Posts By: Harold Jarche

innovation in complexity and chaos

In 2019 I summarized my observations about innovation in — What is innovation? I concluded that while innovation may be 15 things to 15 different people, I still found nine general guidelines. The connection between innovation and learning is evident and we cannot be innovative unless we integrate learning into our work. Radical innovation only… Read more »

nineteen years of blogging

“A knowledge worker is someone who’s job is having really interesting conversations at work.” —Rick Levine (1999) The Cluetrain Manifesto [and that’s what blogging lets you do, from anywhere] Today marks my 19th anniversary of blogging here. This post is #3,566. I note that on my 5th anniversary I mentioned that I had started ‘micro-blogging’… Read more »

hierarchies, experts, and dogma

Dogma — prescribed doctrine proclaimed as unquestionably true by a particular group — a settled or established opinion, belief, or principle. In 2021, research concluded that medical orthodoxy, such as ‘droplet dogmatism’, blocked the acceptance that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was mainly transmitted through the air, in spite of knowledge from fields outside infectious disease. Three… Read more »

pulling knowledge

Nick Milton discusses the knowledge cycle as you have never seen it before in a 2018 post. He says that most organizational knowledge management processes are focused on ‘Pushing’ knowledge and then discusses an alternative by ‘Pulling’ knowledge.

Kieran Egan 1942-2022

I found out the other day that another person who has inspired my work has passed away. Kieran Egan’s book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding greatly influenced my thinking on public education. I have curated some of his work that has been shared on this blog over the past two decades…. Read more »

Farewell Roger Schank

“Learning by doing is really how we learn: Teaching others to do this is the next step in the education revolution.” —Roger Schank I found out yesterday from Socratic Arts that its founder, Roger Schank has died. Roger’s work has been an inspiration for my own over the past two decades. Roger’s work on story-centered… Read more »

markets for behavioral surplus

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. “It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually… Read more »

auto-tuning work

Are we moving into a post-job economy? Can the concept of the job continue to be the primary way that people work? Building ways to constantly change roles can be one way to get rid of the standardized job, which has decreasing usefulness in a creative, networked AI-assisted economy. We should be preempting automation by… Read more »

it’s not not about the technology

Writing my essays at university was always a painful process. We were still allowed to write them, though more professors were requiring essays to be submitted typed. My essays were never good because I often left them to the last minute and hand-writing a better version was just too much time and effort. As much… Read more »

fixing a plane in flight

The following opinion article was published this weekend in local newspapers — Telegraph Journal, Times & Transcript, & Daily Gleaner. Education changes: ‘like fixing a plane in mid-flight’ By Harold Jarche Politicians constantly tinker with our public education system because it is designed without a solid foundation, just a series of cobbled-together initiatives based on whatever was… Read more »