Quickthink

Another Learning Strategy Comment

Here is an interesting fact — it takes the brain (yours too) 15 minutes before it can start seriously getting engaged in a complex matter. In other words, there is a significant gap between the time we start thinking and when we are engaged in learning.We might think of it as a mental warm up period.  Here is a link to Nigel Paine’s blog on the issue, with a nice video on the problem of concentration.

Bottom line — the switch into “learning mode” where we engage our creative energies may be more fragile than we think. There may be motivation issues that block us from focusing at all (failure panic, for example). These will make us highly susceptible to distraction. But even if we are motivated, each time something distracts us (like tweets, email, phone calls, sms, etc.), we need another warm up period to rebuild the engagement. All major “oops!” problems if you are trying to build learning capacity.

And, there is some value in learning how to calm the mind (using meditation or other tools) as a way to build our learning capacity.

HuffPo had a nice headline about Obama’s recent speech in Pennsylvania. Here is the link. He must have read my QT post of a few days ago :). The key line from the speech:

I need you

I can’t remember him asking his coalition for support like that since the election. Very refreshing.

NYT ran a fascinating article today about an assistance project in Kenya. Here is the link. The story is nice, because it showcases the commitment of Jeffrey Sachs to doing good work, and because his good work is having results in a small village called Sauri. But more fascinating still are the learning strategies that might grow out of this.

One might recall that we cannot learn without plugging our actions into a story line. And that the story line has to build towards a positive ending. If we do not believe in the ending, we give up. Jeff Sachs has produced a success story. He has been able to reverse the poverty for a group of people. But the naysayers ask, “Is it scalable?”  Wrong question. Of course it can be duplicated. And as we engage in duplicating the project, we will learn how to do it better — and expand on the success. Why? Because we are confident that it works (it gives a happy ending). The scaling will be learned as we go — not something we bring to the story at the beginning.

The bogey man in the closet here is corruption and poor governance. The naysayers want to attack corruption and poor governance directly, arguing that these are the things that  hold countries back. Yet after quite a long time, we have no happy endings in projects that directly combat corruption and poor governance. I would argue that we should therefore seek to contain the negative effects of these things (keep them from interfering), while building more projects, like the Sauri project that work.

Rule of law advocates take note. There is a hint of a strategy here for better legal assistance projects as defensive tools (against certain effects of corruption and poor governance) rather than social engineering tools.

For those following the changed US strategy in Afghanistan, the Maarja campaign is moving to stage 2 - the taliban have been largely driven out. The US is building a new local government framework that can secure the region.

The next step is to announce and organize a take over of Kandahar. The announcement is a critical part of the plan. To build expectations of inevitable success, and weaken the morale of the taliban. So far, it appears that the strategy is working — but it was always understood that the military part of the strategy would be the easy part. I have seen no reporting on how well the new Maarja local government is performing.

Here is a link to a Bloomberg report.

One of the endless sources of pleasures that I get from life comes from debates about great wine vintages. There is first the anticipation as the summer gets under way. Is the sun right? The amount of moisture? Then will it last through harvest? Then how does the young wine seem? Is it maturing as expected? How does it compare? And on and on.

But what about those vintages that were not favored by excellent weather? 2007 burgundy was one such year. People tend to say, “Ah well, there is always next year.” Or, “we still have a lot of the 2005!”  Eric Asimov writes a nice article taking issue with this. Sure the 2007 burgundies are not bombastic. But they are extremely interesting. What fun! Here is a link to his article.

Enjoy!

 A follow up on using learning strategies

It has helped me to break down my learning strategy into four broad themes (doing, strengthing, metricing, tracking). Having this break down allows me more quickly and intuitively to see and understand the learning essence of what I am doing at any given moment. And I agree with Dan Coyle that if you want to learn from what you do, it is critical to find a peak sense of awareness (to get in the zone). Otherwise you get bogged down in details or just zone out. In case you missed that point in my post a few days ago, here is the link again to Dan’s very important post about how to get into and stay in the learning zone).

For each of my learning strategy themes, I have a question at hand.

Doing - Am I stuck, or am I engaged and moving?

Strengthening - What strength am I building on?

Metricing - What standards am I using to measure success/failure?

Tracking - How am I keeping track of improvements over time?

Of the above, I find tracking to be the most frustrating. It is an ongoing challenge for me to stay focused on doing things and to track them.  Perhaps that is why I enjoy stories about how people do this. Here is one such story from 101 Cookbooks. Have you ever thought about how people make cookbooks? It is essentially a tracking problem.

Dan Kahneman gave a very interesting TED presentation about the differences between our two selves — the experiencing and the remembering selves. I am not sure, but it sounds very much like right and left side of the brain correlations. The right side experiences, the left side remembers. In happiness terms, the experiencing self wants to be happy in our lives. The remembering self wants to be happy with our lives.

One fascinating aspect of this — measures of how happy we are vary between the two. So, for example, a 3 week vacation is much better for the experiencing self than a 2 week vacation (it gets more happy experiences). Yet the remembering self is not likely to get significantly value added, unless something different happens in the extra week (it remembers the vacation as one unit without significant difference between 2 and 3 weeks). Our remembering self tends to dominate our decision making and perceptions of happiness. So after the 3 week vacation, you might not come back any more refreshed. Very interesting.

Kahneman also said that the story telling side of our selves comes from the remembering self. And one of the most important aspects for the remembering self to tell its story — and here is the key point —-  is the ending. Sure, the story contains various significant events. But it is the ending that grabs us. So, check this out — we might be happier to endure more pain from a surgical procedure if the procedure ends in a less painful manner. That is what we are likely to remember.

This has major implications for persuasion and learning strategies. For persuasion, this means that we will be far more persuasive if we promote believable and positive endings to our stories (less about the blah blah blah of getting there). From the perspective of learning strategies, it is not likely that we can get engaged in any learning process (bringing in a right side connection), unless we anticipate that it will produce a positive ending (relaxing the left side so that it lets go of the story line about the risks of failure). The remembering side needs to believe before we can get engaged in the hard work of learning. This means that Dan Pink is right. Motivation issues are critical to get us “off the block”.

BTW — this means if you believe in the value of learning, and that building learning capacity is a great story line in itself, you are already there.

And there is more. The importance of endings tells us a lot about why people get trapped in levels 1 and 2 in Dave Logan’s 5 tier paradigm. A shock to self esteem may block the sense that one can find a happy ending.  Having lost that, there is no story line possible. And no engagement, just anger (level 1 and 2 primary emotions). Logan’s level 3 (egocentric) is a major step forward — “the hell with you, I can produce my own happy ending!” But it is very hard then to get to level 4 — where the group members revel in happy group endings. Why? It means setting aside the egocentric solution that was so important to get from level 2 to level 3, and it means believing in a system that you cannot control. That requires a hell of a lot of trust.

So, what kinds of endings are most important? Money is important when we don’t have enough of it. It becomes unimportant for the experiential self over a certain amount. The remembering self may still demand it (as part of a story). But Dan Pink argues that more important story endings are about mastery, autonomy, and authenticity.

Here is the link to Dan Kahneman’s presentation.  Wow!

Experts are still scratching their heads over the financial meltdown of last year. What caused it, and what should be done to prevent round 2? Paul Krugman offers an interesting comparison between Ireland and the US. Here is the link. The bottom line? According to Krugman

we need a sea change in attitudes, a recognition that letting bankers do what they want is a recipe for disaster.

That would mean rolling back the Reagan revolution. Hmmm … I wonder how one goes about that.

There are quite a few odd sayings in English. The new film production of Alice in Wonderland has brought out quite a few. One is the commonly used phrase “mad as a hatter”. It was a commonly used phrase in the days when Carroll wrote the original story. But where did it come from? NYT offers this entertaining article. Short answer - the most commonly used explanation is that they were susceptible to mercury poisoning does match the science. Mercury poisoning madness causes introversion, not extraversion. Apparently, no one really knows.

We might have more luck with this phrase “It was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey!” I must admit that I haven’t really heard this said very often. But I have been aware of it more generally as an off color remark that one would avoid using within earshot of one’s mother.

In fact,a rather logical explanation for this one has been offered. Thanks to Steve’s joke group for this. The origin may be from a method allegedly used on sailing ships to keep cannon balls from rolling around. The argument goes that they were stacked in a triangle formation, with a square at the bottom. To hold the bottom layer still, a form was used. But it could not be of iron, as that would rust. Brass was used instead, and this form was called a brass monkey. But brass contracts faster than iron in the cold, and so when it got very cold …. you know what happened to the balls in question.

But I wondered, why did sailors call the form a “brass monkey”? To answer that, I did a quick Google search, which was instructive. Here is the link that I found to the Phrase Finder. According to Phrase Finder the reference to stacking cannon balls is nonsense. In fact, ships didn’t really do this, and anyway the science is wrong. The differing rates of contraction between iron and brass is not that great. Indeed, there were many other common phrases about brass monkeys such as “ripping the heart out … ” and so on. Hmmm …

Phrase Finder helpfully suggested that the phrase may have related instead to brass figures of the famous three monkeys (with the anatomical reference in the phrase inserted later) or was just a synonym for any object. Alternatively, there was a type of cannon aboard sailing ships called a “brass monkey”.  Indeed, young lads who were in charge of loading powder were called “powder monkeys”. So, there may have been a nautical reference — just a more colorful one, just as my mother would have suspected.

Techmeme is replacing its “permalink” button with a “share” button. Here is a link to their explanation why. Pushing the button gives you options for linking the post via Twitter or Facebook, and for what type of link you want to create.

NYT started up a similar idea a while ago (recommend), but it hasn’t take hold yet.  But I think “recommending” and “sharing” will grow as core internet tools. They represent small steps forward in getting people to engage more in building threads about content rather than just consuming it alone. But we are just starting to develop the vocabulary for it.

If this interests you, check out my 3 part series on teaching and learning for some metrics in how we spark a learning revolution via the web. here is a link to part 1, to part 2, and to part 3.