Between Work and Learning

Almost half the year is done. A certain someone in my neighbourhood saw me after a while. “How are your travels going? I don’t see your LinkedIn posts as often”. I’ve indeed been involved in a variety of work to be online as much. That’s true for me in this year on almost any forum that requires curative attention. Terrence H. Seamon and Allon Shevat and Fred Nickols, Solution Engineer would bear me out.

Here’s what’s in reflection though, before another busy period ahead. Firstly, I managed to keep my head between three cities in the main. Mumbai, Pune and home Bengaluru. I left a comment for a hotel I stayed in Kochi last week. The staff were quick to pick it up and thanked me online “We have noted your perceptive inputs”. Fourth city! I’m possibly picking up perceptive aspects of my emotional landscape.

Here I am making a few mentions among several possible ones – for want of time.

1.??????The assault of mass media on the capacity to think critically is not trivial. Reading AND writing have ebbed enough to dent #curiosity itself. So much so that people feel entitled to be informed on media they are on, no matter what they consume. However, not all learning can flow this way. It is like asking for soup on a flat plate, or asking for timber to be transported in a oil tanker. Media restricts or shapes the message. #Learning #agility is to step back and methodically sieve for what one wishes to learn. It will indicate what media serves what kind of learning most.

2.??????Practitioners keep their job interests paramount, not acknowledging enough the paradox they are in. Humans are enduring some of their most complex and ambiguous moments in work life. These tensions on one end of the paradox are mounted by accelerated effects of the pandemic’s requirements for physical health, and technology’s march to salvage economic workstreams. The other end of the paradox is about anticipating job loss due to obduracy and the harsh edge of Ockham’s razor in capitalist entities in the name of free market liberalism. Thanks for expressing it for me Robin N. Cook . Risk is assumed for the capitalist, and not on behalf of the employed professional or worker. The paradox is sought to be resolved in preparing for anticipated capabilities that individuals hope to demonstrate. Therefore, some invest in their higher education as a risk within one's own control. Now, what if the risk-taking learner is unaware of the trap of #media they are on, without discretion for the types of learning efforts involved? Can learning intent be strategy enough to navigate the future? My take? It is a form of naivete that is unique to this phase of human history.

3.??????The misreading of #science is not confined to the superstitions fanned out during the pandemic. Professionals at work have reduced their curiosity to what they are exposed to via job responsibilities. Hence, the art of asking fundamentals or what my friends Vineesh U S and Anish Aravind in #Kerala have thought of advocating as First Principles thinking is scarce. In fact, such is the state of affairs, that somebody who wanted to push their wares via #Design #Thinking templates waited in the wings to connect with me on LinkedIn not looking up enough, whether my own need was already satiated in this respect. I’d go to the extent of stating that it is often more effective to have #nameless #change (thanks to Glenn Allen ) by using first principles than to grab hold of the fad hammer to push down the apparent nails in the organizational woodwork.

4.??????This week, one of my linguist friends shared a very gripping feature from BBC online.??“English is largely made up of the rules we don’t know that we know. And actually, the rules we know we know are a rarity”.?The hesitation or maybe the lack of skill to learn from one’s own experience runs counter to the trends that speak to learning on the job. In a recent facilitation of #action #learning teams, participants sensed acutely, that even simple personal introductions revealed more of their colleagues than they knew after decades of working with each other! The ’illumination’ in the team was palpable. This is often because people reduce their learning to procedures of compliance than to enquire what can work better with first principles, and how else they may achieve the outcome. For example, the ‘#case #study’ as a term is used so randomly as is the word ‘#strategy’ in the corridors and meeting rooms of organizations. Indeed, it takes skill to read and learn from a case study, let alone acquire a skill by analysing the case to death!

A case is about the past. It is not in present continuous tense of the English language! An obdurate expectation is that such an episode as the case protagonist narrates will befall the reader in real life. Unlike computer programming, statistical modelling, or even on a chessboard; it may hardly predict the case’s utility in organizational learning, organization development or even in cases of individual counselling. I’m willing to bet that what is casually referred to as the ‘case’ method is often a ‘caselet’ or vignettes presented for animated viewpoints and perspectives, with no requirement for personal values clarification or content analysis of embedded units of the case record. To my academic colleague Professor Ashish Malik I am grateful for the opportunity to represent such vignettes in the book he edited with Chris Rowley. Please access Chapter 10 there for adaptations of the OD method with my analyses from the #Covert #Processes frame developed by Robert Marshak.

Indeed, these may be essential tensions to be acknowledged for personal and organizational development to occur. Denying these to insist that what does not appear online or on one’s medium of preference is trivial; is to defer or block learning.

Until another time, every best wish for our oncoming futures.