I was pointed by Harold Jarche to Dave Snowden talking about the coming age and the characteristics of what it will take. He documents a shift from mechanistic to systematic, and posits that the coming age is chaotic, requiring a new approach. Dave terms this ‘praxis‘, a continual cycle of experimenting on the basis of theory and reflecting, rather than pre-determined approaches.
Harold wondered whether this counted as meta-learning, and I’d have to say yes. You not only are looking at the outcomes of your intervention, but you’ve got to be paying attention to your process, and revising the theory and the practice as well as the problem-solving. It may seem like an awful lot of overhead, but these skills become practiced, and the outcomes are far better in the long run.
Things aren’t slowing down. I was reflecting earlier today on how quickly the ‘iClones‘ came after the announcement of the iPhone. Things are moving faster, we’re being showered with more and more information, and asked to do more and more with less. Most importantly, the fundamental game changes, where a whole industry is upended by a disruptive innovation, are getting so frequent that there is no longer a period in which to adapt to a steady state: change is the steady state.
Everything of any value at work will be adapting to change and solving problems. The processes you’d execute against will be out of date by the time they’re codified. You’ll instead be applying frameworks, and monitoring the results while you refine the models and your approach.
At a personal level, this means meta-learning: learning on an ongoing basis, developing your learning skills and continually problem solving. It’ll also mean collaborating, as it’s no longer sufficient to assume you can do it yourself; there’s power in numbers, when managed right. So you’ll also have to develop and evolve not only personal learning, but learning to learn with others. (That’s one of things Harold, Jay, Jane and I are working on via TogetherLearn.)
This naturally implies the skills of larger groups of people, and at the organizational level it means continuing to experiment as well, and providing the tools and the space to learn. It also means being systematic and continuous about review. (Doug Engelbart, ahead of the curve as always, has even suggested another level, where nodes of meta-learning collaborate to review the meta-learning!)
It’s attitudinal, too, as you’ve got to keep it from being scary, and let yourself remember that learning is fun. As Raph Koster tells us, learning is fun (at least until we kill that thought with schooling). So, let’s start having fun!