Realishness

Lessons for everyone from teaching young kids to ride bikes

Let me begin by calling out the very clear and simple fact that I’m neither a professional, nor certified, nor aspirational bike instructor. Actually I’m not even sure if there are bike instructors in the world. There must be. But I’m not one of them.

But, I also kind of am. While I may boast “Master of Popular Music and Culture” as a formal designation, “Enabler of Quicker Transport on Pavement by Human-Powered Mechanics” is a certification I won’t put on my office-wall but will keep close to my heart. I have four young kids and each of them is able to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. Each managed to achieve this feat between the ages of 2-5, and I’ve had some small part to do with it – at least in terms of setting the conditions for them to get spinning in the right direction.

The key? Realishness. You read that right. It’s not a typo on a condiment made from pickles, it’s a variation on realness, and not in the virtual direction either. In the ish-ness direction, to be precise.

In this post I’ll unpack some broadly applicable lessons from teaching these four young kids to ride their bikes, and how realishness made it all possible. Is this actually broadly applicable? Yes indeed. If life isn’t a whole lot like biking, I don’t really know what life is. And even though some of us may have achieved double digits in our ages, and the first digit nearly – or actually does – round up (in other words, you’re basically 100 years old), and we work in fancy and distinguished professional undertakings that require us to wear attractive shoes to do our work … we’re all essentially kids in adult bodies.

So ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between – buckle up your helmets, fasten your sneakers, and let’s go for a ride.

---

Realishness

Let’s begin with this weird word, because it’s at the core of the entire post.

To actually learn something – not just read about it or get obsessed with abstractions – you need to have enough of the real deal, but not the full amount. If you have the good fortune of having a solid learning setup, one or two real elements have been carefully isolated so you can experience real feedback loops, but a bunch of the other elements aren’t like the real thing, mostly so you don’t hurt yourself/become traumautized/never want to even think about the thing ever again.

So it’s real, but not real. Realish. I guess the Uncanny Valley fits this definition too, but this not-entirely-real experience is meant to be helpful, and not just some weird, unfocused eyes on CGI characters.

Burn Your Training Wheels

It seems like training wheels are a perfect example of realishness, based on my definition. The novice bike-pupil experiences the rush and exhilaration of pedalling, and the sweaty grips within their palms, and the wind in their hair, and the joy of peeling away from their most swift-footed enemies with minimal physical exertion.

Peeling away from your most swift-footed enemies is most definitely a real part of biking, if I’ve ever known one.

But here’s the problem: peeling away from your most swift-footed enemies isn’t the essential part of learning to ride a bike. Realishness needs to isolate the essential element of the activity the new disciple is learning, otherwise it’s a form of virtual reality. And I haven’t been hooked up to Mark Zuckerberg’s latest iteration of The Matrix to say this with certainty, but I’m pretty sure you can’t learn to ride a bike with a VR headset because just like training wheels, it offers a few real elements, but not the ones you really need.

Although biking and biking-with-training-wheels may look identical to the 5-year-old protégé, they’re about as related as filling up your water bottle at the fountain, and going scuba-diving. They both involve water, of course. What else could there be?

In the case of biking, the answer is balance.

Balance

In my kids’ bicycling tutelage, the first step was establishing their balance. For those of you cynics who believe the world has been on a steady decline since the roaring 20s or the agricultural revolution or whenever, I implore you to consider your hypothesis in light of the Balance Bike.

The Balance Bike (henceforth uncapitalized, while still wishing to convey my reverence for it) is a true sign of our species’ brilliance and wizardry. The antiquated & barbaric approach to bicycle tutelage was to install crutches in the form of training wheels and encourage the new rider to rip around with almost instant mastery of a skill that seems essential to biking (applying power through pedalling). Later you introduce nearly-insurmountable difficulty when the training wheels come off, and in the wise words of The Jefferson Airplane the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies.

So, don’t you want somebody to love? Yes! And that somebody is a balance bike. The hard skill to learn on a bike isn’t pedalling, it’s balancing. Think of how weird it is that you can ride forward and make turns and stop and start and do wheelies in 2-dimensional space, on a machine that’s only balanced in 1 dimension. This is some Stephen Hawking material.

The balance bike is a bike with no pedals. The balance bike is close to the Platonic form of realishness.

The handlebars function in a totally real way. The bike responds in a totally real way, in the most important dimension of realness … and no other ones. My son got a great feel for balance with his slight dose of recklessness/courage as he’d rip down our sloped driveway and careen on to the sidewalk with a sharp left turn.

The ish-ness of the balance bike is that it has no pedals. As soon as the bike starts to tip, the devoted disciple puts their trusty feet on the ground so the whole enterprise suddenly seems like walking.

Balance takes a long time to learn, and it’s the crucial skill for riding a bike so you can eventually & actually peel away from your most swift-footed enemies with minimal physical exertion, and do a lot of other more ordinary and pleasant things on a bike. Spinning pedals around in a manner very close to walking takes almost no time to learn, and isn’t really essential to biking (though I will acknowledge, you will be fleeing no swift-footed enemies without this mode of conveyance).

To learn something, your practice environment must include the essential element as real as possible, and guardrails around it.

Real, but not entirely. Realish.

Interlude: False Confidence

Small sidebar to point out that realishness is somewhere between slightly-to-very dangerous if the pupil doesn’t realize they’ve been protected by an ish, and they think the thing they’re doing is completely real.

For responsible realishness, it must come clearly labelled.

Applying Realishness Broadly

I promised at the top that my young childrens’ bicycling tutelage would have broad applicability. Because I am a man of my word, on that broad applicability I shall now deliver.

If you’re setting out to learn or teach something, achieving realishness is basically alchemy. There aren’t many examples as pure and wonderful as the balance bike, but here are a few:

• Low balance beams for gymnasts

• Trick foam pits for skateboarders, BMXers, and scooterers

• Flight simulators with electro-shock capabilities

The last one isn’t actually a thing, but to move from virtual reality into realishness, I think it needs to raise the stakes of things going awry. Pain sucks, but it’s a great teacher. Of course, dealing with the full consequences of crashing an airplane is not a very good way to learn anything, much as that expression goes, If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving isn’t for you.

Realishness always involves a ratio of realness to ishness. There are parts of our attention that wake up when we know there’s some risk, we just don’t want that risk to be large enough that it’s a deterrent. A good realishness ratio has just the right amount of real things happening so the learner can start to play with how the environment responds, and develop confidence that the environment will continue to respond that way.

Put differently, the downside of things going badly should be proportional to the person’s level of skill.

Interlude: Learning to Give Feedback

An area I’ve done lots of work in is helping managers become competent at this extremely unintuitive area that involves having many people doing work that you yourself are not doing, and may not even be capable of doing. There are reams of specific skills that a great manager will have internalized, and beginning to learn these will involve breaking them down to their essential ingredients, like balance is for biking.

For example, giving feedback is a perennial manager skill which transfers into many areas of a person’s life. What would realishness look like for learning to give feedback?

The common path that learning & development professionals take is setting up simulations, or role-plays. A group of managers will learn a basic structure for feedback (describe the situation + point out the behaviour you’re giving feedback about + describe its impact in as-neutral-terms as possible). Then they’re broken into smaller groups with example scenarios, and told to practice.

It’s better than nothing, just like riding a bike with training wheels is way better than sitting on your porch and imagining riding a bike. But I’m not sure that this feedback learning structure isolates the essential part. In my experience, having the courage to take initiative and share something with another person is the really tricky hurdle to overcome. 69% of managers say they’re uncomfortable communicating with employees. We tend to overplay how hard these conversations will be, and once we’re in them, we discover they’re manageable.

Maybe realish feedback training involves no role-plays, but asks participants to go around the room and share something that’s real and happening in this moment with another person. Yes, there may be some awkwardness, but there’ll also be a ton of confidence that comes along with it.

Conclusion: Realishness, Everywhere

From biking to the board room. When we want to learn or teach something, we need to boil it down to its essence. If we can deliver that essential element in a real way, we’re on the right track (or, in the right gear. Or something). If we can deliver any element in a real way we’re doing a job, and it’s a lot better than nothing.

But for the quickest path to greatness, or to peel away from your most swift-footed enemies, figure out what realishness looks like, and ride on, you crazy diamond.