Iteration

I’m straight back to work on the new material on AI and Learning, but with a shift in focus. Last week I was building out the narrative. This week I am trying to simplify it.

When I first learned to paint with watercolours, I followed a predictable path to failure: I started with a blank sheet of paper, and laid out the outlines of what I wanted to pain, sometimes using a mapping pen. So far so good. Then I would build up the colours slowly, painting between the lines. Also good.

And then, with depressing regularity, I would overwork the image.

It took me a long time to realise two things about watercolours: the first is that you don’t really want to ‘put the paint on the paper’, but rather float it through a film of water, and the second is that less is often more.

This is not the exact same process as developing new ideas in my practice. I don’t tend to find myself looking at a blank sheet of paper, and filling it up slowly with ideas. Instead, I am sat in the centre surrounded by disparate ideas, and sometimes drawing threads between them, or finding new things, or having something fall into my path. It tends to arrive as a jumble, and my first efforts at expressing the idea are attempting to narrate that mess. Only through an iterative and dialogic process (which for me also includes illustration) do I find that I have any chance of ‘finding simplicity’.

So painting starts simple and gets overworked, whilst my work tends to start confused and (if I’m lucky, and work at it) I may find simplicity. I realise that this may not be the same for everyone, but that is my experience and process.

I was talking to Sae about this the other day, and she reminded me that you have to internally work with concepts to build understanding. Which is why I often say that the writing is supposed to be hard.

This is relevant in the material I’m sharing for the AI and Learning session: if we outsource the ‘hard’, then we may accidentally outsource, or simply lose, our ability to learn.

In other news, my new Quiet Leadership Udemy programme is now live. It will take around two hours to work through, exploring leadership in the smallest of actions. You can find it here.