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Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoiaby Roberto Zoia

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How to cultivate genius

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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.

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. ↩