Still Learning

How Curiosity Keeps Us Human in an Uncertain World

For twenty-five years, nearly everything I’ve done has come back to learning in one form or another. I’ve made films and television, designed workshops and digital interactions, facilitated conversations, and spent time with people inside organisations who were trying to change something, explain something, or work out what they actually thought.

Over those years I became interested in what happens when we stop thinking of learning as something delivered to us at school, on a course or in a training room, and start choosing it for ourselves in every part of our lives.

Still Learning is a book about curiosity and uncertainty. It’s about asking questions, listening properly to people - but also to a book, a podcast or an argument you don’t agree with - reconsidering what you assumed, and exploring new possibilities.

Curiosity is something you can practise. It means thinking for yourself, staying open to other people and being willing to change your mind. Almost anything we want to know is now only a click or a prompt away. The danger is that we mistake information for understanding, and easy answers for learning. 

The idea for the book came from observing, across very different situations, what actually works: coaching and drawing out someone’s motivation, project-based, historical and scientific inquiry, and change programmes that engage people rather than announce at them. All of these learning experiences draw on the same five skills, I call ALIVE: 

Ask. Listen. Interpret. Validate. Explore.

You can practise them separately, in the way you might practise different skills in tennis, but in play they work seamlessly together.

The book is personal and anecdotal - don’t expect academic studies. I share times I learned too late. The film school interview where I brought every question back to the beard I’d recently grown. My inability to play the piano, and how that changed my relationship with music. What learning to drive taught me beyond clutch control: that my instinct is to hesitate when the road is actually clear. I also write about imposter syndrome and how I manage it, by sharing what I am still learning.

Inevitably it is, like me, a work in progress. Finished, obviously, or I wouldn’t be publishing it, but a marker in the sand rather than my complete thinking.

For as long as any of us are alive, we are still learning. The book simply asks you to do it on purpose.

​You can buy Still Learning here, or ask for it wherever you usually buy your books.