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)

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.

 

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.

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!

Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker

In March 1999 management thinker Peter Drucker published an article in Harvard Business Review called Managing Oneself. Drucker, who was born in 1909 and died in 2005, published this at the age of ninety, and it distills the thoughts of an emotionally and intellectually rich life. There is much good advice here for anyone who wants to better understand, foster and share their own learning and to make it part of a successful life.

The article was recently republished in book form by Harvard Business School Press. This is a small book, only 64 pages it can be read in a few hours. But it repays close reading and thought, so I will not begrudge HBSP this repackaging. It is nice to have this in a bound form to keep handy and to give on to other people.

The key messages are

• Know ones strengths through analysis of the outcomes of ones decisions
  
• Understand how one performs, or gets things done
  
• Understand how one learns
  
• Know ones values and work in organizations that support them
  
• Know where one belongs and what one contributes
  
• Be responsible for ones relationships
  
• Plan for more than one career

Decision Records and Understanding Performance & Learning

Drucker feels that the best way to understand ones strengths is to keep a record of ones decisions. Each time you face a major life decision, write down what you have decided, what the alternatives were and what you expect the outcomes to be. Then periodically revisit the decision and see what the actual outcomes have been. Eventually you will get a feeling for what you are good at. Your decisions will improve and you will learn to focus your time and energy on what makes you successful.

I seem to be facing my fair share of decisions over the past few years, and I adopted Drucker's approach in 2005 when I left Recombo, a company I helped to found. At that time the basic decision was whether to (i) go back to school and maybe get a Ph.D., (ii) start another company, (iii) do some consulting, or (iv) take a position at a larger company. I began with the consulting as a way to defer a decision and then when an opportunity came up I joined Monitor Group, a consultancy in Cambridge MA. My goals in joining Monitor and the results to date are sketched out below.

• To see how I would perform in a larger organization
  
  So far so good, my main struggles have been with not having direct control over the larger decision making process and not having deep visibility into finances. I find both of these deeply frustrating. The learning made possible at Monitor, especially the opportunity to work with thought leaders such as Bruce Chew, Tom Nagle and my boss Jonathon Levy has been astonishing, and I am learning as quickly here as I have at any time in my life (I have zero tolerance for situations where I am not learning full tilt).
  
• To understand how big-time consulting works and see if it suits me
  
  I have learned an enormous amount about how the consulting business works and about key frameworks, especially in marketing, pricing and decision making, and how these are implemented in very large companies. Consulting itself does not really suit me as I prefer to be engaged in building teams and creating innovative products - again, this has something to do with being able to shape things directly, whereas consultants work through analysis and persuasion
  
• To experience living in the US and come to understand it better
  
  I am a committed citizen of Vancouver and am deeply engaged in the art, writing, food and music of that city. But I spent ten years of my life in Japan and have lived in Europe as well. Living in these other cultures has helped me to see Canada and Vancouver more clearly. But I lacked the perspective of our closest neighbour, which also happens to be the world's most powerful country. And we have chosen a good time live in the US: a presidential election year, during a financial crisis, with infrastructure crumbling, as the semantic web emerges from research groups like MIT (I cycle by it everyday and should spend more time interacting with researchers there), Stanford and Rensselaer and begins to be applied in real-world applications, and (I am being optimistic here) hints of a cultural rebirth can be seen in music, street art and poetry. Do I understand the US? Not sure that one can understand another person, let alone a country. But I surely have a more honest and informed perspective and a deeper affection for the people. I can also see that I want to live in Vancouver in the long-term.

Values and Contribution

If an organization does not share your values then don't work there. End stop.

Understand how you best contribute and make sure the organization supports you in contributing in that way. And if it does not, create a new job, either in the same organization, at a different organization, or somewhere you create with your partners.

I believe I best contribute to an organization in three ways

• Idea shaper and instigator - I am not sure how original my thinking is, but I have a good ability to take ideas from different disciplines and to blend them into new constellations that can be applied to solve real problems
  
• Team leader - I enjoy and think I am quite good at building teams and making each team member successful
  
• Pattern detector - I am reasonably good at spotting long-term economic, technical, social and cultural trends and injecting them into ideas I am trying to shape and teams I am trying to build

On the other hand, I am not a skilled administrator and my sales quotient is no better than average (unfortunate as I have learned to enjoy sales). I can only work effectively on a team where I can help other people to use their own strengths and cover my deficiencies.

Working with my wife, object maker and photographer Yoshie Hattori, over the past almost three decades has also helped me live into my values and contribute to our families growth. And she, quite simply, helps me to see better!

Relationships and Career

Drucker points out that most of us can and should expect to keep on working as long as we keep on living, but that most of us will not want to stay in one career for forty or fifty years. We need to build a wide net of people that will help us and guide us in our decisions over our life and these people should come from many different areas.

I invest a lot of time in my network of friends and colleagues (and I don't separate the two groups) and in meeting and talking to al sorts of different people. But I am doing less well in thinking through what an alternative career might be! Whatever it is, it will probably involve starting a company or founding a non-profit organization. Some possibilities - a store that sells odd things from every part of industry and design, a small restaurant, a company giving art tours for older people, a company giving art tours for children, a non-profit for people raising children in more than one language or for people who have no first language, an institution to research long-term patterns of all types ...

Suggestions?

 

Learning Styles

A big part of my understanding how I learn has been to understand my own learning styles and them to find or create opportunities to learn in the ways that work for me. As it happens, these are rather idiosyncratic, and they are probably quite different from how most people learn. But then, I suspect that the ways in which any individual learns are different from the ways in which most people learn!

There has been a lot of talk on learning styles over the past thirty years or so, probably more talk than there has been understanding. In many cases what are conventionally called 'learning styles' are better understood as preferred modes of information absorption. For example, a Google search on learning styles (made February 23, 2008) turned up the following explanation from ldPride.net as its top return. (LdPride.net is a wonderful site for people with learning disabilities that shows how to turn a learning disability into a learning ability.)

• Visual Learners - Learn through Seeing
• Auditory Learners - Learn Through Listening
• Tactile/Kinesthetic Learners - Learn through moving, doing and touching

To me these are modes of gathering information and when turned into the actions of drawing, speak and writing, and moving they are modes of expression. Important stuff, and useful to understand. But I use all three and do so consciously. I will give some examples of how blending modes can enhance learning and memory, for now suffice to say that I love to cook for other people, and I use all three modes plus taste when I explore new ways to prepare food - one of the most important ways I learn. (And our beagle, Hana - means both 'nose' and 'flower' in Japanese - learns a lot by smelling things, and once in a while I try to follow her around and learn how she experiences the world by trying to figure out what on earth she is smelling - and she usually does have her nose stuck close to the earth.)

So if Visual, Auditory, Tactile/Kinesthetic are modes of gathering information, then what are 'learning styles'?

I find it useful to use the term 'learning style' to refer to the preferred approach people take to learning in terms of how they access, organize and apply information (in some cases knowledge) using a variety of models and integrate this into their own lives. I have tried to sketch this below (don't take the sketches too seriously, they are casual aides to understanding and not formal diagrams).

A full set of learning styles would be described in terms of the different ways that people 'access', 'organize', 'apply' and 'integrate' information (including its affective or emotional aspects) in their day-to-day lives.

The modes visual, auditory, tactile, etc. described above may be useful in understanding 'access'. Different approaches to knowledge classification - hierarchical, networked, open networked - may help to understand 'organize' and theories of action could provide models for how learning is 'applied. The styles people adopt when applying learning are equally importnt - some want to begin by imitatiion, others need to first create their own applications. Affect also plays an important role, not captured in the sketch but relevant to a person's learning styles. What one feels about what one learns is a key to motivation of course, but there is an affective aspect to learning that goes well beyond the movtivational. Affective learning itself is an important topic. One that I will come to in future posts - and it is an area where I have a great deal of learning to do!  But all this takes us beyond where I am ready to go in this post, so I would like to come back to my own understanding of my own learning styles.

At this point I have identified five learning styles that I come back to over and over again in my learning.

• Abstract
• Historical
• Social
• Modeling
• Written

Let's dig into each of these and give some examples.

Abstract - I need to understand the theoretical framework and often prefer to work top down in understanding an area of practice. You can see this in my approach to this post, which begins by a discussion of 'modes' and 'learning styles' before getting down to my own idiosyncratic styles. I also try to find the largest and most general patterns in what I study and link them in with other patterns (when I am ready to add a sixth learning style, I will probably add one around associating or blending of ideas). This 'abstract' style is closely related to the 'modeling' style.

Historical - I like to understand the history of how things came to be the way they are, go back to the source materials, and explore some of the paths not taken. So I often go back and try to read the original texts in a field, the recent trend in the publishing industry to collect original scientific texts with comments by a leading contemporary researcher has been very helpful for me, see, for example, physicist Stephen Hawking's On the Shoulders of Giants: The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy. I tend to prefer poetry, art and music from the beginning of a style (I am a big fan of Archilocus, less fond of Theocritus), but I do try to follow how styles (of thought as well as art) develop over time and explore the byways and supposed dead ends.

Social - I learn best by discussing things with other people and entering dialogues. I often take this to the step of organizing an organization in order to learn something at some depth. At Monitor, we sometimes form 'Buddy Groups' of people who want to learn about something together. The choice of a blog as a place to gather these thoughts on my own learning is another example of this.

Modeling - Modeling and mapping an area of practice and creating models, both internal models and external models that place it in a larger context or ecology, helps me to remember things and to make first guesses on the causal web and the implications of decisions as they ripple through the field of effects. There are many tools I find useful for this, but over the past few years I have tended to default to the Unified Modeling Language, to Concept Maps and to various light (as light as possible) uses of the Semantic Web. One of the main places I collect and think about learning and that of my team is on an internal Semantic MediaWiki that Monitor maintains.

Written - By writing, including writing poetry, aphorisms and abstract equations or pseudo code, I come to my own understanding of an area and develop the ability to make decisions and to act. And reading is a good complement to writing, so I try to read a lot, keep track of what I read, and weave what I read into what I do.

In my previous post I looked at how understanding one's strengths is an important way to understand how one learns. In this post I wrote about learning styles. In my next post I will see how strengths and learning styles come together.

Applying Strengths

Over the years I have learned that I do well by focusing on what I do best. It took me a long time to learn this. Like many people, I spent years struggling to succeed by overcoming my numerous shortcomings - I prefer to begin things rather than to conclude them, I am not detail oriented, I have strong spatial pattern recognition but only average temporal pattern recognition and so on. Oh yes, I have terrible hand-efe coordination, but excellent balance and well beond average lung capacity. These days, I try to lead teams where other people make up for my weaknesses and I can concentrate on what I do best.

The first time I became aware of the philosophy that one should know what one does well and then do that was from management guru Peter Drucker (there is really no better word for this wonderful man). Drucker was a banker early in his life and then a journalist. He was not particularly successful at either profession and it was not until he honed in on the study of management that he was able to make a real contribution to human thought and activity. For much of his life Drucker kept a record of major decisions he had made and would review these decisions periodically to see what the outcomes had been. One of the decisions he repeatedly went back to and reinforced was the move from working in organizations to studying them.

This idea has been popularized in books by Marcus Buckingham and his colleagues, such as Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book is based on many years of research by Gallup which has developed a test instrument called Strengthsfinder to help people discover and understand their own strengths. I tend to be skeptical about such survey driven instruments, I have studied test design and generally find tests of this sort easy to game. But then, as the goal is to better understand myself, the only person who who would lose by gaming this system would be me! So I have used it several times in good faith, and I have also encouraged people who work with me and my family to use it give them a frame of reference for their own life decisions. And I have found it helps a great deal to get a bearing on ones own strengths and to understand those of the people around you.

On my last run through (I plan to do this again using the new version at some point this year) my strengths were as follows:

• Strategic
• Achievement
• Ideation
• Input
• Learning

These come as no surpise to people who know me.

I have been working to understand these strengths for several years now and have developed my own interpretations of what they mean to me.

Strategic: I look for patterns, long-term patterns, and the points in the pattern that have the potential for change.

Achievement: I am competitive and want to win. And I want what I win to have some significance, at least in my own eyes and for my immediate circle. Ideally, I want what I do to have some impact for the better.

Ideation: Ideas matter, generating them, sharing them, investigating them and seeing them become real.

Input: High bandwidth absorption and processing of large amounts of information, sorting them, and sending them back out. (How else to see larger patterns? Someone with different strengths might say through contemplation and deep thought.)

Learning: Well, I am trying to understand learning more deeply in this blog!

I have found these strengths apply pretty generally to how I live my life. Take cycling. Over the past few years I have become a hardcore urban commuter cyclist (through downtown Boston, up and down the Charles River for some extra distance, and over into Cambridge MA where I work). And I am working up to longer distances, I rode a century (160 KM) on my fixed gear last year and want to do a one-day ride of at least 200 KM (again on my fixie) this year. I am learning as much as I can about bicycles and cycling, from the design of the bike to the biophysics of performance and endurance (learning and input). I ride hard, don't like to be passed, and always try to go a bit longer and a bit harder (achievement). I plan my rides both daily and over the course of the year, trying to design rides that have a good rhythm and that explore the physical structure of Eastern Massachusetts (strategic). And I enjoy talking to my friends about their ideas and experiences of cycling and looking for better ways to hydrate or to build stamina and strength--interval training anyone?(ideation).

So over the course of this blog, I will be turning these strengths in on themselves, and using them to better understand how people learn, how it shapes their lives and communities, and how it contributes to a more connected society (connected into longer patterns of time and space, connected across cultures, and connections between people).