Work is learning. Learning is the work.
When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall
—Paul Simon, Kodachrome (1973)
Nothing that you learned in school has prepared you for today. Nothing. You are not ready. For smug Canadians, consider that 2/3 of us think there is a crisis of asylum seekers at our borders. They are wrong. And even more worrying, Russian trolls may be behind this, or not.
Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
@ProfFeynman: “FEYNMAN learning strategy in THREE points:
1. Continually ask “Why?”
2. When you learn something, learn it to where you can explain it to a child.
3. Instead of arbitrarily memorizing things, look for the explanation that makes it obvious.”
“Learning is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories.” —Eric Kandel (2000 Nobel Laureate), via @charlesjennings
“It is certain in any case that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” —James Baldwin, via @UNESCO
@AralBalkan: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.” – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “I wonder if @jk_rowling realised while writing this that it is the perfect warning about Silicon Valley, ‘the cloud’ and surveillance capitalism.”
@ChaosPrime: “remember, kids, if you absolutely bust your ass integrating yourself psychologically so you’re aware of what you’re doing and why and can actually act ethically, you then get to enjoy getting outcompeted by everybody whose neocortex is tasked solely with post hoc justification”
@white_owly: “Cognitive diversity makes for awkward conversation when you first meet. You’re essentially speaking different languages. Food for thought when designing a recruitment process.”
I have worked as an external ‘consultant’ for the past 20 years. Prior to that, I was an internal consultant, with my last five years of military service as a training advisor in the aviation field. Consultant is a very general term and can mean many things in different fields. My company is called Jarche Consulting, a term I chose in 2003 that would allow me to change my lines of business without requiring a name change. For instance, in my first few years of freelancing I did a lot of advisory work on choosing learning technology platforms, something I do little of today. I am a different kind of consultant now than I was in 2003.
My experience is that as an independent external worker, there are three fundamental roles.
“Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world. Like international travel or meditation, it creates space for us to question our assumptions.” —Eliot Peper
“I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they’re always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world.” —Ray Bradbury
3 Reasons Why You Should Read Science Fiction:
1. SF Extrapolates Current Technology
2. SF Highlights Societal and Cultural Changes
3. (The Best) SF Helps Solve Big Problems
—Richard MacManus
I read a lot of non-fiction and post book reviews here. When I get a chance, I read fiction, mostly science fiction. Here are some recommended reads from the last year.
Ian McCarthy’s paper and slide presentation on the honeycomb of social media (2011) was part of my inspiration for creating the seven facets of enterprise sensemaking. This video explains my problem-solving process in detail. The image below is the most current version, as it has been modified since 2013.
In January 2018 I started the coffee club as a professional community of practice focused on work and learning. We have a private community space for the members. There are now [2019] over 60 members of the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club. As it grows — which is my hope — I will focus more of my energy there. So far we have a discussion forum and I host live web video chats monthly. These are recorded and available for 30 days. We try to ensure that what is discussed inside the coffee club stays there. It is intended to be a trusted space. If the club grows, I will offer more services to meet demand.
We are now one year in [updated January 2019] and there are members from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, & USA. It’s a pretty eclectic group and while the main focus is workplace learning, we talk about whatever interests our members. The surveillance economy, and how to deal with it, was a recent topic. We also talk about books and current events.
If you are looking for a trusted space to share ideas and learn from fellow professionals, please join us.
Here is what we talk about on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hjarche/lists/pbcc/
We have more in-depth conversations in the community
What do you get?
Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse & armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile … it has become the carapace, the protective & aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.” —Marshall McLuhan, via @grescoe
“Computers are rubbish. They only give answers” —Picasso, via @alansmlxl
@mmay3r: “The internet doesn’t fracture truth, it reveals the many competing truths that always existed but were flattened by centralized broadcast technology.”
@cennydd: “I’m trying to avoid the term ‘AI’. It mythologises tech as a new species, a self-directed moral agent outside our control. But, of course, these technologies are absolutely within our control. They’re products of our code, decisions, and policies. Their ethics are our ethics.”
@SimonDeDeo: “Machine learning is an amazing accomplishment of engineering. But it’s not science. Not even close. It’s just 1990, scaled up. It has given us *literally* no more insight than we had twenty years ago.”
@LuxAlptraum: “Plastic Strawgate became a thing for the same reason we endlessly argue over recycling: it’s easier to fixate on small, personal choices that feel under our control than it is to restructure our society at the systemic level we’d need to truly help the environment.”
@HughCards: “You can have a fantastic product, work your ass off, be loved by the media, and still be poor. Just ask any restauranteur.
Do we really understand tacit knowledge?, asks Haridimos Tsoukas in a 2002 paper. He bases his position on the work of Michael Polanyi in that all knowledge is personal and all knowing is through action. Tacit knowledge [I use the term implicit knowledge as it is easier to understand for non-native English speakers] is not merely explicit knowledge that has yet to be codified. Knowledge is personal.
Tsoukas states that:
“we do not so much need to operationalise tacit knowledge (as explained earlier, we could not do this, even if we wanted) as to find new ways of talking, fresh forms of interacting, and novel ways of distinguishing and connecting. Tacit knowledge cannot be ‘captured’, ‘translated’, or ‘converted’ but only displayed, manifested, in what we do. New knowledge comes about not when the tacit becomes explicit, but when our skilled performance – our praxis – is punctuated in new ways through social interaction.”
This is important for anyone working in training, education, knowledge management, and the various growing fields of ‘artificial intelligence’. Knowledge cannot be transferred. We can observe how people use their knowledge but even they cannot explain all of it.
“Although the expert diagnostician, taxonomist and cotton-classer can indicate their clues and formulate their maxims, they know many more things than they can tell, knowing them only in practice, as instrumental particulars, and not explicitly, as objects.”
It is only when we no longer think about something, like hammering a nail, that we can concentrate on the next level, like fixing the roof. We are constantly creating mental black boxes to lessen our cognitive load.
“Knowledge has, therefore, a recursive form: given a certain context, we blackbox – assimilate, interiorise, instrumentalise – certain things in order to concentrate – focus – on others.”
Some people seem to be naturally curious. Others work at it. Some just lack interest in learning. You can notice this when traveling. Some people can describe many aspects of their local vicinity while others don’t know anything about why certain features exist. They say that the most interesting people are those who are interested in others.
This is what I wrote about connected curiosity two years ago. Basically, curiosity about ideas can foster creativity, while curiosity about people can develop empathy (not sympathy). We get new ideas from new people, not the same people we see every day. We get new perspectives from people whose lives and experiences are different from ours.
I was recently interviewed by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. The subject was my personal knowledge mastery framework which Bonni uses in her university teaching. You can listen to or download the podcast. Here are some lightly edited highlights of a very pleasant conversation with Bonni.
We can talk about knowledge bases and things like that, but for me, knowledge is that human sense making of experience, and exposure, and everything, and messy interactions, and feelings, and culture and all and all those kinds of things. And that’s really what knowledge is. Knowledge is the stuff that we use from which we take action. I use my knowledge to do whatever it is I’m going to do, to go to work, to make a decision, to do anything like that. Maybe it’s not a wonderful dictionary description of it, but it’s kind of a fuzzy place to start.