Dave’s Whiteboard

This week’s edition of the Encephalon brain blog carnival includes a timely, rambly post by Kylie Sturgiss about Women and Superstitions.

She’s looking at beliefs that are inconsistent with the laws of nature, or with what’s generally considered rational. As she points out, superstition in a broader sense can mean finding a link between behavior and outcome when none actually exists.

(That should bring the connectivists out of the woodwork.)

My own favorite examples of superstitious behavior (in the Skinnerean sense) are ones I’ve exhibited; probably you have, too:

• You approach an elevator. The “up” button’s already lit. You wait… and eventually press the button.
• You walk into a familiar room and flick the light switch. Nothing happens… so you flick it again.

In a sense, these behaviors are rational. You’ve built up a history with elevators and lights: when you press the button, the elevator comes. So if the button’s already been pressed, but there’s no elevator, why not press again?

Maybe it didn’t hear the first press?

I mention this not just because of the connection between Halloween and superstition. (And, actually, the traditional superstitions — witches celebrating, All Hallows — are vanishing; only recently are we leaving behind more recent superstitions about booby-trapped candy.)

I think there’s a lot of ritual or even superstitious behavior in the workplace. I’m most familiar with training and learning, though that behavior occurs in many other places as well.

We don’t always have time to look for evidence that something works. Organizations tend to be pragmatic, but they also tend to follow Newton’s laws, which is why it takes so many organizations so long to change practices and processes.

My division of GE developed a phobia about lengthy PowerPoint presentations. Sadly, one of the most widely-adopted solutions was the “four blocker” — four data-laden slides crammed onto one, like the quartering on coats of arms.

I suppose they were intended to store information for later reference, though no one ever included a magnifying glass. The intended outcome, I guess, was something like “people skilled in or well-informed about X” along with “fewer PowerPoint pages printed.”

In reality, the behavior of creating the four-blocker led mainly to the outcome of “handout never consulted again.”

What superstitions occur in your work environment?  A colleague who shared my skepticism about Myers-Briggs said his type was GFNJ.

Guy From New Jersey.

Multidirectional elevator button photo by bob.fornal.
Arms of the Duke of Norfolk from Wikimedia Commons.

Our DVD player came with a manual, which I last consulted when hooking up cables.  Every so often the player seems to tire of its default settings; it activates a feature we didn’t know existed.

Last weekend we watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (here’s the trailer), based on the life of French magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby.  A massive stroke left him unable to move except to blink his left eye.  (The French title is Le scaphandre et le papillon.)

I think the DVD player chose to play a version dubbed in English, rather than in French with English subtitles.  I found it confusing that the characters spoke English (with French accents) but pronounced the alphabet in French.  Only afterward did I realize the the movie hadn’t been made in English.

For me, trying to follow a soundtrack in French is confusing enough. There’s an almost unavoidable gap if you understand the spoken language as you’re reading subtitles — things get left out for the sake of speed or clarity or simplicity. And of course nuances get lost.  The Italian proverb is traduttore, traditore — “translator, traitor.”

Like the quirk in the English title — “scaphandre” isn’t “diving bell,” as in bathyscape — it’s “diving suit.”

This morning I read Starting with Cantonese on John Biesnecker’s blog. John speaks Mandarin and is learning Cantonese. As he says in an earlier post, he wanted more exposure to the language than he was getting in a formal class.

What language classes really provide is not language education, but rather structure and expectations. You have to show up at a certain time, and you have to study in order to keep up with the class. In a perfect world, those things would push students to excel, but in reality the result is often frustration and abandonment.

There’s a lot to what he says, I think. The best formal language classes generate interest and excitement. They provide incentive to learn, and some students transform that into their own motivation.  But not all do.  I was thinking how enthusiastic I was in high school, learning French — but none of my three schools had language labs, and so my exposure to high-quality spoken French was limited to my teachers (which may account for the hint of Québec in my accent).

So I studied, which may explain why as a junior in Maine, I tended to get the highest grade in my class, but was unable to flirt with girls the way classmates like Boissoneault, Parisien, Bolduc, and Gagne could — they spoke French at home, they spoke it with one another, they joked around with the French-Canadian and French-Canadian-descended brothers who staffed the school.

John’s not a complete novice for either Cantonese or Japanese (another language he wants to improve), so his strategy of viewing movies and other media isn’t bad.  No worse than sitting in a language class with its inevitable reversion to the mean.

Last night, my wife and I went to a Smithsonian event, a book-tour chat by chef Jacques Pepin (who does a hilarious Julia Child impression).  Pepin’s been in the U.S. for 50 years, stiff with a strong French accent.

The point is that he’s succeeded in an English-speaking world, communicating clearly and entertainingly on a variety of topics.  He hasn’t let the accent stand in his way.  He’d notice that scaphandre doesn’t strictly mean “diving bell,” but he’d probably pay more attention to the compelling story in the film.

(A 2005 interview with Pepin by Bruce Cole.)

Diving suit photo by Terekhova.

He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
— P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

When it comes to Twitter (and I still don’t come to Twitter that often), I’m finding, if not nuggets, at least flakes of gold.  A little while ago, Harold Jarche sent this quotation: “”Information overload does not exist. Failing information strategies do exist. ”

Harold included this link to an interview with Ton Zijlstra, who describes himself as “a networked individual in a networked world.”

So, the disgruntled part first: on reading that quotation, and bits of the interview, my first thought was, “Yeah, yeah, hyperlinked, overcaffeinated.” Especially when I read, “My networking activities are a continuous thing, never really switching off.”

Let me tell you: I switch off.

But that’s not the real point.  It’s easy to stay inside a comfort zone.  Democrats tend not to read columns written by Republicans (except maybe to yell at them); people with school-age children find their lives centering on kids, school, sports.

So lately, when I feel far from gruntled, I’ve been trying to step back (or, if I’m getting paid, metacogitate) and explore why I feel that way.  I’ve learned (more than once) that feelings are indicators of internal states, not external realities.

Zijlstra says in the interview,

My strategy to avoid overload is to embrace social media entirely. I do not watch television, don’t read any newspapers or magazines anymore, nor do I read books related to my profession; I hear it all through my networks. The authors are in my network, and I usually hear things much quicker and more nuanced. I trust my networks to give me the feedback to detect those patterns.

Well, I see newspapers, and the magazines that come here, as one more channel — more concentrated in some ways, not really a network.  I don’t yet have all that much confidence that my networks include all the authors or authorities I need.

But — Zijlstra is making sense.  First, he’s not telling me to be like him; he’s just sharing how he works.  I took the implicit invitation and visited his blog, Interdependent Thoughts. And from there he took me to this presentation.

Slide 27 in that set is “The Tools I Use.” I like how he presents them:

• Jaiku, what I do
• Twitter, what I say I do
• Plazes, where I am
• Dopplr, where I will be
• Blogs, what I think
• …and so on.

The half-dozen or so slides after that are worth reading — an explanation of why he thinks as he thinks. One highlight (my rework of slide 36):

• More connections –> Active personal role
• More speed –> Other information skills
• More information –> Different tools and work forms

I’m still skeptical about multitasking — evolution doesn’t happen in one generation, or in five — but Zijlstra helps convince me that we can get better at task management and task switching. I know that I need to do both: control the flow (the way you’d turn off the TV or click away from breaking news) and develop the cognitive muscle to switch flexibly when I need to.

So, disgruntlement — a frown, a roll of the eyes when coming across an idea I’m quick to pass unfavorable judgment on — is becoming for me a cue to explore further. There are limits — I have no interest at all in hearing why the earth is only 6,000 years old, I lack both skill and interest for fantasy sports teams. When it comes to work and learning, though, I’m prodding myself to work at learning.

Gold-panning photo by anglerp1.

This post is my contribution to the October edition of the Working / Learning blog carnival, hosted at the Xyleme Learning Blog.
(What’s a blog carnival? Details here. If you blog about learning in a work setting, or about working deliberately at learning, you should take part.  Don’t be shy.)

In a recent post, Beyond Training, Harold Jarche (in one of his comments) gives his rule of thumb: “Training is the last resort, when all other performance improvement alternatives (which are usually cheaper) have been discounted.”

Instead of “discounted,” I might have said “examined.”  Otherwise, Harold’s highlighting a dilemma that corporate and organizational training departments (by whatever name) have been struggling with decades.

Here’s the deal: there are all kinds of ways to instruct efficiently and effectively.  You can design (as Bob Mager and Peter Pipe said more than 30 years ago) criterion-referenced instruction so you don’t waste people’s time “teaching” them what they already know.  You can sequence, you can use increasing approximations of the real-life job, you can avoid war stories and nice-to-know.  You can avoid spoon-feeding.  You can emphasized hands-on, problem-based exercises.

But… a lot of the time you don’t have to do those things.  How much of “training” is a kind of corporate Clearasil applied to the zits of a counterproductive computer system or an alleged process that’s really the business equivalent of the cowpath that became a paved street?

How much of what some subject-matter expert or department head thinks people really oughta know (or, worse, really oughta wanna know) actually matters?

It may be that people don’t know this stuff (whatever “this stuff” is).  It’s less clear that traditional training is the way to change the outcomes.

For many people, the father of “performance improvement” was Tom Gilbert; I had the chance to meet him several times, and his thinking has permanently influenced my own.  Some time back I quoted his model for creating incompetence.  Consultants Joseph and Jimmie Boyett published a crisp article (PDF) explaining why the performance-improvement model makes sense.

It’s worth a look; it tracks with Harold’s point about training as a last resort.  In essence, Gilbert would approach a performance problem (a gap between the results you want and the ones you have) like this:

• Do people have the information they need?
  (Notice, that’s not “do they know?”  Gilbert is talking about information about how to perform and about how well you’re doing.)
• Do they have the instruments they need — tools, methods, technology, whatever?  You can train pharmaceutical workers in all kinds of good manufacturing practice, but if (as at one location I worked in) people have to walk from packaging line A to line B because line A doesn’t have the right kind of scale — and you’re measuring residue in fractions of a gram — you risk not getting the accuracy you claim you need.
• Do you have incentive systems to support the performance you need?  If the customer comes first, do you punish people for not completing their end-of-the-day paperwork by a set time?  If your speeches are about relationship selling, are the annual award winners the salespeople who pushed product?
• Only after examining these other influences on performance would Gilbert ask whether people have the skills and knowledge to perform.  As the Boyetts say,

By correcting deficiencies in information, instruments, and incentives first, you make sure you don’t end up training people to use tools that could be redesigned, or to memorize data they don’t need to remember, or to perform to standards they are already capable of meeting and would meet if they knew what these standards were.

I love working in this field; I get excited when people in client organizations produce better results on the job.  What has mystified me since I read Mager in grad school and Gilbert’s Human Competence in the late 1970s is why otherwise sensible organizations waste millions of dollars (and millions of worker hours) trying to talk or PowerPoint or click-enter or multiple-choice people into worthwile results.

Photo of criterion-based traffic test by Birger Hoppe.

I’m not foolish enough to try and improve on Cathy Moore, whose Too Basic? Chop It! needed only 273 words.  (And “duh” accounts for 5 of them.)

I cracked up reading one part, which reminded me of a certain type of “subject-matter expert” fretting about leaving out important information:

But what about the two people who don’t know what “email” is?