The following is a short excerpt from a debrief between two fighter pilots (Lemoine 2019). Technical jargon aside, see if you notice what makes this conversation special:

The debrief continues in this way for 24 minutes and 30 seconds. They review every moment of the short flight point by point from brief to takeoff to landing. Their tone throughout is calm and matter-of-fact. What makes this debrief special? Nothing, actually. Commenting on the debrief, Lemoine says:

In the world of aviation, debriefs are a mandatory wrap-up to every flight. In the world of leadership, not so much. And yet we found that the great managers we studied acted a lot like seasoned pilots. Rather than solving a challenge, forgetting it, and moving on, they Pause and mine the experience for new learning. We call this BU “Extract.”

To visualize how Extracting works, let's briefly turn our leader lab into a chemistry lab. Chemical extraction is a separation process, isolating one substance from a matrix of components. Without extraction, we'd never have tea from leaves, vanilla extract from beans, or vodka from potatoes.

In the same way, there are “molecules” of insight floating around every experience we have. These rich lessons can be invisible on the surface. In fact, many of them can even look like moments of failure and frustration, experiences we'd much rather forget than turn to for personal development. But when you deliberately Extract the learning, you can uncover countless lessons just waiting to be learned.

Of all the BUs we teach managers in our workshops at LifeLabs Learning, this one gets the most raised eyebrows. Most people assume that learning happens when we find out about new concepts or apply the concepts firsthand. These forms of learning are all important, but a little-known truth about the brain is that people learn best when they reflect. In fact, reflecting can even lead to more rapid skill-building than additional practice (Karpicke 2012). According to the famous education reformer John Dewey, reflection should include a look back at actions and emotions and ideally done together with others (Rodgers 2002).

Many of the great managers we studied had an “after-action review” template of some kind for themselves and their teams. Many call it a retro or a debrief and several use the term “blameless post-mortem” (the key word being “blameless” to keep the focus on the situation rather than the person). Whatever the name, the most common components include:

1. What went well
2. What didn't go well
3. What we can do differently next time

Most managers admit that the first few team reviews are typically uncomfortable. The mood is tense and everyone is coiled tight and ready to spring with justifications for their actions. Once the ritual becomes familiar and team members realize that the focus is on learning, they relax into the process and start to enjoy it. The more predictable the cadence (for instance: after every project, at the end of every sprint, on the first Monday of every month), the more fluent the team becomes in Extracting the learning together and the more quickly they improve.

Aside from Extracting the learning as a team, several managers we interviewed mentioned that they encourage each team member to Extract individual learnings. Here are two examples:

“I like to make a big deal when something goes right. I try to shine a big flashlight on it and ask, ‘Hey, that was great what you did there! What made you do that? What was going through your mind? How are you going to remember to do it next time?’”

“We do a ‘year in review’ on people's anniversaries. It's a really nice tradition. You look back on the year and write down your accomplishments, lessons learned, relationships built. Sometimes, you don't realize how far you've come and how much you've changed until you look back at that starting line.”

Just about any conversation can be an opportunity to Extract the learning. Take a look at the following exchange and spot the Extraction opportunities Mia misses:

Again, Mia didn't do a bad job. This conversation was supportive and encouraging. Alas, it also allowed a learning opportunity to slip by. What would you have done differently to Extract the learning? Let's look at the Do-Over Mia decides to try:

Aside from helping others learn, perhaps most admirable of all is that great managers are constantly Extracting their own learning. Any time they do something new or collaborate with someone new, they Pause to Extract. They also Extract insights from others by “pulling” for feedback. In other words, they ask for feedback rather than waiting until someone decides to “push” it to them (stay tuned for more on how to do this well in Chapter 9).

Every day that passes can become an education for the day that follows. The more skilled the managers we studied were, the hungrier they seemed to be for feedback and the more willing they were to learn. Although this correlation between experience and humility surprised us, it turns out to be a fairly common phenomenon, dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger and Dunning 1999).

Source: Based on Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning. 1999. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, no. 6: 1121–1134.

Though the Dunning-Kruger effect has been challenged by some researchers, it rang true in our experience. The most confident and least curious managers we studied were usually also the least competent – a state known as “unconscious incompetence.” The more quickly people recognize the gap between their current skill level and their desired skill level, the more rapidly they're able to close that gap. Best of all, the more a leader models this learning mindset, the more likely it is to permeate throughout the team culture, resulting in faster learning, better results, and fewer coworkers trapped in that annoying overconfidence that comes from unconscious incompetence.

Following are several distinct Extraction varieties we've come across in our research:

This final Core BU is actually the most important one you can add to your manager toolkit. Extracting is like an accelerant for every other BU. Want to master all seven Core BUs 20 times faster than it would take you to learn through experience alone? After every one-on-one and meeting you have, ask the Extraction questions below. Within seven weeks, your brain will have a learning Extraction habit. This superpower is like having your very own Do-Over Button!

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In summary: Get more out of every experience by Extracting the learning and helping others do it too. Reflect on what worked well or could be better, pull for feedback, and demarcate learning. In retrospect, it's not odd that Extracting is one of the BUs that distinguish great managers from the average folks. Managers who regularly Extract just keep getting better faster. And look! It's time for your final BU Lab Report. If you've been completing these reports thus far, you've been Extracting all along. Well done, you. What do you want to Extract from this chapter?

MY LAB REPORT	Today's Date:
My takeaways:
I regularly Extract learnings:	1   2   3     4     5 6     7     8     9    10 (strongly disagree)(strongly agree)
Experiment idea bank:	If I've had a tough conversation, then I will Extract the learning. If someone does something well, then I will ask them how they did it. If my team has completed a project, then I will schedule a retrospective.
One small experiment I'll try to increase my score by 1 point:
Post-experiment Learning Extractions:

Bonus: Want to take your manager skills to the next level? Check out the bonus Inclusion Stations at leaderlab.lifelabslearning.com.