Serendipity and Learning

I dont usually go out of my way to network. But over the last few years, I ensured that I spend some time creating new connections. It is a small fragment of my time that goes into it, but what I realised was that some of those networking events were not really working out. I also took time to post about the things I do (mostly on Linkedin) and here (nobody reads this - this is more of a note to myself).  It seemed to be the same set of people saying the same set of things. So, this year I have decided to step back.  Unless it is a truly unique event, I wont be going to any event - and thats how the unconference happened.  Unless it is a really significant update, I wont be posting about it.  And spend time creating and doing the things I like to do. Perhaps read more. Or write more. It is April now and I have done well so far.  Managed to read a few books. Actively working on a few creations. And then some. Lets see.  So for all I know, I might write less ...

 To a trickle.  I had written about this about 2 years ago, but back then I had a decent excuse. I was working (yes, really) on a few things.  But I realised that this is not a one off thing at all. I have actually reduced my reading. The book buying continues unabated, but reading has gone down.  Yes, I still consume textual information in general - but reading is now on the internet. There is substack and there is twitter. And there is a bit of instagram (not a huge fan, but hey, some of the content is too good). So I have decided to step back and read more. On things I need to know. On fun things. Will come back and share how that is going. 

Decided not to attend any conferences this year. Atleast not the typical ones I have often ranted about here. Will be both choosy and intentional about which ones to attend.  The ones to attend are the ones put up by practitioners of a craft. The rest is marketing one way or other. 

Podcasts bloat Ted talks bloat Online courses bloat Hell they have even managed to make reels bloat. One course I saw recently has 22 hours video on some innocuous topic. Many Ted talks can be compressed to 3 sentencs (or 5). Tip - read the transcript - it is way faster. Part of the reason I gave up listening to podcasts was bloat and ads.  So, why this bloat? What is the incentive to keep on adding layer after layer of meaningless information. Anything more and this post will bloat.  So, stop. Cut to the chase. 

 Recently, I was in the unenvious position of having to ferry around a few kids to and from classes. And these are very articulate kids. They can all talk very well - like digital natives, these people are almost - English natives. That means, English is their primary language of communication - perhaps at home, surely at school and with friends.  Now this set of kids can talk very well and it sometimes gets mistaken for knowledge. Articulation is not knowledge - not by a long margin.  A little about a similar experience from a few years back .  We often miss this in the fog of communication. Recently, I interviewed someone who was extremely articulate - but that just translated as words and more words. I missed this persons ability to abstract, condense and summarise. 

 If everything is taught, what remains? How does a child learn to be spontaneous and learn by serendipity if everything is taught? I recently saw an ad for Lego classes and it left me wondering.  My EO learnt Lego by going through the "idea book" - often as father and son. We started off by making Legos as mentioned in the idea book, but very soon, the Lego was dismantled and became a part of his imagination. This was the fate of every set - except the railway set (I got only the locomotive and the tracks) and a set which had Gandalf.  And then what we made became a story. This is a creative process I have enjoyed much and we created vehicles like a snowpusher (no it doesnt exist) or an ice jeep or gliding horse or a double decker with 4 decks or a vehicle that was made every brick we had. We made endless towers that stretched from floor to ceiling and airports and cities that spanned our entire room.  And that was the extent of my expertise - He outpaced me very soo...

Everyday I walk on my terrace. And one of my apartment mates has a dog. The dog sees me everyday, jumps, plays, wants to be patted and then goes its way. Because of the lockdown, I can only walk on the terrace and the dog can only walk on the terrace. So, we meet, each day. A little hi, a little paw, a pat on the head and neck and I go back to my walk and he goes back to smelling every corner of the terrace. Every few rounds, he remembers my existence and pauses his walk to get patted. As we repeated this exercise for the umpteenth time today, it struck me that this whole lockdown has been a pause.  A pause button on our existence. The way we go about our lives. And a question, well, make that a few questions. A question about the needs of many things. About the so called wants. About the so called necessities. About so called likes, dislikes, do's, dont's and so on. So, as we wait to hit the play button - perhaps it is worth asking, what is playing...Before hitting that...

We sat there, watching a friend in his first ever yoga class. This friend has years of experience (the yoga teachers experience is measured in decades, not hours - he said). The class was being held in a not very posh place. It was simple. The people who came to learn were not people you will find in Nike ads. One way to think about it is to say Why does someone with so much experience have to do this? Does he have to go through this grind? He deserves so much more. He should have waited and launched himself at a bigger place. The other way is to say He is trying He is brave He is working on his mission He has brought his passion alive in a small way Thats when it struck me. Beginnings are small. All beginnings by their very nature are small. Take any dream, any business. The beginnings are almost always messy, untidy and even unsure. But they are beginnings...

The last year, as I embarked on my entrepreneurship journey, I ended up buying a ton of books. Being a book lover, it was easy to justify all the purchases.  All of them were important to my learning, my development and the development of a practice.  But what happened - as I observed - was that the range of books I purchased was narrow cast towards my work.  And my son asked me "You work and you read about work, why dont you read something else?" And that question prompted me to raid a few of his books...

It has been a great year of learning... Learning from about 15 different companies...Different cultures..working styles...levels of leadership and maturity...business...challenges...people... Putting myself into, no, out of my own comfort zone and working in very diverse environments - from students to startups to established global tech firms to large format workshops to introducing new concepts into the market... What did I learn? The biggest learning for me has been the learning of how to design better. This is no small learning because I am used to a typical school of designing learning interactions - so to be able to throw what I have learnt out of the window (well, not really) and learn another way of looking into it, has been, both, difficult and interesting. Difficult because I really have to activate Type 2 thinking and interesting because once you go that path, I need to still have my divergent thinking hat ON. Having worked with different people, firms as a consulta...

The matrix is all around you. From consumerism to groupthink...it is all around you. At work, it is there at the watercooler. In life, it is on Facebook and other social media. It is there in meetings. It is there in convention and ideas. It is there everywhere. It is the matrix. Take consumerism for example... They all say, be yourself. See the ads for any product. They are all the same - from insurance to Do this, do that. Buy me to be happy. Try this to be happy - while telling you that happiness is not in the buying - it is in the experience - and slyly selling you experiences on the side. In Home Sapiens, the author terms this as romantic consumerism - and it is funny that those who espouse exactly this are often at the pinnacle of it as well...There is romance in consumption (of goods, experience, products, services). There is a strong 'matrix' at work as well - from the organization culture to accepted behaviors and so on...In a good sense it is the cult...

As the Leader of a reasonably large sized team, the team does have ups and down. Sometimes, an initiative we design does not see light of day or is rejected by stakeholders. Sometimes, it is a moment of frustration. Sometimes it is dejection. These things keep happening. One of my managers told me the other day, "The one thing I see about is a never say die quality. Whatever happens - be it the worst thing - you only see it as an opportunity and you always see the positive side" As a leader, we do not have a choice. You cannot be dejected or have a hang dog expression. It is important to keep the spirits up. It is important to show a positive direction to people. And when you go off on the entrepreneurial journey, some amount of optimism is needed. Well, correction. A large dose of unbridled optimism is required. And this time, there is no team. All that optimism is for you, with you, inside you. I have read all I can about this. How to handle rejection. How not to c...

As part of an assignment - I got a chance to train students. A very different audience than my regular corporate audience and I took as a challenge. And it was fun. So what is the difference? Mind well, but these are the generation that will soon be in the corporate world - and some of them already are - the digital generation. Couple of things struck me... These kids are super articulate  - not that we dont know it... They were born with the internet - so it is second nature to them Awareness about the world is high - very high - but awareness around (state, city, culture) seems to be on the lower side If you are going to 'teach' them, you better add value (true in all cases) If they have a doubt/thought/comment/wisecrack - they will share it - accept it - and it makes the interaction richer They are hungry to learn - but only those who put in the time and engage in focussed effort will cross over the inflection point (pretty obvious at any point) The bell curve of ...

Nearly a half year along the entrepreneurial journey in the learning consulting space and these are some of my thoughts and observations. Sales cycles are long and can be frustrating. As many books as you can read, rejection is difficult to take. (Yes, it is not rejection and I have  possibly read all the strategies around it) There is only one way to experience the entrepreneurship journey - and that is by taking it. Everything else is like learning to swim on land. There is a wide world out there. The learning in a few months of the journey is much greater than a 10 times timeframe of a similar secure job. The nature of work, the types of firms, the types of people are all very different. Differentiation is the key (and as much as I work on it, I think the question is a constant one). Everybody thinks they are different, but the market does not see the difference. There are may 'quasi' differentiators, like there is 'quasi' IP, but very little in the real s...

A learning experience often is not about telling me something I don't know. That is easy. The sum total of what one person does not know as opposed to the sum total of what one does know is far greater. So, telling someone something new may not be that much of a stretch. However, making them see an existing thing in a new light is far more difficult. If you are used to doing something in a particular way, doing that in a different way is far more difficult than doing something totally new. Therefore, in a learning experience, insight happens when I am shown something that I already know or rather think that I already know and then use that insight to move me from what I know to what I don't.  Insight is that powerful question that makes you pause, and go, hmmm..that is a different way of looking at it. That is insight . Insight most probably does not mean a complicated solution - the problem may be complicated for sure, the analysis may be complicated for sure, but most ...

A speaker at a session gave this analogy recently and I just loved it. He said, Imagine a goldfish swimming in a bowl. The goldfish represents a new idea in the organization.  The cat is outside, watching the goldfish. The cat wants to kill the goldfish (the idea) The baby is outside, watching the goldfish. The baby is curious - wants to know more, do more. All to often, manages end up being the cat, while they should really be the baby! Beautiful analogy, I thought.

What is creativity? I have attempted to answer this question a few times here and many times in my own mind. There is no real confusion in the minds of those who do it. But for the outside world, there is often a confusion between aesthetic creativity and problem solving creativity. Most people only recognize the former as creativity while missing the latter. So, if you ask people, the common answers that you will get on creativity is about music, movies, filmstars and such like. And often creativity is also confused with being 'fashionable' or 'wearing the right clothes' or 'I am different'  and this is creative, no doubt - because even being different is creative, but it may not result in any direct contribution to anything. So, if you are called in as a 'creative' expert to beautify/colour/spruce up some junk that someone else made, then believe me, you are being aesthetically creative (most likely) or perhaps helping a lazy person survive in the org...

Just the other day, we were discussing about elevator pitches. And in one such session, the trainer told the audience (both of whom shall go unnamed) - that the idea of the elevator pitch is to concisely project the idea to the person you are pitching it to - in the time that it takes to get to the floor. While this is true, it misses the point. So what, if you concisely projected the idea? What is the expected outcome? The outcome in my view, is to evince interest in the person you pitched it to, so she tells you, "Set up time with me to go through this" - that is the measure of the success of the pitch. After all isn't that why it is called a pitch. The best example of this is a trailer of a movie -that is designed to woo audiences in those 3 or 4 minutes. In those fast cut motion sequences - there is a dash of what all the movie promises to bring. If it is humour, music, action or a little bit of all of them - the trailer gets you a concise pitch so that - so th...

I have started reading this book, Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull the head of Pixar. And I have barely reached a few pages into it and it has already made for some great reading. The question Ed attempts to answer is 'how to sustain a creative high performing culture' - so it is actually a practitioners perspective.So, far the book has made for some fascinating reading. It speaks of the managers role in maintaining an open culture and mulls over it and this is what I hope to get some more insight into. I will write a longer post when done, but what is fascinating in the story of all the people in that era. Whether it is Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others - the role that their university and industry ecosystem played was simply amazing. Person after person talks of how that ecosystem fosters collaboration, deep dive research, experimentation and the hunger to do more.How does one create an ecosystem in ones own team - is it possible? What about the overweening culture of t...

Over the past few months, we have been trying out some learning techniques. One of these is 'eliciting' learnings from the audience. Earlier, the courses we created (and I refer to Instructor Led sessions) were 'fact heavy' where the instructor taught on dos and donts, tips, rules and a lot of other gyan. Pure gyan based sessions are one way downloads and the people go back sleepwalking. Over time we tried to change it into a mode where the learning happens based on peer interaction, eliciting learning using various activities or other modes of learning.Pure elicting sessions tend to give the impression to the audience that the facilitator did not add value. So what we realised that there needs to be a balance between the two. People tend to not like something that is heavily laden on the former nor on the latter. What is that balance - I dont know, but there is some balance here that I think will get to a point where the audience goes back happy. And those are t...