Teaching Behaviors
Active teaching - where mentors accept productivity costs to improve learner capability - prevents costly mistakes before they happen.
Active teaching is expensive but prevents even more expensive failures. Organizations that rely on passive learning save mentorship costs but pay through mistakes, turnover, and lost knowledge.
Teaching is rare in nature - most species learn through observation and trial-and-error. Teaching requires: 1) Demonstrating behavior for learner's benefit (not personal benefit), 2) Modifying demonstration based on learner's progress, 3) Accepting cost (time, effort, risk) to improve learner's knowledge. Meerkats actively teach pups to hunt scorpions: Adults bring dead scorpions (safe) to young pups. As pups gain skill, adults bring injured scorpions (some risk). Finally, adults bring live scorpions (full risk). Each stage adjusted to pup's capability. This is teaching - adult accepts risk of pup being stung to improve pup's hunting skill.
Business Application of Teaching Behaviors
Active teaching - where mentors accept productivity costs to improve learner capability - prevents costly mistakes before they happen. The NYT spends $60M annually on knowledge transfer, protecting a $2B+ revenue stream. Passive learning creates the Jayson Blair scenario: errors published, credibility damaged, knowledge transfer gaps revealed.