About this Blog

Purpose of this Blog
This blog is an open stream-of-consciousness as I reflect and/or double-loop on my early morning shower musings and late night blogosphere travels. Being who I am, these musings tend to revolve around Innovation, Business, Technology and Learning.

So, instead of being “Hot off the Press” what you will read here is “Still wet from the Shower” or “Halfbaked Ideas” from what’s hot on the Blogosphere wires.

That being said, I have been in and around this space for quite some time and my goal with this blog is to push the envelope of my own thinking by exposing it in raw form to others. I am opening my Johari window if you will – so that we can collectively benefit from each other’s insights if there is a post that grabs our collective attention.

None of us is as smart as all of us. The Smart Mobs/Wisdom of Crowds meme is out there. In the future, our ability to learn will no longer be a function of an individual’s capability to cram stuff into their heads as fast as possible, instead it will be our collective ability to convene around an important opportunity or challenge and co-create insights and solutions that are new to the world. In the future, learning will be as much about tuning your wet-ware network as it will be about feeding your mind.

Eventually, my task will be to come back through and look at what was said and make sense of what was thrown out there within and across posts.

Process 1: Morning Shower Musings
After my early morning yoga session I wait for the first cognitive tension or word-play that intrudes on the wonderful feeling of nothingness that I just created for myself. I figure it must have some merit if it is the first thing that encroaches on something as blissful as emptiness….so why not go with it!

If you have not already picked up on it, I am an ENFP and I have ADD, so I tend to meander a lot. I am conscious – not always in-the-moment but at least in theory – that others have different synapse wirings that cause them to prefer more direct styles of communication. To mitigate frustration, leveraging my consulting background, I am going to rely upon the argument structure developed (or at least popularized by) Barbara Minto to help bound the blog.

Situation: Something observed that everyone else would mostly agree with
Complication: Something a little less obvious within that overall situation that is actually the piece of wool you pull at to unravel things ; ) Identifying the complications that underpin the situation
Question: What question emerges from this complication that warrants skull work?
Answer: The hard part for me as I am more about jumping onto the next set of questions that the complication raises but I will attempt to get some answers for these ones first.

I can’t promise that there won’t be tangents within this structure, but hopefully – as I have learned from Cognitive Science and Performance Support -this scaffolding or affordance should be helpful in helping others “grok” what I am up to and should at least keep me from “P”eeing all over you as the Myers Briggs folks like to say.

Process 2: Late Nite Halfbaked Ideas
At the end of each day (usually around 12:30AM right after Charlie Rose) I jump on Google Reader and end up spending way too much time learning from the keen insights of the wonderful people who give of their time to share their wisdom with the blogosphere. The learnings here are truly generative and double looped. Plus it helps me keep up with my pals in the community. So no expectations on this one, just weaving my .02 into the flow of dialogue around hot topics on the wires so that the collective wisdom around the issues that matter can become stronger.

Hope
Most importantly, my hope for this blog is that it accomplishes four things:

1. You leave with more questions that you had when you arrived
2. You feel a strong urge to respond (either with enthusiasm or exasperation)
3. You come back to see how the wisdom of crowds is improving upon these answers
4.You find a place in that other world out there where what you shared and what you learned here makes a difference

At the end of the day, I truly do believe that Learning Matters. Yes it is a Word-Play (another foundational meme of my blog). It matters because there is no change without learning. It matters because most conflict and strife in the world comes from a lack of ability of warring tribes or governments to truly learn and understand the ememy’s point of view. It also matters because the world is becoming increasingly complex and our human ability to cognitively “grok” what the hell is going on is remaining constant. We are victims of our own success, we have created information technology that gets twice as fast and remembers twice as much every 18 months.

I don’t want to get into the whole Seely Brown versus Bill Joy argument on Technology Good versus Technology Bad (respectively). But I do think that the more we can develop technologies that allow us to learn collectively (not just individually) the more we can accentuate the positive and attenuate the negative.

Finally, I called this blog Learning Matters because the “strange attractor” in my cogitation always seems to land there. I mentioned earlier that I will be musing on Innovation, Business, Technology and Learning. If I were to think in pictures, which I do. I see this as a planetary system where learning is the gravity creating body in the middle and the other, quite large planets, Innovation, Business and Technology, are rotating around it.

At the end of the day, today at least, this blog will be about learning, why learning matters as a standalone concept, and why it matters as it relates to innovation, business and technology.

Looking forward to our journey together…. thanks for being here now.