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 …  ?

 

Playing Go Against Myself

I started to play Go again a couple of years ago. I had played intensively when young in Japan, going to Go clubs and playing against some decent players (5 and 6 Dan, who of course crushed me) and when I moved to Boston in October 2006 it was one of the things that I began to do again. I started to play games against myself as a way to regain my board sense and to get a feel for the stones and patterns, but it has become one of my favorite ways to relax (after cycling of course).

Playing a game of perfect information (a game where chance does not play an explicit role and all information is available to all players) against oneself is a good way to stay honest. When playing other players I sometimes try to lead them into traps or take advantage of their miscues. I don’t think this is a good way to play, and it leads to bad habits that stronger players can exploit, but as I like to win I sometimes fall into the mental trap of exploiting other’s weakness. I can’t do this when I play against myself – I am not quite that schizophrenic – so playing against myself means taking turns at finding the absolute best move for black then white, assuming (is that the right word?) that my opponent has as much insight into the board as I do (I hope so, since my opponent is me).

This makes the game one in which the goal is to seek balance and to find patterns. Each move made into a place of deep repose where all of the different tensions on the board are resolved as best I can, and each moving setting up its own new potentials. I am learning a lot doing this, not just about Go, but about the relations of spatial to temporal patterns and how they can disrupt each other.

Sometimes the play can go quickly, when the call and response is obvious or when I am working through Joseki  I know well. Sometimes I even stop and look up Joseki online at sites like Sensei's Library .

Usually the games are pretty close, ten points either way, with black having the edge. But some times the game cascades in one direction or the other and black or white gets a massive victory. There is something important for me to learn here, but I am not completely sure what it is. There is something about this experience that reminds me of self-organizing criticality, where a system seems to suddenly take control and organize itself. It is also a good reminder than small choices can cascade into larger patterns and that these will not always seem to be fair.

(Photo by Yoshie Hattori)

What to Record

I learn by returning to what I have tried to learn before. A little distance allows more depth of field, and a greater distance can let some patterns open up. So I keep some records of what I am trying to learn, and some of what I do, and come back to these at regular intervals to pause and reflect.

I am not sure that I am recording the most important things. Most days I note down where I slept that night and anything exceptional that occurred. Sometimes I will write down the details of an insignificant event, that I try (but cannot) choose at random. If I have a dream I may put it on my FaceBook page (I keep access to my Facebook down to a small number of friends and family). I enter in my weight, resting heart rate and blood pressure, how far I ride my bike and if there were any significant hills. Sometimes I’ll comment on road conditions. If I come across an interesting website, and I do most days, I capture it into CrowdTrust, and if I think it may be of broader interest I will send it out on Twitter or add it to FaceBook. Importantly for me, I record what books I am reading and a bit about each book. I used to note down the key references I discovered in reading a book, to let me weave a larger web of relations. These days I tend to just add these to my wish list on Amazon. I am trying to keep a ‘decision record’ of the type that Peter Drucker recommends, but as I do not make life altering decisions all that often (or if I do I am not aware that I am doing so) I find it hard to weave this technique into my own process of observing, revisiting and revising a little every day.

Every weekend I write down my priorities for the coming week and share these with my colleagues (we use an internal Semantic MediaWiki for this). This includes some notes on what I am learning and trying to learn. I encourage (with only middling success) other people to do this as well, and when they do it usually changes my own learning priorities. If one of my colleagues is trying to get a fix on, say, the use of metaphors in marketing, I will also follow this thread, as I am easily swayed, or try to be.

Every month I set aside a few hours to go back and think about what I was reading, thinking, doing at that month in past years. I have records going back more than five years now (and I wish I had started to do this much earlier). This is a simple but surprisingly powerful technique. It gives me a feeling for the longer, under the surface flows in my interests. I think of it as a way to loop sutures from one month to another across the years.

And once a year, usually between Christmas and New Year, I will take a few days to study the trends in what I am doing and sketch out a concept map of how the pieces are fitting together.

Almost every July I find myself reading something about the Tour de France. In winter I tend to be reading some form of longer poetry, either a collected works or an epic poem, often something in translation.

• 2003 Collected Poems, Basil Bunting

• 2004 The Cantos by Ezra Pound

• 2005 The Inferno, Alighieri Dante, translated by Robert & Jean Hollander

• 2006 Isla Negra: A Notebook by Pablo Neruda translated by Alastair Reed

• 2007 The Gem Glistening Cup: Waka Anthology, translated by Edwin Cranston

• 2008 The Dream of the Poem Hebrew Poetry From Muslim and Christian Spain, translated by Peter Cole

• 2009 The Book of Songs (Shijing), Arthur Waley translation

Looking back on what I read gives me a chance to look for some balance. I try to read a mix of business, economics and technology books, and mix in math, art and philosophy. In 2008 I even did an analysis of the original language and the gender of the author of the books I read. To my mild surprise, I found that most of the books I read were by white men writing in English (about 60%). If I left poetry and novels out of the calculation, about 80% of the books I was reading came from this narrow group. So this year I am trying to broaden my range, and I am actively searching for business and economics books, written by woman, from outside of Canada and the United States. (This is proving to be more difficult than I expected, North American culture mostly looks in on itself, and it takes a real effort to look outside, but more on that another time.)

As I track my cycling everyday, and have set up a number of reports so that I can compare how much I am cycling and how it correlates with my weight (not much) and my resting heart rate (the more I cycle the lower my resting heart rate). A good hard ride with a few wind sprints goes a long way to controlling my blood pressure. I am now looking for some relations between my riding and my writing, a first hint of which can be found in my winter cycling lines (I am working on a spring cycle as well).

The passage from recording to reflection is still only single-loop learning, and I hope to return to this at some point and think through the movement from learning to recording to reflection and back to action in terms of double-loop learning. The concept of double-loop learning comes from Chris Argyris inspired by Gregory Bateson and second-order cybernetics. It reminds me a little of the need to stand beside in Zen meditation practice. Over time, my ambition it to build double-loop thinking into work and the systems we design and take to market, into my own learning and what I share with others, and into my relationships with Yoshie, our children, our friends and the larger circles I move in.