Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoiaby Roberto Zoia
Good educators ensure we remember and apply one core idea they shared for the rest of our lives.
Great educators make us fall in love with the subject.
Outstanding educators – a rare breed – make us fall in love with learning.
— Rohan Rajiv, What Great Educators Do
Yuval Harari is best known for his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos this year (2020), he focused his talk on the dangers of technological disruption.
Disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) will certainly eliminate jobs. For Harari the question is not whether new jobs will be created —they will be— but whether people will be able to learn new skills fast enough to adapt to these jobs. But it doesn’t stop with the immediate generation affected by those changes. Considering that AI is nowhere near its full potential, automation will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. People will need to reinvent themselves again and again. Those who can’t keep the pace will fall behind. “(…) in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance.”
I couldn’t help but connect Harari’s warnings to what Carl Newport’s describes as the abilities to thrive in the new economy: The ability to quickly master hard things, and the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
Both abilities can be learned, but not in a short period of time. So better start today.
This article has also been published in Spanish with the title La disrupción de la Inteligencia Artificial y la necesidad de aprender a aprender.
Paul Graham writing about great work and genius in The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius:
(…) the most exciting implication of the bus ticket theory is that it suggests ways to encourage great work. If the recipe for genius is simply natural ability plus hard work, all we can do is hope we have a lot of ability, and work as hard as we can. But if interest is a critical ingredient in genius, we may be able, by cultivating interest, to cultivate genius.
As most things Paul Graham writes, it’s worth reading the whole article.
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
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.