My learning plan for 2020

For the past twenty years or so I have used a formal learning plan. I have to do this as I am forgetful and do not take well to authority, including the authority of universities and other formal learning institutions. In fact, I tend to keep away from these places, so I have to compensate.

I am now in my sixties, so I feel a growing urgency around learning. There is so little I know and so much I need to know if I am to work better with other people and leave the world a somewhat better place than I found it, at least my little corner of it.

The basis for my learning plan is a recognition of how I learn. This is not necessarily how other people learn. How one learns is as unique as ones skills or DNA. Nor is it static. As we grow older we lose some of our capacities, my math is not what it once was and my memory has more and more holes. On the other hand, I have grown a rich set of connections between different ideas, people and things. This network provides me with a lot of context to learn in. The people I work with, family-friends-colleagues, provide me with many ways to apply what I am learning.

My learning style is abstract, connected, historical, social, visual, written. This shapes how I plan my learning. I also invest time each year strengthening each of these, for me, foundational skills.

Abstract: I need to understand the model and work best from general to specific (I am surrounded by people who work best from the specific to the general, or only with the specific, so this causes me a lot of socal tension, but that tension is something to learn from).

Connected: How are people, ideas, objects connected to each other? How do Hyperobjects (see Timothy Morton). Making new connections and resurfacing old connections is central to how I learn (and I think an important part of how learning works, as Deep Learning style AIs suggest).

Historical: I want to know origins and how things have evolved and changed over time. One of my favourite books is How Buildings Learn: What Happens to the After They Are Built by Stewart Brand. The paths not taken, the evolutionary dead ends, with all of their potential, fascinates me.

Social: I learn best with other people. This explains the work I put into managing the Design Thinking group here on LinkedIn, it is one of the reasons why I create companies and host Meetups and conferences. My wife teases that when I want to learn something I start a new organization.

Visual: OK, I have terrible hand eye coordination and anything I draw looks awkward. But drawing things, especially drawing connections, on whiteboards, in note books and by placing objects into patterns, is one way I make connections and find patterns.

Written: I read a lot, mostly books, and I need to write. Most of what I learn, I learn first by writing fragments of what I think of as poetry. I also blog a lot, for Ibbaka and TeamFit and sometimes for OpenView. Writing is also part of how I build community and I try to write with other people, often by interviewing them (I learned this from Hans Ulrich Obrist).

So what is my learning plan for 2020?

To begin, I will go back to books that have shaped my thinking, reconnect to the ideas, and look for connections between them. Some of these books are

Causality by Judea Pearl

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by James Gibson

How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard

Market Segmentation by Malcolm McDonald

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing by Thomas Nagle and Georg Müller 

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The second theme for 2020 will be graph theory (nodes and edges).

Graph theory seems to me to be one of the foundational mathematical studies for the 21st C. It is to our century what calculus was to the 20th C. I plan to go deep into the math itself, but to also look at the software we can use to understand and manipulate networks and the many applications. Graph theory is, I think, at the root of the work in skills and value that we are connecting at Ibbaka-TeamFit. Our underlying data structure for skills is the SkillGraph and we are now working on a Value Graph. The deep innovations will come from connecting these. I am happy to share resources on this with anyone interested.

The third theme will be microbiology (including biofilms and pond scum).

I first became interested in this domain a few years ago as I came to appreciate the grave risk of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This led to phages (one of the best books I read in 2019 was Merry Youle's marvelous Thinking Like a Phage) and from phages to new models of evolution (directly relevant to work we are doing on Open Competency Models) and community. It is the community angle that is driving my interest in biofilms and pond scum. There is a lot one can learn from these micro ecosystems and they have the advantage that I can make collections and cultivate examples quite easily (be careful if you plan to drink out of my dirty tea cap, it may be an experiment).

Outside of this, I will also be working to learn more about my relationships and my body.

For relationships I want to train myself to do better at listening first, and then listening more, and not reacting. My wife, Yoshie Hattori, and I plan to work on some books together this year. Working with her over the past four decades is what has given me the ability to see patterns and appreciate textures in ways I would not have imagined.

Physically, as I need to understand the new limitations on my body as I age. I need to sleep more and differently. I can still ride my bike long distances, but I am going slower and slower. What I want to cook and eat is also changing, and I am cooking much more simply, with fewer flavours and ingredients.

All of this can sound terribly practical and abstract (an odd combination) but the main reason I learn is not for any material advantage but because it gives me pleasure. As I get old, have to take my pleasures where I find them - people, ideas, learning, art, potery, cooking, boats and bikes.