Serendipity and Learning

 We replaced our washing machine after 15 odd years. In those 15 years, we had used exactly one setting of the machine. Everything else was pointless (and not for lack of exploring).  The older one had 4 options. This one has 8.  Water level options are the same though (I suspect you cant do much with it) - there seems to be a mapping of the level to the wash program - I havent cracked it yet. But the automatic function has been messing up things. It apparently weighs the load and then decides - but almost always its decisions seem to be wrong with the result that the clothes were not washed properly.  The beeps of the older machine were different - this one sounds odd (for now) We are still getting used to this machine.  So, ultimately, it is a washing machine. What would make it more user friendly? (No, please dont think IOT and app driven sms, notifications for a wash). I somehow feel it can be far more intuitive.  Clothes are X. Water level has to be Y (X and a little more) so that

Today I was listening to someone talk. The topic of was the future of work in a post pandemic world.  What was striking that the leader was saying the right things - yet nothing was strikingly new. It was what everyone has been saying on Linkedin or in any other report. And that led me to think - given that there is the internet and what people write typically and know as typical - it is very easy to believe that "you know everything" because everybody knows it and believes it to be  true.  To find original thought, you have to go beyond that. Else you will be taken by surprise when a different thought comes along. Or caught unawares when the market moves.  Sometimes our confidence in what we know is foolhardly  (this was written when the pandemic had just made an appearance) and will prevent us from seeing beyond what we know. So, at every point, how do we ask this question of ourselves? The title of the post is a question that is ostensibly asked by Jeff Bezos at interviews

Microlearning by itself is pointless. Unless micro learning is preceded by skill building, supplemented by opportunities to practice in a safe space with opportunities to receive feedback, microlearning is about as effective as watching ads. If content has to be more and more condensed because peoples attention spans are reducing, then Netflix would not be making series, people would not be playing games for long hours. That is an engagement or interest question . So, if your content is not good enough or your learners do not find it interesting enough, well, you have to solve for that first.  Learning metrics will not give you causation by and large. By and large it will be correlational. As an L&D professional, your job is to build better correlational metrics. Going after causation is not going to work. Investment in content platforms almost always will not give you great returns or great adoption. Especially if you are a start up. So invest wisely. Unless, of course, you have m

Probably the best book I read this year - User Friendly by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant. The book traces the journey of how the focus on user friendly interfaces, products, design thinking, watching the user in their natural habit - all of this - evolved.  Part history, part story - it takes us closer to the pioneers of the field, who am sure, most of us did not know. It also takes us into some of the crucial moments that made it happen.  If you are a fan of Design Thinking or work on something for your users (which is true for almost all of us), this is a must read.  Somehow missed posting this when I had read it back in November

 Recently a friend sent a small video he had created with the caption, "I cant believe I created this". I opened the video and it was a nice video with text, images and a simple background score. He had created a small clipping of the Bhagavad Gita. And he wanted someone to create the video - but he created it on Canva and was thoroughly pleased with the effort. This is why Canva is so loved. It makes you feel that you can design your folder, brochure, ppt, video - you name it. The free version is so generous - it is possibly the most generous app - and it makes you feel that design is accessible, affordable and captures your unique voice.  Ideally if you are building something, you want the users to feel the way they feel after they use Canva. That satisfying feeling when a painter takes two steps back from the canvas, admires her work and says "I did that".  Canva makes users feel they are designers. They can do it. It is easy. It is unique. And of course, it capt

I am somewhere in the last stages of designing a game. I have been in the last stages for 3 months now. But each time I see it with a fresh pair of eyes (of my users or my collaborators), it is excruciatingly tough to change what I knew or thought I always knew. Over 20 playtests with approx 80-100 folks and about a 100 odd hours of testing and iteration led us to keep seeing thing that were blind to us. For instance, a design which I thought was working well is now being comprehended in a different way. In order to make that right, I have had to change my thought/approach and come at it from a new lens.  We made many changes as we engaged with users and bit by bit the change has happened. And yes, we could see the improvement of the way the users engaged in the next test. Colours had to be changed. Text. Visuals. Rules. We had to simplify things. We had to explain things we thought were obvious. And things which we thought were difficult - users wanted a degree of complexity as well.

 Sure, I am late for this story - but it so happened that the nephews were playing a tiny match somewhere in a small ground in a small suburb and he shared me a link to see the scores. And I was blown away and thats how I stumbled onto cricheroes.  Servicing a niche community via an app is nothing new - indeed almost every app serves a specific niche, but this one enables cricketers.  In their own words. " Today any team taking part in any cricket game anywhere in the world can score their games on the CricHeroes app. In any kind of match — school, community, corporate, with leather, tennis or any other kind of ball, from 24 Parganas to Zurich." [ Article here ] So imagine you are playing this obscure cricket match - you can share it with anyone and feel like a big player (among other things). A perfect way of understanding a tiny slice of the world and making something that all users (the entire ecosystem) loves.  

Continuing from the previous post... I have been often been labelled as a "creative" person. And I have firmly believed that I am not someone who is artistically creative or someone who has so called original thoughts. I believe (with good reason) that my creative outputs are a function of joining dots that are non obvious.  I read a lot, gather tons of information and sometimes in that pot-pourri ideas emerge which are not obvious to others.  Is this the only way it works - I dont know - this is just my view or my own confirmation bias. Either way my creativity has not been enough for me to make enough money out of it. It is still at a hobbyish level.  What works for ideas, possibly works for opinions as well.  That a lot of opinions we hold are not really ours - they are hand me downs. They come from somewhere else. Mostly some person. And nowadays with social media it comes from a specific cluster. So, what is the way out? Critical thinking. Go and read and find out for yo

 I started this book in December and finished it in a few days. One of the key arguments of this book is that a lot of what we think of as our "desires" are mimetic behaviour. We want something because someone else is doing it. Think of it as imitation.  Most of the phenomenon of marketing is all about subtle or latent imitation. Social media is all about mimetic behaviour -  considering that everybody's lovely lives are put out on display. The author argues that social media has suddenly made the entire world much more suspectible to being caught in this trap.  Think influencer marketing. Or advertisement. That is still in your face - but a lot of other desires are latent - we dont realise why we want what we want. There is a virtuous circle of mimetic behaviour and a vicious circle of mimetic behaviour. The point is to know which of our desires are actual and which of the are mimetic. And there is no good or bad - the very nature of human existence means we display mime

The switch to virtual training was tough - well managed. To think of an analogy - we managed to score runs on a low scoring pitch and bad light - but there is much work to be done in this space. We are still in Day 1 of virtual training, and possibly trying to map Physical training to virtual modes. More thoughts ( here , here , here and here ) Demand for learning continues to go up. I may personally not like learning as engagement - but companies seek learning as engagement, learning as culture, learning as skill building, learning as talent management. So, more power to those who are in these spaces. Indian content is still not there yet I feel. My own book was received fairly well . So again, a space of opportunity and much more. And I am not talking about Indian models - just content optimised for India without the usual biases. I really wonder what will happen to big content providers who sell "licences" or what makes them survive so far? There are newer business models

 The Hanyama puzzle is a puzzle I have been looking in vain to lay my hands on. Finally thanks to a friend, we got our first Hanyama puzzle. The image in blue is what is written on it. The puzzle offers no solution, except asking to work with your logic and intuition. Sure, you can search on youtube and crack it, but the kids are at it so far. One has been cracked thanks to one fellows intuition. The second one has been dissembled thanks to one persons perseverance - but it awaits reassembly.  The second image is the image of the Exploding Kittens rulebook. Earlier, in the pre-internet days, one had to read through the rule books and understand a game. Not any more. Youtube has videos by the makers and the players explaining the game. But I suppose one has to still have a rulebook, so the game has the rulebook with this message on it.