zoiaorg

by Roberto Zoia

learning

Problem Solving Skills for the Future

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Learning complex thinking is uncomfortable. Complexity is, after all, the realm of unknown unknowns.

The Cynefin Framework is a conceptual framework created in 1999 by Mary E. Boone and Dave J. Snowden while working for IBM Global Services. It classifies the issues leaders face into five contexts, defined by the nature of the relationship between cause and effect. It offers decision-makers a “sense of place” from which to view their perceptions, and make better decisions.

Obvious or simple is the domain of best practice, or known knowns. Problems in this realm can be solved by applying rules or best practices. There is rarely disagreement or doubt about what needs to be done.

Complicated is the domain of experts, the realm of the known unknowns. Relating cause and effect requires expertise and analysis, but once the problem has been analyzed, the course of action is clear: apply the appropriate good operating practice.

Complex, on the other hand, is the context of the unknown unknowns, where the relation between cause and effect is known only in retrospective. “Complexity is more a way of thinking about the world than a new way of working with mathematical models1.” Complex systems are dynamic. They involve large numbers of interacting elements. Interactions are non-linear. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Political entities, organizations, markets, the rainforest… are examples of complex realities.

Solutions to complex problems can’t be imposed. There is no ‘right solution’. Deciding on the criteria to be used to evaluate possible solutions is part of solving problems in this realm.

Most situations and decisions in organizations are complex because some major change—a bad quarter, a shift in management, a merger or acquisition—introduces unpredictability and flux. In this domain, we can understand why things happen only in retrospect2.

Finally, a problem is chaotic when it’s too confusing to wait for a knowledge-based response. Because cause and effect are unclear, we need to establish certain level of order first, sense where stability lies, and try to turn what’s chaotic into the realm of complexity.

Guess what kind of problem solving skills will give you an unfair advantage and won’t get you replaced by a robot, automation, or a clever machine learning algorithm anytime soon. “Work is moving yet again. The move from Simple to Complicated that was a hallmark of the twentieth century is being outpaced by a move from Complicated to Complex and Chaotic3.”

To learn to navigate the sea of complexity, you need a sense of curiosity and the habit to notice the nature of things around you. You need to nurture the ability to learn new things. Expose yourself to complex situations, where identifying the problems is part of the challenge, leaving behind the shallow and safe waters of what’s just complicated and tactical.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

  1. cfr HBR, November 2007. A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. SNOWDEN, David J. and BOONE, Mary E. ↩
  2. cfr HBR, November 2007, idem. ↩
  3. Taylor Pearson, The Commoditization of Credentialism: Why MBAs and JDs Can’t Get Jobs. ↩

Teach it to a Child

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If you have experience in something, it can be difficult to explain it succinctly to other people.

This may seem counterintuitive. Doesn’t experience give you the advantage of understanding how something works? When you’ve been doing things for a long time, your brain makes part of the process transparent to you. You unconsciously make leaps.

Other times, it’s not that you are taking things for granted that may look like magic to other people. We think that we’ve got a solid understanding of something, when there may be important gaps in our knowledge.

Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman used a method for learning that relied on teaching. He found that explaining things to others is a great way to learn. His method is now known as the Feynman Technique: Choose a concept. Teach it to a child. Identify the gaps and go back to the source material. Review and simplify.

Give it a try. You’ll find that children are curious and acute. Finding solid explanations for things you thought you knew will help you consolidate that knowledge.

Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method, by Per Kristiansen and Robert Rasmussen

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Kristiansen and Rasmussen have been deeply involved in the Lego Serious Play method since its inception. Lego Serious Play is a facilitation methodology created by the Lego Group, available since 2010 under an open source, community-based model. Its goal is fostering creative thinking through team building metaphors of their organizational identities and experiences using Lego bricks. Participants work through imaginary scenarios using visual three-dimensional Lego constructions, hence the name “serious play”.

Some ways that Lego Serious Play can help an organization are:

Going beyond 20/80 meetings and creating lean in. 20/80 Meetings are, as defined by the authors, meetings where 20 percent of the attendants take 80 percent of the meeting time. The attention density —how long we pay attention to something— is low.

Lego Serious Play can also help leaders unlock other people’s potential. Often, people are not aware of their knowledge on a given topic. A group of smart people eager to contribute don’t necessarily know how to form a solution. Leaders should help unlock the knowledge in the room.

Unlocking also means deepening the participant’s understanding of the system, and “creating a culture and process where there is an understanding that the organization needs to probe, sense, and then respond. (…).”, and helping them realize the connection (or disconnection) between each individual’s purpose and the purpose of the organization.

Breaking Habitual Thinking. Expertise in a domain can lead to using tested and proven patterns of thinking over and over again. While in most cases this can be seen as an advantage, in can hinder creative thinking and problem solving.

The focus in Lego Serious Play is not on the brick; it is on the story they create. Yet there is no story without the brick. The bricks and the models become metaphors, and the landscapes of the models become stories. (p. 31)

What is Serious Play?

lego_serious_play

The authors define Serious Play as play with an explicit purpose. A session of serious play is an intentional gathering to apply the imagination, where participants seek not to implement but to explore and prepare, by following a specific set of rules and language.

“The purpose of the systematic use of the LEGO brick is to make the models —not any individual present— the center of attention in the meeting.” Lego bricks are not used to convey answers but to unlock and construct new knowledge. There is no “right way”, every participant has the obligation to build a model and a right to tell the story of the model. The method encourages questioning the model and its story, not the person.

The Science Underlying Lego Serious Play

The Lego Serious Play methodology rests upon Seymour Papert’s constructivism.

Papert, who is considered the “world’s foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn and teach mathematics, thinking in general, and other subjects”, saw conventional school environments as too sterile, too passive, too dominated by instruction. They didn’t provide or promote an atmosphere that allowed children to be the active builders that he knew they were1.

Constructionism involves two types of construct: when you construct things out in the world, you simultaneously construct knowledge in your head. “If we believe that we hold knowledge as structures based on our interaction with the world, then we can create knowledge faster and better (learning) when we are engaged in constructing a product or something external to themselves—a sand castle, a machine, a computer program, or a book. In short, ‘When you build in the world, you build in your mind.’” (p. 82)

The Builder’s Mind

Understanding the builder’s mind and in particular short-term and long-term memory plays an important role in Lego Serious Play’s foundations.

One could say that learning includes easily retrieving memory of new knowledge. But first you need to have something to retrieve; hence, encoding/formation stands out as an obvious first key stage in creating results with Lego Serious Play” (p. 100)

Long-term memory depends strongly on attention density2. Focused attention increases memory formation. According to the authors, there are four factors that affect memory formation:

  1. Levels of processing. The more deeply we process information, the stronger memory formation is. If we can transform information into something personally meaningful, then stronger memories will form.
  2. The importance of context. Context can serve as a good cue to retrieve memory, which is essentially an interaction between encoding and retrieval.
  3. Generation, when the learner is involved in making new knowledge. Ownership optimizes learning and creates long-term memory. Generation and levels of processing are very closely related: producing your own learning means you are processing more deeply.
  4. Emotions. Current thinking is that strong emotions help to focus attention and activate the amygdala (which plays a key role in mediating the effects of emotional arousal on the strength of the memory for the event).

Focused attention is essential: when attention is divided, research shows, the hippocampus shuts down and no memory is formed. Techniques like distributing learning over time and chunking —simplifying knowledge in a way that it forms clusters of similar meaning and a pattern of understanding— can lead to significant improvements in learning.

Insights are fresh knowledge that comes in the form of surprising solutions to an often known problem. What does the brain need for insights to emerge?

Research shows, explain the authors, that before an insight occurs, the brain quites down. Fewer signals come in and there are fewer signals between different brain waves. Also, good mood makes it more likely to solve a problem with an insight, and therefore to form a strong memory. “It puts the brain in preparatory state.”

The Joy of Effective Learning

Nature gives us a special type of biological feedback that rewards appropriate learning activities. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi refers to this feeling as flow. “Flow is a condition in which we are completely engrossed in a game or task, lose our sense of time and place, and utilize our learning potential to the fullest.”

We arrive at the flow condition when our competencies and the challenge we face are in balance with each other. Lack of challenge leads to boredom, facing a too difficult challenge creates anxiety. We develop and become more competent as a result of experiencing flow: we have a high point experience, that is, we succeed mastering a challenge that initially felt too hard and out of reach. (p. 114)

Strategic Imagination

“Imagination is the ability to conceive of what is not. Creativity is imagination applied.” Different types of imagination serve different purposes.

Making sense of things, or descriptive imagination, is used “to evoke images that describe the complex and confusing world out there.” It not only reveals what’s happening, but enables us to make sense of it and identify new possibilities and opportunities.

Creative imagination allows us to see what isn’t there (yet). It’s used to create something new and different. While fanstasy is the domain of the imposible, creative imagination focuses on possible realities and the making of reality.

With Challenging imagination we negate, contradict, and destroy the sense of progress that comes from descriptive and creative imagination. It starts from start and assumes nothing.

The Role of Play

Play is about process, work is about results. The purpose of Lego Serious Play is to use play to produce faster results.

The authors quote Johan Huizinga’s four-part definition of play: Play is fully absorbing, is intrinsically motivated, includes elements of uncertainty and surprise, and involves a sense of illusion and imagination.

Biologically, play influences positively brain development. “As play activities become more complex, new neural networks are added to handle this complexity.” (p. 131). Socially, play helps develop the calibration of one’s emotional responses to the world’s many unexpected and ambiguous events. It helps us prepare for unanticipated interactions by fine-tuning copying skills and refining social competences. Play also helps us “test our capabilities, rehires, and hone our skills.” Learning memory last longer when we learn by playing.

Play is culturally, temporally, and spatially marked. Where, when, and how are clearly defined, for example, by freedom (you don’t have to play), separation (marking of time), non-productive orientation (no need to produce goods), rules (that help suspend reality, or normal real life), and factiousness (awareness that play is different from real life).

play is a transformative power—something that we all intuitively use while in childhood, and ought to use in adulthood as well. (…) This extension of play into adulthood is believed to be the basis of what Whitebread and Basilio called the ‘flexibility of thought which underpins the astonishing problem-solving abilities and creativity of humans.’ (p. 133)

I enjoyed reading this book very much, specially the sections explaining the method’s foundations. This book will provide a good insight into the Lego Serious Play methodology, although you’ll need a trained facilitator to apply it effectively.

  1. Papert was, among other things, co-director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, inventor of the Logo programming language, and the genius behind the Lego Mindstorms product line. ↩
  2. “the key definition of attention density is that it is the combination of how long we pay attention to something and how much we pay attention to it. The how much can further be divided into are we listening, or are we listening and looking, or are we even listening, looking, and touching. Meeting attendees are creating very little or even no new knowledge, and thus no new solutions. These meetings may even destroy value –partly because the participants are taken away from value-creating activities, partly because employees haven’t solved the complex issue the meeting was intended to address, and partly because the meeting itself destroys collaborative efforts between the individuals and may even create stress (which has a very negative impact on the brain).” (p. 17) ↩

Three Ideas to Improve Your Reading

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For several years, as part of my end-of-year review, I take a look at my reading1 and make plans for the year to come. I’ve written down some ideas from my process that you may find useful. Of course, most of the advice is not originally mine: I learned about these ideas by reading about how some giants –call them virtual mentors if you like– do their learning.

1. Have a list of the books you want to read this year

Compiling a list of the books you want to read during the year has several benefits. Taking the time to build a reading list is a signal to yourself of the importance you give to reading and more in general to gaining knowledge.

As soon as you start adding books to your list, you’ll soon realize that the number of books you can read in a year is finite. You will need to prune your list, which at least in my case is a painful process. But it’s absolutely necessary. Not only will it help you make the best use of your time. Sending books to a not-this-year list will also force you to think and gain clarity about what topics you really care about.

The list will also help you avoid falling to the song of the sirens and pick the latest and shiny book you learned about some days ago. When you finish reading a book, you just look at your curated list of books and decide what’s next. Of course this doesn’t mean that your list must be cast in iron. But it should be a clear guide of where are you investing your time (and money).

While in the process of deciding what to read, book recommendations can be of great help. There are a lot of sources for this, you’ll find some ideas at the end of this article.

2. Have a system in place so you read every day

One of the best tactics I’ve found is Shane Parrish’s advice of reading 25 pages every day. If you are reading just for the pleasure of reading, keeping track of the pages you read every day may seem anticlimatic to you. But if you read to gain knowledge, and like most humans are bound to time constraints, then reading 25 pages per day will help you achieve a reasonable pace and read on average three books every two months].

It also helps to block a specific time on for reading in your calendar2. Best if it’s at the same time of the day. This will help you build the habit of reading3, it will help you focus faster on what you are reading. If for whatever reason you break your reading chain and miss reading some days, try to restart your routine as soon as posible.

Few things are as rewarding as making friends with the eminent dead. Reading isn’t something to be done once a week to check a box; it’s something to do every day. —Shane Parrish

3. Connecting the dots

We live in an age where finding information is not a problem. Connecting ideas and coming up with new ones, however, does not happen just by collecting information. Although for 2019 I’ve set a reading goal that is challenging for me, if I have to sacrifice the number of books I read to gain deeper understanding of a topic, so be it. That’s one of the reasons of why I’m not into fast reading techniques, or use executive summaries of books.

Learning how to take better notes, and anything that helps you grow a “second brain” is something you should always be interested in.

In my case, in my reading process I make heavy use of highlights and notes. After finishing a book, I reread the notes and highlights and incorporate them into my knowledge system. This is process is time consuming, but is totally worth it.

4. (Bonus) Where to find books

There are lots of resouces that can help you find good titles to read. Depending on the topics you are interested in, you may find the following list useful.

  • The book review section of The Gates Notes, Bill Gates’ personal page. Bill Gates is a long time avid reader, and writes reviews of the books he finds interesting.
  • Brainpickings. Maria Popova started Brainpickings this living monument to intellectual hunger for cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friend.
  • Taylor Pearson’s newsletter. Taylor is author of The End of Jobs, and writes about innovation, productivity, and the blockchain. Once a month he sends an email titled_Favorite Books, Articles, and Quotes_to his subscribers. You can also check his book notes.
  • Farnam’s Street Blog, by Shane Parrish.
  • Ryan Holliday’s Reading List and Favorite Read List for every year. Ryan is a writer and media strategist, author of several bestsellers about marketing, culture, and the human condition.
  • Derek Sivers notes to more than 250 books.

You don’t have to agree with me about the importance of reading. People may have different priorities and motivation. However, we live in an age where self-learning becomes more relevant every day. As less people read books, reading becomes a real competitive advantage. It’s a very effective way of standing on the shoulders of giants.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash.

  1. The results for 2018 are mixed. On one hand, I read some very good books, three of which stand out: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval N. Harari; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson; and Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. On the other hand, because I didn’t stick to my reading routine, I read less books than the previous year. Non-fiction reading gets a space in my calendar. It’s a more conscious reading. Novels, I read them on my spare time, like before going to sleep. ↩
  2. In my case, if something is not in my calendar, it has a 99% percent probability it won’t get done. ↩
  3. Resolutions or goals without habits to support them are most likely to fail in short time. The exception may be situations where emotions about the resolution are strong enough to amass enough will to cross the dip and begin forming an habit. ↩

I don’t know how to do this –yet. Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset

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I’ve just started reading Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. Dweck has been studying for years why it’s not just our abilities and talent that brings us success– but whether we see them as fixed qualities or as the basis for improving and learning. She calls this two different mindsets fixed mindset and growth mindset.

Here is table compiled from the examples she gives in the first chapters of the book about the different mindsets. What column resonates more with you?

FIXED MINDSET GROWTH MINDSET
Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much. No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are. You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.
Urgency to prove yourself over and over. Passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?
Focused on being right. Focused on learning from mistakes.
I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this –yet.
“Nothing ventured, nothing lost.” “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
If at first you don’t succeed, you probably don’t have the ability. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
Don’t believe in effort. Recognize the value of challenging themselves and the importance of effort.
Terrible at estimating their abilities. Amazingly accurate at estimating their abilities because they need it for learning.
Poor resilience against life setbacks. Fragile. Special talent for converting life’s setbacks into future successes. Antifragile.
Avoids challenge. Thrives on the sure thing. Seeks challenge, thrives on it.

Photo credits: Unsplash, Dan Carlson.

How many books did you read last year?

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How many books did you read last year? How many do you plan to read this year?

Reading books is in decline.

Taylor Pearson1 writes that “in a 1978 survey [US], 42% of adults had read 11 books or more in the past year, and 13% they had read more than 50. In a 2014 study, Pew found that just 28% hit the 11 book mark and only 1% had read more than 50%.2”

In our interconnected reality books have to compete for time against Facebook, instant messaging, mail, or whatever the app of the moment may be. As Seth Godin says, if we have to choose between reading a book and checking e-mail, e-mail wins. The chime of a text message coming in is so irresistible that for many texting while driving is a serious problem.

Our use of the Internet and social media trains us for short bursts of attention and jumping between tasks, not for deep reading or activities that require long spans of attention. Even if we find time for reading a book, we may have a hard time reading it effectively –which is essential for learning– because it has become difficult for us to focus in one thing for even half an hour.

Are books the only way of learning?

Reading books is of course not the only way to learn things.

For example, the offer of open or paid online courses today is better than ever, with plenty of alternatives from serious institutions and companies. Some universities like MIT have published almost all of their course content online for free. But online courses have their own problems. For example, according to a 2014 study3, only an average 6.5% of enrolled students complete open online course, and the rates are negatively correlated with course length.

TED is another great way of learning. TED offers interesting talks, and maintains its quality thanks to the events organizers and the TED community. But I think part of its success is because the talks are around 15 minutes long. Watching a 15 minute video of a talk by an interesting speaker –many times a reference in her field–, with good text transcriptions, is something most of us can do.

Shane Parrish makes a distinction between reading for information and reading for understanding4.

A good heuristic: anything easily digested is reading for information.

Consider the newspaper, are you truly learning anything new? Do you consider the writer your superior when it comes to knowledge in the subject? Odds are probably not. That means you’re reading for information.

There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s how most people read. But you’re not really learning anything new. It’s not going to give you an edge or make you better at your job.

Learning something insightful is harder, you have to read something clearly above your current level.

Listening to a 15 minutes video may give you some insights and ignite the spark of curiosity needed to learn further about a specific topic. But if you need a deep and thorough understanding of the matter, books are still one of the best choices.

Why read

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.” — Francis Bacon, The Essays.

The benefits of reading books are widely known. Reading broadens our understanding of the world, improves focus and concentration. It enhances our imagination. Reading books allows us to have a conversation with men and women of the present and past, learn from them, and let them affect our lives.

“People who do little or no serious reading (that is, reading for other than practical purposes or shallow amusement) don’t comprehend others, or their culture, or the complexities of reality, as well as those who do such reading.”5

The habit of reading correlates with better reading skills and higher academic achievement6. “Learning constantly is one of the best ways to get results in life. And reading –reading effectively, and reading a lot– is one of the best ways to learn7“.

According to his father, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates was an avid reader since an early age8:

Just about every kind of book interested him -–encyclopedias, science fiction, you name it. I was thrilled that my child was such an avid reader, but he read so much that Bill’s mother and I had to institute a rule: no books at the dinner table.

As you can see from his book recommendations page on his personal blog, despite his multiple responsibilities, Bill hasn’t stop reading.

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose challenge for 2015 was to read a new book every other week –with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies– states that books allow us to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today.

Whether or not people read, and indeed how much and how often they read, affects their lives in crucial ways. (…) The data (…) demonstrate that reading is an irreplaceable activity in developing productive and active adults as well as healthy communities.

Amazon’s best selling business author Taylor Pearson, who reads around 60 books a year, writes:

For all the tricks I’ve developed to, the real reason I think I read so much is that I see it as a career competitive advantage. If I have to cut something out of my schedule, reading books is one of the last things to go. (…)

As less and less people read books, it’s getting even more valuable. As more people are focused on USA Today [newspaper] articles on their phones, the more profound the benefits from older books.

Reading is also an expression of who we are. Harold Bloom’s answer to the question of why should we read is that “only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self.” Read not to change the world or to be a better person but simply to know, to become, yourself9. We read (…) in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests10.

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. With each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. — Nick Hornby, Ten Years in the Tub

A closing quote from Bloom, Why read:

We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life… We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. I am not exactly an erotics-of-reading purveyor, and a pleasurable difficulty seems to me a plausible definition of the Sublime, but a higher pleasure remains the reader’s quest… I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

How many do you plan to read this year? Set yourself a goal, it’s worth the effort.

  1. cfr 8 Ways to Read 60 Books A Year. ↩
  2. If you were wondering about reading habits in Peru (where I live), according to a survey by Ipsos, only 19% of adults in Lima read a book the previous year, compared to 24% in 2010 and 25% in 2009. Note that there is no mention for adults reading more than one book a year, so the data wasn’t worth mentioning. According to another survey by Arellano (2014), 26% of peruvians have never read a book. ↩
  3. cfr Farnam Street, How to read a book. ↩
  4. cfr John Hallwas, Reading decline. ↩
  5. To Read or Not To Read, National Endowment for the Arts, 2007. ↩
  6. cfr The Best Way to Get Smarter? Learn to Read the Right Way.. ↩
  7. cfr How to Raise a Billionaire: An Interview with Bill Gates’ Father in Forbes, Jan 2016. ↩
  8. cfr Michael Gorrat’s review of Bloom’s How to Read and Why. ↩
  9. cfr Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why. ↩