Recently I bought a game for my daughter which is all about managing a wildlife park.  I made her promise to me that she would take the time to learn how to play before asking any more questions.  After playing it for a while she has given up because she couldn’t work it out.  Now, she is only little but I must admit I have seen this trend in people much older than her.

Here is another example.  Recently I told a group of my students about the final exam for a subject I am running.  I gave four very obvious hints as to what I was expecting in the exam only to be shocked and dismayed when I marked them over the last couple of days.  They didn’t get the hint.  Now, maybe I am being a little too blind to what an obvious hint is … but when you say, “This is a really obvious hint,” followed by, “you can find the answer on this page,” you begin to see my frustration.  The generation that has come after me are a special case and I have written about them before.  What I have noticed however, more and more, is that context gets lost in massive amounts of information.  So what has that to do with learning?

Learning takes place in a context

If you have ever attempt to learn a language you will know of the problem of immersion.  This is when you are placed in unfamiliar surroundings and forced to make sense of the language in order to communicate what you mean properly.   If you are learning French for example, the French in Action series forces you to study the whole damn course… in French!  They immerse you in the language so that learning is faster, richer and more contextual.  What happens though when you take large amounts of information, displayed in a shallow context across a wideband?  INFORMATION OVERLOAD!  You have lots of information, plenty of facts but very little perspective or context.

Add to that the problem facing our children.  They have unprecendented access to information in massive amounts but only know small portions of it.  That is, courtesy of a massive exposure to information from the point of education until now, we have a generation of people who are very capable at collecting large amounts of information in shallow context situations.  Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink calls a more positive version of this (based on research) “thin slicing”.

Thin Slicing and Generation Y

Thin slicing is making extremely fast decisions with a small amount of information (A good introduction to the topic can be found here).  What happens when we are forced to make fast decisions about things as a matter of practice and have only limited amounts of information?  We end up slicing that information into smaller “thinner” parts and based on our previous expertise are able to make snap judgments in a moments time.  If you think of a leg ham as a piece of knowledge… taking some of the bone should be enough for the expert to make a judgment that is probably going to be true as it is logical.  For example, if you are a mechanic and you want to diagnose a problem with a car.  You can hear a rattle and know instantly what the problem is and what the likely solution will be.   If you are an expert! Now, let’s reverse that situation for a moment and take a slightly different look at it.

When you are exposed to massive amounts of information and you are forced to make sense of it, your brain is likely (I am conjecturing here… is there a neuroscientist in the house?) to build models of the information that it thinks you want.  That is, as you are exposed to massive dispersed amounts of information, you have to compartmentalise it in order to be able to store it.  When you have too much information to choose from you build models that are shallow because you can’t actually contextualise the information as much as you should be because you have, “too much information”. In Gladwell’s book he speaks of ‘experts’ being able to glance at a problem and make snap judgments.  In some cases, this is quite profound because it enables the expert to see the connections faster than others.  In the case of Generation Y, they are building models of information this way… all the time.  They are creating shallow pools of information by thin slicing everything.  They are learning ‘enough’ of everything at a shallow level of context and then applying this knowledge to the way in which they solve their problems.

We are now starting to see the effects of this kind of thing at Griffith University.  People that have been exposed to the massive amounts of information seem to be to part of a the new learning plague… to coin a phrase.

The new learning plague

You may call this an attention problem.  We can’t hold the attention of people because they are used to having concurrent information streams available.  However, I think what’s happening is that our education system and the society we live in has created an “information monster”!  We have so much information now that in order to filter it, you need to slice it into smaller portions and be happy with the lack of depth OR become very good at one thing at the expense of having a collection of shallow knowledge OR a variety of either.   This has, in my mind at least, created a plague.  We have a generation of people who are happy to keep things at the surface level where information is linear, causally efficacious and makes perfect sense.  Don’t believe me… watch a morning show about budgeting and you get simple advice that is repeated ad nausem.

I recently tested this out at a course I went to for work about Occupational Health and Safetly.   I was sitting next to an early to mid twenties manager who was exteremly intelligent.  Throughout the course, he kept texting, talking and not really taking notes.  It really pissed me off when he got better marks than me on the test because I had my phone switched off.  When I got over myself, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.  He was extremly good at filtering.  He could hear what the trainer was saying and filter that on a surface level whilst focusing on his text messaging at the same time.  People of my ilk will focus on one thing at a time.  Generation Y people tend to be able to move between different information mediums shallowly and filter out what they need and then move on to the next thing.   To watch this filtering process in action was something to behold.   I couldn’t believe after teaching 17 and 18 year olds for a few years that I had missed this.

Whilst having a developed skill set of dealing with information overload through thin slicing and filtering is wonderful, it can’t replace deep learning.  Deep learning challenges context, ideas, notions and themes.  I remember having to defend the way I teach a few years ago for a performance review and I picked on Mizerow who argued that in order for learning to occur, you need your subjects to be able to challenge how and what they learned by getting them to critically reflect on it.  I still believe that.  You can’t be an expert in something if you have filtered it out to a logical sequence.  Neither can you find perspective, depth or multiple streams of meaning if you are simply looking for the straightforward answer all the time.  By the way, life is pretty far from straightforward!

At the time of this writing I have move beyond frustration with people who don’t want to learn the deep way.  Instead I have developed coping strategies to help me understand why people want to learn in shallow streams of information.  It’s this… nobody is really as interested as I am! I am not even saying that this is a new phenomenon… it isn’t.  What I am saying is that we have generations of people exposed to large amounts of ‘wikipedia’ style information without bearing down a context for them to challenge these core assumptions.   People who filter out important information to get a logical core fail to realise one important point: Facts are socially constructed.

To finish up this post I thought a video would be nice… see you next time.

A while ago I set out to learn the guitar.  At the time, I had the bright idea of teaching myself.  Fast forward a few years and now I make the same mistakes I did years ago and I have absolutely no way of progressing forward without relearning the basics from scratch.  What a bummer.  Nevertheless, through this experience I have learned something.  There is no shortcut to brilliance… no not even if you want rock out.  You have to learn the ropes… there is no other way.

Learning requires that you “actually” learn

The amount of students that I meet that don’t really want to learn the process.  I get emails asking me for help and very often they haven’t even tried.  I must admit, it doesn’t really bother me that much… I am more worried about them!  I mean my stuff is pretty easy.  How are these people going to survive with a hard ass boss?  It makes me wonder about the state of things.   Anyway, what really surprises me is that people believe (as I did for many years) that they think the easy answer will come to them.    Such thinking produces dire results.  We cheat and look for the easy way around.   In short, there is no easy way around… you have to do it.  It seems like a simple thing doesn’t it?  Yet we very rarely want to go through it.

Ask a millionaire they will tell you

Even though we live in an age that promises the get rich quick answer, there really is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme.  Even though people like Branson and whoever else you may conjure up look like the made money fast, they had to learn something along the way.  They picked up some skills, they put them to work and they learned there way through the problem.  I am not saying that it should take years, but you won’t wake up one day and suddenly realise, “oh crap I am rich”.  Sure, it does happen.  But, you want to learn a language… you have to do in a way that works.  That’s a whole other post!

What you can do to avoid ‘shortcut mentality’

Shortcut mentality wants to have easy answers.  The kind you find on the back of your cornflakes packet.   To even learn how to garden, bake a cake, make a sandwich, or do anything that you wish to do… you have to learn it.  Our mind plays tricks on us by saying that we can circumvent the process.  That if we just get the ‘good’ information we will be set.  There is nothing that is not worth learning, that won’t cost you something.  The better the information, the more it will cost you… the higher barrier to entry.   Think about what Stephen King knows about the fiction game or what Richard Branson knows about haggling?  They have learned things that got them where they are, along with a whole lot of luck.

Taking a shortcut is good if it’s efficient to do so but if it means you have to go back to where you started and start again… then it’s not worth it is it?  Think about your life, business, job or family.  What do you have that didn’t require some effort in learning?  Remember, getting there quick is good if it’s smart but if it’s not… you will only have to go back to where you started and hit it again.

A while ago I was set a task. To drive to the Gold Coast every Thursday and try my hand at teaching a subject about information. Hey why not? The Gold Coast is an interesting place and the people there are quite nice. The interesting thing is that in five years of teaching this subject elsewhere I have found that people really don’t like it. We have tried everything from standing on our head to juggling in class. Many years ago a friend of mine even dressed up like a witch and handed out minties to increase student engagement. Alas, it didn’t work.

It’s easy to teach something people love… try teaching something people hate

I remember five years ago turning up to a class and introducing the major assessment to the class. After one hour of reading on a big screen a student came up to me and asked… what was that about? No, I am not joking. I am being serious. I asked her what she meant and she told me she wasn’t watching for the past hour and wanted me to explain what I had just said… again. During my time this experience stands out but is far too common in my courses.

People hate this course. It’s about ‘information’, informatics, information systems and so on. Boring? Students in the class range from my friend above, to mavens, critics, trouble makers and the occasional paradigm shifter. Overall this has been however, a part of my life that has brought me a lot of growth but a quadruple measure of frustration as well.

How do you hold your head up when the majority of students don’t want to learn… they just want to earn

95% of the people I have taught in any of my courses almost always don’t give a crap about what I have to say. Now, if you are reading this and you were in my course you may be in the 5%. If that’s you then God bless you. If you are reading this and remember me you may have liked me or the course but can’t remember what I said. That’s probably my fault. But what can you do when you are stuck with subjects like knowledge management? For goodness sake, I don’t even know what that is.

Most of the people I meet are on the their way to the sausage factory. By that, I am of course referring to the giant machine that sucks the living creative spirit out from us and makes hamburger patties with it. That machine. The evil corporate beast that brings you the lottery, things like ‘the systems development life cycle’ and so on. Why am I harping on about this? Well … why not?

So how do you cope with students who just want a ‘pass’. Granted I believe a lot of the time in what I teach that it’s A). useful and B) helpful. But I am stuck with this bullcrap idealist mentality I inherited from someone. Can I tell you that most people don’t want to learn about information… even though I want them to? Why should I bother?

When I started teaching I had a concept of what I thought teaching would be like. Sharing ideas, collaboration you know the sort of thing you see on those Lotus advertisements. But who the hell am I kidding? How do you hold your head up? You either forget about being a teacher or you push hard, make them hate you and move on. Neither option is good… there is probably a third when my head pulls itself out of this daze I will remember it.

Amongst the gloom: there have been shining lights?

Of course. I am by nature an optimist. So there have been many people who I helped who were incredibly nice. Overall my assessment is however, that most of time you are simply repeating information for those who ‘want to get through’. Through to what? Through to corporate sausage maker.

A friend of mine put it this way: we are feeding meat to the corporate sausage factory. I think he is right. I have no power to change the way society chooses to run it’s business. You don’t have to run business that way. Read Maverick (Ricardo Semler) if you don’t believe me. Things can be different. Yet, we stick to the Fordian principles of ‘scientific’ management which insist we develop ‘plans’ whilst never questioning the underlying motives of our ‘superiors’.

The system is not good for people who care

If you are like me and you have a heart you simply can’t switch off when it comes to these things. I have heard it said that you the author is separate to the page. I am sorry but that simply is a load of rubbish. You can be diced up into little bits and fed into the sausage grinder unless you want to be. If you care about your teaching and want to help people learn … it will cost you. There’s a price you must pay if ‘learning’ is the aim of any course. No matter if it’s basket weaving at your local school or quantum mechanics… you will have to pay the price. If you put effort or time or energy into what you do then be prepared for the sausage people. They are part of life.

An optimistic view

I am the kind of academic who believes in knowledge but I don’t REALLY think the endless streams of meta-information we call ‘journals’ are really going to improve society. After realising during my PhD that most knowledge streams never interact I have become more than a little concerned about problems and society. For example when I was reviewing the problem solving research literature I went to all kinds of disciplines. Education, humanities, science, information systems, information technology and social science to name just a few. Do you know what I found? I found the same argument mentioned at least 30 times. Exactly what was that argument?

We need to find better ways to fix messy problems

They all said the same thing but in different contexts. Yet none of them spoke in the same voice. It’s like being in a room with 30 people from different nationalities while they all speak the same sentence in their own language. How can so many different people have the same conversation with themselves? And anyway could you please tell me how any of that is improving society? People can’t because overall it’s about promotions, journal rankings and impact factors. Is that really improving society? Well you might say, ‘I got into Academy of Management Review but if it isn’t working or improving things who actually cares?

I am not saying that I don’t care. That’s precisely the problem I do care. But why? A theory is only as good as it’s validity or usefulness. But I digress.

I would like to end my rant here on a positive note. I have had many wonderful students. Too many to name actually. These people have enlightened my life with their brilliance, challenges and wit. I have met great teachers, fellow thinkers and carers on the path of knowledge who made my life wonderful… for a while. Most of them wind up in trouble with the sausage machine, sacked or moving on. How sad.

So what’s the positive point? There are people who want to learn and grow. These ones are rare but make the journey worthwhile. Yes, it makes up for all the stupid university politics (hat tip to Peter Checkland), the disciplinary meetings and the endless reams of ‘research’. Why because somebody cares and was bothered enough to look beyond the surface level. These people teach me that sausage maker can’t get to everyone, oh no there are some who for the sake of learning have shunned it’s shiny metal surface. So for these I say it’s all worth it!

Yesterday I spoke about the four stages of learning.  Today, I want to point out the missing element of learning that often is overlooked by many people.  This is the part of learning that refers to your natural talent.

Your natural talent

People who excel in their area, such as Elvis, were not just hardworkers. They had a special something that made them different from everyone else around them. They had a natural inclination or gifting that guided them to the target. If you look into the history of successful people you will find somewhere in their story a natural desire to follow a certain path. You have this too and so do I.

How can I know my natural talent?

I can’t answer this with a one line answer except to add this: what you don’t have to work hard to achieve and find very easy to learn could be your natural talent. For me, it’s writing. I don’t have to think beyond writing the next word to know what I am going to say. As a matter of fact as I am writing this… it’s just flowing out of me. No planning, no forward thinking, no nothing. Just a natural flow of creativity inside me. That’s God given. Finding it, is not as easy as simply letting it flow however and that’s where yesterdays post comes in handy. You have to develop your natural talent. You may find like I did as you were developing your natural talent in one area you discovered it was actually in another area! But that’s what makes life so interesting… we all have so much potential (that’s tomorrow’s topic…).

An example of natural talent

Say you like organising people. You love to file things away, be organised and structure things. That’s a natural talent. You may be creative and ideas are always flowing out of you… that’s a natural talent. You may be drawn to cooking, sailing, fishing, running or whatever. It’s that drawing you need to develop and master on the road of life.

There are many reasons why people never realise their natural talent… none of which are important right now. What is important is that you make a committment to begin looking for that talent and start developing it. In the next post in this bunch I am talking about what potential is and how to use it. You must come back and read that if you are stuggling with your own personal development.

When you start learning anything you begin from the standpoint of what I like to call the ‘jackass’.  This means you know nothing about what you are doing and where you are going.  I was like this the first time I can to Excel. Now I can teach it without thinking about it.  So what are the four stages of learning?

Phase 1: Jackass

When you start to learn anything knew… you don’t have a clue. You are confused, angry, annoyed, tired and alone. That’s the first stage and it’s sad to say most people will give up in this early phase. You are a complete dumbass at this level and you make mistake after mistake after mistake and just don’t seem to be learning.

Phase 2: Partial Success – or from Jackass to partial incompetence

This is when you begin to get a handle on things but you are still making big time mistakes. You fumble four times instead of five instead of five. You sort of get the hang of it, or at least think you have but ultimately you still fail. There can be no worse feeling that I have ever known then to be at this stage. One minute you are high as a kite the next you are wondering where it all went wrong.

Phase 3: The emerging champion

This is when your skills begin to shine through. Now you are failing two times out of four tries and having more success than failure. If you have ever learned the guitar you know what this feels like. It’s that magic moent when you pick up the guitar and play that song you have been practicing for years. The stars align more often than not and you are there. You just do it. Tomorrow it may not come off but today you are the emerging champion.

Phase 4: The Champion – unconscious competence

This is where most mavens wind up. They are the champions of their area and almost always produce brilliance. They are the Stephen Kings, Speilbergs and so on who even on their worst day are still better than the next person. People at this level find it very hard to tell people how they got there. They use strange sayings like: “it just clicked” or “there comes a time when you just get it.” These are amongst the few people who have become so good at something that they have in tucked away in their unconscious. I am sure if you had the chance to ask Clapton or Hendrix: why are you so good… they might answer with, “I just know what works and what doesn’t.” This is where you want to be… this level of unconscious genius!

You have to accept that learning is a process. There is a way you learn and a path that you have to follow to get to phase 4. It requires committment, determination, faith and courage. Now, there is another element… your natural ability. That is the subject of the follow up post which you will read if you come back tomorrow.

I work in a university teaching people about computers (mainly) and policy.  The stuff dreams are made of.  Every semester there is always one student that irks me more than most and the kind that just wants the answers.  Their version of life is to simply have the “facts” and that is that.  Well I can tell you that if you really want to learn about life there is a world outside the facts you need to consider.

Having the answer… isn’t the same as the answer itself.

My way of learning is not to just get the answers… it’s to work out how I can get to the answer. Say, for instance, you are into affiliate marketing. The information you need is not how do I get sales BUT how do I actually become a competent affiliate marketer. What’s the difference? The process of selling and learning how to market things will teach you how to get sales. If I tell you this is how I get sales there will be important information missing. Stuff like, what is your budget, demographic, what is the marketing environment and so on. If I just told you what to do without giving you the chance to learn… you would not remember a bloody thing.

You must learn the way and then innovate it as you go along… not collect facts

Nothing gets under my skins faster than students who couldn’t be bothered to learn the skills I teach. I mean it’s really easy to show you the answer but the way there is lost on someone like that. That’s not teaching it’s programming robots. I am not into AI so I am dealing with humans. To rephrase a popular saying, “I can give you the fish or I can teach you how to catch them yourself.” If you are smart you will go through some pain to get there and build something with it. If not, you will be amongst the growing ant population that populate the cubes of the EVIL corporate beast. But I digress…

If this is you… don’t be an ass. Decide to begin learning the way by trying. I know your parents probably bailed you out up to this point or you are as lazy as I used to be. Don’t be like that! Once you know something you have power and you can use this power to dominate the world destroy the UN go back in time better yourself. If you don’t then you will be a GRADE A moron in my books.

* Note: the previous blog post may not resemble coherent thought.

I was playing Wii Baseball the other day and all of a sudden I realised that I could hit the ball. I had what I call a ‘breakthrough’ moment. Prior to that I was swinging and missing… trying and failing. All of sudden the pitcher hurled a fastball at me and BLAM over the fence. I had a breakthrough moment.

You can have your own breakthrough moment

Whenever you are learning anything or just starting out… you are really are crap at it. You know that feeling. It’s like the first time I attempted the guitar. I am no Eric Clapton or Steve Vai but I am getting there. However, I couldn’t hammer on or pull off (or rock for that matter) when I first began. I was struggling more and more each and every day then one … I had a breakthrough moment. I could play that song I couldn’t play without thinking about it. When you are learning something stick with it. Don’t just quit when it gets hard. Push against that until you ‘breakthrough it’ to the other side.

What stops the breakthrough moment

The breakthrough moment is stalled by thinking that you will never get there. Anything is possible to them that believe it is. What’s the difference between a winner and a loser. A winner loses and gets back up again… a loser quits and stays down. One of the best sayings I have heard is this: Never give up, never surrender. If you want to be good at something you have to practice but I can assure you that there comes a moment when you breakthrough.

As for me I am the baseball champion. I smashed a 9-1 game right after a 9-0 game the other day.  Am I unbeatable?  No.  But I am a lot harder to beat now, that I can smack you out of the game before the end of the first innings.  How did I get there?  By playing it until I could time my swing right and pitch at 152km/h.  That’s fast.  The same principle applies to anything you wish to achieve and it’s not that hard to get there.  You can become good at anything by having a winning attitude.  I can assure you that you will ‘breakthrough’ to a place when you become a champion… just like me.

I am moving house at the moment so I am strapped for time so I thought I would write a brief post on how I learn. I have spoken about this before here and also more specifically about learning here. How do we really learn things? Instead of writing a post about it I would like you to do this test.

I turned out to be a tactile/kinesthetic learner which according to this test means and I quote, “You learn best when physically engaged in a “hands on” activity. In the classroom, you benefit from a lab setting where you can manipulate materials to learn new information. You learn best when you can be physically active in the learning environment. You benefit from instructors who encourage in-class demonstrations, “hands on” student learning experiences, and field work outside the classroom.”

For me, this wasn’t too suprised because I hate giving tutorials without a physical component. I often find ways to demonstrate ways of saying something by doing it. My earliest memory is of me pulling apart my bike just to see how it fit together. I think I was five. That memory makes me realise that I was always a ‘doing’ and then a ‘learning’ person which in some circumstances may be harmful. However, that’s the way I am wired up. What about you?

This test showed me some of my cognitive biases as well. As an academic I think my theories should work and be useful (I am into ‘action’ research). If they aren’t then what’s the point? All of my research is geared up to ‘pragmatic’ philosophy which means I am constantly applying my ideas as a basis of their validity. I have plenty of opinions which I can’t validate yet most of what I believe I have experienced to be the case. Go ahead and take this test you might be surprised at the results.

Technorati Tags: learner, research

The greatest thing you can ever do is make mistakes. I hear people say to me all the time… if only I could erase my past mistakes then I would be free. That, is a misunderstanding of epidemic proportions. If you erased your mistakes you would erase a great percentage of what you know and the information you have already got in your possession. Why would you want to do that? Because of how much it hurts.

The pain we feel we make drastic mistakes is terrible. When I failed in business for the second time I was devastated. I spent about a month in a complete daze because my whole world and all of my dreams came crashing down with it. To say that I was ruined would be an understatement. Then after a period of time I began to realise I know a few things about failing in business I could teach others. I began to share my stories of failure with people at the university where I work. The students gained genuine insight in what NOT to do. As a result of that my reputation as a not-so-bad teacher increased dramatically. The fruit of that was people following me into other courses and a great wrap from my boss.

When I was sharing with people the mistakes I had made I realised that one of the most important things for me to do is milk them for all their worth. It would be a tremendous shame if you simply let them slip through your fingers. What amazed me about this losing experience was that it has become leverage to me. Now, I can see others making similar mistakes and I can warn them about it. They often come back and thank me later. Now, I am still not physically rich but I am rich in knowledge and this I would argue is of much greater value.

Technorati Tags: mistakes, past mistakes, failing

My ideas about things are not the same as yours. As a matter of fact, what you have learned in your life up to this point may be entirely different to what I have learned. For the sake of simplicity, whatever you know about anything (your knowledge) is called you set of ideas. The set of ideas you have about things is very different to the set of ideas I have about things. If you are like me, you came from a background that is ‘working class’ which means the ideas I have about the world are largely shaped by those kinds of values. On the other hand you may be from a background where you had access to resources that were less than mine and you view things very differently to the way I do. The output of your ideas is your actions – that is what you think is what you do. Your thoughts are intrinsically linked to your actions. When you create new thoughts about something, in your mind you have already worked out how you are going to approach it. This is automatic.
For a moment stop and think of a problem you currently have. Write in the space below in one sentence what the problem is.

“…”

Now that you have done that, study the sentence above. What happens when you consider this problem? Did you automatically think of certain kinds of solutions? This is because you have been educated to think this way. Here is an example:

“The problem is my wife hates my guts.”

Some may say, “What have you done wrong? Do you need counselling? Are you getting divorced?” This is because when we are faced with a problem we automatically come up with solutions or an educated guess as to what the answer is likely to be. We have learned nothing! A guess is just that… a guess. Now this is not all bad news, this skill comes in very handy as well shall see later in this book.

As each new thought comes into your mind it gets filters through you’re your set of ideas about the world. Your view of the world will determine how you take action in the world. For example, if you have low self-esteem burrowing it’s way deep into your mind your actions, thoughts and reactions to the world outside will filter itself that perception of low self esteem. When your teacher at school said to you, “you will never amount to anything,” you took that idea and buried it in your mind. I am not a psychologist but I can tell you this – the bible tells us that as a man/woman thinks in their heart so are they. Say for example you are a young go getter looking for a way to improve your standing at work and go for a promotion. If you have confidence and faith in your abilities you are likely to create actions and take initiatives that will give you those kinds of opportunities. If on the other hand you lack confidence despite your abilities you will actively build that kind of reality around you. The people you associate with will support your low self esteem most likely, the job you take will agree with it, the way you interact with others will agree with it and so on. Your mindset of low self-esteem will build a reality around you that is entirely consistent with your thoughts. Another example of how our view of the world affects us is found in the words of our mouth.
Here is an exercise you can do to assess your view of the world, what comes out of your mouth. It is positive? When trouble comes, as to all of us it does, how do you respond verbally? Do you say: “that’s just my luck,” or something like, “Why does it always rain on me”. Why did you say that? You have not learned anything else. The way we see the world through our perceptions of it (deeply built into our subconscious) will negatively or positively affect the image we create. That picture we build of the world are deeply held assumptions about how it operates, what people are like and so on. Here are some examples:

“She’ll be right, mate.”
“What goes around comes around”
“What goes up must come down”
“You will never amount to anything”
“You’re just like your father”
“Everything happens for a reason”

Each one of these points of view holds behind a deeply held assumption about what the person who said it thinks. I would like to call these things ‘imaginations’ . These phrases are things people have built into their mind and are being expressed from their mind as words. An imagination is what I would call a micro view of the world that is held or bound to a certain way of thinking. For example the term, “you are just like your father,” automatically has a negative imagining attached to it. Why is it that being like your father is a bad thing? Maybe your father is a good person and that’s a compliment. This however, is very unlikely given the nature of people to use words to bring people ‘down’ to a certain perception of how they should think or act. The media are especially adept at this because they feed us imaginations all the time to engage with. What news we get, is given to us so we can form an imagination about it and turn it around in our mind. How often do we see a dodgy business on TV and instantly feelings of hatred and judgments immediately made. That imagination has now been built in you and you in turn build it into others by becoming an evangelist for your TV show. You spread the word by going to work and saying: “Did you see that business on TV – what a dodgy operation.”

That particular viewpoint expressed on television now creates a way of thinking about that place. There have been several classic examples of them getting it wrong and almost ruining businesses only to offer a brief apology as a way of operating in damage control. Too bad if it already has cost that business thousands. Why do they do it? They are trying to get you to build an imagination so you can engage with them and agree “what a terrible thing this is.” Every now and then they offer us imaginations to build our thinking on because most of us unfortunately have undeveloped viewpoints about things. That is, we have not learned anything except how to be spoon fed regular doses of whatever we are told. Our view of things is directly related to how we learn because what we do is build what we think on our imaginations of things.

Next time you watch the news ask yourself this question: “What is the news trying to get me imagine?” These things you begin to imagine will become part of the way you begin to view the world. If you grew up with racist parents, the chances are your parents built racism into your view of the world. You may think you aren’t racist but go and walk amongst those of another culture and see what comes out of your mind. You may not walk up to them uttering racist sentiment but in your mind there are ideas floating around that may convince you otherwise. Not that is real learning, breaking the conditions we have been led to believe and getting the experience to challenge our underlying assumptions.

We evaluate things through our view of the world and this gives us the toolkit for building learning skills into our life. How we view things will tell us how things can be learned. If you grew up loving science, you will take a scientific approach to life and usually rely on all things scientific to give you answers. You may use phrases like, “there is a system to everything”. This is an expression of how you think things work. We will call these kind of people “scientific people”. If you are given to this style of learning you will struggle with life because sometimes the answers are not as cut and dry. For example, Henry Ford was a great pioneer but time has shown that his management style is nothing short of abhorrent. Why? Because he saw people as “resources” and not as living beings with a mind, will and emotions. He approached management as a science, when it is more like an unstructured art. Modern works have even urged us to think of our spirit in the workplace which would make poor Henry do flips in his grave. People are not numbers, they are living beings with real families and real personalities. On one hand people are the greatest thing about a business but on the other the biggest enemy.

If your view of the world is less scientific and more open to other views you might be what I call “unscientific” and given to large bouts of intuition. If you are a ‘free’ thinker then you will evaluate everything that comes your way and form your opinions based on what you think is right and perhaps a feeling you have about it. You might be someone who questions everything, especially science and never stop learning. The unscientific approach to management would use techniques found in Semler’s Seven-Day Weekend :

Organizations rarely believe they’re to blame when an employee under performs. But if the organization doesn’t provide the opportunity for success, then people falter. At Semco we accept that every individual wants and needs a worthwhile pursuit in life. It’s up to us to provide the environment and opportunity for their gratification.

This kind of approach to building a workplace is different as the human resources are allowed to be more human. It’s a well-documented success story but it started by breaking the mold and breaking established business rules. The rule breakers are always learning and never accepting common ill-conceived points of view.

We will never land on the moon. What really? Never? People that make these kinds of statements about learning are scientific and evaluate everything objectively in their world view. That world view will only take knowledge from those that know and they will eventually have a head full of other people’s ideas. Every pattern, every notion and every single last idea will fall into what somebody else came up with unscientifically. Learning is unscientific because it takes that which is unknown and tries to make it known. Scientists who were pioneers where the most unscientific of them all. They used faith in every endeavour and relied on personal intuition and vision as well as there academic abilities.

When we learn we are applying the single most unique and profound ability we have – the ability to gain new insights and gain fresh information. If our view of the world tells us we can learn then we can. If we are willing to question the way things are and build for ourselves new mindsets about things (despite the cost) then we can learn. Everyone can learn. As a lecturer in a business school I have found quite often that my students do not want to learn, they want to collect facts, but they don’t want to learn. So often I get smart questions like, “What’s on the exam?” My response to this usually is to tell them precisely what’s on the exam – lots of questions about the things I wanted you to learn. Invariably almost nobody gets what I mean by that.

What knowledge do you need to build upon to get through life? That depends on what you plan to do with it. The primary skill you need to make it is learning. A friend of mine once told me this story about learning:

My boss told me to do a job and I told him I couldn’t do it and he said to me, “Oh well I guess your going to have tell the customer that we can’t complete the job and they won’t get what they have paid for. I said to him that I would go back and try. When I did try I found a way to make it work.”

The problem is we are no longer willing to try and learn what we need to make it in life. Our view of the world tells us we can’t but in fact we can. Students often ask me for answers, I only give them more questions. After a while they stop coming to see me, because they don’t realize or cannot understand that the things I am teaching to them can only be learned by them. If the courses I teach are going to be valuable to them at all then they need to learn the stuff for themselves. I could offer them a standard response and tell them the answer but what have they gained. Where was the struggle for new concepts, the trial and error process? What happened to that? When the objective of learning is to gain an answer, that person has lost the reason they set out to gain insights in the first place. Learning is the gaining of new information about something that you didn’t know before. However, learning comes from and goes to somewhere it’s not purely self-perpetuating. Your learning accumulates.

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