In 1992 I stood in front of midshipmen at Carnegie Mellon and had to explain things I had only ever done. Why a crew briefs. Why a checklist exists. Why a calm voice matters on the radio. Then I walked across campus to the business school and became the student again, and the lesson ran the other way. You do not really know what you know until you have to hand it to someone else.
Every idea I value reached me that way, through a chain of people. My job is to add one link and pass it on.
Rogers, Moore, then me.
Everett Rogers, a sociologist, began by studying how farmers adopted new seeds and methods. He went on to study how new ideas spread through whole societies. Geoffrey Moore carried the idea into technology. Then, in 1996, our investors brought Moore to Pittsburgh to teach their companies. He sat in a room and handed the curve to a founder who was trying to figure out why customers loved his product and still would not buy it. That founder was me. At WiseWire we used it to find our beachhead. It was Lycos.
Being handed an idea is not the same as owning it. Three years later, at Internet Venture Works, I never asked Moore’s question of myself. Our customers were visionaries. The shoppers we depended on were not, and they did not arrive in time. I had learned the curve at WiseWire. I should have applied it to myself. That is the story in Debrief Through the Curve.
I have been handing it on ever since. I lecture on diffusion theory, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan and Carnegie Mellon. When I draw the bell curve on a whiteboard, I am drawing something that passed through Rogers, then Moore, then me, before it reached that room. Some of the students will draw it for their own teams one day.
A chain that ran through me.
I heard “speed is life” on every mission, starting in flight school. I carried it to Lycos and said it at every management meeting in 1997 and 1998, and to Bob Davis, our CEO, so often it became a refrain. Engineers said it to each other late at night. Then Bob wrote a book and titled it Speed Is Life. A phrase from flight school ended up on the cover of a business book. That taught me how far an idea can travel through a culture when someone repeats it until it becomes true.
You learn what you teach.
Teaching forced me to say out loud what I had actually learned. Inside a company, lessons stay half-formed. They live in your instincts and your scar tissue. A room of people about to make the same mistakes forces you to turn instinct into language.
I did not fully understand many of my own lessons until I tried to teach them.
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
A 2014 study in Memory & Cognition points the same way. Students told they would have to teach a passage recalled more of it, and organized it better, than students told they would be tested. Nobody actually taught. Expecting to teach was enough.
Nobody owns the idea. Everybody who carries it makes it a little sharper.
Trace your chain of teachers.
- Pick one frameworkChoose one framework that changed how you work.
- Trace it backWrite down who taught it to you and who taught them, as far back as you can trace it.
- Check that you own itName one decision where you failed to apply it to yourself. That gap is what you have not learned yet.
- Teach it this monthTeach it to one person, in your own words, with your own story. Notice what you learn by teaching it.
Quick answers.
What does Rob Frasca mean by a chain of teachers?
Rob Frasca uses the phrase for the way an idea passes from teacher to teacher and gets sharper with each one. The adoption curve went from Everett Rogers to Geoffrey Moore to Rob, who learned it from Moore in Pittsburgh in 1996 and now teaches it at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan and Carnegie Mellon.
Why does teaching help you learn?
Rob Frasca says teaching forces you to turn instinct into language. He found he did not fully understand many of his own lessons until he tried to teach them, a pattern supported by a 2014 study in which students who expected to teach a passage recalled and organized it better.
Sources.
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter XII, Passing the Torch.
- Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675. Historical Society of Pennsylvania (modernized spelling). Source
- John F. Nestojko, Dung C. Bui, Nate Kornell and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, “Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages,” Memory & Cognition, 2014, as reported by Washington University in St. Louis. Source
- Bob Davis, Speed Is Life: Street Smart Lessons from the Front Lines of Business (Currency/Doubleday, 2001). Library catalog record. Source
- Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (Free Press, first edition 1962).
- Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm (HarperBusiness, 1991) and Inside the Tornado (HarperBusiness, 1995).