Thirty years ago I read a book that changed my life. It was written by a wise man (Piero Ferrucci).
Last night I finished reading a new book by the same man. I figured if he was wise thirty years ago, his current thinking must be just extraordinary.
The new book is about kindness.
Some paragraphs in this book made me raise my eyebrows. I was awestruck by his depth of insight and the nuances he was able to put his finger on.
In one chapter, entitled "Service", he talked about good salespeople. He said they are "warm" and make the customer "feel at ease."
He DIDN'T just say they "build rapport", or "establish commonality". It wasn't about technique.
He was talking about authenticity, and genuine caring. He wasn't suggesting it be feigned for the sake of hidden motive. The suggestion was that one can cultivate such an orientation.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Instructional Design
I am a dedicated reader of Edge Foundation's annual publication containing about one page written by each of the world's top scientists and thinkers. These extraordinary people, from many disciplines, are given a straight forward question and they do their best to answer. A couple of years ago the question was, “What are you optimistic about?” Before that was, "What do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?" Last year the question was, “What have you changed your mind about?”
Imagine reading the edgy thoughts of quantum-mechanical engineers, mathematicians, evolutionary biologists, linguists, physicists, psychologists, anthropologists--the whole shebang of brains who push the edge of human thought! Every year. Each answering the one new question. When a new issue comes out, I find myself happy I've stayed alive long enough to have the privilege to read it.
I don't recall ever being invited to submit my own answers. Then, I haven't heard from the Nobel group either.
I wonder if most simple readers, such as myself, ever ask themselves these questions. Probably. Yes?
My problem with this year’s question (what I’ve changed my mind about) is that I keep changing my mind about so many things, I don't know which one to pick. I guess that's another reason I'm still in the little leagues.
For what it’s worth, when I got out of the shower today, I was admitting that the topic below is something about which I’ve changed my mind.
I used to think the key to educating people around their behaviour (let’s call that “training”) was to approach the topic conceptually. People would change, I thought, if they had a bigger model of their challenges than they currently possessed. So, I would extend the "size", if you will, of their working model so that, with the new, broader perspective, they could make more informed decisions and choices. You could call that my conceptual phase.
Then I went through my temporal phase as a designer: basing a learning experience on an exploration of the sequential moments in time of a behaviour so that learners could discover the antecedent to the desired behaviour, their historical, presumably not-optimally-desirable response, and the alternate behaviour they could choose instead. Though somewhat Pavlovian in nature (ring bell, antecedent; salivate, consequence), this seemed particularly useful for behavioural learning. For example, “when the customer says ‘your price is too high’, we have been responding with x (whatever the response); instead of choosing x, let’s choose y.”
I loved my temporal phase. I thought I had found the key to the universe (of education). When people become aware that their mistakes occur in a moment in time, immediately after they've been triggered to follow their habitual path, they become empowered to make different choices, to take a different path.
However, it wasn’t so good for teaching people how to devise a strategy for penetrating their accounts or their marketplace. Teaching people to be strategic is not really teaching a behaviour, per se (though it would be easier if it were). There are moments of choice during the development of a strategy, but they are better attacked at the conceptual level.
So, now I’ve changed my mind again. Effective learning design involves a thorough exploration of context (e.g., the process aspect of the thing being learned about) AND the temporal (what choices are available beyond the robotic).
Temporal consciousness might be a beautiful thing, and learning to make different choices as moments pass is a gift we get from educators. But I take my hat off to those who hammer home context as well as linearity, global as well as local, macro as well as micro. How else could instructional design be holistic in nature if it didn't integrate the thing being learned into the whole of which the thing is a part?
Imagine reading the edgy thoughts of quantum-mechanical engineers, mathematicians, evolutionary biologists, linguists, physicists, psychologists, anthropologists--the whole shebang of brains who push the edge of human thought! Every year. Each answering the one new question. When a new issue comes out, I find myself happy I've stayed alive long enough to have the privilege to read it.
I don't recall ever being invited to submit my own answers. Then, I haven't heard from the Nobel group either.
I wonder if most simple readers, such as myself, ever ask themselves these questions. Probably. Yes?
My problem with this year’s question (what I’ve changed my mind about) is that I keep changing my mind about so many things, I don't know which one to pick. I guess that's another reason I'm still in the little leagues.
For what it’s worth, when I got out of the shower today, I was admitting that the topic below is something about which I’ve changed my mind.
I used to think the key to educating people around their behaviour (let’s call that “training”) was to approach the topic conceptually. People would change, I thought, if they had a bigger model of their challenges than they currently possessed. So, I would extend the "size", if you will, of their working model so that, with the new, broader perspective, they could make more informed decisions and choices. You could call that my conceptual phase.
Then I went through my temporal phase as a designer: basing a learning experience on an exploration of the sequential moments in time of a behaviour so that learners could discover the antecedent to the desired behaviour, their historical, presumably not-optimally-desirable response, and the alternate behaviour they could choose instead. Though somewhat Pavlovian in nature (ring bell, antecedent; salivate, consequence), this seemed particularly useful for behavioural learning. For example, “when the customer says ‘your price is too high’, we have been responding with x (whatever the response); instead of choosing x, let’s choose y.”
I loved my temporal phase. I thought I had found the key to the universe (of education). When people become aware that their mistakes occur in a moment in time, immediately after they've been triggered to follow their habitual path, they become empowered to make different choices, to take a different path.
However, it wasn’t so good for teaching people how to devise a strategy for penetrating their accounts or their marketplace. Teaching people to be strategic is not really teaching a behaviour, per se (though it would be easier if it were). There are moments of choice during the development of a strategy, but they are better attacked at the conceptual level.
So, now I’ve changed my mind again. Effective learning design involves a thorough exploration of context (e.g., the process aspect of the thing being learned about) AND the temporal (what choices are available beyond the robotic).
Temporal consciousness might be a beautiful thing, and learning to make different choices as moments pass is a gift we get from educators. But I take my hat off to those who hammer home context as well as linearity, global as well as local, macro as well as micro. How else could instructional design be holistic in nature if it didn't integrate the thing being learned into the whole of which the thing is a part?
Sunday, May 10, 2009
A River
The Buddhist notion that "life is suffering" is interesting.
I used to think it was somewhat overly dramatic, if you know what I mean. Quite a pessimistic view of things.
It's about wanting more than i have now--more time, more pleasure, more control.
And there's my wish that i could know all that i am. And hold onto it. Instead, i flit. No hold. A reaction here, an unconscious blurt there. I am neither this, nor that.
But some days it seems to hum to the rhythm of my consciousness, to the strum of each moment. It's right in front of me.
If life is suffering--and maybe it is--is that so bad?
I know love. Is flow not lovable?
Go ahead, take me away.
Suffering just is. Like a free-flowing river.
I used to think it was somewhat overly dramatic, if you know what I mean. Quite a pessimistic view of things.
It's about wanting more than i have now--more time, more pleasure, more control.
And there's my wish that i could know all that i am. And hold onto it. Instead, i flit. No hold. A reaction here, an unconscious blurt there. I am neither this, nor that.
But some days it seems to hum to the rhythm of my consciousness, to the strum of each moment. It's right in front of me.
If life is suffering--and maybe it is--is that so bad?
I know love. Is flow not lovable?
Go ahead, take me away.
Suffering just is. Like a free-flowing river.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Time Capsules
I am a fan of time capsules. The whole idea of digging up a container filled with icons of a different era is very appealing to me. Maybe I should have been an archeologist.
Perhaps if we were going to bury a time capsule today, one that would be unearthed 50 years from now, we would put in today’s newspaper, a blackberry, an empty piggy bank, a model wind turbine, and whatever else would exemplify life in the present. What would you put in there?
The idea, of course, is for people of the future, or perhaps even aliens, to be intimate with life at that former time.
I suspect that you have your own time capsule, only it’s not meant to depict social norms as much as it your personal circumstances. And, you probably add to your container when memorable events occur. And you look at it every so often. (So it might not be a time capsule in the strict sense).
I have one of these too: it’s called “a box in my basement.” Mine has a mint condition, plastic-sealed Al Kaline card, my Man from U.N.C.L.E. membership card, my grade 4 report card saying “Arthur fidgets in class”, a love letter I got in grade 7, a Canadian one dollar bill, a post card I sent from a small town along the Bruce Trail which I hiked when I was 13, a memento of a school trip I took to Italy in grade 12, a ball bearing that I won playing marbles in grade 2, my last academic philosopher paper…things like that.
I also have a diary that I’ve been keeping since 1974. A friend gave me a “nothing book” for Christmas (hard cover, blank pages). It’s kind of like a time capsule because it tells me what my inner world was like at the time of each entry. At the beginning I wrote in it twice a year or so, but now, 30 years later, it’s once every few years at best. And the early entries were one or two pages, while more current entries are just a few lines. “Mother died. It does indeed appear that I've processed a lot of this already."
Sometimes I wonder about my motivation for this record-keeping tendency. My friends and family sometimes remark that I have a thing around holding onto the past. (Actually they say I have a lot of “things”, meaning quirks, neuroses and peculiarities). But I don’t think my interest in making periodic notes to myself that I can read in the future is so bad.
My favourite thing in this regard is to make file entries in my computer of newspaper articles that forecast doom and gloom so that when, for example, the doom doesn’t come, I can adjust my level of trust in that source.
I don’t just do this with newspaper articles. I even do it with myself. For example, when the disease SARS hit, my business was affected. Around that time I found myself catastrophizing. “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” I thought. I wrote about that fear in my computer journal (those kinds of things don’t make it to the handwritten diary). But now, with the provocative swine flu, I reread that entry and say, “oh.” I learn from my time capsules.
Perhaps if we were going to bury a time capsule today, one that would be unearthed 50 years from now, we would put in today’s newspaper, a blackberry, an empty piggy bank, a model wind turbine, and whatever else would exemplify life in the present. What would you put in there?
The idea, of course, is for people of the future, or perhaps even aliens, to be intimate with life at that former time.
I suspect that you have your own time capsule, only it’s not meant to depict social norms as much as it your personal circumstances. And, you probably add to your container when memorable events occur. And you look at it every so often. (So it might not be a time capsule in the strict sense).
I have one of these too: it’s called “a box in my basement.” Mine has a mint condition, plastic-sealed Al Kaline card, my Man from U.N.C.L.E. membership card, my grade 4 report card saying “Arthur fidgets in class”, a love letter I got in grade 7, a Canadian one dollar bill, a post card I sent from a small town along the Bruce Trail which I hiked when I was 13, a memento of a school trip I took to Italy in grade 12, a ball bearing that I won playing marbles in grade 2, my last academic philosopher paper…things like that.
I also have a diary that I’ve been keeping since 1974. A friend gave me a “nothing book” for Christmas (hard cover, blank pages). It’s kind of like a time capsule because it tells me what my inner world was like at the time of each entry. At the beginning I wrote in it twice a year or so, but now, 30 years later, it’s once every few years at best. And the early entries were one or two pages, while more current entries are just a few lines. “Mother died. It does indeed appear that I've processed a lot of this already."
Sometimes I wonder about my motivation for this record-keeping tendency. My friends and family sometimes remark that I have a thing around holding onto the past. (Actually they say I have a lot of “things”, meaning quirks, neuroses and peculiarities). But I don’t think my interest in making periodic notes to myself that I can read in the future is so bad.
My favourite thing in this regard is to make file entries in my computer of newspaper articles that forecast doom and gloom so that when, for example, the doom doesn’t come, I can adjust my level of trust in that source.
I don’t just do this with newspaper articles. I even do it with myself. For example, when the disease SARS hit, my business was affected. Around that time I found myself catastrophizing. “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” I thought. I wrote about that fear in my computer journal (those kinds of things don’t make it to the handwritten diary). But now, with the provocative swine flu, I reread that entry and say, “oh.” I learn from my time capsules.
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