Have you ever learned a learning?
If you are under the age of 20, you can stop reading. You have certainly never heard the word learning pluralized. If you have the pleasure of being in corporate America long enough where you stop learning lessons and start logging learnings, you may be one of the many people that have independently noticed that something is off about the word.
Learning makes sense, it is the process of learning. But what, exactly, is a learnings? The pluralization makes it an item to be logged. An item logged, but, contrary to its name, very rarely learned.
Lessons have a structure, an argument, and arguments can change people. Someone humiliated can learn their lesson, they would never learn their learning. Their learning is nonsensical even - a learning isn’t owned by anyone, instead it is an omnibus axiom on the world delivered from on high or on-call.
A lesson, a good one, typically has a ‘why.’ It is the adoption story - how the lesson became yours.
Remember your middle school math class - they probably had some contrived word problems that still had an esoteric reason to learn SohCahToa. Sure, you probably aren’t using a shadow length to measure the Empire state building, but maybe you’ll see a shadow and have learned that trigonometry could accomplish that.
The learned concept in isolation is a learning, the residue of digestion. If you ask people about lessons they learned, they will point to learnings they logged, sucked from the context that makes them filling.
Don’t be fooled by learnings. Lessons come when the student is ready. If motivated, someone can be presented with facts and learn that yes, they can calculate the building’s height using the shadow length and they will remember that. They will adopt it. Attach it to the finite surface of a person’s pre-existing interest or the learning will drift in the sea of meaningless information until it is indistinguishable from waves of factoids and fictions.
And, in a corporate setting, don’t undergo the charade of “learnings” if you can help it. They are, at their noblest, notes for future you to reference. I promise you, no one has ever cited bullet 3 of a 5 month old post-mortem as a reason they adopted a best practice - they either touched the stove, felt its heat earlier, or sought out best practice while genuinely interested.
You probably haven’t learned a learning. You may have learned a lesson about learnings, but, if not, I hope you pause before saying the word uncoerced.