The Learnstream of Jay Cross

The irony is that the eight years of the Bush administration have coincided with a growing body of scientific research demonstrating the power of human instincts, at least in certain circumstances. In fact, some studies suggest that when confronted with a complex decision - and the decisions of the president are as complex as it gets - people often do best when they rely on their gut feelings, just as Bush does.

However, it has also become clear that listening to your instincts is just a part of making good decisions. The crucial skill, scientists are now saying, is the ability to think about your own thinking, or metacognition, as it is known. Unless people vigilantly reflect on how they are making an important decision, they won't be able to properly use their instincts, or know when their gut should be ignored. Indeed, according to this emerging new vision of decision-making, the best predictor of good judgment isn't intuition or experience or intelligence. Rather, it's the willingness to engage in introspection, to cultivate what Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, calls "the art of self-overhearing."

Gotta know when to trust your gut, says Jonah Lehrer

Computers don't have feelings. Because our emotions weren't reducible to bits of information or logical structures, cognitive psychologists diminished their importance.

Now we know that the mind is an emotional machine. Our moods aren't simply an irrational distraction, a mental hiccup that messes up the programming code. As this latest study demonstrates, what you're feeling profoundly influences what you see. Such data builds on lots of other work showing that our affective state seems to directly modulate the nature of attention, both external and internal, and thus plays a big role in regulating thinks like decision-making and creativity. (In short, positive moods widen the spotlight, while negative, anxious moods increase the focus.) From the perspective of the brain, it's emotions all the way down.

Thus, it figures that Learnscapes must take emotion into account. Love your UX and learn more.

By comparing each one, where possible, with similar firms that had fared better, Mr Collins identifies five stages in the process of decline. Stage one is hubris born of success (possibly brought on by reading the case study of the firm in one of Mr Collins’s earlier books). Firms start to attribute their success to their own superior qualities. They become dogmatic about their specific practices and fail to question their relevance when conditions change.

Stage two is the undisciplined pursuit of more: firms overreach, moving into industries or growing to a scale where the factors behind their original success no longer apply. Stage three is denial of risk and peril. Warning signs mount, but the firm’s headline performance remains strong enough for bosses to convince themselves that all remains fine. Problems are invariably blamed on external causes.

In stage four the problems are clear enough that firms start grasping for salvation. Rather than returning to the fundamentals that made them great (which Mr Collins regards as the most promising route back to greatness), they gamble on a new, charismatic saviour-boss, dramatically change strategy, make a supposedly transformational acquisition or fire some other supposedly silver bullet. The longer a company remains in stage four, the more likely it will spiral downward into stage five: irrelevance or death. However, inspired (at times, perhaps too much) by the Churchillian belief in never giving up, Mr Collins points out that many still-great firms have bounced back even after getting to stage four, including IBM, Nucor and Nordstrom.

You’re more likely to have faith in what you hear from someone you can identify with, your work peer, than from a corporate father figure. Hence, it makes sense to incorporate opportunities for peer-to-peer exploration and reinforcement of new knowledge into the corporate learnscape.

Head down, looking at the Rubik's Cube that is the corporate Learnscape.

As I read, I jot down notes on how to inject its lessons into the cloud learning environments I call Learnscapes:

• Purpose: an important discussion early on is to determine the purpose of the group - why it exists. While many groups will have similar descriptions of their purpose (learning, tap into the organisation's knowledge in the domain, solve problems faster, standardise practices etc), each group needs to have this conversation.

• Knowledge Market: this process encourages participants to identify things they can offer (specific techniques, documents etc) and things they need to learn or need help with. This process can be done face to face or via teleconference. It helps the group build relationships and to start sharing their knowledge and expertise.

• Community Orientations: a concept developed by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith and described here. In this activity groups discuss the areas they will focus mostly on in the short term.

• Discussion tables. This activity is designed to get groups talking about the things they can do to improve their practice in the selected domain. In this conversation useful things to think about are things that will make the biggest difference for the domain and things that will make their work easier/better/more enjoyable/more rewarding.

Most of the tools that are central to social media are very easy to use. Each year they get easier. Each year their power increases as well. Each year it becomes more obvious that any organization - a business - a Non Profit - a government - a school - a family - will do much better if they adopt social media.

So why is adoption not more evident?

Because unlike adopting word-processing or spreadsheets - that made something familiar easier and better - social media demands some thing very difficult.

It demands that we give up how we see the world. We have to give up the idea of direct control and replace it with the idea of “order” in a network.

Rob Paterson's bag of concepts for thinking about tipping into major change

We need an Open Source Social Business Stack which can serve as a foundation to help companies get started with social software, much in the same way the LAMP stack makes development cheaper, a social stack need to provide a set of software which, when aggregated together, create a complete solution.

Yes! My thoughts exactly. This is spot-on.