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Founded in 2002, the blog here continues to be a space of daily conversation about the science of mind and its implications and applications
Helping people identifying learning questions often requires several prompt questions. Here are a few examples.
What would you want to get better at?
How would you want to have more impact?
What would you like to be easier or requiring less time?
What would you want to worry less about?
What new kinds of feedback would be useful for you?
There are at least four ways to learn from experience: experimenting, reflective critique, feedback and learning questions.
Experimenting is trying new things and common things in new ways. Experimenting yields far more learning than analysis paralysis and death by discussion.
Reflective critique extracts learning forward from any experiences on the success-failure continuum. Experience is only a teacher when we reflect back from it.
Feedback is discovering how useful or not useful our efforts are for others. It is particularly helpful when it's based on our learning questions.
Learning questions are what we are most curious about, what we want to explore, discover or master. They make us more attuned to new learning from any experiences going forward.
Found time is the unplanned windows of time that come and go in our work and lives. They can be windows of 20 minutes or 2 hours Three things happen with found time.
1. We use it for a today to do
2. We use it to waste time
3. We use it to work on a dream or learning question
Option 3 means always having dream or learning questions to work on. Just leveraging found time, we can make all kinds of unplanned and unpredictable progress on even the most extraordinary dreams or learning ventures. We don't have to postpone traction on initiatives
I have written a book a year several times simply by using found time. That's the simple power of found time.
There are at least three dimensions to knowledge focused learning that we can do during the course of our work. These have to do with knowledge about our industry, markets and organization. The idea is to sustain a live list of learning questions related to each at any point during your work.
We can be curious about what's going on in our industry including new trends and challenges, new stories of success and failures. We can discover more about the experience, needs and dreams of those we impact and serve through what we deliver. We can learn more about what's happening inside of our organization so we better understand the big picture including those who impact us in those we impact.
All of this knowledge shifts and churns on a regular basis so it is important for us to keep our learning questions agile and iterative.
