sensemaking is not efficient

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

“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.” —Hermann Hesse, via @johnkellden

@johncutlefish: “Teams are often too busy, too highly utilized, too reactive, and too pressured to do the deep work required for sensemaking. Building shared understanding is messy, difficult, and time-consuming. It’s not ‘efficient’.”

@smakelainen: “Code by even a great programmer has ~4 bugs per 1,000 lines of code. Cars today have 150M lines of code. So, even if all of the automotive industry coders were great (they’re not), we’d be talking over half a million bugs on wheels. Isn’t that comforting? (no, it’s not).”

‘A beginner’s guide to critical thinking:
1. Start with a thought
2. Ask “Is this true?”
3. Ask “What makes this true?”
4. Ask “What’s another way to look at this?”
5. Ask “Why?” at each step
6. Reassemble first thought’ —@markpollard

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metrics, thy name is vanity

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About a year ago I deleted Google Analytics from this website. I no longer know where visitors come from, what they find interesting, or what they click on. This has liberated my thinking and I believe has made my writing a bit better. I always wrote for myself but I would regularly peek at my statistics. Was my viewership going up? What did people read? How did they get there? What search terms were people using? — Who cares?

There are a lot of numbers that ‘social media experts’ will tell you to maximize. But there are few that make any difference. For instance, I put out the word on social media about my social learning workshop: on LinkedIn it had 79 likes and 4,630 views. One of my tweets received 22 link clicks and 5,611 views. But only one metric mattered: registrations. That number was 1. If I kept looking at how often these were shared on social media I might think there was interest in taking my workshop, especially since feedback from participants has been very good. But by focusing on the only real metric, it is obvious that the audience for this workshop is not there. As a result, it is offered less frequently, and is now part of my overall services to companies and organizations.

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leadership is enabling

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I have often said that the essence of leadership or management in organizations is helping make your network smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions. It is not telling people what to do, or managing how they get things done, especially in an age where more work is unique and non-routine. Those doing the work are often the only ones who really understand the context.

John Wenger says that empowerment is a term that we should avoid when it comes to management of organizations. He says it is better to focus on enablement.

“Empower seems limited to the granting of authority, which can be rescinded when it suits the holder of power, while enable seems much broader to me. It encompasses what someone does to ensure that others have the requisite capabilities and skills to carry out a job well, to take up their own power (potency) and when necessary, showing them the door to gaining new capabilities and skills. It seems to be more akin to equipping and supplying than conferring power. Once equipped, the enabler can then get out of the way and let the person access their own power to get on with it.” —John Wenger

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working smarter case study

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In 2010/2011 Jay Cross and I worked with a corporate university of a large US company with the objective to cultivate a fully engaged, high performing workforce through rapid, collaborative, informal, self-directed learning. The aim was for employees to learn fast enough to keep up with the demands of their jobs and grow into experts in their field.

The university transitioned from designing processes for formal learning to increasing support for informal learning by:

  1. Establishing a learning & performance innovation team.
  2. Developing low-cost methodologies (Do It Yourself).
  3. Integrating informal learning support into work.
  4. Phasing out approaches, tools & methods that were no longer providing value.

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learning to create the future of work

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I recently wrote that when we look at the future of work, the loss of current jobs, and the effects of automation we should use a compass to guide us, not a list of what the jobs of the future may look like. These kinds of maps get dated too quickly. In preparing for this new world of work, policy makers and organizational leaders should look at how they can enhance self-determination for everyone: by fostering autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We are moving into an age of augmented work where much of the value we create is intangible, the knowledge we require to work is implicit, and most of this will be learned informally, outside the classroom.

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culture is complex

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I am in a rural village in France enjoying my last day here before heading home. This week was spent mostly in Paris, running a workshop and meeting with a few people. One of the frequent topics was AI: artificial intelligence, not actionable insights. I admit that I know very little about AI, but luckily I know other people who know a lot. My network helps to keep me informed.

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permanent truths

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

“To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad arrogance. To let go of that belief is to find safety.” —Ursula K Le Guin (1929-2018)

@jessfraz: “Hire people who automate themselves out of a job. And then keep giving them jobs.” via @DustinKirkland

@Acuity_Design: “Hack events rush to solution doing/making. I’m still trying to frame the problem.”

@white_owly: “We can’t celebrate a shift to a short-term gig economy and complain about individual short-termism in the same breath.”

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life in perpetual beta 2.0

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The perpetual beta series synthesizes about 12 years of writing on this site. The four volumes examine learning, technology, democracy, personal knowledge mastery, leadership, and new working models. But life is in perpetual beta. Therefore the second version that builds on the series is now available. If you want the beta (latest) version, then this is it. At about 70 pages, this PDF, like the others, is DRM-free and you may print and share as you like, though my preference is that you don’t get into the publishing business with it ;)

Here is the table of contents:

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no time, no learning

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I do a fair bit of public speaking. But I doubt that much of it has changed anyone’s behaviour. I may have presented some new ideas and sparked some thinking. With a one-hour lecture, you cannot expect more. Yet a lot of our training programs consist of an expert presenting to ‘learners’. Do we really expect behaviour change from this? That would be rather wishful thinking. Learning is a process, not an event.

‘Setting aside any reservations about what they teach, religious systems have long emphasized what the secular world tends to overlook: if it’s important, it warrants learning repeatedly.

“By contrast,” [Alain] de Botton writes, “modern education adheres to an implicitly bucket-like theory of the mind: one pours in the contents and, bar accidents, they’ll stay there pretty much across a lifetime. That’s why we’ll think nothing of earnestly declaring a book a favourite—and deigning to read it only once.”

Bringing a truth to mind repeatedly gives it an enduring, three-dimensional existence in your head, by reaching you in every mood and every context, in every season, both at times when you’re enthusiastic about it, and when you’re tired of hearing it.’ —Raptitude 2018-01

To learn a skill or get better at one, you have to practice. Deliberate practice with constructive feedback is the key for long-term success. This is how I learned to write. Before I started blogging my writing was quite bad. Even though I had two university degrees, I was not proud of my written work. But through blogging every day and now several times a week, I became a better writer. I also read a lot more and saw how others expressed themselves. I modeled their good practices. Yesterday Heather McGowan wrote that I am, “a gifted communicator who provides clarity with simple images and carefully crafted words.” That made my day. It has taken me over 3,000 blog posts to achieve this clarity.

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fifty percent

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The dominance of men over women in society has been going on for a long time. I have suggested that our primary communications media have influenced this gender-based power shift, proposing that electric communications in networks are redistributing some power back to women. While the written and print forms of communication favoured men, oral societies were often matriarchal. It may be that electric communications will favour women, promoting what have traditionally been seen as feminine leadership traits. The deep past of our oral societies may help guide us into the future.

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