You remain relevant as a worker if you excel at the skills that smart machines cannot do well. These skills include creativity, imagination, critical thinking and decision-making in conditions of ambiguity.

In this book summary of Hyper-Learning, business professor Edward D. Hess prescribes a holistic approach to lifelong learning that will enable you to develop and hone the skills that set humans apart.

Content Summary

Recommendation
Take-Aways
Summary
About the author
Genres
Table of Contents
Overview
Review/Endorsements/Praise/Award
Video and Podcast

Recommendation

Quickening disruption is inevitable as AI and machines invade work that people once routinely performed, writes business professor Edward D. Hess. To help workers deal with this development, Hess prescribes lifelong learning, unlearning and relearning focused on creativity, collaboration and critical thinking – which people still do better than machines. His approach to learning is holistic, marrying mind, body and spirit – and it’s based on hundreds of journal articles, books and 17 years of teaching experience. Hess also offers numerous thought experiments, assessments and journaling exercises.

Take-Aways

• Hyper-learning demands continual learning, unlearning and relearning.
• Humans evolved to connect, cooperate and learn throughout their lives.
• Learning requires a quiet ego and safe environment.
• Inner peace facilitates optimal learning.
• A learning mind-set frees you from the fear of making mistakes.
• Make learning stick through behavioral change.
• Hyper-learning demands different ways of working.
• Promote trust, collaboration and communication within your team.

Summary

Hyper-learning demands continual learning, unlearning and relearning.

To remain essential, workers must focus on the skills and abilities that machines perform poorly. These include soft skills such as critical thinking, improvisation, creativity, problem-solving, empathy and collaboration. As machines grow increasingly more capable, workers must stay a step ahead through continuous, focused learning and unlearning: “hyper-learning.”

“The opportunity exists for all of us to continually rewire our brains, update our mental models and improve our thinking.”

At present, humans outperform technologies in tasks requiring creativity, imagination, critical thinking and decision-making in conditions of ambiguity. Building these skills requires a mind and body approach combining physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological and social health.

Humans evolved to connect, cooperate and learn throughout their lives.

You must change and reinvent yourself at an unprecedented pace today, and do so many times in your lifetime. Dispense with the notion that you learn for the first one-third of your life and can forget about learning thereafter. Beware complacency. Continually question what you think you know, and connect with others to gain different perspectives, thoughts and ideas.

“All learning occurs in conversations with yourself (deep reflection) or with others.” (psychology professor Lyle Bourne, Jr.)

Open-mindedness, curiosity, focused listening and challenging your beliefs don’t come easily. Your brain naturally seeks to conserve energy and to protect your ego. Cognitive laziness and many blind spots caused by biases create barriers to hyper-learning. This renders you – like everyone else – a “sub-optimal learner.” To optimize, you need other people to help you recognize and address your biases and overcome your cognitive resistance.

Learning requires a quiet ego and safe environment.

When listening, don’t think about how to reply or judge what you hear. Seek only to learn and understand. Pay deep attention. Hyper-learning needs a relaxed ego and a curious mind that remains open to new ideas. Set aside competition and self-promotion to engage in collaboration and experimentation.

“Collective flow reflects a team becoming one – an emotionally integrated group of people devoid of fear and self-centeredness, totally engrossed in the common task.”

Hyper-learning demands a psychologically safe and positive workplace that invites ideas from all. Everyone should feel safe to bring their authentic, whole selves to work, and caring teams must rally around a shared purpose and values. Command-and-control hierarchies – which impede or even forbid crucial openness, creativity and innovation – must give way to purpose, trust and strong relationships. These conditions often lead to “collective flow”: When team members think and collaborate almost as one person, losing their fears as barriers evaporate, their thinking crosses borders and performance soars.

Inner peace facilitates optimal learning.

Get your mind and body to a positive place that inspires meaningful conversations and learning. Inner peace comes from a quiet mind, body, ego and a positive emotional state; this peace forms the core of hyper-learning. Inner peace allows you to hear opposing ideas, build trust and see opportunity. With effort and practice, you can gain mastery over your mind and body. Prevent your mind from wandering by taking deep breaths and by monitoring your ego and emotions.

“Inner peace comprises four key elements: a quiet ego, a quiet mind, a quiet body and a positive emotional state.”

Don’t conflate your ideas or beliefs with your identity. Forge your identity around how well you listen, think, collaborate and learn. This helps you avoid reacting to triggers; you won’t worry about who likes you, care about sounding smart or become defensive when others disagree with you.

Your mind and body aren’t separate; they influence each other. Quiet your mind and ego by practicing mindfulness meditation and appreciating and extending positive thoughts to others. Slow down, smile more, be kind, stay humble and don’t approach life or conversations as competitions.

Listen to your body to recognize whether you feel tight or relaxed, anxious or open. Remain conscious of your body language as it sends positive or negative signals during conversations. Subconsciously and imperfectly, your brain works constantly by recognizing – or inventing – patterns and making predictions to keep you safe. You can change your brain throughout your life.

“Mindfulness meditation is actually inner peace superfood.”

To make new neural connections – to learn, in other words – you must prevent your mind from wandering and from making assumptions or coming to conclusions based on fast, subconscious thinking. In addition to mindfulness meditation, go for a walk in nature, read or listen to a calming podcast to aid this process. These activities can take your brain off automatic mode, so it can focus, and you can think critically about new ideas or evaluate emotions your brain may conjure that can impede new learning and the creation of new neural pathways. Keep a journal to record your state of mind and body and to learn what activities, places, tasks and communities put you in a quiet, positive place.

A learning mind-set frees you from the fear of making mistakes.

No one can force you to learn. You need to want to adopt a hyper-learning mind-set, love it and pursue learning out of passion. Make learning personally meaningful by adopting a growth mind-set that opens you to learning and frees you from fear of mistakes, being wrong or feeling stupid. Shed those fears to create, consider opposing ideas, acknowledge what you don’t know, imagine and think critically – the very abilities you need to learn and remain essential in the workplace. These are also the very skills that no machine can develop.

“We underestimate the magnitude of our ignorance, and we have been educated to avoid making mistakes, which means we tend not to take risks in exploring what is new or different.”

Consider the teachings of some of history’s wisest people, such as Aristotle, Plato and Einstein. Plato believed you should be careful not to be swept up in constant stream of thoughts that dominate your day. He, and other towering philosophers, discussed the importance of mindfulness, curiosity, imagination and kindness. They advocated living the Golden Rule, adaptability, constant reading and continuous learning as the foundations of a successful life.

What resonates most with you? To forge a hyper-learning mind-set, list 10 to 15 ideas, perceptions or thoughts in your journal that you discovered during your learning. Look for themes and compare the ideas you highlighted with the strengths you have and those you seek to develop.

Make learning stick through behavioral change.

Put hyper-learning into practice through your behaviors. Think about how you learn. For example, do you learn by asking questions, remaining open, staying humble or keeping focused? Do you prefer quieting the ego, exploring, collaborating, testing assumptions or examining data and evidence?
In your journal, list seven behaviors you find critical to your own learning. Then ponder the sub-behaviors that drive each of your seven behaviors. For example, if you chose “collaboration,” you might write “active listening” beneath. If “courage” appears on your list, add “challenging the status quo,” and/or “having difficult conversations.”

“Behavior change requires the utmost self-discipline and daily effort and vigilance.”

List the behaviors required to listen actively or others that impair active listening. This exercise results in a list of metrics against which to measure your progress. Reflect on your list and consider how it all comes together to encourage hyper-learning.

Take Hess’s Hyper-Learning Mini-Diagnostic at: https://www.edhess.org/blog/hyper-learning-mini-diagnostic. Analyze your results per the site instructions to gain further insight into your mind-set and areas in which you might improve. Re-create your story around your identity and what you must do to become a hyper-learner. Consider your fears and concerns and build your own business case for investing the time change demands. Choose one of your seven key behaviors – with its sub-behaviors – and begin working on it. Enlist a friend to keep you on track, measure your progress and ask experts for advice.

Hyper-learning demands different ways of working.

Even if you and the people on your team adopt the inner peace mind-set and behaviors necessary for hyper-learning, you all will not achieve optimal learning unless your work environment nurtures it. Unfortunately, most organizations still maintain outdated management practices based on fear and hierarchies. Leaders pretend to know it all, control and micromanage. Such environments stifle hyper-learning. Firms must instead emphasize collaboration, psychological safety, shared authority, autonomy, diversity, caring, trust, emotional intelligence and purpose.

“Overbearing, all-knowing, elitist leaders will be severely challenged under the New Way of Working.”

Seek to create a work environment that is a humanistic, “idea meritocracy” to which people bring their whole selves, engage with others warmly and have confidence in their leaders’ emotional intelligence. Employees must believe in their leaders’ commitment to enable, engage, support and serve them. Design people’s work in accordance with their strengths. Develop learning plans for everyone and create a safe environment for even the most junior people to share ideas, concerns and recommendations. Leverage the pillars of human motivation: autonomy, relatedness and mastery. Know your people’s strengths, weaknesses and aspirations. Don’t fear uncertainty and complexity; by example, encourage your team to embrace them.

Promote trust, collaboration and communication within your team.

People need connections at work to find meaning and thrive. Make work about joy, not dread. People can’t learn alone, and their best thinking occurs with others. Small, close and diverse teams of people who care about each other and who share a common purpose, values and goals gain from each other’s candor, openness, mutual respect and unique perspectives. They increase their abilities through trust and a collegial environment.

Positivity boosts people physically and mentally through the release of oxytocin, which engenders feelings of warmth and deeper connections – which in turn generate a virtuous cycle by triggering the release of more oxytocin. This cycle causes feelings of competitiveness to morph into feelings of safety, caring and the pursuit of mutual success.

In meetings, smile, say positive things and ask questions about people’s weekends, kids, travels and activities. Consider what makes you care about other people and what they do that makes you feel they care for you. Leverage diversity and ensure your team is at least 50% female, because women prove more proficient at collaboration and collegiality than men.

“High-performance teams have a specific purpose that every team member believes in and is committed to achieving.”

As the digital age accelerates, teams must coalesce, trust and collaborate. Many teams cannot, which impairs their effectiveness. Consider the best teams you’ve been a part of. What made them great? How did people behave and how did you feel? How can you replicate those activities and feelings within your teams?
Conversations drive connections and connections bring meaning. Help people build the necessary skills for meaningful conversations. Respect each team member’s uniqueness and perspective. Discourage telling; encourage asking. Meaningful and productive conversations happen in teams whose members ask: What’s missing? What alternatives exist? What data do we need? Which experiments should we run? Who else should we consult? What do you think? How do you feel?

About the author

Edward D. Hess is an American academic and author. For more than twenty years, he was senior executive at Warburg Paribas Becker, Boettcher & Company, the Robert M. Bass Group, and Arthur Andersen. Today, he teaches at the Darden Business School at the University of Virginia.

Edward D. Hess is Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. He is the author of 13 books, including Humility Is the New Smart, Learn or Die and Smart Growth.

Edward D. Hess is a professor of business administration and Batten Faculty Fellow at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. His professional experience includes twenty years as a business executive and eighteen years in academia. His research and thirteen books have a common theme: high individual and organizational performance. His work has been featured in over 400 global media outlets.

Edward D. Hess | Website
Edward D. Hess | YouTube
Edward D. Hess | Twitter @HessEdward

Genres

Education, Career Success, Leadership, Self Help, Psychology, Business Leadership Training, Workplace Behavior

Table of Contents

PART 1

Hyper-Learning Requires A New Way Of Being
Chapter 1: Achieving Inner Peace
Chapter 2: Adopting a Hyper-Learning Mindset
Chapter 3: Behaving like a Hyper-Learner
Chapter 4: The Susan Sweeney Personal Transformation Story
Chapter 5: The Marvin Riley Personal Transformation Story

PART 2

Hyper-Learning Requires A New Way Of Working
Chapter 6: Humanizing the Workplace
Chapter 7: Creating Caring, Trusting Teams
Chapter 8: Having High- Quality, Making- Meaning Conversations
Chapter 9: EnPro Industries: Enabling the Full Release of Human Possibility
Chapter 10: Hyper-Learning Practices
Chapter 11: The Adam Hansen Personal Transformation Journey

Overview

The Digital Age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can’t.

Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become Hyper-Learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change. To do that, we have to overcome our reflexive ways of being: seeking confirmation of what we believe, emotionally defending our beliefs and our ego, and seeking cohesiveness of our mental models.

Hyper-Learning requires a new way of being and a radical new way of working. In Part 1 of this how-to book, Hess takes a practical workbook approach and helps readers create their Hyper-Learning Mindset, choose and embrace their needed Hyper-Learning Behaviors, and adopt their daily Hyper-Learning Practices. In Part 2, Hess focuses on how to humanize the workplace to optimize Hyper-Learning. Featuring case studies of three business leaders and two public companies, this book shows how to harness the power of human emotions, choices, and behaviors to enable the highest levels of human cognitive, emotional, and behavioral performance–individually and organizationally.

Review/Endorsements/Praise/Award

“Ed Hess’s Hyper-Learning is uniquely practical and is the essential starting point for charting new ways of thinking, living, working, leading, and being fulfilled in our new world.” – Gary Roughead, Admiral, US Navy (retired) former Chief of Naval Operations

“If Inner Peace, Otherness, and Hyper-learning do not seem to you to be key Digital Age skills, then you’re in for a big surprise. Ed Hess takes you on a journey designed to enable you to continually adapt to an ever-changing world where jobs will be automated at a dizzying rate. Meaningful work and a meaningful life will be intimately tied to your developing the capacity to practice a ‘new way of being’ that enables you to excel at doing the types of work that technology won’t be able to do well. Hyper-Learning is a wonderful practical guide to help you stay relevant in the Digital Age workplace.” – Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School, and author of The Fearless Organization

“Hyper-Learning is a masterpiece ‘how-to’ and ‘why-to’ book that takes us on an instructional journey to a future where learning must change in profound ways because of advancing technologies. This book helps readers reflect deeply about feelings, mindsets, and behaviors to discover things about themselves in a way that sticks. The powerful goal of ‘thinking behaviorally’ is a great way to describe this book, which also helps leadership move from ‘command and control’ to ‘inspire and support.’” – Gary S. Calabrese, PhD, Senior Vice President and Director, Corning Global Research, Corning Incorporated

“The future will require us to be more human, to continuously reinvent ourselves, and to excel at doing the things that technology cannot do well. Ed Hess gives us practical tools, based on learning science, to learn a ‘New Way of Being’ and a ‘New Way of Working’ that will enable human adaptation and life-long learning in the Digital Age. We all will need to excel at: knowing how to learn, unlearn and relearn; how to effectively collaborate; and how to manage ourselves in order to do our best work and to live a meaningful life. The workbook ‘learn by doing’ approach in this book is a winner!” – Alex Hernandez, Dean, University of Virginia School of Continuing and Professional Studies

“Hyper-Learning is the ‘how-to’ road map for leading in the Digital Age. Enhancing one’s learning agility is the only way to thrive in a world of ever accelerating change.” – Fernando Mercé, former CEO and President, Nestlé Waters North America

“Hyper-Learning offers readers fresh insights into how to learn, behave, and thrive in an era of unprecedented digital challenge and change. Professor Hess—through insightful commentary, rich research, and illustrative case studies—shows us how we can become better, fuller versions of ourselves and tells us why it is imperative that we do so. Hyper-Learning is psychologically astute, refreshingly pragmatic, and designed to help us move forward in a new and uncharted era.” – Ming-Jer Chen, former President, Academy of Management, and Leslie E. Grayson Professor of Business Administration, Darden School of Business

“Hyper-Learning is a unique book. Reading it is like having a candid conversation with a wise close friend who cares deeply about you and about your happiness and success. It invites you on a journey that is actionable and science-based that can increase the probability that you will have continuous meaningful work in the Digital Age because you have learned how to be a hyper-learner. And, as importantly, it illuminates clearly how to build meaningful human relationships. Its workbook format will engage your mind and your heart. Enjoy!” – Sean Ryan, President, School Group, McGraw-Hill

“Ed Hess is prescient in identifying a challenge that all of us will encounter—the need to become hyper-learners—that is, to become more agile, quick, and efficient in our ability to learn and adapt to the future. His workshop-based book will engage you deeply in a hyper-learning experience that will grab you, enlarge you, and change you in ways that will help you become more like your best self.” – Kim Cameron, William Russell Kelly Professor of Management and Organizations, Ross School of Business, and Professor of Higher Education, School of Education, University of Michigan

“A must-read! Digital technology touches all aspects of life, and hyper-learning will be a major factor in everyone’s well-being and success.” – Chris Baer, former Vice President, Leadership Development, Marriott International

“Hyper-Learningis a wonderfully comprehensive and enlightening book. For many of us, the pace of the technological revolution seems dizzying, dazzling, and hell-bent on destroying the jobs and professions that define us. Like many others worried by this seismic change, I’ve wondered how any of us can possibly compete with smart machines in the long run? In Hyper-Learning, Ed Hess offers a distinctively human strategy and a science-based path to enduring relevance through self-reflection, self-development, and the practices that are required for learning faster and transforming our abilities at the speed of change. Ed’s work demonstrates that we must truly love learning to become hyper-learners and that we must also have the emotional peace and humility required to learn from others and to unlearn some of our ideas as readily as we learn new ones.” – Peter Rodriguez, Dean and Professor, Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University

“Hyper-Learning shows us how to stay relevant in the Digital Age. It is a field guide for navigating the new ways of being, thinking, and behaving essential for teaching us to do what machines can’t. Synthesizing a vast swath of social science research, its advice covers every facet of the journey, from the intensely personal to strategies for humanizing the workplace. Along the way, its vivid examples and hands-on workshops provide us the opportunity to begin our journey, which our future depends upon.” – Jeanne Liedtka, United Technologies Corporation Professor of Business Administration, Darden School of Business

“The book offers a comprehensive and stimulating path to hyper-learning, capabilities for continuous learning at the speed of change. A must-read for anyone who wants to thrive in volatile and uncertain times.” – Maryam Alavi, PhD, Dean and Stephen P. Zelnak Jr. Chair and Professor, Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology

“Once again, Ed Hess is one step ahead, redefining the way we look at our technology-driven world that is evolving faster than our previous models have prepared us to handle. These technological advances are like an accelerating train that we will never be able to catch if we don’t change and adapt. Instead of a dystopian view, Ed provides a humanistic and learning-centric framework for us to effectively develop the skills and behaviors that will be necessary to be successful leaders and build high functioning organizations. As the head of a sixth-generation family business looking to the future, I encourage other leaders to pay close attention to Ed’s wisdom and embrace the concept of Hyper-learning before it’s too late!” – Frank H Foster, Chairman, Hixon Properties, and founder of the Legacy Center at Graziadio Business School, Pepperdine University

“As an educational leader, I believe no book is more relevant to the times in which we are living than Ed Hess’ Hyper-Learning, and no workplace needs Hyper-Learning more than America’s school communities. Ed’s own self-described journey to find empathy, kindness, and warmth in his personal and professional life illuminates what it takes “to bring our Best Selves (our hearts or souls) to work every day in the pursuit of meaningful work that creates value for others” (p. 183). Imagine how different our communities and workforce would be if all the high school seniors in America graduated with Hyper-Learning behaviors.” – Dr. Pam Moran, Executive Director, Virginia School Consortium for Learning, and retired Superintendent, Albemarle County Public Schools, Virginia

Video and Podcast

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