“The public has concluded that our 20th century institutions are incapable of dealing with 21st century challenges.” – Washington Post
Harold Jarche
seeking and sense-making
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
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
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
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
“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
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]
a dire shortage of alternative models
The shift from a market-dominated society to a networked society is well on its way. The TIMN [Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Networks] model shows how civilization grew from a collection of tribes, added institutions, and later developed markets, as the dominant form of organization. These, in my opinion, aligned with revolutions in communications: from oral, to written, to print. The network era began with the advent of electric communications (telegraph), though it is by no means completely established. As with previous shifts of this magnitude, there is a tendency in parts of society to retreat to the old ways.
friday’s finds #264
Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well won and fortunes ill won; between those gained as an incident to performing great services to the community as a whole and those gained in evil fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law honesty. Of course, no amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.” – Theodore Roosevelt, 1906
social media: an unrealized opportunity
“The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.” – Zygmunt Bauman
I would rather say that social media can be a trap, but are not by their nature an inevitable one. Social media don’t teach us anything. We have to teach ourselves how to use social media. For the first time in history, 3 billion people are connected to each other. Is this a trap or an unrealized opportunity?