The Crow Does Not Take Courses

The crow learns to solve a specific problem. A reflection on upskilling and reskilling that starts with the task.

The crow does not take courses

Series: What nature already knew about talent · 4/6 · Upskilling and reskilling

On an island in the Pacific, two thousand kilometers east of Australia, lives the only non-human animal that makes hook tools.

The New Caledonian crow takes a twig, strips off the leaves, carries it to a hole in a trunk, and extracts larvae that it could not reach with its beak. Up to this point, other animals do similar things. The extraordinary part begins when you look closely at the twig: the crow has chosen one that has a fork, has broken it at the exact point, and has sharpened the end to turn it into a hook. To extract the larva, it does not poke it: it hooks it.

And it makes a second type of tool, even more surprising, with the leaves of the pandanus, a plant with serrated edges. It cuts the leaf into a step shape, so that one end is wide for gripping and the other narrow for inserting into crevices. These stepped tools have different designs depending on the area of the island, and the designs are maintained over generations. Researchers Gavin Hunt and Russell Gray have been documenting this for decades, and the most debated conclusion is whether we are witnessing cumulative culture: techniques that are transmitted and improved, not reinvented by each individual.

How a crow learns

What interests me is not that the crow is smart. It is how it becomes so.

A young crow does not learn to make hooks in the abstract. It learns because there is a larva in front of it that it cannot reach. It tries one branch, it doesn’t work; it tries another, it breaks it poorly; it observes an adult, copies the gesture, corrects it. It takes about a year to make tools as well as an adult, and during that year, each attempt gives it immediate information: it has extracted the larva or it has not.

Notice the ingredients. There is a specific task that requires a specific skill. There is a clear distance between what the crow knows how to do and what the task requires. There is practice directed exactly at that distance. And there is immediate verification of whether the distance has been closed.

No young crow enrolls in a general tool-making course. It learns what it lacks for the task at hand, and it knows when it has finished learning it because the larva is in its beak.

How we form ourselves

Now look at how training is decided in most organizations.

At some point in the year, a plan is made. Managers are asked what their people need, and the managers say what they remember from the last conversations. People are asked what interests them, and they say what they feel like. It is crossed with the current supplier's catalog and the budget, and a plan emerges: so many hours of this, so many of that. It is executed. At the end of the year, it is reported how many people have done how many hours and what grade they gave the course.

What is almost never present in that circuit is what the crow has.

There is no measurement of the initial distance: training is done without knowing who knows what. There is no connection between training and the task that demands it: the plan is built on the catalog, not on the position. And there is no verification of whether the distance has been closed: attendance and satisfaction are measured, which are the easiest to measure and the least relevant.

The result is the phrase I have heard most in twenty years of conversations with people directors, said with variations: "we invest in training without knowing if it is impacting." And the phrase that follows when the budget tightens: "I don’t know how to justify it."

It is not a problem of training. It is a problem of the question. The question is not "what courses do we offer this year?" It is "who lacks what to do what the business will ask of them?"

Starting with the larva

Changing the question changes the entire process, and it changes it in the reverse order to the usual.

First, the task. What will the business demand in the coming months, from which roles, and what specific skills are behind that? Not in general: for this role, this level of this and that. Many times the change comes from outside, from a new product, an operation that is digitized, a regulation that comes into force, and today’s role no longer covers it.

Second, the distance. Where is each person regarding that, measured, not asked. Here the usual surprise appears: the real distance looks little like what the managers had estimated. There are people over-trained in things that were going to be included in the plan and people with gaps that no one had seen.

Third, directed practice. Training in what is lacking for those who lack it, not the same course for the entire staff. When the gap is concrete, training can be short: most of the skills that companies need to reinforce can be closed with well-directed hours, not with weeks.

And fourth, the larva. Measure again. The only proof that someone has learned something is that they now know how to do what they did not know before, and the only way to know it is to measure it the same way as before. This turns the training report into something else: not "we did 4,000 hours," but "the sales team went from this level to that one in these five skills, and here are the three people for whom it did not work and we need to see why."

What the crow transmits

I am left with the detail of the regional designs. The tools of the crows from one area of the island resemble each other and differ from those of another area. This can only happen if the technique is transmitted and maintained: if what a crow has learned does not disappear with it.

In companies, what someone learns in training usually stays in their head and, with luck, in a certificate in their file. When the person changes positions or leaves, the knowledge goes with them and no one even knows what they had. Measuring capabilities after training is not only useful to justify the investment: it serves to know what the organization knows, and that map is what allows moving, promoting, and planning.

At The Wise Skill, we build training this way: a gap opens when evidence shows distance from the position, each gap comes with what closes it, and it is only closed with evidence of the same type. Measure, train, measure again. But the question that changes everything does not need any tools, just that you ask it the next time the training plan arrives.

Where is the larva?

If there is a change in your team that requires capabilities that it does not yet have, a new product, a changing operation, a regulation, message me directly and let's see where to start.

Next delivery: the wolf of Yellowstone, or why AI does not eliminate jobs, it changes what is done in them.