I often stumbled on the phrase ‘A picture is worth 1000 words’; but it never occurred to me that I could take notes in the form of pictures until I read the book “The Back of the Napkin”. I came across the acronym SMART many times in many reading materials but I found it difficult to recollect. From the learnings of the book “The Back of the Napkin” I took notes in the form of doodles and I was able to recollect it easily. Here is my doodle.
I also noted that drawing doodles or mindmaps during meetings helped me to concentrate a lot, an explanation given to that kind of concentration is that I am a visual learner; other types of learners are auditory and kinesthetic. Doodling consumes some resources of my brain such that it does not allow me to day dream and helps me stay focussed; also as a side effect it helps me recollect information much better. If you are a visual learner try your hands on doodles, this place could be one of your starting points – braindoodles.net. As per that website we remember just 10% of what we read but 90% of what we see.
As days progress, I get increasingly overwhelmed with the amount of catchup I need to do in terms of learning new things, it creates an imbalance between what we want to know and what we can do. What people do to bridge these gaps at work place is to create structured training programs to up skill people. Sugata Mitra explains in his ted talk how seemingly difficult things are grasped by people if we let the learning happen. This talk explains that people will find a way if there are enough knowledge resources available and curiosity generated at the right time.
The structured training programs barring a few are none other than comforters which provide a false sense of security. We build a training program and let people adapt to ‘get me trained & I will do what you ask’ mindset. Increasingly organisations are relying on self sufficient & self organising teams but the learning and development is still structured and top down push.
What is necessary for ‘learning to happen’?
Curiosity – People will learn at any cost if they want to know something.
Tools & Resources – Easy access means there is one less barrier.
Creative tension – Do not let people settle for the ‘status quo’.
Autonomy – Structured & classroom learnings are optimised for lesser load on the teacher, each individual is unique & should be allowes to pace their learnings.
Time & Environment to share – The more loaded we are, the more we tend to seek rest and if the environment is not conducive for sharing and collaboration then that impacts the speed at which knowledge can be acquired and shared in a group setting. It also creates peer pressure.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea
In medical field there is a term called Sutton’s slip which is used when possibilities other than the obvious are not considered. Problems are everywhere and when we try to solve them we tend go for the obvious solution. When going through the 11 laws of fifth discipline by Peter Senge I inferred that there are more problems created through easy corrective actions one takes for the problem. If we focus on the obvious solutions then as per the ‘laws of fifth discipline’ things seem to get better and then becomes worse than it was ever before.
One example I could think of ‘where going for the obvious was a wrong choice’ was at my workplace. Our software development team’s velocity was in a constant decline. Velocity directly translated to the requirements getting implemented and clients always had a close watch on it. One of us in the team decided to include a metric ‘Cost per story point’ to help bring visibility into the cost associated with building a feature which in turn he believed will drive the team to be conscious of the output and take corrective actions much early on to reduce the cost. What followed was the inflation in the estimates, the team was using fibonacci series as the estimation scale. We had 1,2,3,5 as possible sizes for our stories, what we did not notice was that there were no new 1 point stories added to the backlog. Slowly inflation ate up the 1 point story and the two point story became the beginning size. Though it eventually led to a lower cost per story point, the value delivered was much lesser.
When you’ve got a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail
Novi's 