Improve your understanding – The Feynman Technique

How well do you really know something? We all tend to overestimate our knowledge and tell (or convince) ourselves we understand things, even when we really don’t, or maybe not in enough depth. This is where the Feynman Technique can help.

You go ages without hearing someone’s name, then I came across Richard Feynman‘s work twice in a week (cue quote about buses). First in a book ‘The Science of Self Learning’ by Peter Hollins, referring to this technique, and the second time while watching ‘Challenger – The Final Flight’ on Netflix. He sat on the Rogers Commission investigating the cause of the disaster. He famously did an experiment dropping a section of an O-ring into a glass of ice water to show how the O-ring failed to expand correctly at cold temperatures. This was a very powerful, visual and easy to understand explanation of a complex issue. He was renowned for his ability to clearly explain complex scientific knowledge.

The Feynman Technique

This technique is really simple, but very powerful. It will prove if you have really understood a topic, or if you are just glossing over certain concepts. It is a very quick way to compare what you think you know with what you actually know. In simple terms, ask yourself a question and answer it honestly. The aim of the technique is not to answer the question, but to see where you are unable to answer this question.

There are four steps;

• Choose a concept
• Explain the concept in plain English
• Identify your knowledge gaps
• Use an analogy

Choose a concept

This approach works for pretty much any concept or subject. Simply identify what you want to know or understand. e.g. Gravity, Why is the Sky blue, Cloud Computing, How does a CPU work, etc.

Explain the concept in plain English

This is the key step. Write down or say aloud an explanation of the subject. Can you do this easily? Do you have any areas you can’t fully explain properly? Explain it as simply and articulately as possible. Could a child understand it based on your description? What bits do you skip or gloss over? these are you gaps.

Identify your knowledge gaps

If you are unable to clearly and accurately come up with a short description, then you have gaps in your knowledge. Now you have something to work on. Identify the gaps and research them until you do understand them and you can describe them easily. If you can’t summarise it in a few sentences, then you still have blind spots.

Use an analogy

This is an extension of step 3. If you are able to find a good analogy of a concept, then you likely understand the main traits of both. It will help understanding on a deeper level  and make it much easier to explain. This also helps create mental models for things you already know, strengthening the connections and making it stick.

Use for Studying

This is a great technique for studying. I am currently using it for helping me with AZ-204 Azure Certification. I am reading through lots of documentation provided by Microsoft so it can be easy to say yes to myself, I have read that, and I now know it, but using this approach I now ask myself to describe the new concept I have just read about. If I can’t do this well enough then I go back over it until I can. If I find myself referencing another technology or topic in the explanation, I then repeat the process with that too.

Agile User Stories 

Of course you can use this approach anytime you want to check your true understanding of an issue or topic. In terms of Agile, one idea could be to use this to explain a User Story at a refinement session. If you can’t explain a story or task clearly using simple language in a few sentences, then maybe the story needs to be updated or further work is required by the team to understand it. Either way this should lead to an improvement in quality, as the understanding is deeper, and if explained to the rest of the team, the knowledge shared is now at a higher base level.