Learning From People

A few years into running Majhi Group, I had a conversation with a VP of Sales who had just been let go five months into a role. He was calm about it, he had clearly already worked out what happened.

"The brief was wrong," he said. "Not because the CEO lied to me. Because nobody asked her the right questions."

He explained with a precision I had not encountered in any hiring framework I had read. The intake process had built the brief around outputs, what the incoming leader needed to deliver, without mapping the situation they were walking into. The team structure, the existing pipeline quality, the first real problem that needed solving. None of it was in the document. Every candidate had been assessed against criteria that described the ideal end state, not the actual starting point.

That conversation changed how I run intake permanently. I had been asking "What does your ideal candidate look like?", which produces a wish list of credentials. I switched to "Describe the situation this person is walking into." And then: "What does success look like after ninety days, not a year, but ninety days?" The ninety-day framing is deliberate. A year invites aspirations. Ninety days forces description of the ground level: the team, the gaps, the dynamics, the first real problem.

No book taught me to change that question. One conversation with a candidate who had experienced the cost of the wrong question did.

This is not an argument against books. It is an observation about where the most important learning actually happens.

What people know that books don't

Books are excellent at transferring codified knowledge, things that have been articulated, refined, and turned into text. They are poor at transferring tacit knowledge, things that experts know but have not fully articulated, or cannot fully articulate.

The difference matters.

Most of what makes an experienced executive good at their job is tacit. It is pattern recognition built from thousands of situations. It is judgment developed through failure and recovery. It is the ability to read a room, a market, a person, in ways that come from having read many rooms and many markets and many people.

None of that is in a book. It is in the person. And the only way to access it is through conversation, real conversation, where you are asking the right questions and listening to the answers more carefully than you are preparing your next question.

The question is the skill

The quality of what you learn from a person is almost entirely determined by the quality of the questions you ask.

This is a skill that is rarely taught and rarely developed deliberately. Most people treat conversation as exchange, I say something, you say something, we move forward. That is not learning from people. That is socializing.

Learning from people requires going into a conversation with genuine curiosity, with specific things you want to understand, and with the discipline to follow the thread when something interesting appears, even if it takes you away from your prepared questions.

It also requires the humility to ask questions that reveal your ignorance. The most useful questions are often the ones that feel embarrassing to ask. "How do you actually decide that?" "What do you do when that doesn't work?" "What would you have done differently if you knew then what you know now?"

These questions work because they require the other person to access the tacit knowledge rather than just rehearse the codified version. When you ask someone to explain their actual decision process rather than their official decision process, you almost always get something different, and the difference is where the learning is.

The most useful questions are often the ones that feel embarrassing to ask. These questions work because they require the other person to access the tacit knowledge rather than just rehearse the codified version. The difference is where the learning is.

What specific conversations taught me

I have run hundreds of executive searches. The thing that changed my practice most was not a book or a course or a framework. It was a conversation with a candidate who had failed in a role, a VP of Sales who lasted five months before parting ways with the company.

He explained, with more clarity than I had ever heard, what the intake process had gotten wrong. Not the company's fault and not his fault: a systematic failure of translation between what the CEO said she needed and what the role actually required. The brief had been built around the outputs she wanted, not the situation she had. Every candidate had been evaluated on the wrong criteria.

That single conversation changed how I run intake permanently. The old default question was "What does your ideal candidate look like?", which produces a wish list: prestigious background, specific industry experience, a set of credentials. None of those things describe the situation. I stopped asking that and started asking something specific: "Describe the situation this person is walking into. What is working? What is broken? What will they inherit? What does success look like after ninety days, not in a year, not on paper, but actually, in ninety days?"

The ninety-day framing is deliberate. A year is too abstract, it lets people describe ambitions rather than conditions. Ninety days forces them to describe the ground level: the team, the process gaps, the political dynamics, the real first problem that needs solving. That is the brief that produces a hire who fits.

A book could have told me to do this. No book did it as efficiently as that one conversation.

The types of people worth seeking out

Not every conversation is equally instructive. Three types of people are especially valuable.

The first: someone who has done something you haven't, and lived with the consequences long enough to understand them. Not just done the thing, lived with what it produced. The executive who built a team and watched some hires fail and had to work out why. Experience plus elapsed time is what produces genuine perspective.

The second: someone who has operated in a context fundamentally different from yours. What they take for granted reveals what you take for granted. The divergences are information. I learned more about how institutions actually work by talking to people who had operated in very different institutional environments than I did from any organizational theory I studied.

The third: someone who will tell you when you are wrong. These are rare and should be cultivated deliberately. The people who agree with you are easy to find. The people who say clearly "that is not how it works" or "I have seen that fail" are far more valuable and far rarer.

The compounding of learning

The returns to learning from people compound in ways that are not immediately obvious.

Every person you learn from teaches you things that make you better at learning from the next person. Every question you ask teaches you how to ask better questions. Every conversation that goes deep teaches you what deep conversations feel like, so you recognize when you are in a shallow one and can redirect.

The learner who spends ten years in genuine conversation with thoughtful people has access to an education that cannot be replicated in any institution. Not because institutions are bad, because the tacit knowledge of practitioners, accumulated across thousands of specific situations, is not codifiable. It cannot be transferred by any method other than conversation.

I have tried to be that learner. I have not always succeeded. But when I think about the things I understand that I did not understand ten years ago, about hiring, about institutions, about how organizations actually work, about India, about people, almost all of it came from conversations.

Pay attention to the people in front of you.

They know more than they've written down.

See also: How I Think About Learning, The Evolution of My Thinking, What Am I Learning?

Sources

Michael Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Peter Senge: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization