Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
The future of work is beginning to look increasingly like the past – via @WillRich45
“For centuries, the workforce comprised a host of artisans who had been apprenticed to a trade and learned their skill on-the-job. These people would typically include stonemasons, cabinetmakers and blacksmiths and they earned a living in their local area carrying out work for local businesses, farmers, gentry etc. They were predominantly self-employed, but often shared workshops and tools and sometimes teamed up with others to take on larger or more complex tasks. They relied on word of mouth and reputation to provide them with a steady stream of work and had a range of loyal and satisfied customers.
Much of these same principles apply in today’s so-called gig economy.”
Being Bilingual Changes the Architecture of Your Brain – via @JenniferSertl
‘But if you really want to learn that second language, you can’t shy away from that panic. You should lean into it. “The native language may take a hit during second language learning,” Kroll said. “But that may be a crucial processes in learning to regulate language.” Preliminary results from her own lab suggest that “learners who are better able to take that hit to their native language and suffer those early consequences may be better able to learn the second language,” she said.’
@DonaldClark: Amazon’s amazing workplace learning project
“This is about ‘vocational’ learning, while you are at work. It feeds you into internal jobs, if available, but also into the open jobs market. The clever bit of the scheme is the starting point – job statistics. This is all about demand statistics. Amazon do not pay for courses where there is no proven demand profile for jobs with proven salary hikes. They have a list.”
HBR: To Win the Civil War, Lincoln Had to Change His Leadership – via @MichelleBlanc
“Lincoln realized in early summer 1863 that he had two big challenges: reestablishing control over the Army and recapturing public opinion. With this realization, Lincoln made some bold choices. First, he got rid of some old beliefs that no longer worked. And second, he started leading in a completely new way. In retrospect we can see how his bold choices in the summer of 1863 helped him become one of the greatest leaders the U.S. has ever known.”
Cooperation emerges when groups are small and memories are long – via @pevansgreenwood
‘In a final set of experiments, Stewart and Plotkin used computer simulations that allowed the memory capacity of players to evolve alongside the strategies themselves. They found that not only were longer memories favored, but the evolution of longer memories led to an increase in cooperation.
“I think a fascinating takeaway from our study,” Stewart said, “is that you can get a set of circumstances where there is a kind of runaway feedback loop. Longer memories promote more cooperation and more cooperation promotes longer memories. That kind of situation, where you go from a simpler system to one that is more complex, is a great example of what evolution does, it leads to more and more complexity.’
Wired: The Biggest Crowdfunding Project Ever Was Supposed to Create Manager-free Companies. But It’s a Mess – via @petervan
‘By the time the deadline for investing in the DAO arrived late last month, about 10,000 people had anonymously poured more than $168 million into this new online creation. That makes it the largest crowdfunded project ever. Now, it’s time for the DAO to start accepting pitches for all those anonymous people to vote on, bringing a new kind of democracy to the iconic flavor of capitalism that delivers so much modern technology.
Just one problem: So far, all the pitches are suggestions for changing the DAO … The DAO is based on Ethereum, an online system billed as an improved version of bitcoin, and many of the prominent figures in the Ethereum community are also working on the DAO, including some of the “curators” who decide which pitches get sent to the community. What’s more, the project was created by European company, Slock.it, that hopes to use it to fund a separate project involving Ethereum and “the Internet of Things.”’
Why Personal Knowledge Mastery? – by @leadershipABC
