Desirable difficulties
As I was leaving my house to head for a 6 am spin class, I thought to myself, “Lee, you don’t have to do this, you know.” Yes, I knew that I was inflicting this exercise bout on myself without any outside impetus, that, as has been the case throughout my adult life, I was choosing the hard way, the tough course. The term “desirable difficulties” popped out of my sleepy brain.
I ran across the term “desirable difficulties” a couple of years ago when I was doing research on learning for my second book, BIG DECISIONS: 40 disastrous decisions and thousands of research studies tell us how to make a great decision when it really matters.
Challenges enhance learning
Here’s what I wrote about “desirable difficulties”:
Daniel Kahneman says that System 2 [the logical, analytical part of our brain] comes into play when mental effort or impulse control is necessary. “It gets mobilized when one encounters difficulties.”[1] What about intentionally placing “desirable difficulties” in our way as we decide? In theory, that will have us slow down and engage the decision-making tools this chapter promotes.
For decades, UCLA professors Robert and Elizabeth Bjork have investigated the role of “desirable difficulties” in learning. Their fundamental finding is that “conditions of learning that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas conditions that create challenges (i.e., difficulties) and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimize long-term retention and transfer.”[2]
In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, the authors debunk how most people try to learn. “Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they’re also among the least productive. By massed practice we mean the single-minded, rapid-fire repetition of something you’re trying to burn into memory, the ‘practice-practice-practice’ of conventional wisdom. Cramming for exams is an example. Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.”[3]
Desirable difficulties shown to increase learning – that you can apply to your learning about decision tools and when making a big decision – include: [5]
Pre-testing, starting by attempting to answer questions about the topic even before you begin learning about the topic. An analysis of studies about the value of pre-testing published in Nature found that “…taking a test before being exposed to learning content enhances retention compared with no retrieval practice.” In one study, “[The] results indicated that the harder the pre-tested questions, the larger the improvement on retention. Even when the rate of success obtained in the pre-test was very low…learning with a pre-test was better than just studying twice the content.”[6] [7]
Spaced practice or spaced learning. University of California San Diego psychologist S. C. Pan wrote, “The benefit of distributing learning over time is commonly known as the spacing effect. This effect has been demonstrated in over 200 research studies from over a century of research.[8] Generally speaking, multiple practice sessions over time results in better long-term memory than a single practice session of equivalent duration or an equivalent number of repetitions.”[9] Essentially, don’t cram in all the learning at once. Doing so reduces future recall. Instead, space it out over time.
Retrieving and recalling information or a skill previously studied. Psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis explained, “…retrieval practice…enhances long-term retention of information by slowing the rate of forgetting.”[10] A form of retrieval practice is testing yourself frequently. Take advantage of the testing effect, in which long-term memory is often increased when some of the learning period is devoted to retrieving the to-be-remembered information.[10] [11]
Interleaving, mixing up learning topics instead of focusing on just one thing at a time. Psychologist Rick Bryck advocated “alternating between types of information — whether it be subject areas, topics, or problem types” rather than “presenting them in an isolated fashion (i.e., ‘blocking’), which is the intuitive and much more common approach.” While interleaving “might appear counterintuitive, [but] examples abound of better performance with interleaving solved and unsolved problems.”[12]
Variation, introducing a topic in different ways, from different perspectives, or in different contexts. For example, addressing a problem that involves the topic, then reading a story about the topic. Also, changing the setting in which you are learning – your desk, the library, etc. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork wrote, “a change of contextual cues can make the retrieval of information studied earlier more involved and difficult, such spacing and contextual variation will also make the act of retrieval (provided it succeeds) more potent in fostering the subsequent retrieval of that information.”[13]
Upping the ante
The term “desirable difficulties” has rattled around my head ever since I wrote about it. The more I think about it, the more I like it. It reminds me of how I have upped the ante just for the sake of doing so, for the experience and improvement, in simple undertakings and in those so much more challenging. Here are several examples:
In decades past I had apple and pear trees, whose fruit wound up on my lawn, usually damaged by squirrels and birds. My game was to toss the damaged fruit into a trash can or compost bin, progressively getting farther away from the target and seeing how far, high, hard, and twisty I could throw the fruit and score by hitting the target. While this was not an efficient way to clean up my lawn, the increasing difficulty and gamification of the task provided great entertainment and satisfaction.
When I reached my 70th year, I was seeking a way to memorialize the milestone that would make an emphatic statement about age being in many ways an artificial limit. What I wound up doing was to run seven marathons that year. Crazy, perhaps. But imposing the “desirable difficulties” on myself by committing in advance to running seven marathon races and then actually doing so resulted in an abundance of mental, social, and physical benefits.
I had a big job for one of the biggest banks. But I was frustrated that our CEO and Board Chair were at odds and necessary change was not occurring at a fast enough rate. I could have continued to collect my big pay check, but instead I walked away from that job and over the next year and a half I wrote a business plan for a new magazine, raised three quarters of a million dollars from nearly 40 investors, founded a company, recruited a staff, engaged vendors and suppliers, launched a marketing campaign, enlisted advertisers, and brought my magazine vision to life. Now that was difficult! But the learnings were priceless and have benefited me immensely thereafter.
Here’s where thinking about “desirable difficulties” gets interesting, at least to me. As a strategist, it’s my job to help organizations and their leaders attain greatness. That is, to become the best they can be in delivering on their mission and producing benefits for stakeholders.
Too often I see organizations and leaders take the easy road, the worn path, the usual course, going with the flow. The organizations and leaders I work with should not expect me to endorse that approach to business (or life). There is a direct line between difficulty and achievement, whether for athletes or business people. The easy road is almost never that direct line (ignoring the element of luck).
Take the hard road
When I encourage my clients to strive for great success, to achieve something big and meaningful, I am beckoning them to up the ante, to create “strategic difficulty.” In my blog post The hardest thing, I define strategic difficulty as follows:
Strategy is about direction and destination. It is the way to the vision. It is intended to marshal the organization's resources and energies to pull it to a new, better place.
Let's postulate a law of strategic difficulty, which has three parts:
(1) The greater the differential between the current course of the organization and the envisioned future for the organization,
(2) the more entrenched the organization is in its current vision and direction, and,
(3) the fewer resources the organization has that will help it move to the new vision...
...the more profound the strategies need to be and the more difficult the strategies will be to implement to get the organization to the vision.
More simply, strategic difficulty is determined by the amount of difference between the new vision and the old, the degree to which the organization continues to "own" the old vision and the strategies it had been pursuing to reach it, and the resources it can commit to reach the new vision.
Consider “the learning organization”
MIT Professor Peter Senge coined the term “the learning organization” and wrote about it in his best seller, The Fifth Discipline. He defined learning organizations as “…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together. “
Consider what can emerge when Senge’s “learning organization” concept is melded with the learning benefits produced by “desirable difficulties.” This potent combination suggests that organizations with people who are fully enlisted in overcoming the strategic difficulties of producing fundamental change - rather than just pecking away at incremental change - are more likely to learn and attain great success.
My counsel? Don’t avoid the hard road, whether you are an individual or an organization. You will learn as you go and up your odds of getting to a better place.
Endnotes
[1] Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. 8th edn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
[2] Bjork, Robert & Bjork, Elizabeth. (2020). Desirable Difficulties in Theory and Practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. 9. 475-479. 10.1016/j.jarmac.2020.09.003.
[3] Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L. III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
[4] https://sites.edb.utexas.edu/slam/70-2/
[5] Latimier, A., Riegert, A., Peyre, H., Ly, S. T., Casati, R., & Ramus, F. (2019). Does pre-testing promote better retention than post-testing?. NPJ science of learning, 4, 15. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-019-0053-1
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-019-0053-1
[7] Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354.
[8] https://psychology.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-program/undergraduate-resources/academic-writing-resources/effective-studying/spaced-practice.html
[9] Roediger, H. L., 3rd, & McDermott, K. B. (2018). Remembering What We Learn. Cerebrum: the Dana forum on brain science, 2018, cer-08-18.
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect
[11] Goldstein, E. Bruce (2010-06-21). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience. Cengage Learning. p. 231.
[12] https://www.landmark.edu/research-training/blog/making-learning-stick-research-on-interleaving
[13] Bjork, Robert & Bjork, Elizabeth. (2019). Forgetting as the friend of learning: implications for teaching and self-regulated learning. Advances in physiology education. 43. 164-167. 10.1152/advan.00001.2019. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00001.
