Category: Learning

Collaboration, communication, Learning, Personality

What are you passionate about?

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 But what if science isn’t your world? I admit, I don’t know whether people outside of my social sphere would care about this at all. I’ve spent my entire adult life embedded with scientists and the people who love them. I take it for granted that this sort of knowledge is cherished, is yearned for. And I am keenly aware that in order to tell you what we found, it required a thousand words of explanation before I could get to the crux.

by Becky Chambers – To Be Taught, if Fortunate

What are you passionate about? What have spent so much time thinking/working/reading/playing with that you know “everything” about it? I love to watch someone talk about their passions and what they find interesting. You can see how excited they get, and how they feel more alive. It’s amazing to see how a person or a group of people can get stuck in the small details that for outsiders feel completely irrelevant but for the people who care is the most important thing in the world.

It also has its downsides. If you are new to a group and just getting started. It can be hard to get in. You don’t have the history, the knowledge nor the language to fully take part in the discussions. This means that the group needs to work extra hard on how to include them. Let them make mistakes or say the wrong things without getting ridiculed. We all need to start somewhere. I think the language is especially important to teach to new people. Words have a history and a special meaning in organisations and they might not mean what you think when you get started. 

Failing, Learning

Learning requires failure

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“It might not be dangerous with this spell, but it’s a good habit to get into for future spell designs. Start with a fraction of the power needed to activate it and then work your way up slowly. Once you’re sure the construct is stable, you can test it at full strength.” “You knew that would happen, didn’t you?” accused Will. “It was a fair bet, but this was a safe spell for accidents, and accidents are the best way to learn.”

By Michael G. Manning –  Secrets and Spellcraft

In many cases it is better to let people learn from their own mistakes than to fix them before they happen. What we have to watch out for is how big the consequence is of the failure and if there is time to fix it. As a father when watching my kids jump, climb and play I often see them on they way to hurting themselves. If I feel they might break a bone then I will stop them but if it will cause some pain or a bruise it is better that they learn consequences and assessing risks. 

It is the same at work. As a leader or coworker you shouldn’t always stop someone from failing. Sometimes it is the best way to learn, both from what they did wrong but also from dealing and fixing the outcome of the failure. And if they can’t fix it themselves then they will have to practice asking for help.

Leadership, Learning, questions

But who will I ask?

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“You don’t happen to know what that was, do you?” Lindon asked hesitantly. “You’re asking me, but who am I supposed to ask?”

Will Wight, Soulsmith

Starting your journey as a leader or manager can be a lonely experience. Going from being a colleague to managing others, and feeling responsible for their success, can be daunting. To combat this, it is important to find new colleagues who are also managers or leaders. These peers can provide a safe space to discuss, ask questions, and learn together.

While you may have a great manager who can coach you, it’s not always the same as discussing with colleagues who are in the same stage of their journey. It’s important to consider what you’re learning, how you’re learning, and who you’re learning with. If you’re unsure about any of these things, take the time to find your answers.

communication, Complexity, Learning, questions, reflection

Conviction kills

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Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.

R. Scott Bakker, The Thousandfold Thought

When we get too certain of what is right, what we know, and how things should work then we stop asking questions and trying to learn. We need to question ourselves and our situation to grow.

When we try to understand ourselves, others and their situations then we start to empathize and connect.

It’s not about questioning everything, but to keep reflecting. Especially when we feel most certain or when someone says or do something that seems stupid to us. To ask ourselves, why does this make sense to them and not me?

As a side note: I had to check what begets mean before I understood what I read and maybe you do to: begets mean to cause or to produce an effect.

Adaptivity, Leadership, Learning, Resilience

Prepare to be spontaneous

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“One can never prepare for everything, but when one prepares for what one can, it’s much easier to deal with the unexpected.”

L. E. Modesitt Jr., Imager

Preparation and thinking about what obstacles might happen is not about predicting exactly what will happen and creating a plan that should be followed to the letter. It is about opening our minds to the unexpected and to create a culture in your organisation around adaptiveness, resilience, and learning. It is about accepting that we will fail, that things we didn’t plan for will happen and that we need to be able to act on it. By talking about obstacles and creating scenarios together for how to deal with them, then we are much better prepared when sh*t hits the fan and when there is no time left to think and you just need to act.

Learning

Keep learning

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“If you don’t feel like you’re going to die when you’re training, then you’re doing it wrong,”

Will Wight, Blackflame

It is easier for us to keep working in the same way as we have always done. Keep using the same methods, models, and tools. It is easy and we know what we will get. If we try something new, it will be harder, and we might not get the result we want. We might not get the result we want with how we did it before, but it would be easier.

It is easy to end up in this trap. And both we and our organisations are constructed to reinforce this: We strive for the simple and easy, and it is scary with new things and uncertainty.

We need to be persistent and focused to continue learning and developing. And we need to dare. Start with a small change tomorrow and see what happens, and then see what feels small the day after that…

Data, Decisions, Learning, questions

Too many dots

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“Too many dots,” Miller said. “Not enough lines.”

James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

The last few years we have been given more and more data. Data-driven decisions is a buzzword in many businesses and people seem to trust you more if you say that you based your decisions on data. The challenge is that the more data we get, the harder it is to analyse. You need more time and more skill if you want to analyze large datasets, and it becomes easier and easier to make an error and come up with a wrong conclusion.

If you learn some basic data visualization techniques, then you will get far. And please stop calculating the average of all the data you get; most people have no idea what it means nor how dangerous that measure is.

Instead focus on a few dots, visualise it, and then try to draw some lines. Or try go talking to people…

balance, Impact, Learning, Organizations

The balance between boring and pushing

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“Well, in his experience, soldiers spent little time doing soldier things. They instead spent ages walking places, waiting around, or—in his case—getting yelled at for walking around or waiting in the wrong places.”

-Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

I think most jobs are like this. We rarely push our skills to their limits, and we spend most of the time at work doing routine stuff. This can be boring but it can also be used to replenish our energy and improve ourselves. It is not sustainable to always be on our toes, always creating, and always stressed. The challenge comes when we spend too much time in the routine or too much fun stuff that pushes our limits. One leads to stagnation and the other leads to burnout.

You can’t compare sports to normal work but if you look at elite athletes they spend at lest 90% of their time practicing and 10% competing. I admire their commitment, willpower and grit. Their amazing achievements comes from spending so much time training for one thing.

It would be very expensive for everyone to practice the same way in most organizations. But I think most companies need to focus more on making sure everyone learns and develops more during everyday activities and continues to push themselves to become better at their jobs.

Learning

What do you want to master next?

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Not for the first time, a cold fist appeared deep within her stomach. Never in her life had she worried about credits or having a place to go home to. But with the last of her savings running thin and her bridges burned behind her, there was no margin for error. The price of a fresh start was having no one to fall back on.

– Becky Chambers; The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

When we start something new we loose a lot of security, but it also means we can start over, learn new things, and meet new people. I read an article a few years back we should change our career every 7 years. This was based on the assumptation that it takes 10000 hours to master something (that may or may not be true). The thought was that if your goal in life is to develop as much as possible you should change your job after you have mastered it. If you stay in the job then you may produce a lot of things but you might also get bored.

I agree with the thought that we should change what we do when we stop learning because if we can find a new place that we learn it will be more fun and I think we will get a bigger sense of accomplishment by learning something new. It will also be really scary as you are forced to continuously learn and develop throughout your life. I remember talking to a 70 year old woman about this and I loved how her response was: “Then I should have time to master at least two more things in my life.”

What do you want to master next?

communication, Learning, Personality

The circle of life?

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“it had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.”

– Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

What we say and how we say it shows who we are and also makes us more of that person. Our brain will focus more on the things we talk about and then we will see more of those things and then we will talk more about them. Is this the circle of life? 🙂