Every so often, I like to look back and reflect on what I’ve been learning. Outside of work, my main projects have been learning French and West Coast Swing.
And so, I am once again thinking about the zone of proximal development.
Let me explain with an example from West Coast.
One of the first patterns I learned was a very basic sugar push. The goals was to get the fundamentals right: Get the count, end up in the right place, and not run into my partner. Even with a partner who could lead flawlessly, I could only do that basic sugar push. No matter how much I wanted to look fancy, I could only do the basic step.
After six months I could do a credible sugar push, responding to my dance partner’s lead, and moving together with them.
To get there, I had to learn to a number of specific skills. My teacher didn’t introduce all these skills at once. She introduced them progressively. Each new skill built on an earlier skill. She demonstrated, explained, broke things down, gave feedback. After a year, I could add a few simple variations. Pretty fancy!
If your work involves introducing new practices or processes (Agile, anyone?), my journey with West Coast Swing points to an important idea: the zone of proximal development (ZPD).
The zone of proximal development is often depicted as three concentric circles.
The center circle represents tasks a person can accomplish independently. The outer circle represents tasks they are beyond current capabilities. They can’t do them even with assistance. Between the two is are tasks a person can do with some support. That can come from a teacher or consultant, a coach, a more capable peer, or from some other sort of scaffolding, such as guides, prompts, and the like.
Just like I couldn’t get from only knowing only the basics of WCS to looking smooth and confident, organizations usually can’t get from where they are now to some desired future without a lot of work and learning in between.
Grand leaps in capabilities are not a thing. Building capacity and capability over time is.
This is hard. It’s hard because people are impatient. People want results NOW. It is hard because when you know how to do something, you may forget that it is not second nature to everyone else. Its hard because it isn’t always easy to identify the intermediate skills people need.
But if we want to get to excellence, we have to travel the zone of proximal development.
By Esther Derby