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.
