Off Course-On Target

What if the Secret to Success is Failure?

A recent NYT article “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” is long by today's snack food reading standards but served up a VERY full course meal of great food for thought and is well worth your time to read no matter if you are a student, parent, teacher and indeed aren't we all of these simultaneously. 

I'm a huge fan of failure and remain puzzled and curious as to why it has come to be such a negative thing in many societies and communities.  Something to be avoided at all cost.  Maybe it is because I fail so often, many times every day, always have and hope I always will, that I have come to love failure.  What I love most is learning and I figured out a long time ago that learning and failure are inexorably linked and almost synonymous.  No learning without failure and no failure without learning.  Every time something goes wrong or does not work out for me, my first instinct is to ask "What is this trying to teach me?" or "What can I learn from this?" and each time I find the answer my learning goes up significantly.  Part of the reason perhaps that I also go for experiential learning every chance I can.  What I’ve learned along the way is that failure IS the “secret” to success in learning, love and life.

I mention all this for some context as to why this article resonates so deeply with me, along with my years as a high school teacher, a parent and an insatiably curious learner.  Learning is hard and figuring out how to do it well, especially in the more formal setting of education and training is particularly so.  I think we all know this and yet most discussions and programs seem to assume the opposite and come up with overly simplistic explanations of the problem and matching shallow solutions. 

It is therefore refreshing to see this complex challenge being treated with such seriousness and vigor as outlined in this article.  You may disagree with the specifics or perhaps the whole approach the two schools in this article are taking and I hope you will indeed reflect upon your experiences to critically consider their approaches.  However I also think your experiences will have shown you that “character traits” are more than anything else, the underlying factors leading to true success; a happy, meaningful, productive life.

Think about it; whether you are considering a new job applicant, a student, your children, your partner or best of all, the person you see in the mirror, don’t you find that it is traits such as

“zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity”

that have most determined your success?  Isn’t it when you have failed to do as well as you know you could in these areas that you have learned the most and gone on to be that much stronger, smarter and successful?

Whatever your answers and thoughts are to these questions, please do give this a read and your careful consideration.  I know many of you who follow my writing and speaking are in the learning, education and training fields and will find this particularly relevant.  Moreover though I think there is much to be learned here for every one of us snowflakes as we too strive to succeed a bit better each day at living a happy, meaningful and productive life. 

I hope you will get as much out of reading this article as much as I did and will give it your thoughtful consideration, talk about this notion of “character based learning” with your friends, family and colleagues and continue the conversation with your own posts, articles, FB updates, Tweets and talks,

Technology Can and DOES Change our Relationships; for the BETTER!

I like the concluding recommendation in this article and this TED talk by Susan Turkle for learning to love yourself better by being comfortable with and appreciative of solitude.  However I think that Turkle's TED talk and her new book Alone Together,make a fatally flawed assumption that using things such as texting and social media are eliminating our alone time and that our virtual means of expressing our emotions are replacing the real ones and lessening our human connections.

I simply don’t buy into Turkle’s assumptions that we are letting technology "take us places we don't want to go." and her conclusion that"The little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful that they don't eve change what we do, they change who we are."

Sorry Susan, but in my experience and observations at least NO! this is NOT necessarily so and WE as fundamentally social animals decide how, when and where to use tools and technology .  While learning to choose the best tool for the job and how to use it well is a big challenge that takes time and lots of experiential learning to figure out, and this is an exponentially increasing learning curve in our world filled with such abundance of choice, most of us DO figure it out and are all the richer for it in terms of improved connections with the other special snowflakes we chose to include in our lives.   Some of us are slower to learn than others and we pay lots of “stupid tax” in the wonderful cycle of try/fail/learn/adjust/repeat, but this tax amounts to less than a rounding error in the overall net value we gain through such learning.

While I understand that there are some glaring examples of poor choices we make along this learning curve which gossip and the media focus on, based on my experiences and observations, these examples are by far the vocal minority and represent a small extreme end of the spectrum of human behavior.  Surely by now we understand that such examples and “failures” are necessary components of learning and improvement and we should see them as positive things we want more of not less in our quest to continuously enrich our lives with greater breadth and depth of connections with both ourselves, our friends and our families?!

History shows that we make this same mistake over and over again where the pundits proclaim the arrival of new tools, technology and media are going to eliminate those that came before.  TV was going to eliminate radio, flight was going to eliminate trains and automobiles, eLearning was going to eliminate teachers and so on.  While new innovations clearly have a significant influence on what came before, (when was the last time you sat around with friends or family listening to the radio??), the new hardly ever eliminate or replace the old.  Our world is much more one of a giant Boolean Add equation than one of subtraction or reduction.

The new and sometimes daunting challenge as we acquire more and more tools in our toolbox is to know how and when to use the right tool for the job.  When is a Tweet or a FB update the best choice?  When is an Email or a phone call better?  When best to wait for the chance to meet in person and what to do in the interim?  I concur and hope that we will always prefer in person human contact over more distanced and removed virtual forms, but surely we would also want to augment the limited opportunities we have to be with those we love and care about with every possible means to converse, share, love and learn with them.  And as our tools and technology continue up the exponential curves increasing capabilities and decreasing costs, not too how the tools become more and more transparent and the connection we have with others becomes the focus.  Does it matter HOW an emotional personal connection with another human happens or that these happen more often for all 7+ billion of us snowflakes?

Turkle posits that our increased use of digital technology to converse with each other is lessening our ability to self reflect.  Seriously?  For me at least it has produced the exact opposite effect and something I’ve blogged about several times on my Learnativity blog as I try to reconcile how I can have so many deeply rich experiences in my day to day live in such a very short time.  It is an effect I have called ELD or Exponential Learning Density which I believe is created by a cycle of living IN the abundance of moments life offers us every day, then reflecting upon these and then sharing our thoughts, questions, feelings and learnings with others.  My conclusion is that by repeating this cycle of Live-Reflect-Articulate I end up with this extreme “density” or rich learning experiences and a life that is filled with non stop adventures, interactions with others and Mother Nature and more love, life and learning every day.  As I reflect back on how filled with rich experiential learning my life is, I still can’t quite comprehend I’m only just starting my fifth year on this grand sailing life adventure!

As one who perhaps has more solitude than most as I wander, wonder and ponder the world one nautical smile at a time single handing my sailboat around the planet, I can offer at least one shining example where I use the entire plethora of means at my avail to express my thoughts, feelings and emotions with the many friends and family who I am blessed to be surrounded by.  When I’m with others I meet out here or on my trips back to see friends and family, I’m as good and frequent a hugger as you’ll ever meet, I’m as comfortable kissing men as women (on the cheek/forehead) who I love and care for when I’m given the gift of the opportunity to be with them in person.  If I shake your hand, clink glasses with you or talk to you, I will be looking deep into your eyes.  However to the best of my knowledge all these people in my life also feel my love and caring for them more often as I use a vast array of tools and technology.that augment my abilities to connect with them.  All of these additional means are “virtual” through the use of the increasing abundance of communication choices I have.  I care SO much less about the means through which I get to express and share with others as I do with ensuring that we have more and more opportunities to share our lives, learning and love with each other.  So let’s please keep our eyes on the prize and not mistake the means we use with the end results of deeper human connection, commitment and conversation and ensure that what we have the most abundance of is Life, Love and Learning!

We Snowflakes are all made of Stardust!!

I learned one of the most amazing things yesterday and just had to share it with the rest of you in case you didn’t know this either. 

Every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded! 

That means that each of us snowflakes are made of stardust!!  How awemazing is THAT?!?! 

 

I learned this yesterday while pursuing one of my current curiosity threads about space time continuum and the cosmos and reading “A Universe from Nothing” by Lawrence Klauss.(highly recommended)  Klauss explains how the heavier elements such as nitrogen, oxygen, iron were NOT made by the “Big Bang”.  These heavier nuclei elements can only be made with truly huge energy levels and heat, much more than even during the Big Bang.  The only place there is enough energy and heat to form these heavier atomic elements is during the rare occurrence of an exploding star called a supernova.  A supernova burns for about a month with the brightness of 10 billion stars!  This only happens about once per hundred years per galaxy, but then again there are billions of galaxies so there are still quite a few of these overall. (about 200 million in the history of our galaxy). 

What this means then is that the only way these elements could get into our bodies is if these stars were kind enough to have exploded and sent their products hurtling out into the cosmos, some of which eventually arrived at the blue marble called Earth. 

It gets even better for me in that the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than the ones in your right.  So we are quite literally as Klauss puts it

“we are all, literally, star children and our bodies are made of stardust!

Sorry, I’m fascinated by so many things and even without the assistance of my ADD riddled brain I’m sure I would be just as easily excited by the awesomeness of the world around me. I’m still reeling in amazement of just how poetic and powerful and humbling it is to learn that each and every one of us snowflakes are made of stardust.

I’ve described some of my many experiences of looking up into the night sky while out here sailing around the world on my Learnativity blog.  The perspective you get when you are out in the middle of the deep blue sea with no land in sight is a unique life experience as the sea and the sky merge into one and surround you completely.  It is an awemazing experience with a spiritual like quality as you feel a profound connection with the world around you and become one with it.  You are no longer a mere external observer, you are a part of this big picture. 

Regular readers know that I live using serendipity and synchronicity as strategies and guides so it came as no surprise that this morning, as I was typing up this post and catching up with Emails, Facebook updates, notes, etc. (ADD remember!) I stumbled over a post that my friend Tina in Newfoundland Canada had posted to FB about her discovery of the exact same fact that we are all made of stardust.  Her source was Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and was his answer to the question “What is the most astounding fact you know?”  Better yet, Tina included this great video (must watch!) and moreso, she posted all this at literally the same time I was reading my book!  Thanks Tina!

I used to have the problem of keeping my jaw from bouncing off the steel desks of my sailboat when my mouth gaped open as I looked up and out at the night sky which is now almost every night in this charmed life I lead, but I just lay down and look up now so my jaw doesn’t hurt so much. I have similar feelings when I’m snorkeling and experience those moments when I become one with that undersea world in these areas where all the other life forms wondrously ignore me. But last night, as I looked up into the clear night sky and those billions of stars shining down on my here in Fiji, it was somehow even more amazing now that I know that not only am I part of the universe but it is a part of ME!

Maybe you already knew about this and I’m just slow to learn as usual but if we are not all amazed by things like this and the beauty that surrounds us EVERY day, then I think we are just not paying attention and not living up to our responsibility to live this gift of life well.

Snowflakes Effect Hits Financial Models: Snowflakes funding Snowflakes

The evidence that the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization is continuing to build at an exponential rate continues to show up just about everywhere I look. One dimension of the Snowflake Effect that has not received a lot of discussion yet is the financial side if the story; how will the mind boggling numbers of personalized solutions needed every day be funded?  What are the new financial and business models going to be in a Snowflake Effected world?  If as I believe more and more of us are going to become designers and producers and creators by making our own “stuff”, and especially if others are asking us to make and share some for them, how will we pay for this?   Well, why not apply the Snowflake Effect to funding itself?

Microtizing Finance, Credit & Loans

In fact this the Snowflake Effect has already hit funding models already and we are seeing more and more examples and growth of these wild new models.  One of the hallmarks of the Snowflake Effect is breaking things down into very small components whether that be each of us as unique individuals or each unique moment in time or small parts that can be reused and reassembled into infinite numbers of unique new assemblies Lego block style.  This same “microtization” trend is increasingly taking hold of financial models and enabling each of us 7 billion plus snowflakes to not only become designers, creators and producers, we are also becoming financers and funders. 

One example you have likely heard of and many of you are already participating in is that of microloans, microfinance and microcredit.  Essentially this is where once snowflake can loan small amounts of money to another snowflake or individual cause.  As is often the case this is not a new idea or invention but what is new is the scale and reach of these models.  Back in 2006 Kevin Kelly posted this good overview of “Micro-Loans Online” which he introduced by saying:

This year the father of micro-finance and founder of the Grameen Bank won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in inventing and promoting micro-loans in the developing world. A micro-loan is as little as a few hundred dollars invested into a one-person business with minimal qualifications. That tiny borrowed amount can launch a vegetable stand, repair shop, or bicycle taxi -- a living in other words. As each micro-loan is repaid (and most are), the effects of that small goodness are amplified and leveraged by being loaned out and invested again and again. Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.

Snowflake Effect Hits in Financial Models in Developed Regions

Most of these micro loans and micro financing have been focused on dealing with poverty and developing regions and they continue to escalate in both numbers and positive effects.  Somewhat newer and greatly increasing the scope of this Snowflaking of financing is their application to the financing of individuals and small businesses in developed regions and markets.  One of the more noteworthy examples is Kickstarter  which has the tag line of “A new way to Fund & Follow Creativity” and bills itself as being “The world’s largest funding platform for creative projects”.  The model is essentially the same where anyone can pledge any amount, typically one to one hundred dollars, towards a specific project that someone has proposed on the site.  As they point out this is not about lending or investing as each project creator maintains complete control and ownership of their work.  Those who pledge money are also protected because no money changes hands unless the project reaches its funding goal within a set time.

You can check out the Kickstarter web site and Kickstarter blog for more information and examples of the enormous range of ideas, products and services being developed which include everything from software applications to games to art to books to home hardware.

How well is this working?  Well Kickstarter recently had a record setting day with two projects exceeding $1M each in pledges and $1.6M being pledged in 24 hours.  All this from individual snowflakes like you and me.  In fact they had quite the day as they also saw New York’s city council endorse the site as a way to highlight community projects that need funding

It was also noteworthy to me how different the two projects were that exceeded the $1M in pledges.  The TechCrunch review of this eventful day highlighted this nicely:

Often Kickstarter is thought of as a venue for people with very limited means but a good idea to execute that idea. The Elevate Dock is a good example of this.

But Double Fine is an established game studio with office space, employees, and many products under its belt? Why should it go to Kickstarter? Well, Tim Schafer explains that in the video, at least for this project: no publisher would go near a point and click adventure game, but they knew at least some people wanted it. Reasonable enough.

The question, really, is why we even question it. If people want to make something, and people want to fund it, why shouldn’t it be on Kickstarter? The easy stuff — cool accessories or small devices that need a little capital to get started — are just the first wave. Why not pothole repair on a neighbourhood street? Why not a new coffee shop? Why not a feature film? Some of these have been tried, no doubt, and perhaps failed — but the principle is sound:

If you want to make it, and others want you to make it, this is a way for you to connect.

Why not indeed!!  What if the impossible isn’t?

Snowflake Effects on Learning

As you can see then, the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization continues its exponential growth and influence on almost all aspects of our world.  For those of us who look at the world from the perspective of learning, my ongoing question and fascination is with how the needs for each of us as individuals and as societies are changing and being changed by the Snowflake Effect.  The personalization of learning itself such that each learning moment is more successfully and deeply personalized is happening at an equally exponential rate with more examples of this showing up every day.  However an even larger and multiplying effect is the need for a whole new set of skills, knowledge and competencies each of us snowflakes are going to require to survive and thrive in the rapidly evolving new snowflaked world we are creating and will live and learn in.

I fully realize that this all continues to sound unimaginably large and impossible.  And yet as the examples of financial models I’ve highlighted above show, we are surrounded daily by more and more examples of how the impossible isn’t.  The oxymoron of typical Snowflake Effect models that are infinitely scalable AND sustainable turns out to be true!  Or as Kevin Kelly put it; “Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.” 

Add enough snowflakes together with these kinds of models and you have a perpetuating avalanche of invention, discovery, creativity, production and happiness.

Living & Learning in a World of Exponential Change

NOTE: The following is the third excerpt from the small contribution I was proud to have made to the “Learning Perspectives 2010” collection put out by The Masie Center in memory and commemoration of Jonathan Kays.  (see previous postings for details)

I run into more and more examples every day of how much our world is one predominated by exponential change and how inexperienced and incompetent we are of working with exponential rates.  Hence my brief post below and my recommendation that we all put a focus on this “new math” of exponentials so that we are able to take full advantage of what continues to be the premature arrival of the future.

If you are interested in more background on exponential change and some of my longer standing perspectives on them, you may enjoy this previous podcast (2007) as well as some examples I’ve highlighted in the past such as this one on “The Encyclopedia of Life” and this one on the effects of exponential change on expertise.

Enjoy and please add your comments or create your own postings with your reactions!

- Wayne

 

Living & Learning in a World of Exponential Change

We have little experience or logical models to help us deal with and understand exponential change. While we have long been familiar with examples like compound interest (and we know how to do the math), when we are confronted with new instances of exponential change, our reaction is one of disbelief. For example, if you fold a piece of paper, you double its thickness and therefore each fold increases its thickness exponentially. So take an ordinary sheet of paper and fold it in half. Then fold that piece of paper in half again and then in half again. After about seven folds, the paper is about the thickness of a notebook and you are soon physically unable to fold it any further, but mathematically, if you were able to do so, you'd find out that after about ten more folds, you would get something about the height of your house. Ten more folds after that, you'd get to the outer limits of the atmosphere. Sixty folds after that, you'd be at the diameter of the solar system. You can see how this kind of progression is something that we just aren't very good at estimating.

Cable and satellite TV enabled two channels to grow into ten, ten into one hundred, and one hundred into thousands. While that was a very steep rate of change, it felt more like a linear rate of change as we had more and more choices of what to watch. With some of the more recent changes, like the introduction of VCRs, recordable DVDs, PVRs (Personal Video Recorders like TiVo), YouTube and TV via the Internet such as Apple TV and Google TV, the increasing abundance hit its tipping point. Today, we have what is effectively an infinite number of channels and choices of what to watch.

Does the concept of a “TV channel” seem almost irrelevant when you can watch almost any show at any time in any place? What you have today might be thought of as a set of personal channels that have just what you - and only you - want to watch. The tipping point of television or video abundance obviates the whole concept of a channel. This is typical and only one example of the way in which the Snowflake Effect is causing such fundamental changes.

Lastly, consider that revolutionary change is very far reaching. Mass production not only affected manufacturing: it has indelibly altered and predominated our entire society by changing such diverse aspects as government, education, housing, clothing, medicine, styles and design. We can and do expect the Snowflake Effect changes to be even more pervasive and profound

It is increasingly critical to acknowledge the need for not just diversity and abundance, but also uniqueness. The needs of every person are different every day as they face new and often unexpected situations: and not just people in rooms with desks and computers, but those on trains, in the fields, on job sites, in cars (under cars!). This applies to everyone, everywhere, every day.

In my estimation the ability to work well with exponential rates of change is one of the top skills of our age and the centuries ahead.  This shift has already happened and will itself continue at exponential rates so we need to increase our learning and our skills in this area at a matching rate.  I’ll post more examples of both what these exponential changes are and how we can all (me too!) acquire such new skills.

Related articles

• YouTube May Imitate TV, Channels and All (technologizer.com)
• Vocabulary-Exponential Functions (tutoringtowardssuccess.wordpress.com)

The Snowflake Effect on the World of Things

NOTE: The following is the second excerpt from the small contribution I was proud to have made to the “Learning Perspectives 2010” collection put out by The Masie Center in memory and commemoration of Jonathan Kays.  (see previous postings for details). 

It is my contention that changes falling resulting from the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization such as the Third Industrial Revolution I covered in the previous posting and the dramatic transformation of “physically real” things are disruptive changes that will shake up and shape our future at a holistic and societal level.  In addition to their direct use and applications to learning my greater concern and excitement is on the new skills, competencies and knowledge required by all of us as “students” living in this world and therefore the challenges and opportunities this presents to learning, education and training.

Enjoy and please add your comments or create your own postings with your reactions!

- Wayne

The Snowflake Effect is causing dramatic changes in the world of things as they rapidly transform from being mass produced to mass personalized and, in the process, become snowflakes themselves. Flexible manufacturing was one of the initial enablers of this transformation, but that was just the beginning. With the advent of more computer-controlled design and machining, and, more recently, the introduction of affordable 3D printers and scanners, we are seeing an increase in the personalization of individual items that can be designed and produced to match the unique context of an individual person/situation for no more - and often for less - cost than previously mass produced things.

This is about disruptive innovation: not disruptive elimination. We do not want or need everything to be unique. Large scale items such as airplanes and cruise ships will likely continue to be produced in quantity; but even now, these items are uniquely built to match the individual customer and be adapted to match some specific routes or conditions. Many large scale items are already being designed and built so that they can be changed over time to match contextual changes, whether predicted or not. For example, several of the world’s naval forces are building their newest ships so that they can be reconfigured to match different contexts of use, like switching from a configuration best suited for military situations to one that better accommodates response to natural disasters.

There will likely always be a need for some mass produced parts. We will still want large numbers of exactly the same thing (like fasteners, screws, nuts, bolts, etc.). There will be instances when many people will want to have the exact same thing and there will continue to be fads around popular books, songs and movies. But these will be at the front end of the Long Tail and small in number. As you move down the curve of the Long Tail, you find that more and more things for more and more people have less and less in common.

For example, even if I really like the pen you just showed me and we can “print” an exact duplicate for me, I might want to modify it a bit - to be shorter, heavier or more curved to better fit my hand and match the way I write. The same dynamics will play out for coffee cups, eyeglasses, shoes, chairs and certainly our learning in both process and content. In this way, there will be an equivalent Long Tail of things and it will be a spectrum with products falling at all points along the exponential curve towards uniqueness. As we are seeing with the Long Tail effect on music, movies, books and the like, the transition will be such that the volume of objects at the unique end of the tail will rise dramatically and become the majority in terms of instances, business and learning.

Above and beyond being mass customized and personalized by their design and production, things are increasingly connected to each other and us as we use them. One version of this is often referred to as “The Internet of Things”. A commonly cited example is the way in which home appliances are being connected to each other and the Internet for everything from monitoring energy use to setting thermostats and timing when to turn things off and on. All the items in your fridge are able to dynamically update their status in terms of how full they are, their expiration date, peak freshness and so on to help you choose what’s best to make for dinner tonight and what to pick up at the grocery store on your way home.

Start to think smaller and smarter: imagine and prepare yourself for things like “smart” and digital dust, dirt, pixels, locations, ink dots and paint. Products or “things” are going to increasingly be snowflakes themselves; alike, perhaps, but no two exactly the same. Just like us, as things become more like snowflakes, they too will start to have their own identity, networks, conversations and even their own “social networks”. Indeed, if you’re paying attention, many already do! But it is the more far reaching and latent effects of these changes - especially those on how, when, where and what we learn - that are most exciting.

The revolution in the world of learning is upon us and it is as daunting as it is exciting and powerful. The best way to predict the future is to design your own; therefore, we can strategically and serendipitously lead the transformation of learning, training and education rather than have it happen to us. By exploring and better understanding current trends and directions of the Snowflake Effect on the world of “things”, we will be able to bring the power of mass personalization to the world of learning. Each of us will be able to experience great learning moments every day.

Related articles

• The Snowflake Effect the Third Industrial Revolution (waynehodgins.typepad.com)
• Snowflake Socialize Your Burger? (waynehodgins.typepad.com)

The Snowflake Effect & the Third Industrial Revolution

NOTE: The following is an excerpt from the small contribution I was proud to have made to the “Learning Perspectives 2010” collection put out by The Masie Center in memory and commemoration of Jonathan Kays.  (see previous posting for details).  This topic and my perspectives on us entering a third Industrial Revolution is one I have been having a great deal of fun presenting and discussing for quite some time now and it seems to be generating some of the most excitement and resonating more profoundly with more people as I’ve done so recently.  My intent with this posting is to provide you with a quick synopsis (consider the source!) of my perspectives on the Snowflake Effect and the resulting Third Industrial Revolution, and then follow with more details and directions I believe this is taking us.  The potential of these changes continue to be a source of great excitement and inspiration for me and I hope it has a similar effect and value for you.

Enjoy and please add your comments or create your own postings with your reactions!

- Wayne

The Snowflake Effect & the Third Industrial Revolution

The overarching theme that will shape the future of not only learning but most all of our societies, organizations and communities is the escalating transformation of our society from one that is shaped by mass production to one that is shaped by mass personalization. For several years now I have synthesized a large number of major trends and patterns into this massive global and societal shift - which I refer to as the Snowflake Effect - that is driving a complete reset of the world as we know it.

Within this context of transformation to mass personalization, a new revolution is coming into focus: a third Industrial Revolution. As with the previous two Industrial Revolutions, this third version is both sculpting and itself being shaped by an emerging society resulting from the mass exodus from a world governed for over a century by mass production to one made up of societies, communities and organizations characterized by pro-active individual members. These people take on increasingly direct roles in the design, creation and use of the new forms of learning. They feed a constant stream of real time data about their reactions, thoughts and ideas, which provide feedback loops for evolutionary self-improvement cycles.

The Snowflake Effect

The Snowflake Effect started with the simple observation that we are all unique individuals: no two are alike, just like snowflakes. What’s more, so too is each moment in time, each situation we are in and each group of people we are with unique. They are distinctive combinations, just like the crystals of a snowflake. This is certainly not a new observation or condition and has arguably been true for as long as we have existed; yet, this poses the intriguing question:

If our uniqueness as individuals is so obvious and has been so true for so long, then why do we live in a world designed on the assumption that we are all the same?

This question has haunted me for many years now, like the small irritant of a grain of sand that causes a pearl to form in an oyster. In this case, my articulation of the Snowflake Effect is the resultant pearl.

One of the results of technology improvements over the past 50 years is that our world is getting smaller as distance and physical separation become lesser issues. We are more connected with more people in more ways than ever before. While we need to continue to work on distributing access to these advances to all of the world’s populations, it is increasingly true that we can communicate, socialize and work with anyone anywhere. We can access food and other products no matter where they come from or what season it is. We live in a world of increasing abundance and the rate of change is exponential. It has hit a tipping point, triggering immense and often seemingly impossible transformation all around us.

From Mass Production to Mass Personalization

In many ways, we can trace this focus on sameness back to the first two Industrial Revolutions and our transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. Initially, mass production only applied to manufacturing, but over the course of a century or more, mass production has expanded and extended to the point where it now permeates and, in many ways, defines the world in which we live. Our thinking and assumptions are largely based on the principles of mass production. Consider for example how we design almost everything. We typically start with a problem or a need that is shared by a large group of people. Given the usual time, energy and cost that creating something new requires, the larger the group, the better. Once we have the design for a product, it is mass produced. If the design is for a service, we put together a process and supporting resources so that same service can be delivered to as many people as possible. This is how most governments, businesses and schools work. Consider how most education models work: with standard objectives, text books, curriculum and schedules. It’s no coincidence that our education models were largely created at the beginning of the first industrial revolution to meet the demands of a new factory work force.

Prior to the first Industrial Revolution, only a privileged few were able to get just what they wanted, whenever they wanted it. With the advent of mass production, it became possible for many people to buy a car, a home and become educated; however, this highly scaled model was made possible by mass producing and delivering the same solution for everyone.

Mass production worked very well and we have spent over 100 years improving and refining it to become a very efficient model. In many ways, we have mass production to thank for the transformation of our world into one of abundance for more and more people. But, in spite of - or perhaps because of - this abundance, the predominance of a mass production mentality is no longer sufficiently meeting our needs. It is at odds with our uniqueness when we only have mass produced choices which must be, by definition, compromises for the solutions we really want. This gap is now being closed as we shift from mass production to mass personalization.

The Snowflake Effect is largely about context-based design and the notion of personalized fit. It is about getting things just right. Products and services have the greatest value when just the right people have just the right things at just the right time in just the right way in just the right place. Just as the answer to most questions usually begins with “it depends”, so too does all design need to be dependent upon our unique personal contexts: the unique sets of conditions and characteristics of any situations that determine how well a solution of any kind fits each of us as unique snowflakes.

In the past, we have accepted any mismatch as perfectly reasonable and the best we can expect within typical constraints like budgets, time, community, family, etc. After all, to think otherwise, to imagine a future where most things are just right for you would mean that we’d need to have a different solution for every person, every day - in fact, most likely many times every day! At the time I am writing this, almost seven BILLION people inhabit the planet, and there are 24 hours in a day. That equates to at least 168 billion unique solutions per day and at least 61.32 trillion unique solutions per year! We all know that is impossible.

Or is it? Such outrageous and exponential scaling certainly will be impossible if we continue to rely on our existing mass production mentality and models, but we are increasingly surrounded by more and more examples and evidence of new models where extreme mass customization is not only possible, but already happening on a previously impossible scale. There exists proof that, both as unique individuals and as groups, we can have just what we need, when, where and how we need it. We are increasingly surrounded by examples of what Kevin Kelly succinctly called “impossible in theory, but possible in practice”. Look at some examples in our everyday life: we are increasingly able to get just the right fit for the music we listen to, the news and information we consume, the clothes we wear, the products we buy and the way we can often find just the right information when we need it. This doesn’t happen often enough, but it is occurring more frequently. Check out the developments in areas like personalized manufacturing with 3D printers and 3D scanners, real time information, recommender systems and others you have probably recently experienced. While it is still very early in this transition and we are still surrounded by more mass production than mass customization, the new models and our new behaviors are evolving with accelerating velocity.

Two key enablers of the Snowflake Effect are mashups and modularity. Mashups, a relatively new term but not a new idea, are a unique assembly of pre-existing items to form a new integrated whole. Modularity refers to having things in very small and interchangeable modules. This can be compared to simple Lego^TM blocks, which can be used to create almost anything imaginable by snapping together new combinations of these pre-made plastic blocks. Think about, for example, how you find and listen to music today: you find individual songs rather than whole albums and you put together your own unique playlists based on personal recommendation systems (that are built upon your unique preferences and recommendations from others). This stands in stark contrast to the previous “mass production” models of buying albums and listening to top 40 radio stations. Similar transitions toward mass customization are happening with what we read, what we watch, who we converse with and how we organize ourselves. Mashups and modularity enable the infinite scalability required by the Snowflake Effect for every person, every day.

Note that mass customization and getting things just right does not eliminate and, in fact, includes some products and services that will still be mass produced and remain the same. There will still be “hits” and fads. We will still have some songs, movies, books, presentations and keynotes that millions, even billions, of us are universally drawn to and find valuable; however, these will no longer be the most common or the most used resources. Instead, we will have a very full spectrum of the “Long Tail”, a concept from retail that describes a strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities, usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities: http://www.longtail.com/. These range from huge hits on one end to completely unique, extremely personalized items on the other end. The big change will be an inversion of where the greatest volume of solutions, products and services are found along the curve of the Long Tail, with the vast majority of what we each choose to use coming more and more from the unique end of the tail. The total volume of low popularity items already dramatically exceeds the volume of high popularity items in areas like books, music and video. This trend will dramatically increase; we will continuously find individual items and mash them together in the marvelously messy mix of choices we make.

The 3^rd Wave: Industrial Revolution 3.0 = Learning Revolution 3.0?

The third Industrial Revolution is driving this change. I make this observation in part based on a book published in 1980 by Alvin Toffler called The Third Wave. I have long believed that Toffler was an extremely prescient author, seeing the changes looming ahead. I also believe that even he underestimated the time it would take for these changes to visibly emerge along with the effects they would produce. I’ve most often referred to Toffler’s earlier book Future Shock, published in 1970, where he created the portmanteau word “prosummer” by combining producer with the word consumer. Toffler coined this term to describe the future society he saw where we would not be neatly dived into categories of active producers and passive consumers; instead, these would blur and merge as we all became inextricably and intimately intertwined with the processes of creating. While this has taken much longer than Toffler anticipated, everyone reading this article is a living example of a prosumer. We are all becoming much more active and passionate participants in designing and building our respective futures. I can’t imagine a more positive pattern that bodes well for all of our futures to be bold and bright.

It is Toffler’s book Third Wave, however, which contains the most significant and relevant observation affecting the future of learning and our world. Toffler did not directly refer to a third Industrial Revolution and simply referred to a Third Wave, however he did outline just such a revolution. The Wikipedia entry defines the three waves as:

· Toffler’s First Wave as the settled agricultural society which prevailed in much of the world after the Neolithic Revolution which replaced hunter-gatherer cultures.

· The Second Wave was the Industrial Age society, which began in Western Europe with the Industrial Revolution and subsequently spread across the world. Key aspects of Second Wave society are the nuclear family, a factory-type education system and the corporation.

Toffler wrote:

“The Second Wave society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine these things with standardization, centralization, concentration and synchronization and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”

· The Third Wave is the post-industrial society. Toffler says that since the late 1950s most countries have been in transition from a Second Wave society into a Third Wave society.

Thirty years later, this Third Wave is in fact a Third Industrial Revolution. It started back in the 1950s and has been slowly but exponentially increasing. We are now at its tipping point and seeing the more startling and dramatic changes being produced. Contemporary examples include such things as 3D scanning and 3D “printing”, which enable us to copy, modify and print any physical object, including those that are complete working assemblies, like motors, pumps, watches and anything else that strikes our fancy.

More recently (April 2010) urban theorist Richard Florida has put forward many similar views of a third revolution in his book “The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Posterity”. Florida provides some good historical background on the previous two Industrial Revolutions and an analysis of how current world economic situations are contributing to the third one. Florida does a good job of debunking many common myths and The Great Reset details his observations on the changing social characteristics and geographical concentration of creative knowledge workers in mega-regions around the world and the need for a very different and highly mobile work force. Overall Florida adds to those pointing to the need for an equally great reset of our education and training systems and the way we learn in general.

The third Industrial Revolution will require an equal or greater revolution in education, training and learning to fulfill and drive the new forms of creation and our new societies. What does this really mean in terms of learning and performance? One good outline of some skills and competencies required by this Third Industrial Revolution can be found in Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind[1]. Dan describes the shift from skills and competencies required by the former Industrial Revolution - which are mostly associated with the left side of the brain (i.e. analysis, sequential reasoning and text) - to a focus on right brain skills and competencies (i.e. synthesis, holistic reasoning, context, images, design and pattern recognition).

The question for learning professionals and organizations - the question the rest of Learning Perspectives 2010 explores - is what will YOUR role be in this process? Will you lead or follow? Will you shape or be shaped? Will you be part of the solution or part of the problem?

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§ [1] See also Elliott Masie’s Interview of Daniel Pink at http://www.learning2007.com/university/2005/8/10/dan-pink-interview-a-whole-mind-audio-podcast-text-transcript-new.html

Perspectives on Loss & Learning

One of the sadder points of 2010 was the loss of a great learning leader and colleague, Jonathan Kays.  For an all too brief time Jonathan was the Chief Learning Officer of the Masie Center’s Learning CONSORTIUM after following a long career with the Central Intelligence Agency, including a stint as their first CLO.  However our loss has also resulted in much gain as my long time friend and colleague Elliott Masie inspired and pulled together a fascinating collection called “Learning Perspectives 2010” in memory and commemoration of Jonathan.  This collection of “Over 40 learning leaders from global corporations and government agencies contributed perspectives on how learning is changing (and will continue to change) in the coming years” is as eclectic as it is excellent IMHO.

Nigel Pain, another dear friend and colleague, along with Elliott, Meghan and Brooke from the Masie Center somehow managed to tap all these contributors, get their submissions and expertly edit them all in mere days and the result is something Jonathan will have appreciated and smiled at.  A printed version was given to the 2000 people fortunate enough to attend the big Learning 2010 event at the end of October.  Better yet, and in part the purpose of this posting is to let you know that earning Perspectives 2010 is available for anyone as a free download at http://learning2010.com/ebook 

I’ve long since departed the USA and resumed my life of constant adventure aboard the good ship Learnativity* and have been reading and re-reading more of the articles in Learning Persepctives 2010 as I float out here in the tropical atolls of the Marshall Islands.  As I’ve been doing so I thought many of you might also enjoy starting off your new year being inspired by some of these articles and by Jonathan’s legacy and hence this post.

* Cut and paste these lat/long coordinates 07 06.274 N, 171 22.358 E  into Bing or Google Earth to see my current location

As another gift to yourself courtesy of the Masie Center I’d encourage you to go check out the enormous collection of even more great content including lots of video and audio from the Learning 2010 conference that is all available at www.learning2010.com  Even if you’ve been there previously it is worth return trips as there have been lots of additions in the last two months.

I was humbled and honored to be asked to submit some content for this tribute to Jonathan and I’ll be posting some out takes from that in the coming weeks here to stimulate some additional comments from you and inspire me to add more of my own so please stay tuned for those.

Wherever this note may find you today I hope that 2011 is floating your boat as well as it is mine and look forward to another fun year of learning, loving and living.

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog

Back aboard the good ship Learnativity
moored off town of Uliga on Majuro atoll, Marshall Islands
07 06.274 N, 171 22.358 E

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Country or Community or Neither?

Maps are such a big part of my life as I experience the world via my sailboat so the TechCrunch posting XKCD Updates Its Map: We No Longer Live In Actual Countries But Digital Ones provided some serious fun for me this morning looking at this updated map for 2010 and this previous 2007 Map of Online Communities from XKCD.  These maps show online communities as countries with size based on the volume of daily social activity. 

It is both a fun perspective on the world we live in and very useful to support the trend I’ve been talking about for many years that the whole notion of national boundaries is fading fast relative to their importance and relevance in our daily life.  Let me be quick to point out that I am not in any way suggesting that national boundaries will be eliminated or forgotten nor that we will be any less proud of your national heritage.

But in terms of what matters in our daily lives as we go about living, learning and working together I think we are all seeing more and more examples where national boundaries matter less and less.  The country of origin of a person, product or service matters less and less to us compared to their fit and match to our unique needs and preferences.

Think about it, in your conversations and correspondence over the past week which have you mentioned more often; what country you are from or what online community you are from?

I’m certainly pleased and proud to be Canadian for example and just sent out a Happy Canadian Thanksgiving (Oct.11th) wish to one and all.  But guess where and how I sent it?  My blogs, Facebook, Twitter and all done from the cockpit of s/v Learnativity here in Majuro atoll in the Marshall Islands group. (07 06.274 N, 171 22.358 E)

I would also point out a related pattern that the importance of and the differences between the physical and the digital, between the real and the virtual, between the geographic location and the online location, are also becoming less and less relevant and distinct. We can and should start dropping them as qualifiers in our conversations. Just like we are less likely to feel the need to point out that we are calling someone from our car or an airplane and focus on the conversation at hand, we will have less need to add that some thing, or even some one, is digital or online or Canadian and focus more on having the right people and things connected together at the right time and way to meet the unique needs of the moment.

Perhaps more importantly it seems to me that communities matter more than countries.  I don’t see this as anything uniquely modern or new or digital.  Reflecting back on human history one could argue that communities have often been more important than nationalities.  What is new however is the reduced need to factor things like location or nationality or digital into our daily decisions.  They are not irrelevant, just less relevant. 

Taking an even longer view, which is my nature, I see all single point categorization such as nationality, gender, age group, digital, real, and so on, fading in importance and relevance as we instead use these as bits of metadata or characteristics which number in the hundreds, millions and centillions (10⁶⁰⁰) and which we combine into mashups and mine to help us make faster better decisions and help us avoid stereotyping and other forms of mass production thinking.

While not without new problems and challenges I for one see all these changes as a VERY good thing and a major step forward by providing more ways and opportunities for all of us to help make this a better world to live, love and work within.

In any case, have fun wandering and pondering these maps.

Here’s a Good Idea:

Several in fact; check out the two videos below from Steven Johnson, consider reading his new book “Where Good Ideas Come From: the Natural History of Innovation” and see if these help you generate more good ideas of your own.

I also love these RSA video animations like the first one below which are intriguingly from the Royal Society for the encouragement of Art and are an extremely effective way of presenting ideas and concepts.  If you’ve not seen one before I think you’ll enjoy not only the topic but the presentation style itself and you’ll find lots of them available on YouTube and elsewhere if you start searching.

But my real purpose of this post was to bring your attention to this provocative pursuit of the challenging question “Where do good ideas come from?” and a book which Steven Johnson has recently released after his five years of his pursuit from an environmental (our surroundings) perspective.  The presentation and the book provide the patterns he has gleaned from his research and observations. 

I particularly liked his his notion of “creating spaces where ideas can mingle, swap and create new forms”.  And as a real serendipity and Lego block kind of guy I was particularly drawn to Steven’s thoughts on good how good ideas are formed by the collision of smaller hunches and the cognitive catalyst of serendipitously stumbling over some rich bit of new information.  He notes that what we’ve been seeing, over the past six to eight hundred years, is the historic rise in connectivity to reach out to other people and borrow their ideas and hunches and let them collide with ours and create something much bigger than the sum of these hunches themselves.

Check out these videos below and see if they don’t provide some great cognitive collisions with some of your hunches and ignite some great new ideas that you can share with the rest of us and keep this cycle ever growing and widening.