February 2016 – Harold Jarche

working for a living

2016-02-26 by Harold Jarche

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@girlziplocked – “The current economy has no place for intellectuals and is desperate to make entrepreneurs the socially recognized genius.”

@matthewsyed – “It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own.”

@atduskgreg – “Machine learning is automated bureaucracy. It spits back the systemic biases we feed it in feature vectors, training sets, reward functions.”

When things go wrong, people have a tendency to want to blame someone, often as soon as possible. It makes us feel better to find the culprit or get the ‘bad apple’. We have the opposite tendency when it comes to ourselves. The cognitive dissonance of not meeting our self-image or expectations can be so powerful that we make up stories to cover our failures. And we actually believe them. This happens to judges, lawyers, doctors, nurses, and many other professionals. But it happens less frequently with pilots. Why? It’s all about the systems they work in.

network era economic shift

2016-05-062016-02-16 by Harold Jarche

“The public has concluded that our 20th century institutions are incapable of dealing with 21st century challenges.” – Washington Post

seeking and sense-making

2016-02-16 by Harold Jarche

How do you make sense of your work? Many of us subscribe to newspapers, magazines, web feeds, blogs, and other forms of push information. In themselves, these are low sense-making activities and often are difficult to share, due to digital rights management restrictions, or because of the format. I use Feedly to organize my web feeds and Diigo to capture what I find on the web. The key is to subscribe to a diverse assortment of perspectives and opinions.

learn like a gamer

2016-03-262016-02-14 by Harold Jarche

Learning is the new literacy. Personal computers are just one example. We buy new ones every few years. Operating systems change. Programs change, get replaced, or become obsolete. But we often continue with the same habits until something goes wrong. Few of us do the equivalent of ‘looking under the hood’. We learn enough to get our work done, but often do not take time to understand the underlying systems and logic.

By not being active learners we lose the agility to react quickly to changing situations. We have to take the time to keep learning. It’s an effort that too many of us avoid. When was the last time you learned a new computer program? How many books do you read? When did you try to master a new skill? These are things we need to make a priority. If not, we risk becoming obsolete before our time. Aiming for retirement is not a bad thing, but what happens when it is forced on us and we are not ready?

learning responsibly

2016-02-12 by Harold Jarche

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” – John F. Kennedy – via @AdriaanG_LP

@Tom_Peters: “Presidents rarely get good advice. Every “presenter” presents a totally biased solution–often suppressing competing evidence.”

deliberate practice

2016-06-302016-02-09 by Harold Jarche

The key to developing expertise is deliberate practice. While some of this can happen during formal instruction, expertise has to be developed outside the classroom, as that is where most of us spend our time. Expertise takes time to develop, but how can organizations support novices as they go through their journeys to expertise? Tom Gram has three posts that cover the research and application of deliberate practice based on the work of Dr. Anders Ericsson.

Practice & Development of Expertise: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

we don’t need better leaders

2017-06-242016-02-04 by Harold Jarche

“Why is everyone so hung up on Leaders, Leadership and Leadership courses – it’s what gets us into a mess. Think banking, politics, sport…” —Donald Clark

If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. If all you know is hierarchical leadership by virtue of one’s position, then all solutions are in the hands of the CEO. Conversations with 150 CEO’s only yield ‘CEO thinking’.

the printed word at electric speed

2022-04-202016-02-02 by Harold Jarche

In tribal organizations, influence often comes through kinship. It still does with certain royal families. In institutions, power is exerted through the hierarchy. It is positional. Even today, in a market-dominated society, many people are their institutional job title, and feel naked without it. But those who exercise power through markets can often throw off their job titles and not worry about their formal qualifications, as long as they deliver the goods (and services). [more on TIMN]