One of my most respected LinkedIn contacts is Phil Rink, a fellow engineer who writes the Jimi & Isaac series of children’s books, and is generally well-informed about anything he chooses to comment on.

I just recently finished the second book of his series, Jimi & Isaac 1b: Curve Ball. (I love reading good kids’ books – they’re similar to reading a great short story, but with a bit more meat on the bones.) In it was this remarkable passage:

“Isaac’s mom is teaching him how to pitch,” I told Dad. “She played softball, so she’s teaching him how to throw a baseball.”

“She’s helping me learn,” Isaac said. “My dad says nobody teaches anybody anything, but some people help other people learn.”

This was like the proverbial light bulb flashing on, a true Eureka! moment.

I’ve long known how difficult training is. A couple decades ago I was in charge of helping a very talented group of manufacturing technicians become proficient at cereal packaging, a job to which everyone, including me, was brand new. One method we used was to bring in service technicians for each piece of equipment on the packaging line, and have them train our technicians.

At least that was the intent. For most of them, what instead happened is that they ran the equipment while our folks stood around and watched, then eventually went away, leaving us no better off. Or actually worse off, since they cost us an arm and a leg for their labor, travel, and per diem expenses.

There were one or two, though, who very quickly had our technicians becoming expert themselves. We loved those guys, because they made such a vast difference in our ability to operate and maintain the equipment.

But what was different about them? I knew at the time it was an ability to “reach” our operators in a way your average extremely knowledgeable machine service tech couldn’t, but I never got much beyond that.

Much later, as we developed our company’s continuous improvement methodologies, the concept of “Learn-Do-Teach” came around, and that helped a bit. Certainly, including the bit about the learner not just grasping but being able to teach the material by the end was a great notion. But it still wasn’t the answer.

Later still, as I became active as an adult Scout leader, the BSA training methodology – the EDGE method – helped even more. It’s an acronym for “Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, and Enable.” This truly got at the root of each person learning to do something in his own way.

But Phil’s passage brought it all home. You don’t actually teach anybody anything! You help them learn. What a huge, deep concept made completely simple, in a children’s book of all places. Yes. It’s all clear now.

Nice job, Phil. Thanks.