What happened to workings-out?
On curiosity, uncertainty and thinking out loud.
At school, the maths teacher would ask you to show your workings out. I wasn’t good at maths, but I understood that even a wrong answer could gain you marks if the person marking your work could see how you got there.
I've spent around twenty-five years working in learning. When I sat down to write a book about it I felt the pressure to prove I knew what I was talking about. I didn't want to write from the front of the room, handing down answers, because the honest position - the only one I actually had - is that I'm still forever working things out.
The longer you've been doing something, the more tempting it can be to hide the bit you don't understand. I notice it myself doing it sometimes in meetings. Someone says something I don't quite follow, and there's a calculation to be made: should I already know this? Do I ask? Maybe I'll just nod along for a bit and all will become clear. I'm especially not proud of the nodding.
A book forces you to turn anecdotes into lessons. I resisted up to a point, but there is an established form, and I didn’t want to frustrate the reader by taking them through a story only to shrug at the end or let the story kind of … peter out.
I have tried, at least, to make my workings-out visible before offering anything for the reader to try. Case studies often have conclusive endings, whereas what I’m interested in is all the stuff that happens before happy ever after: ideas that didn't work, assumptions that turned out to be wrong, even the realisation that I'd misunderstood the problem altogether. That’s what learning is - a series of adjustments as new information, other people and reality interfere with whatever you thought you knew at the beginning.
Technology complicates this. I can now write a prompt and receive, in seconds, something back. Often I read the response and think - yes, that sounds about right. AI is an incredible piece of technology, but I've caught myself having that reaction often enough to become suspicious of it. Sounds about right.
The answer might even lay out its reasoning, but I haven't done any of the working-out myself. I have to make do with something that sounds plausible over something that has been properly tested. To properly understand the answer, I still have to connect it to what I already know and work out whether I believe it.
I am not anti some easy answers. If I'm trying to find out which platform my train leaves from, I have no wish to explore my relationship with uncertainty.
Why did that conversation go badly? What am I missing here? Why am I so certain about this? What does the other person think is happening? Are we even solving the right problem? What should we try next?
Each of those questions starts when I thought I understood what was going on, but something happened that made me less sure. In theory that should make me curious, but it’s human nature to want to close the gap as quickly as possible and get back to the more comfortable feeling of knowing what's going on.
Over the years I've found five things that help me stay with the discomfort of uncertainty a little longer: Ask. Listen. Interpret. Validate. Explore.
Together they form ALIVE - a word that happily brings its own meaning. In the book I call it a framework - my editor pushed for that word, framework. I resisted it for a while. A framework sounds like something you follow instead of something you think. Steps you tick off and, having ticked them, feel you've done the work. That was my fear - that by naming the five things they might be seen as a hack, a way to skip the queue and miss out on all those lovely conversations. Really it's just a way to remember five things to try when you’re not sure what to do next. I wish I could say that having named them means I am brilliant at them but I still nod along in meetings more often than I should. I am getting better at catching myself, and know that "I don't understand this" is usually a much cheaper sentence than "I'm sorry, I got it wrong."
I have, however, lost pitches because a client wanted me to arrive with a ‘solution’ already worked out. But the right answer usually emerges once we’ve spent time together properly understanding the question, the audience and what they actually need. I'm most useful during the working-out: picking apart the brief, digging out the assumptions hiding underneath it, listening to what everyone actually thinks is going on. That's usually when the real problem shows up (GenAI makes it extraordinarily tempting to skip that part).
At school, showing my workings-out showed that I had tried to solve the problem - and where I went wrong, mostly: something another person could see, and help me with.
A lot of us seem to have got into the habit of rubbing the workings-out away. Thinking aloud can feel risky. It reveals the half-formed idea, and the questions you think you should already know the answer to. It admits you might change your mind.
It also gives somebody else something to work with. Learning is something best done together.