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July 9 - July 26, 2022
modern life requires range, making connections across far-flung domains and ideas.
detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.
the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models,
Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle.
identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list.
Knowledge increasingly needs not merely to be durable, but also flexible—both sticky and capable of broad application.
Learning deeply means learning slowly. The cult of the head start fails the learners it seeks to serve.
In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous.
Bent Flyvbjerg, chair of Major Programme Management at Oxford University’s business school, has shown that around 90 percent of major infrastructure projects worldwide go over budget (by an average of 28 percent) in part because managers focus on the details of their project and become overly optimistic.
Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is captured therein.
Evaluating an array of options before letting intuition reign is a trick for the wicked world.
conclusion: successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.
The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.
Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.
Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute.
mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience.
we learn who we are only by living, and not before.
we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives.
We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.
Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.
Our intuition might be that only hyperspecialized experts can drive modern innovation, but increasing specialization actually creates new opportunities for outsiders.
Rather, as Tetlock and his coauthor succinctly put it in their book Superforecasting,
Like polymath inventors, Eastman and Cousins take ravenously from specialists and integrate.
The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness.
He relentlessly attacked his own ideas, dispensing with one model after another, until he arrived at a theory that fit the totality of the evidence.
Few events are 100 percent novel—uniqueness is a matter of degree, as Tetlock puts it—and creating the list forces a forecaster implicitly to think like a statistician.
“Good judges are good belief updaters,”
learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.
Diane Vaughan’s book The Challenger Launch Decision
At NASA, accepting a qualitative argument was like being told to forget you are an engineer.
cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily.
differentiated chain of command and chain of communication that produced incongruence, and thus a healthy tension.
Incongruence, as the experimental research testified, helps people to discover useful cues, and to drop the traditional tools when it makes sense.
Individuals who live by historian Arnold Toynbee’s words that “no tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.”
“the principle of limited sloppiness.” Be careful not to be too careful, Delbrück warned, or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.
InnoCentive founder Alph Bingham told me, “breakthrough and fallacy look a lot alike initially.”
that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.
Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you.
Once again: we learn who we are in practice, not in theory.
Peter Drucker put it twenty years ago in a prophetic Harvard Business Review article, “managing oneself.” The summary atop the article—which predicts that workers would increasingly have longer and multifaceted careers—reads: “Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves—their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.”
rather than hiding diverse experience, explain it.
produced findings that resonate with a major theme of the book: that sometimes the actions that provide a head start will undermine long-term development,
