The Next Organization

Peter Senge on Learning

I realized when I finished my graduate studies that all was just the beginning. I decided to continue to learn myself without going back to school. Learn to understand and redraw my view of the world, thus the I used to call this blog "Just another view of the world" before.

Nonetheless, most of people thought learning as being bookworm, just by reading anywhere and anything. "Learning" is very often thought of as getting high score in exams, repeating the things one read or heard somewhere at the right time, in the right contents, or finding ways to do things that other have thought of more efficiently. Learning in my opinion is not trying to find out what is expected out of me and strive to make it. Learning is not dissecting the issue and building skills to do small parts of it and forgetting the big picture. Sadly enough, I saw people spending a lot of time doing these and still called it "learning" or "studying."

Peter Senge's "The fifth discipline" is one of my favorites. In the book, Peter wrote a part about learning, which clearly makes the distinction between "learning" and "taking in information". The extract below from a couple of places in the book speaks for what I truly believe about learning:

Systems thinking - effectiveness vs. efficiency

Inspired by a discussion with John Beckford, I wrote this on the airplane to Palo Alto.

It's human natural psychology to improve the way we do things to achieve more. However, trying to work only where the symptoms are visible often times does not bring effectiveness, even when the efficiency is improved. Why? Because any object, being or process does not exist alone by itself, and thus the symptoms need to be analyzed in its relationship to related objects in the system.

Let's take a couple of examples of how efficiency means the opposite of effectiveness.

I have a couple of friends who felt that they didn't have time to do everything they wanted. Feeling time management issues, they tried to improve their productivity while getting more works in order to force themselves "to be more efficient". The problem however got worse and they felt even more under the pressure. What's happening here? My friends are good at getting more works, and actually spent more time to improve their skills of getting more works. As the result, they had no time to slow down and think about how they can improve their execution skills, their real bottleneck.

Develop and Follow up Creative Ideas More Effectively (When Internet is All Around)

My main achievement this week is a discovery of a new plan for my creative idea development. Working with computer and Internet access for most of the day, having DSL at home and being alone made my laptop the center of my life for a quite some time. Meanwhile, from November last year, I stopped using my paper idea notebook and Lotus Organizer to switch over to MindManager. While the software seemed to be faster, it’s not a very natural way to note down idea very quickly. In stead, it made me focus more on the mechanics and structure than the idea itself. After testing a few personal note tools, I ended up using EverNote. I found EverNote quite fast to quickly capture and classify the information and notes.

However, all of a sudden, I spent most of my day on the computer. I kept reading new things and switching from one task to another. I lost my concentration and my productivity seriously dropped. I had no time to think more the ideas I had. Even worse, I wasn’t able to note down many ideas and they kept vanishing shortly after. I felt frustrated and stressful.

How to manage (and lead) mavericks

One of my mentors, Dr. Viet Nguyen, once said: "People are born different. One may be like a hammer, another like a scissors. Don't use a hammer to cut paper then blame it's bad. Similarly, don't use a scissors to hit a nail then blame it's bad, too." Managers, however often have problem with mavericks, by definition "nonconformists". Very often, managers blame that mavericks don't fit with any "normal" plan. I somehow attribute this frustration to the managers' lack of diversity management skills. Like in my quote before, they try to use the hammer to cut paper.

Managing mavericks is quite an experience. Leading them without power is much more challenging. In my early management career, I once had a maverick in my team, so decided to check Mary K. Pratt's tips in her "Managing Mavericks" article immediately.