself.

QUEST gives us a practical way to look more closely at one side of that triangle.

Think about the work you've done over the past six months. Don't start with what you accomplished. Start with what you can now carry forward.

What qualities have you developed? What do you understand more deeply? What expertise have you gained? Are you better able to see systems and connections? Have you become more capable of deciding where your time and attention belong?

Those answers may tell you considerably more about whether your work is developing you than a list of completed projects ever could.

And they raise a useful question for the future: What would you like your work to make you more capable of next?

Source and attribution: The QUEST framework, the distinction between learning and performance, the concept of “performance momentum,” and the Work Triangle discussed in this article are drawn from W. Timothy Gallwey, “The Inner Game of Work: Building Capability in the Workplace,” The Systems Thinker, Vol. 8, No. 6, August 1997, published by Pegasus Communications. The article was based on Gallwey's work in progress that would become The Inner Game of Work.