How I Learn

What I Cannot See From Where I Stand

 "5.6331 For the form of the visual field is surely not like this." (Wittgenstein TLP)

 

One of my current side projects is a workshop at the University of Toronto applying scenario thinking to urban futures. I am working on this with Bruce Stewart (Director of the iSchool Institute) and Kyle Dionne-Clark. As part of our preparation for the workshop Kyle and I are doing a series of blog  posts on scenario thinking on the iSchool Institute website.

A couple of weeks ago, Kyle suggested that we include a post on our own biases, which we did here. As part of this post, I reached out to people who know me reasonably well in a number of different frames: business, writing, cycling and family and asked for their views on my biases. I have tried to factor this feedback into some expanded thoughts on my own biases.

My life has been shaped by living at the intersection of cultures. I grew up mostly in Montreal in the 60s and early 70s, a time when language was a charged issue (to put it mildly) and teenagers challenged each other on the streets with linguistic slurs (I hope this has changed). I learned a rough street French and had some of my complacent middle-class Anglo assumptions thrown in my face. In my late teens I began to spend a lot of time in Japan (my parents were stationed there), moving to Tokyo when I was 19. Over the next decade or so I lived immersed in Japan and it was in Japan that I began to grow up (still working on this). I learned the language, lived very local in an old house in Kohoku (on the edge of Shitamachi), worked, got married, began to raise a family. As a result of my early life in Montreal and my immersion in Japanese in Tokyo I became suspicious of any one language’s ability to be complete – all expression is partial and it is in the gaps that the most interesting possibilities can be glimpsed. It may be a fault, not to be able to see completeness in any one thing.

This doubt of any one language (or system’s) ability to grasp the truth runs deep. I suspect that there are (infinitely) many internally consistent systems of mathematics, but that there is no one meta system by which one can interpret all the others in a way that makes them consistent. Beyond that, I suspect it is the inconsistencies and contradictions that blast open the space that allows anything to exist at all.

I am a committed learner, and how I learn is a filter through which I see the world. My learning style is abstract (I need to understand the model and how the parts fit together), historical (I like to go back to the very first germs of an idea and see what paths were not taken and how the selection occurred), connected (I try to find unexpected relationships) and social (I learn best through conversations with others). Oh yes, I read way too much, but cannot tolerate being told what to read (hence I have had a very limited academic career). I can get a bit anal about my reading, and for the past six years have kept track of all the books I read (I will share this with anyone interested).

Narratives are one of my many weak points. Stories are not my natural way of understanding the world or of being with others. My imagination and relationships are much more spatial and tangential; I am as likely to follow an implication or connotation as a deduction-I am easily drawn into adductive reasoning. Working for a living and managing companies, I have taught myself to tell stories, and more importantly, to listen to other people’s stories, but this is a conscious and learned behavior. I doubt I will ever write a novel or direct a movie, I may write a renga (if I can find the right collaborators) and I enjoy growing a garden.

Reading I like to be challenged by books that force me to uncover and build up new ways to read. The same is true for music, or even walking/riding through a city listening to its sounds. There are many ways to read any one book, and more ways to read several books together. Recently, I have begun to read translations of Japanese poetry into French (mostly haiku) and French poetry into Japanese (Mallarmé). My understanding of both languages is imperfect (as is my understanding of English) and my occasional failure to understand helps me read closer and to pay more attention.

I am always looking for things that force me to pay attention: reading poetry, listening to street noise, riding a bike downtown, sailing (especially in light winds or heavy weather), Yoshie's photos, working with a knife, following what people are saying to each other. Attention is, I suppose, at the heart of much of what I practice and not something I find easy.

Physical activity is critical to paying attention and I need to be physical or to find physical analogs in order to understand (when I say my learning style is abstract I should also say that it is physical, and that I need to express myself physically and encode knowledge into muscles and nerves). I like to sketch systems and then act them out (like a dance, though I am a poor dancer). If I was a better coder, I would want to code what I think about, and then to break the code.

By temperament I am an optimist, I believe things can be made to work out. When I think about the deep changes facing us - climate change, a post-oil economy, massive immigrations, species loss - I assume that we will find some way to work things out. I know that assets cannot continue to compound indefinitely (that is one root of bubbles) and that all funds must fail at some point, but I assume we will find other options.

My optimism leads me to be aggressively anti-ideology. For me, markets are a human technology and not a natural law (although I have learned a lot from Geermat Vermeiji’s application of economic theory to ecology in Nature: An Economic History). I am attracted to technologies that have mechanisms to distribute decisions as close as possible to where the decision will have an impact, and then integrate the decisions at a higher level to find insight and direction. Markets are one example (many individual decisions about value set prices and the prices provide information to the market), Google’s PageRank is another (individual decisions about what to link where determine relevance in search). The competition between alleles that partly determines subsequent phenotypes is yet another (I side more with Dawkins than Gould). I am convinced that the correct answer to most questions that start “What is the best way to ...” is “We don’t know and if we did know that in itself would change the answer.” Accordingly, I prefer evolutionary and adaptive solutions – encourage variation, force selection, repeat. I try to apply this to my own decisions as well – make a decision, see how I am wrong, correct.

Work experience shapes our biases. I have been either self-employed or running my own company since I was 26, apart from a two-year stint at the consultancy Monitor Group. As I am normally directly responsible for my own successes and failures I tend to assume that most problems have solutions and that the solution is to be found by building a team and having at it. Freedom matters, but with freedom to make a decision comes responsibility and accountability. I can be harsh in how I hold myself and others accountable. But I also believe that with every responsibility comes the right to freedom to determine how to meet those responsibilities.

My long term goal is to weave double-loop learning into everything that I do:  not just to learn, but to learn how I learn; not just to have goals but to have movement towards any goal change the goal; not just to connect (with people, places, ideas) but to have my connections become part of what I am connected with.

I have said too much here to really make sense, even to myself, but what am I not seeing …  ?

 

Priviliged Hands

This post is dedicated to the great Dutch marine biologist Geerat Vermeij who wrote a book with this title. Vermeij is blind and knows the world through touch, smell, taste and sound. He has trained his hands to recognize thousands of marine organisms, especially those of the littoral.

My own hands are clumsy and dull, but I learn a great deal through touch and by watching the hands of those much more skilled than I at work. One of the great pleasures of my time in Boston is that my wife Yoshie and I live in a very small walkup in the South End. When we are in the apartment at the same time we are close to each other and can see each other working. Yoshie works with her hands. She makes small, intimate objects by knitting wire forms then weaving in found materials - strips of paper from packing, plastic, bits of metal or heavier wires. Sometimes these are dull colours to give the wire patterns ground. Other times, the found objects can be magpie bright. The forms capture the movement of her fingers. Quick, deft movements, like a bird in flight, then sometimes slower, almost stopped, as she applies strength. The objects themselves are light and strong, supple and alive in the hand. Held up to the light they reveal something of their structure. Holding them in my own hands I remember the movements of the hands that made them. One more way of stitching together time. Hands hold a privileged form of memory.

As I travel I try to touch as many things as possible and remember textures and temperatures. We (or I) lack a rich language to describe texture. I wonder if one could create some kind of visual notation for touch, much in the way some modern composers have created new, more textural, ways to score music: grain, roughness, swirl, sharpness, continuity, concavity, figure and ground as felt in the finger tips, heft in the hand, static and friction, or slip and glaze. The touch of something that crackles. Wondering how to hold flow in ones hands. To know the tension in a string is to know how to touch movement.

Some things touched:

Slimy kelp

The warm rough head of a Jizo at Nishiaraidaishi

The haft of our favourite cooking knife

Yoshie's feet

An old metal bolt, some rust, about three kilograms

Crack in a rock face trying to hold

Rope burn as the sheet runs out too fast

Old chain grease with road grit

The smooth grid space of the keyboard

Orange peel

A fish still alive dieing in ones hand

A dog's soft ears

A child's hand

The same child's hand, years later, bigger and stronger than my own

Dust on the pages of a book

Smooth then rough bark of an Arbutus

A sweaty cheese

Paper cut

Oiled skin

A broom handle, a rake's

Clay soil

Sandy soil

Peat

Bulbs

Hands are the skin over muscles tied by tendon to jointed bones. Arthritic knots. Fine hairs showing the tension. The shape of a hand is its memories.

 

Longer Rides

Things learned through thought and conversation often need to be consolidated by some type of physical activity. For me this can be cooking or washing up, the hot water over porcelain or glass is curiously restful, but many weeks I use a long ride on my bike to push thought down into the background rhythms of my body and make it my own. Friends who run long distances say that running performs the same function, but I prefer to get out and ride. I can go farter and keep up the effort much longer. For me a long ride is anything over 80 km, but preferably longer, 120 to 140 km, and occasionally I will do a century (100 miles or 160 km).

I generally set up some themes for each ride, things I want to have in the background as I push my legs around in circles. This could be a bit of math or logic, Cantor's continuum hypotheses and Zermello's axiom of choice are themes I have used on rides in the fall of 2008. Or it could be a business problem or personal issue I am working on - how to grow and support the people I work with or how to knit deeper my relationship with Yoshie. Sometimes I will try to blend two different themes on the same ride and then use a line from a poem or song as a prompt or point of distance reference, something to come back to as the pedaling begins to wear me down or a hill gets steeper. When the themes are something I grasp poorly, as is often the case with mathematics, logic or certain algorithms, or when I want to be precise and need a memory aide, I will often jot them down on a piece of paper I can shove in my pocket. If I need to I can take this out and glance at it while I wait at an intersection for a light to change, but often just writing something down is enough to fix it in memory long enough for the ride.

I can't say I am thorough or methodic in the way I think while riding. That is not really the intent. The goal is to get things working in the back of my mind, and as the effort grinds on, usually about 80 km in, ideas begin to drift and associate and become part of the sensations of the ride - the wind or rain, sun, sweat, road grit, in the summer bugs, in colder seasons the sting on my face and slight pain in my lungs. This let's loose coalitions of ideas from, how the axiom of choice implies a kind of freedom in infinity, or how my own growth and performance depend on the people I work with. I sometimes see images from Yoshie's photo blog flash up and blend into the textures of the road surface or flow beside me in the light flickering through the trees or off the water. It is not just the way ideas drift together and form new connections that is important, or the way the sensory flow smoothes things together. Riding helps me to think by linking ideas deep into the repeated pattern of movement, the muscle effort of pedaling and guiding the bike around the small dangers on the road surface - loose gravel, pot holes and ruts, the car brushing by too close or coming out of a blind corner not concerned with cyclists. It is the drifting thought, the physical work, and the peripheral flow of sensory information that calms and let's the ideas come together in new and deeper patterns that I can use in my work.

In Vancouver I like to ride from Kitsilano out to Deep Cove and sometimes up Mount Seymour. Or if I am too tired for this, I go south down to the fishing town of Steveston, where the ride along the Richmond dyke is especially lovely. In Boston I tend to head west, out the 117 past Bolton and down the 110 to the Wachusett reservoir. Or on some summer weekends I will take a train north to Beverly and then ride up through Ipswich to Newburyport and out to Plum Island then back down through Essex and around Cape Anne. These are all good roads, long enough to get into a rhythm, enough variety to keep the mind alive, and the car drivers on these roads tend to accept the odd cyclist.

For me, learning requires the integration of many different modes - physical and sensory as well as abstract and concrete thought. Cycling is one part of how I do this. Of course I need to talk to people as well, and conversation is important, but at times I need to be alone with my body in the world.

Urban Cycling: Harvard Bridge to Columbus Avenue

I have learned a lot about urban cycle commuting in the two years since I moved to Boston. I commute by bike pretty much every day, save only days when there is deep snow on the streets or I am going to go from the office to the airport. I thought I knew something about urban cycling from my years in Vancouver, where I have cycled all over the city and go just about everywhere I want to go by bike. But cycling in Vancouver, with its well-paved streets, bike lanes and relatively heavy bicycle traffic (though not compared to a European city, or even to Tokyo) is relaxed compared to downtown Boston. In Vancouver if you know how to dress, follow the rules of the road, and pay basic attention to where you are and what you are doing, you will get home most days. Boston requires a different state of mind.

My morning commute is more relaxed. North on Dartmouth and over Storrow to the Charles River. Then up the river on the Boston side for as long as I have time, then back down the Cambridge side and into the Canal Park complex by the Lechmere canal. Most of the time I am on cycle paths (well mixed use paths, with massive bumps where tree roots are growing under the pavement). The most dangerous thing tends to be random dogs or, in late summer, swallowing bugs.

Coming home is a different story. It is usually late, I am stressed and tired, and I want to take the shorted route home, especially when my wife is in town (she travels even more than I do). So I take the direct route, which takes me along the Charles to Mass Ave. and then over the Harvard Bridge. This is a relatively long bridge, the longest to cross the Charles, and the buildings of Backbay glitter to the left with the river stretching out on either side. The water is generally black by this time of night, and has a coldness coming off it. It can feel like a tunnel of cold leading one into the lights across the river. And there is a bike lane on the bridge (probably courtesy of Cambridge, which in general treats cyclists better than Boston). so I like to dial up the speed on the bridge. I ride a fixed gear, and can accelerate pretty quickly to 45 plus kilometers per hour (just over 28 miles per hour). At one point I used to carry some of this speed and aggression with me into the city. But after a few scares I learned not to do this, and on the last 200 meters of the bridge I reset.

As I enter the Boston section of Mass Ave. I turn the aggression way down, open my peripheral senses as wide as possible, and ride a clear line just out of range of car doors (I have gotten doored twice in my life, once riding in Tokyo and once in Vancouver, I have no desire for another encounter). It has taken a lot of mental training to get into this zone that combines maximum calm with maximum awareness. At this point in my life it is not really something I can maintain for more than thirty minutes or so. It seems to be similar to the condition aspired to when sitting Zen, something that I also do from time to time. Calm, alert, open to what is happening, ready to respond instantly to what happens - a car veering, a new hole in the road (Boston has truly dreadful road surfaces), a person stepping out into the street. I need all my senses on to do this - peripheral vision, hearing - you generally here a change in the underlying thrum as something happens and the micro traffic patterns change - the kinesthetics of the bike and the road - even air pressure plays a role.

I have some confidence that I can slip into this zone, at least for a few minutes, anytime that I need to on a bicycle. I am now trying to extend this in two ways - to stay in the zone for longer periods and to call it up in other situations. In some ways this zone is like the mental space you need to be in to walk safely on dangerous streets, where the trick is to project confidence, belonging and an absence of threatening vibes at the same time. Being non-aggressive and alert is also the key to active listening in business meetings. When tensions are running high in a meeting, or just in the office overall, as when we are trying to make a new release available, it helps me to walk around and just listen to what is happening. I don't necessarily take any action, at least not at the time, but the sense that one gets of how things are working can be the ground for later decisions. It will be interesting to see if and how this can be translated to a more distributed working environment, something I expect my team will need to do over the next few years. Meanwhile, I work on learning how to slip seamlessly from zone to zone, how to listen (with all senses) and keep myself lightly bound by dependent phenomena.