Part four of the TrivesLiv™ series
I used to know the phone numbers of the people I called most. No notebook, no sticky notes, no scraps of paper. My fingers just knew the way across the keypad.
Today I couldn’t tell you most of them. I simply say, “Hey Google, call my wife,” or tap a picture, and a few seconds later we’re connected.
I don’t have to remember the numbers. My phone remembers for me.
In many ways, that’s a gift. I use these tools every week, and I’m grateful for them. But here’s a question I’ve been thinking about: What happens when we stop carrying something within because it’s so easy to find somewhere else?
What We Hand Off
Two recent Harvard Business Review articles have me wondering what we gain, and what we might quietly lose as access – disguised as learning – gets easier.
In one, Esther Kang describes experiments in which people who connected with others before learning something new remembered less of the material, but more about who knew whom. Our minds adapt. When we know where to find something, we may stop carrying it ourselves.
In another, Lynda Gratton names what we might lose when AI makes learning faster and easier: the struggle that builds mastery, the quiet that makes room for reflection, and the lived experiences that shape how we understand ourselves and one another.
Technology isn’t bad in and of itself. What I’m asking myself is whether they’re deepening my learning or helping me skip past it.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to: What am I carrying within, and what have I handed off?
For me, that goes deeper than remembering facts. It’s the difference between having information at my fingertips and letting learning shape how I see, decide, and act.
Learning That Takes Root
In the first post of this series, I shared a Danish phrase that captured my attention: “What was lost outwardly must be won inwardly”.
That phrase grew out of a hard season in Denmark’s history. Around the same time, the ideas of pastor and poet N.F.S. Grundtvig were spreading across the country. He believed learning belonged to everyone, and that it happened through conversation, story, and song, not only in classrooms or among scholars. For Grundtvig, real learning took root in a person, like a tree in good soil.
Some knowledge can stay on the shelf. But when the meeting turns tense, when a team member is not themself, or when the plan runs into a wall, you can’t search your way to good judgment. You draw from what has grown in you.
I learned this early in my leadership journey. I inherited a long-time team member everyone regarded as a high performer. One day she was showing me how to pull a report from our system. Click here, then here, then here, and there it was.
I asked her to explain what each step did so I could do it if I needed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just know it generates the report people want, and I know who to call if you need something different.”
She could produce the result. She just didn’t know how the process worked or what the numbers meant.
More recently, I was coaching a leader who was exploring their strengths. They knew right where to find their CliftonStrengths report. But when I asked them to share their strengths and how they show up, or how they might use them, they kept reaching for the page.
The information was there. It just hadn’t yet become part of how they understood and lived out their leadership. Memorizing the report was never the point. The intent was to develop self awareness and to start noticing the opportunities to leverage their strengths in everyday decisions, relationships, and challenges, until the learning became their own.
Both stories remind me that access and understanding are two different things, and we need both. Good systems and resources matter. So does the judgment to know what to do with them.
Learning also expands our story. It helps us see possibilities we might have missed and grow toward the future we hope for. And our hopes, in turn, give direction to what we choose to learn.
Four Ways to Keep Learning
So what does it look like to keep learning when answers arrive instantly? Here are four practices I’m still working on myself.
1. Stay with the struggle a little longer.
Before you ask a tool or an expert, wrestle with the question yourself. Write down what you think. Notice what you already know and what you’re still trying to understand. A little struggle gives your own thinking room to show up before you reach for an answer and to ask a better question.
2. Learn out loud.
Grundtvig had a phrase for this: the living word. Explain what you’ve learned to someone else. Apply it, talk about it, debate it, teach it. Putting an idea into your own words shows you what you understand and where your thinking still needs to grow. Learning gets richer when it moves out of our heads and into conversation.
3. Protect the quiet.
Make room for unhurried reflection. Take a walk. Write in a journal. Give yourself a few minutes before opening the inbox.
I usually listen to a book, music, or a podcast when I work out. One day this fall, I forgot my earbuds. As I walked the trail, the sounds around me gave my mind room to wander. Ideas flowed to the surface about things I’d been wrestling with. Most days now, when I’m outdoors, I leave the earbuds behind.
Sometimes we need more input. Other times, we need space to make sense of what we’ve already taken in.
4. Choose your learning.
Our tools are always suggesting the next thing to read, watch, or click. Pay attention to what you’re genuinely curious about and what the leadership moment is asking of you, and choose from there. How does it tie to your story and continue to fuel hope? Notice how you learn best, too. The fastest route to information isn’t always the one that helps it sink in.
For Leaders and Organizations
If you lead a team, here’s a question to wrestle with together:
What do our people need to be able to look up, and what do they need to carry within?
Policies, procedures, and data can live in a system. But values, judgment, empathy, and the story of why your organization exists can’t live only in a shared drive. They grow through conversation, practice, and people teaching one another.
When people understand the principles behind a process, they can exercise judgment when circumstances change. When they know only the steps, they may repeat what worked yesterday without recognizing what today requires.
A few simple practices can help:
- Invite team members to teach back what they learned at a training or conference.
- In meetings, ask “What are you noticing?” before “What’s the answer?”
- Let newer staff work through real problems alongside a mentor rather than simply handing them a finished template.
- Tell your mission story often, and invite others to tell it, too.
In my systems-change work, I often see organizations invest heavily in access to information and far less in the places where understanding forms: conversation, reflection, and shared practices.
These are the places where people make meaning together and build wise leadership. They’re also how culture gets handed down, rather than simply handed off.
How It Fits Together
Knowing your story shows you where you’ve been. Fueling hope points you toward where you’re going. Learning is how you grow into that future.
The story is still being written. Learning is how we keep holding the pen.
Questions for Reflection
- What have you stopped carrying within because it’s easy to look up? Is any of it something you need to understand more deeply?
- When did you last stay with a difficult question long enough to learn something new about yourself, others, or the situation?
- What’s one thing you’ve learned that you could pass along to someone this week?
Next in the TrivesLiv™ series: Do What Matters.
