How I Learn

Learning from my connections on LinkedIn

About a month ago I posed a question on LinkedIn about how effective social software systems including LinkeIn are at supporting learning. This provoked much useful (to me anyway) discussion, which I summarized earlier. But one comment in particular stuck with me. Jon Husband, originator of the organizational design theory of wirearchy, pointed out that you get out of a learning network what you put in. So for the past month I have been working hard at using LinkedIn (and to a lesser extent FaceBook) as a learning network. It has been working.

I have done this primarily by seeding questions I am interested in into my network and provoking discussion. This has been successful in a number of ways, with success seeming to depend on the nature of the question and who I was able to draw in to the discussion.

I began with a somewhat technical question.

Is there a standard semantic model for business strategy frameworks?

"My new company LeveragePoint is built on a semantic platform (SMW+, triple store, etc.). Our business is to support the activation, embedding and evolution of strategies at organizations, at this point we focus on marketing strategies. The platform integrates the implementation and communication of strategies with learning and collaboration. We try to be as standards based as possible. We use DC and FOAF and are implementing SKOS and SIOC. Is there something similar for business strategies? If not is there anyone interested in developing one with us? This would need to cover the following types of strategies: Economic Value Estimation, Value Footprint, Segmentation (various approaches), Buying Process, Customer Portrait, Scenario Planning, Sustainable Business Strategies (Green to Gold, Cradle to Cradle)."

This is a more important question than it may appear at first glance. Public vocabularies are the key to the semantic web and if the semantic web is going to be useful for business the vocabularies need to address business needs. Existing vocabularies such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and Dublin Core (DC) are powerful in their own domains, but they don’t address business issues. Google’s recent announcement of RDFa support is an example of how not to go about building such a vocabulary. Google’s vocabulary at Data-Vocabulary.org manages to add little to the public domain while ignoring the already existing power of FOAF and DC. Hopefully Google will open up and realize that what they need to be doing is to providing an open index of semantic vocabularies, leveraging the work of other in the same way they use the effort people make to link websites as a way to improve search!

Anyway, on the surface this question had a poor response, only two public answers, but there were also a number of private responses that pointed me in the right direction. Especially useful were comments from my friends at Vulcan that pointed me towards the work that Tom Malone and his group at MIT are doing on vocabularies for organizing business information.

I followed up my business model question with one on RDFa.

How are (will) search engines leveraging RDFa?

"My company LeveragePoint is developing a simple model of how a company's offers (services and products) provide value to its clients and solve business problems. This is a subset of the semantics behind our applications. We may also provide a simple form driven tool to generate this information as RDFa for inclusion on a website. We would like to know if and how search engines would index this information and how they would use it. We are interested in meeting with semantic search companies at SemTech in San Jose this June to discuss."

This provided some very useful exchanges, although again most of these were private. The question drew answers from people at Yahoo, Microsoft and Google that were very encouraging. I think there will be a role for RDFa in the public web and the response to this LinkedIn question encouraged me to begin to develop a business vocabulary to map needs, offers and value to one and other. This is based on Tom Nagle and John Hogan’s work on Economic Value Estimation and links to emerging work on value networks and the economic and value exchanges that flow across these networks. I will share more about this approach in the future, which is being developed under the name NOVO (for Needs Offer Value Ontology).

Enough semantic web geekiness, I thought, let’s explore some ideas around virtual and mobile technologies, provoked by recent experiences with iPhones and Android.

Will mobile and virtual blend?

"I have been thinking a lot about how people use and will use mobile devices. A couple of days ago I began to read Edward Castronova's book Exodus to the Virtual World. Let's assume he is right and living in virtual worlds will become a large part of the economy. Will the mobile and virtual trends continue in parallel or at some point do they blend? If so how? One possibility is sketched in the new novel Daemon by Daniel Suarez where game style overlays give players a critical advantage in the 'real' world."

This question seemed to strike a chord. There were seventeen public answers and another twelve direct responses. The answers caused me to think more deeply about the question and identified some developments I was not aware of. Chuck Hamilton, who is involved in virtual world projects at IBM was especially helpful, pointing me to Bobba. Richard Smith pointed me to a great TEDs talk on the subject. There were many thought provoking responses, I encourage those who are inrested to read through clicking on the links. Thank you to all who contributed. I’ll give Jesse Wang at Vulcan the last word though “So, the real issue is that  the virtual and real world will blend, and mobile will be a key medium to accelerate it..” Wow. I just finished reading Brian Rotman’s excellent book Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being and I think Jesse is right, the real and the virtual are blending, and changing our identities, our math and how we share and intermingle our ideas.

Experimenting with LinkedIn has been disappointing in one regard. So far most of the questions have resulted in answers to me rather than in conversations with and between my friends. Things went a bit better on my most recent question, which has resulted in more dialog.

Is there such a thing as "design thinking" that applies across disciplines?

"Many people refer to themselves as architects. There are product architects, software architects, network architects, social architects ... And many people refer to themselves as designers. Is there a common set of ideas, heuristics, algorithms and codes that apply across the different design disciplines? Can there be? Should there be?"

This question resulted in eighteen public answers and a number of e-mail conversations between people. It also drew answers from everyone from prominent software engineering savants like Philippe Kructhen (the articles he points to are well worth reading for anyone interested in design), to practicing architects, interface designers and information architects. The only things missing was an old relational database bear (I am still looking to provoke one). There is a consensus that there is such a thing as design thinking and that it needs to be better researched. I am looking forward to doing some design thinking on how to represent design thinking, and I hope to attend and if necessary to host some conferences in this area over the next few years.

So, is LinkedIn a good tool for supporting learning conversations? Maybe. My network is certainly a good place to have these conversations, and by using LinkedIn as a vehicle I have been able to learn from people that were not my direct contacts. This is very good. But, so far anyway, I have not been able to get the kinds of deep multi-directional exchanges I am hoping for (even if the Design Thinking question and answer was a step in the right direction). Is this because of LinkedIn and how it is organized? Or perhaps it is the nature of my friends (we are an opinionated bunch, and not always as good at listening as we could be). Maybe I just need to learn to phrase the questions better and to guide the conversation. All things to think about, and maybe to ask on LinkedIn!

Body Memory

The deepest learning seems to be physical, bound into muscle and bone, printed on the skin, and found in the repeated firing of nerve patterns. I dream that my bicycle learns from me, in the way my riding style and paths tune its vibrations. I know that my body learns from my bicycle. The deeper I can embody abstract thought the better I remember it and the wider the web of associations it can weave. Makes me wish I was a dancer, or at least a musician.

Now that it is spring, and I am riding longer and faster, I am noticing body memories from other sports in how I corner my bike or try to read traffic patterns to avoid the most dangerous places on the road. Dodging my bike to the right around a car that has suddenly lurched into my path I sometimes lead the turn with my right shoulder. The feeling is almost like running gates, something I did a lot in winter on skis, more than twenty years ago. The same balance and confidence I feel on skis I also feel on my bike, and the same ability to feel the terrain and react quickly is one of the things that keeps me safe. Riding faster, into a wider turn, I stay square on the bike, but drive to the left with my right leg and right shoulder, like carving a turn into ice. Of course you can't carve a turn into ice on a bike, but on a good road the feeling is the same. My years skiing all sorts of slopes in all kinds of weather help me stay up on my bike and have tuned my peripheral senses and tied them to my reactions.

The physical link between skiing and cycling is, for me anyway, very much short term and in the moment. But there are other body memories I call on when I am managing LeveragePoint (where I am CEO). When I lived in Tokyo in the 1980s we had a Yamaha 26 sailboat and spent a lot of time on the open water outside and beyond Tokyo Bay. One thing I like about sailing is that the present can become much longer. One spends time watching the sky for cloud patterns, feeling how the tide run is changing the current and working out how the wind and waves will shape up over the next hour, three hours, day or week. One lives in an extended present. Accidents at sea are often several hours (even days) in the making and happen when one doesn't bother to think ahead. Sailing into Tokyo Bay it was always important to work out the trajectories of the ships (it is a very crowded seaway), time the tide (especially if there was a low and the wind was coming up) and find a safe way through. One lived in the present and the future at the same time. I sometimes try to be in this mindspace when I am making decisions about the company and where we need to go. There is a lot of immediate pressure, especially with a new company in a transforming economy, and one is tempted to respond to the immediate needs and issues, many of which turn around survival. But I find I make better decisions if I bring my mind and body back to a state similar to that I am in when sailing. I try to keep in close contact with the present, following the instant messaging threads, watching the issues emerge on our development tracking system, following our CRM, and most importantly talking to people. But my goal is to track the present in the context of our future trajectories, and make immediate decisions that will, bit by bit, take us into a better place. At a small company, the big strategic moves are made in the tactical decisions. Each of these small decisions is committing us to a future that is always coming into being.

Body learning also helps me make abstract concepts real and to embed them in memory. I am reading Brian Rotman's book Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being this week. He reinforces the importance of gesture and diagram in mathematical thinking (he is channeling Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Chatelat here) and the close links that exist between the body and the abstract. I see this everyday walking around the office and looking at the scrawls on the white boards and in people's notes. (I ran into Bruce Chew this week, Bruce is one of the wisest people I have ever met, in a room that has four walls of white boards, he had worked his way around three of them and was delighted to still have one more left.) The transformation of these visual gestures into code, and then back into vizualizations is a big part of what LeveragePoint does. Part of Economic Value Estimation's power lies in the simple and easy to read image of relative value that it provides. Over the next few years we will be trying to make these vizualizations even more powerful by keeping them simple, and making them into shared gestures that people can use to think together.

Creating a simple set of gestures can be a great mnemonic. For example, I find Kevin Lynch's five pattern's of urban navigation to be a very useful frame for thinking about navigation in general. To help me to remember these, and to explain them to other people, I have come up with a simple gesture for each pattern:

• Landmark: A 'thumb's up sign'

• Neighbohood: Hand spread, palm down

• Border: A chopping motion with the hand

• Pathway: A sweeping motion with the index finger extended

• Node: Hand spread, palm up, pointing to the palm with the index finger of the other hand

One can even string these gesture together in a sentence. The Charles River is a Barrier on my way from the South End to MIT (chopping motion with my hand), but Harvard Bridge provides a Pathway over (sweeping motion with my hand, index finger extended), and leads to the Node of Kendal Square (hand open, palm up, pointing to the palm with the index finger of my other hand), a Neighborhood that I like to explore (hand open, palm down, sweeping motions of the hand to suggest exploring the area).

It will be interesting to see how body learning transfers back and forth from virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, especially as user interfaces like the Nintendo Wii become the basic way we live in these places. The potential of these worlds for a physical form of learning may be the key to their rapidly growing popularity as places for people to learn together.

In any case, I am going to try to become more aware of the role that my body, physical memory, gesture and shared motion play in my own learning and that of my team.

A final thought from Rotman,

"We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their prepatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away and completions - the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them."

from Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves, Duke University Press, 2008, page 23.