Key insight: "We talk about organizations being good or bad at learning, but that's not really the case. All organizations learn. One of the first things a team learns are the shared stories the organization has for being as screwed up as it is"
I think most successful new hires learn how to work within the "screwed up" environment, not how to change it--much less improve it. Change agents are rare.
I don’t understand all of this essay, but something about his awareness of cybernetics makes me want to keep reading it until it makes sense.
> We think of computers interacting with people as something created by programmers… That's not true, though… folks creating UX receive vastly more stimulus from machines than they ever would create for others.
> Programming languages, IDEs, and dev environments affect the people swimming in them far more than those people change the world for others
I think this post is a case study in how a cryptic beginning can turn people off. Particularly these lines:
> Learning is not like seeing lions in a safari. More humble surfing. Less self-deluding chess.
> Reminder to self beginning.
> This is pedantic, but it's important.
The author mentions that storytelling is "near and dear to their heart." My guess is that they are trying to do the storytelling "hook" technique (where you start off by not explaining something fully so that people are compelled to read to the end and get closure). To their credit I did read to the end but I feel like that is a cheap trick. Like a UX dark pattern, but for writing.
The gist of the article is summed up in the title. I suppose this idea has implications for how you think about organizational learning but the author doesn't go into those implications whatsoever.
Author here. Thanks for the stylistic comments, folks. I purposefully did this in about 30 minutes in stream-of-consciousness format. It should be off-putting and odd. It's not like most of the polished (and admittedly marketing) material you see elsewhere on HN. I hope I didn't waste anybody's time.
My own research flow is to read and consume a lot on the material I'm trying to absorb, then try to put that into some kind of essay, either to others or to myself, once I think I have something useful that's resulted. Then, if I'm working on a larger work, months later I come back and collect the associated works and use them as a basis for a first draft of long-form material.
I had no idea it would get many votes. Frankly, I wanted to share this with another site but whenever I share there, it gets auto-posted here. So I figured I would go ahead and submit here myself if it was going to show up in the feed anyway.
If anybody is interested in carrying on the discussion please ping me! I'm finding it fascinating to develop a meta-model that covers both machine, human, and organizational learning. Not sure that anybody's done that before. So far it's been a hoot.
Sending a stream of conscious email to a friend can make sense early in the creative process. Publishing it in way that presents it as a finished product may end of wasting a lot of folks time.
Candidly I took away only one useful observation from your essay: all organizations are teaching organizations. They teach "the way things work around here."
I will engage in a discussion if you first take another hour to make your thesis and points clear. Don't publish it, send the draft to the coordinates in my profile.
Hi Daniel, you didn’t waste my time publishing this stream of consciousness. You’re tackling something that can’t be broken down easily, and part of your prose painted enough of the mystery for me to believe that it had some shape, and it made me check out your books. Thanks for publishing. Would love to chat.
It sounds like the author is discovering intuition as articulated in a very ancient form. Artists and geniuses have long had experiences of knowledge and information flowing through them and expressing itself through them as some external thing. Actually, everyone has this, but some seemingly to a greater degree than others.
Take for example August Kekule who supposedly discovered the shape of the benzene ring via dream of an ouroboros. Or, Seymour Cray who came to solutions via "communicating with elves" under his home.
If I recall correctly, I remember reading that in ancient Greece it was believed wisdom and knowledge was some external thing (maybe only one philosopher thought this?), like a spirit that would visit an individual. Things were not actively learned, but they were granted and bestowed by an unknown force.
The article though is very difficult to parse. Not to be rude but the signature at the end makes me think the author might just really enjoy the sound of their own writing a bit too much and wants to come across as profound. Communicating things in simpler, more relatable terms is much more meaningful and valuable. Then again it's also possible the author is just so eccentric and brilliant that their way of thinking is difficult to follow.
It seems to me the article is worth the sum of its parts and any individual paragraph doesn't necessarily hold a conveyable idea by itself. I believe I've gleaned something and I don't know exactly what but it wasn't what I expected based on the title and your comment alone, though I was better primed for the meandering thought process.
This is an interesting story, but does it have any point? I struggled to find it. Is it that learning can't be isolated so organizations shouldn't bother with formal training? Yet that doesn't seem right.
Strange. I enjoyed the article and nodded along with it but it seemed like an observation I have with a colleague over beers.
13 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 42.3 ms ] threadI think most successful new hires learn how to work within the "screwed up" environment, not how to change it--much less improve it. Change agents are rare.
An organization is always learning something, what and how are we learning, and does that fit for where we are now?
> We think of computers interacting with people as something created by programmers… That's not true, though… folks creating UX receive vastly more stimulus from machines than they ever would create for others.
> Programming languages, IDEs, and dev environments affect the people swimming in them far more than those people change the world for others
> Learning is not like seeing lions in a safari. More humble surfing. Less self-deluding chess.
> Reminder to self beginning.
> This is pedantic, but it's important.
The author mentions that storytelling is "near and dear to their heart." My guess is that they are trying to do the storytelling "hook" technique (where you start off by not explaining something fully so that people are compelled to read to the end and get closure). To their credit I did read to the end but I feel like that is a cheap trick. Like a UX dark pattern, but for writing.
The gist of the article is summed up in the title. I suppose this idea has implications for how you think about organizational learning but the author doesn't go into those implications whatsoever.
My own research flow is to read and consume a lot on the material I'm trying to absorb, then try to put that into some kind of essay, either to others or to myself, once I think I have something useful that's resulted. Then, if I'm working on a larger work, months later I come back and collect the associated works and use them as a basis for a first draft of long-form material.
I had no idea it would get many votes. Frankly, I wanted to share this with another site but whenever I share there, it gets auto-posted here. So I figured I would go ahead and submit here myself if it was going to show up in the feed anyway.
If anybody is interested in carrying on the discussion please ping me! I'm finding it fascinating to develop a meta-model that covers both machine, human, and organizational learning. Not sure that anybody's done that before. So far it's been a hoot.
Candidly I took away only one useful observation from your essay: all organizations are teaching organizations. They teach "the way things work around here."
I will engage in a discussion if you first take another hour to make your thesis and points clear. Don't publish it, send the draft to the coordinates in my profile.
Take for example August Kekule who supposedly discovered the shape of the benzene ring via dream of an ouroboros. Or, Seymour Cray who came to solutions via "communicating with elves" under his home.
If I recall correctly, I remember reading that in ancient Greece it was believed wisdom and knowledge was some external thing (maybe only one philosopher thought this?), like a spirit that would visit an individual. Things were not actively learned, but they were granted and bestowed by an unknown force.
The article though is very difficult to parse. Not to be rude but the signature at the end makes me think the author might just really enjoy the sound of their own writing a bit too much and wants to come across as profound. Communicating things in simpler, more relatable terms is much more meaningful and valuable. Then again it's also possible the author is just so eccentric and brilliant that their way of thinking is difficult to follow.
IIRC, this TED talk is about it https://youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA
Strange. I enjoyed the article and nodded along with it but it seemed like an observation I have with a colleague over beers.