Category: Learning

Procrastination, knowledge work, and important problems

[Cross posted at Future Tense]

Paul Graham’s latest essay is getting some play including within the David Allen, Getting Things Done, world where I came across it. Frankly, I didn’t find it one of Graham’s better efforts and you’d probably be better off sticking with Allen’s insights about life and work. I’d boil down Graham’s take as “stay focused on what’s really important and let the little stuff slide in order to do that.” I don’t have the luxury to hire a personal assistant to let me do that and I’m confident that my wife wouldn’t let me get away with it either. One of the reasons I keep sticking with Allen’s approach every time I fall off, is that Allen gets the reality of both the important stuff and the nitty-gritty reality of day-to-day errands that still have to get done.

On the other hand, Graham also points to another essay by computer scientist and Turing Award winner, Richard Hamming that has much more importance to any of us who want to accomplish something significant in the knowledge work that we do.

Hamming’s essay, You and Your Research, dates to 1986, but is still packed with insight about how to think about your work and problems worth tackling when you have significant discretion about what problems to work on. That’s the defining characteristic of knowledge workers and there’s precious little guidance to draw on. Just a few sample quotes to pique your interest:

What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.
…

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.
…

After quite a while of thinking I decided, “No, I should be in the mass production of a variable product. I should be concerned with all of next year’s problems, not just the one in front of my face.” By changing the question I still got the same kind of results or better, but I changed things and did important work. I attacked the major problem – How do I conquer machines and do all of next year’s problems when I don’t know what they are going to be?
….

…I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you’ve done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you’ve done. It isn’t just a matter of the job, it’s the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It’s just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it’s much more satisfying and rewarding!

As you can see, lots and lots of good ideas and advice. I’ll be chewing this one over for several days at least. Start with Hamming’s essay, go back to Graham’s later if you have the time. And for fun, do take a look at John Perry’s classic, Structured Procrastination as well.

Great essay on procrastination.Jack Holt e-mailed me a link to Paul Graham’s essay on procrastination. It’s great, couldn’t agree more. Thanks, Jack, and Paul.

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Pascal Venier on Jan 1, 2006 10:29 AM)

An old classic … in praise of procrastination is Stanford Philosopher short essay from 1995 on “Structured procrastination”: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/procrastination.html

[David Allen]

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Case-based learning and mindmaps

Some interesting thoughts on how mindmaps can work in the context of case-based learning.

I'll admit to long-term biases in favor of case-based learning properly
done. I come by these biases having worked all sides of the experience;
case method student, case writer, and case-based discussion leader.
Doing it well can be exceptionally powerful. Doing it poorly is also
much more immediately evident than doing other forms of teaching poorly.

One of the keys to success in case learning is active engagement with
the material and active engagement in the discussion process.
Developing a path of inquiry and analysis that leads to an action plan
is the goal, not finding the hidden “right answer.” This can be
immensely frustrating to students indoctrinated to believe in right
answers, but ultimately is hugely useful in a real world that
rarely contains right answers.

I certainly would have loved to have something like MindManager back in
my b-school days. I did use them from time to time as study tools, but
the process of generating them by hand didn't lend itself well to the
time constraints of three cases a night. More recently I did make
extensive use of MindManager and mindmaps as a tool to organize case
discussion and review when I was teaching knowledge management at
Kellogg. As a case discusssion leader I found mindmaps more useful than
powerpoint. This was because a dynamic mindmap let me more easily adapt
to the flow of the actual discussion. If I can find any in my archives
that look interesting I will post them here later.

Case Study-Learning with MindManager.

MindManager maps can make the life of business school students much easier.

When
Harvard Business School first opened its doors in 1908, the “case
method” was just an idea of the School’s first Dean, Edwin F. Gay.
Today, the “case method” is the heart and soul of how business is
taught at HBS and has been widely adopted by many other leading
business schools in the world.

“It’s action learning,”
says HBS senior lecturer Michael J. Roberts, executive director of case
development. “As professors, we have to distill the realities of
complex business issues and bring that into the classroom. Students, in
turn, want to extrapolate from that narrow experience to the world at
large. So, we have to pick good examples and maintain the relevance of
them.” Roberts believes that the case method continues to be the most
effective teaching technique because of its applicability to real
management situations. “Those who practice business are in the real
world making decisions that have real consequences,” he says. “The case
method is intellectually engaging for students because they acquire the
knowledge, skills, and tools to deal with the kind of problems they’ll
encounter in their careers. Because they go through this inductive
reasoning process to arrive at answers, the learning process is more
powerful.”

Mindjet MindManager
amplifies the benefits of this “action-learning” model and follows the
exact same logic that case studies do: capture, organize, and then
share information. With MindManager, learning groups can distill
complex issues into manageable “business topics,” chunks of information
that can be easily re-arranged and interconnected in the way they make
most sense to the students.

….[snip]….

Have you ever used MindManager for case studies? Send us your maps and we will exhibit them in our map library.

Tim Leberecht, Senior Corporate Communications Manager

[The Mindjet Blog]

Design as a signature skill for knowledge workers – ESJ Column

(cross-posted at Future Tense)

Over the summer I wrote a column for the Enterprise Systems Journal that I neglected to point to at the time. The broad point I was trying to work out was that for all the recent attention to issues of innovation and design, the focus has been on addressing the needs of the organization.

Design thinking and design skill are equally, if not more, pertinent to individual knowledge workers. My wrap up there was:

Design is a talent, but it is also a skill, and whatever talent we were graced with, the skill can be developed. Few of us will rival MacGyver (few of us have a scriptwriter and props department handy either), but we can learn to start looking at the world around us as potential resources with more possible uses than intended. We can start to see opportunities to make small changes that will lead to a better fit between our resources and our problems. [ESJ: Design as a Signature Skill]

This is part of a more general trend of organizations needing to deal with how to strike a new balance between execution and design. In the last century, that balance was one person thinking design for every hundred to thousand doing execution. Today, that ratio needs to be much closer to one to one. Moreover, that balance will often have to be managed within each of us as knowledge workers. Perhaps that is one factor that accounts for the relative strength of small organizations versus large ones.

Learning technologies overview from down under

Another excellent resource courtesy of Stephen Downes on technologies in learning.

Emerging Technologies: A Framework For Thinking , Education.au.
This sweeping and forward-looking report commissioned by the Australian
Capital Territory Department of Education (ACT DET) to look at the
impact and potential of emerging technologies in learning is a
must-read for decision-makers in the field; it also serves as an
excellent introduction to emerging technology in learning for anyone
interested in the field. While the authors nod toward traditional
learning technology, such as learning management systems, they also
capture well the larger trends impacting the field: mobility,
interoperability, collaboration and communication, creativity, and open
source. They also note that many of the technologies that will be used
to support learning “are currently banned, or otherwise highly
restricted, by schools,” an indication of the cultural and management
challeges posed in the emerging environment. While on the one hand
conservative (look at the layers of intermediary between students and
internet postulated by Figure 2 (section 6.1) the authors nonetheless
capture the practical value of blogs, wikis, podcasting and vodcasting
(to name only a few). Don't miss this one. PDF. [] [] [OLDaily]

What is an information system?

A nice little reminder from Espen on the value of keep design simple and local.

As much as many of us like shiny toys, it can be too easy to lose sight of the real objective of an information system.

Some years ago (December 1998, according
to my email archive) I participated in an online discussion on the
ISWORLD mailing list, about what an information system really is. I
posted this story, which I had heard told somewhere but never found a
source for:

A
CEO with hotel chain A found himself having to spend a night in a hotel
from hotel chain B. Naturally, he was very curious as to what kind of
information systems they had, and resolved to keep an open eye for
competitive use of IT. As he approached the reception for first time,
the woman behind it smiled at him and said “Welcome back, Sir!”

Flabbergasted,
he said “But…it is 12 years since I was here last! How could you know
that I have stayed here before, what kind of advanced information
systems do you have that can store and find the fact that I was here 12
years ago?”

“Well, it is really very simple”, she said. “When
the doorman opened the door to your cab, he asked if this was your
first stay with us. You answered no, and as you walked through the
door, the doorman looked at me through the window and touched his nose.
That told me that you should be welcomed back….”

Moral of the story: Information systems don't have to mean information technology….

I
was going to use this story in a paper I am writing, did a Desktop
Google search for it – and found it not only in my email file, but also
on a number of web pages (here and here, in addition to a previous story here).

It is kind of fascinating to see how these things move, but I still don't know the real source of that story – does anyone?

(And incidentally, this story is an excellent teaching device…)

[Applied Abstractions]

Becoming a better quick study of new markets and technology

Tim Oren offers
his process for coming up to speed on a new market or technology.
Although it's oriented towards his specific needs as a VC evaluating
potential investments, it is general enough to offer an excellent
starting point for any of us whose lives are characterized by having to
make sense out of new environments on a regular basis. Certainly, there
have been times in my career as a consultant when it seems that the
primary skill requirement is to be an adept quick study on anything.

Here's Tim's key graf:

There are two observations behind this methodology. First, every
technology and market has a private language. It's built of terms of
art, but also names of landmarks such as products, famous papers and
projects, labs, and researchers and other experts. To begin to
understand the market you need to learn this language. Fortunately,
such a distinctive use of language and interlinkage of people and
information artifacts is the very best thing you can have to feed
Google or other modern search tools. The second observation is that the
best way to learn a field is to watch experts argue about it. [Due Diligence]

I would add two suggestions to his approach. First, give some thought
to using a mindmap or something similar to manage your growing
knowledge base. I'm a fan of MindManager for
this kind of effort, and the newest version adds a number of new
features to support this kind of organic research strategy. Jerry Michalski is a fan of a product called Personal Brain.
I used it a few years back and, while I liked it, ultimaely concluded
that mindmaps suited me better. Second, give some thought to how you
want to manage the collection of electronic resources (links, captured
webpages, pdf files, etc) you will ultimately collect. Lately, I've
been having success with a combination of MindManager and Onfolio.

The Art of the Fast Take.
Earlier this week I was in a skull session at the Institute for the
Future, hosted by Howard Rheingold and nominally about bite-size
classes that could be held in real space or virtually in a multimedia
network. As a reflection… [Due Diligence]

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community

Bill Ives finds a nice report on the use of new technology within the intelligence community. You will need to register with the Social Science Research Network (for free) in order to download the report, which is a pdf file, but it’s worth the trouble

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Here is an article by Calvin Andrus of the CIA on how they can use blogs and wikis to help them change, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which is not a bad idea. As… [Portals and KM]

John Seely Brown and New Learning Environments for 21st Century.

Good insights, as always, from John Seely Brown about learning.

New Learning Environments for 21st Century(.pdf)
– I really enjoyed reviewing this presentation. John Seely Brown's view
of learning in today's society is very similar to what I've been
advocating about connectivism.
In particular, he presents the urgent need to rethink how we provide
learning in an effort to compete at a global level. Stephen Downes also
links to an audio file of the presentation.

NY Times on technology skills and careers

(cross posted at Future Tense).

Interesting article in this morning's NY Times on computer science education
and efforts to develop a richer and deeper perspective on how technology skill
connects to other skills and needs inside organizations. It strikes me as another case example of a broader trend to find a new balance between specialization and general skills in organizations:

Edward D. Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington, points to
students like Mr. Michelson as computer science success stories. The real value of the discipline, Mr. Lazowska said, is less in acquiring a skill with technology tools – the usual definition of computer literacy – than in teaching students to manage complexity; to navigate and assess information; to master modeling and abstraction; and to think analytically in terms of algorithms, or step-by-step procedures. [A
Techie, Absolutely, and More, NY Times]

Four Keys to More Effective On-the-Job Learning

I have a new column up at ESJ that takes a look at how you might be more systematic about on-the-job learning. Here’s a small sample:

What we do know about learning is that we generally learn best by
doing. Practice, rehearsal, and performance is where real lessons are
learned. We learn near the edges of what we already know. Moreover, we
learn more from failure than from success. Furthermore, access to
someone with more knowledge helps, especially in keeping us safe from
dangerous experiments and errors.

Given these characteristics of learning and the nature of our
knowledge-work jobs, what can we do to craft a learning strategy that
integrates the two and lets us perform effectively today and in the
future? Mindfulness, time for active reflection, mapping your
ignorance, and enlisting the social environment constitute the core
elements.[ESJ-Four Keys to More Effective On-the-Job Learning]