Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Page 19
as effective. Great.
Now prove it.
It could be your expert intuition at work, or maybe it’s just a cog-
nitive bias or other bug. You need to get some feedback: create a
prototype, run some unit tests, and chart some benchmarks. Do
what you need to do to prove that your idea is a good one, because
your intuition may have been wrong.20
Feedback is the key to agile software development
for precisely this reason: software development
depends on people. And as we’ve seen here, peo-
ple have bugs, too. In short, we’re all nuts—one way or another.
Despite our best intentions, we need to double-check ourselves and
each other.
You need unit tests for yourself, too.
Testing Yourself
When you are dead solid convinced of something, ask yourself why.
You’re sure the boss is out to get you. How do you know? Every-
body is using Java for this kind of application. Says who? You’re a
great/awful developer. Compared to whom?
20. As you become more expert in a given area, you’ll develop more of the capacity for accurate self-feedback, so it will become easier over time.
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To help get a bigger picture perspective
and test your understanding and mental How do you know?
model, ask yourself something like the fol-
lowing questions:21
• How do you know?
• Says who?
• How specifically?
• How does what I’m doing cause you to...?
• Compared to what or whom?
• Does it always happen? Can you think of an exception?
• What would happen if you did (or didn’t)?
• What stops you from...?
Is there anything you can actually measure? Get hard numbers on?
Any statistics?22 What happens when you talk this over with a col-
league? How about a colleague who has a very different viewpoint
from your own? Do they passively agree? Is that a danger sign? Do
they violently oppose the idea? Does that give it credibility? Or not?
If you think you’ve defined something, try to also define its oppo-
site. This can help avoid the nominal fallacy described earlier. If
all you have is a label, it’s hard to pin down its opposite in any
detail (and no, another label doesn’t count). Contrast a behavior, an
observation, a theory with its exact opposite, in detail. This action
forces you to dig a little deeper and look at your “definition” with a
more critical and attentive eye.
Expectations create reality, or at least
color it. If you expect the worst from peo- Expectations color
ple, technology, or an organization, then reality.
that’s what you’re primed to see. Just as
with sense tuning (discussed on page 233), you’ll suddenly see a
lot of what you expect.
For instance, certain faux news channels have focused on such
sensational, Chicken Little-esque “news” coverage that you’d think
21. Thanks to Don Gray for pointing out these questions from the research on NLP
meta models. See Tools of Critical Thinking: Metathoughts for Psychology [Lev97] for more.
22. Bearing in mind Benjamin Disraeli’s observation that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Biases can be made quite convincing through the use of numbers.
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NOW I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK
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the global apocalypse was scheduled for tomorrow (live coverage at
10 a.m. Eastern/7 a.m. Mountain and Pacific). It’s not, but given
a steady diet of their careful selection of the most heinous crimes
and outrageous events, you’d easily be primed to think so.
The same phenomenon applies on a more personal note. Your
expectations of your teammates, boss, or clients will bias your per-
ceptions. And others’ expectations of you will in turn color their
perception.
Finally, to avoid the blindingly rosy glow
It’s all a trade-off.
of wishful thinking, remember that every
decision is a trade-off. There ain’t no free
lunches. There is always a flip side, and looking closely at the
trade-offs—in detail, both positive and negative—helps make sure
you’re evaluating the situation more fully.
Next Actions
! When in conflict, consider basic personality types, genera-
tional values, your own biases, others’ biases, the context,
and the environment. Is it easier to find a solution to the con-
flict with this additional awareness?
! Examine your own position carefully. How do you know what
you know? What makes you think that?
It is by logic we prove; it is by intuition we discover.
Henri Poincaré
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The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be
kindled.
Mestrius Plutarchos (Plutarch), 45 -125 A.D.
Chapter 6
Learn Deliberately
At our current state of technology and culture, your ability to learn
may be your most important element of success. It’s what separates
getting ahead from just getting by.
In this chapter, we’re going to start off with a look at what learn-
ing is really all about, learn why it’s suddenly so important, and
explore techniques to help you learn more deliberately. We’ll begin
by covering how to manage goals and plan your learning over time
and also focus on keeping L-mode and R-mode in balance and
working effectively with each other.
With these ideas as a foundation, we’ll talk about some specific
techniques to help accelerate your learning, including reading
techniques and mind maps, to help you work better with the mate-
rial you’re studying. We’ll also look at some issues of learning styles
and personality that might have an effect as well.
We can accelerate your learning, but first we have to talk about
what learning is.
6.1 What Learning Is...and Isn’t
Many HR departments haven’t figured this out yet, but in reality,
it’s less important to know Java, Ruby, .NET, or the iPhone SDK.
There’s always going to be a new technology or a new version of
an existing technology to be learned. The technology itself isn’t as
important; it’s the constant learning that counts.
Historically, it hasn’t always been this way; medieval farmers tilled
the soil pretty much exactly as their fathers did, as did their fathers
before them. Information was passed along in an oral tradition,
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and until recently, one could provide for one’s family with min
imal
formal education or training.
But with the advent of the information age, that
stopped being the case. It feels as though the pace
of change is the fastest it has ever been, with
new technology, new cultural norms, new legal
challenges, and new societal problems coming at
us fast. The majority of all scientific information
is less than fifteen years old. In some areas of
science, the amount of available information doubles every three
years. It’s quite possible that the last person to know “everything”
was British philosopher John Stuart Mill—who died in 1873.1
We have a lot to learn, and we have to keep learning as we go.
There’s just no way around that. But the very word learning may
have some unpleasant baggage, conjuring up images of youth-
ful chalk dust torture, the mind-numbing tedium of corporate-
mandated “copy machine training,” or similarly ersatz educational
events.
That’s not what it’s all about. In fact, it seems we tend to misun-
derstand the very meaning of the word education.
Education comes from the Latin word educare, which literally
means “led out,” in the sense of being drawn forth. I find that little
tidbit really interesting, because we don’t generally think of educa-
tion in that sense—of drawing forth something from the learner.
Instead, it’s far more common to see education treated as some-
thing that’s done to the learner—as something that’s poured in,
not drawn out. This model is especially popular in corporate train-
ing, with a technique that’s known as sheep dip training.
A sheep dip (for real) is a large tank in which you dunk the unsus-
pecting sheep to clean them up and rid them of parasites (see Fig-
ure 6.1, on the following page). The sheep line up (as sheep do); you
grab one and dunk in the tank for an intensive, alien, and largely
toxic experience. It wears off, of course, so you have to dip them
again.
Sheep dip training follows the same model. You line up unsuspect-
ing employees, dunk them in an intensive, three-to-five-day event
1.
Cited in Influence: Science and Practice [Cia01].
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WHAT LEARNING IS...AND ISN’T
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Figure 6.1: Sheep dip: alien, toxic, and temporary
in an alien environment, devoid of any connection to their day-to-
day world, and then proclaim them to be Java developers, .NET
developers, or what have you. It wears off, of course, so next year
you need to have a “refresher” course—another dip.
Companies love standardized “sheep dip”
training. It’s easy to purchase, it’s easy to Sheep dip training
schedule, and everyone fits in a nice little doesn’t work.
box afterward: you now have a nine-piece
box of .NET developers. It’s just like fast-food chicken nuggets.
There’s only one drawback. This naive approach doesn’t work, for
several reasons:
• Learning isn’t done to you; it’s something you do.
• Mastering knowledge alone, without experience, isn’t effective.
• A random approach, without goals and feedback, tends to give
random results.
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Ignite Your Own Fire
“We must encourage [each other]—once we have
grasped the basic points—to interconnecting everything
else on our own, to use memory to guide our original think-
ing, and to accept what someone else says as a starting
point, a seed to be nourished and grow. For the correct
analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but
wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates
one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.
“Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for
fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there
continually warming himself: that is no different from some-
one who goes to someone else to get to some of his ratio-
nality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own
flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by
the lecture, and the words trigger only associative think-
ing and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a
glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in
the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his
mind.”
—Plutarch, Greek historian, biographer, and essayist
As Plutarch pointed out in the epigraph that opened this chapter,
the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled—your
own fire. It’s not something that someone else can do for you (see
the full version of the quote in the sidebar). This is very much a
do-it-yourself endeavor.
In addition, and perhaps surprisingly, simply mastering a syllabus
of knowledge doesn’t increase professional effectiveness.2 It’s use-
ful, certainly, but by itself it doesn’t contribute all that much to
what you do in the actual, daily practice of your craft.
This has some interesting implications. Besides a continuing
indictment of sheep dip training methods, it casts serious doubt
on most, if not all, technology certification programs. The “body of
2.
Klemp, G. O. “Three Factors of Success” in Relating Work and Education [VF77], and Eraut, M. “Identifying the Knowledge which Underpins Performance” in Knowledge and Competence: Current Issues in Education and Training [BW90].
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TARGET SMAR T OBJECTIVES
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knowledge” is demonstrably not the important part. The model you
build in your mind, the questions you ask to build that model, and
your experiences and practices built up along the way and that
you use daily are far more relevant to your performance. They’re
the things that develop competence and expertise. Mastery of the
knowledge alone isn’t sufficient.
A single intense, out-of-context classroom event can only get you
started in the right direction, at best. You need continuing goals,
you need to get feedback to understand your progress, and you
need to approach the whole thing far more deliberately than a once-
a-year course in a stuffy classroom.
In the rest of this chapter, we’ll look at how to make learning more
effective in the real world. We’ll see how to accelerate learning by
approaching it more methodically and by using the best tools avail-
able for the job at hand.
To start, let’s take a closer look at how to manage goals and plan-
ning by using SMART goals and the Pragmatic Investment Plan.
6.2 Target SMART Objectives
; You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because
you might not get there.
Yogi Berra
To get where you want to be—to learn and grow in your career and
personal life—you’ll need to set some goals. But goals by them-
selves aren’t enough to guarantee your success.
Goals are great things, and you may have many of them: lose
weight, find a better job, move to a bigger house (or a smaller one),
write that novel, learn to play the electric guitar, write a killer Rails
application, or learn all about Erlang.
But many goals never get past that stage—the lofty, generalized “I
want to be better at xyz.” Weight loss is a prime example. Most peo-
ple would like to be trimmer and fitter (especially those of us who
spend a great deal of time sitting on our duffs behind a keyboard).
“I want to be trim and fit” is not a very well-defined goal (although
it may be a great vision—a long-term, desired state).
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How much weight do you need to lose? How much weight do you
want to bench-press? By when? Are you going to focus on limiting
calories or increasing exercise? Similarly, it’s a fine thing to say you
want to “learn Erlang,” but what does that mean? How well do you
want to learn it? What do you want to be able to do with it? How
will you start?
To help you focus on your goals—and be in a better position to
attain them—allow me to suggest an old favorite from the consul-
tant’s bag of tricks: using SMART objectives to meet your goals.3
In this case, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable,
Relevant, and Time-boxed. For any goal you have in mind (losing
weight, deposing your boss, conquering the world, and so on), you
need to have a plan: a series of objectives that will help get to your
goal. Each objective should have the SMART characteristics.
We tend to be a bit fuzzy on the terms
Objectives move you to
goals and objectives. Just to be clear: a
your goal.
goal is a desired state, usually short-term,
that you’re trying to reach. An objective is
something you do to get you closer to that goal. But don’t get too
hung up on the terminology; different folks use these terms slightly