Pragmatic Thinking & Learning

#learningIsAGift ?
#rituals of #theBeautifulJourney 

Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt is a book packed with insights into how the mind works and examples of what one can do to harness the potential of the brain. The book discusses many topics around thinking and learning, a few main points being:

• The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition
• The specifics of the left and right brain and how and why to tap into the right brain more
• Learning techniques
• The Inner Game – Awareness
• Biases and other bugs of the brain

The notes I’ve extracted from this book will make this article quite long, be warned. As usual, they are also mixed with my own research on some of the topics.

The 5 Dreyfus Model Stages:

1. Novices
   1. unsure how to respond to mistakes
   2. need rules, unambiguous direction, quick successes
   3. unsure which rule for which context
2. Advanced Beginner
   1. need info fast, but not the big picture
   2. can start using advice in the right context
3. Competent
   1. develop conceptual models
   2. deliberate planning
   3. can solve problems
   4. have initiative, are resourceful, can mentor novices
   5. “can’t apply agile methods the way we would like – there isn’t enough ability for reflection and self-correction”
4. Proficient
   1. need the big picture
   2. can self-correct through reflection and feedback
   3. can understand and apply maxims e.g Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) or No Broken Windows
5. Expert
   1. work from intuition
   2. know which details to focus on
   3. good at pattern matching
   4. aren’t always the best teachers

To keep in mind:

• Agile teams won’t work with 1s and 2s, ability to receive and act on feedback is essential to Agile
• The occurrence of second order incompetence i.e. being unskilled and unaware of it
• Listen to your intuition, but verify it

To develop a certain skill and move up on the Dreyfus model, one needs deliberate practice. Specifically on practice you can have a look at my summary of the book You Are Awesome – by Matthew Syed.

From Dr. K. Anderson Ericsson, for deliberate practice you need:

• a well defined task
• … difficult, but doable
• feedback
• opportunities for repetition and correction of errors
  • “Practice makes permanent.”

Andy Hunt introduces the Pragmatic Investment Plan as a support tool for development with these 4 main categories to cover:

1. Concrete plan
   • Goals, SMART objectives, smaller tasks to be able to evaluate progress daily/every few days
2. Diversify
   • e.g. languages and environments, techniques, industries and nontechnical areas (management, public speaking, anthropology, music, art …)
   • … but consider the risk vs return on investment ratio
3. Active investment
   • Look for feedback, re-evaluate
4. Invest regularly
   • Create a ritual – minimum amount of time to invest regularly. While the tasks performed in that given time would vary, it still made me think of mini habits which could constitute a part of the activities to do – I’ve written about them in mini habits for the mind and mini habits for the body.
   • “Time can’t be created or destroyed, it can only be allocated.” – good reminder
     • “You don’t have bandwidth, not time.” – mental overload

Other things to keep in mind for development:

• Accept responsibility, don’t “just follow orders”. Ask… Why? How do you know? How do I know?
• Imitate > Assimilate > Innovate (inspired from Shu Ha Ri, a Japanese martial art concept which describes the stages of learning to mastery)
• Consider the context – look for situational patterns
• Write down ideas to get more of them
  • Act on them!
• Apply synthesis, not just analysis

The different functioning modes of the brain are referred here as L-mode (left brain) and R-mode (right brain). While L-mode is analytical, making things happen, R-mode is about intuition, problem solving, creativity, long term memory, idea processing in the background.

Next, I’m extracting examples of How to harness the potential of the R-mode functioning of the brain. The book covers really well the Why you would want to do that, I’ll only mention that not all ideas are verbalizable.  

How to engage the R-mode of the brain:

• Expand sensory involvement – play, role play, describe, discuss, respond to questions
• Draw without naming what you draw (Dr. Betty Edwards – Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain)
• Metaphors – cultivate humour to build stronger metaphors
• Po techniques (Edward de Bono) – random juxtaposition
• Reconcile unlike patterns – e.g. oblique strategies, Zen Koans. On the topic of koans, we also have programming koans. I’ve first heard of these from Jason Trenouth. See, for example, Hacker koan and other examples.
• Meditation – the author mentions Vipassana meditation. I’ve tried Transcendental meditation and now use Headspace for a variety of meditation techniques.
• Image Streaming – from The Einstein Factor book – Start with a problem/question. Close your eyes. For each image that crosses your mind, describe it out loud in as many details as possible using all five senses (if possible) and use present tense.
• Morning pages – hand write 3 pages first thing in the morning. No censoring. Don’t skip days. 
• Walk – walk a labyrinth
• Sports – Yoga, rock climbing, martial arts. I’d add dancing to this list. 
• Change – to your non-dominant hand for certain activities, change your path to work, the type of things to read/watch/eat etc

When discussing learning, the idea of different learning types is quite common – auditory, visual, kinesthetic. Discovering which is the preferred one for oneself would help improve the learning process.

“For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting – no more – and then it motivates one towards originality and instils the desire for truth.” – Plutarch

Learning techniques examples:

• Test-driven learning – try to recall the material over and over again
  • try a 2-2-2-6 schedule: try recalling after 2 hours, 2 days, 2 weeks and 6 months – see https://mnemosyne-proj.org/
• Create study groups to learn and teach
  • See it. Do it. Teach it. 
  • “Documenting is more important than documentation” 
  • Start a book club
• Read deliberately with SQ3R – Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review
• Visualise insight with mind maps – come back to them and enhance them with drawings, styling etc
• Problem solving approach and question – How to Solve It, by George Polya
• Use scaffolding – a process that enables a student to solve a task or achieve a goal that would be beyond his unassisted efforts, as described in McLeod, S. A. (2012). Zone of proximal development. Also see Wikipedia: Instructional scaffolding.

Things to keep in mind:

• Learn from similarities, unlearn from differences.
• Mistakes come with learning. Give yourself permission to fail.
  • Inaction is the enemy, not error.

The  Inner Game Theory – Awareness

“There is always an inner game being played in your mind no matter what outer game you are playing. How aware you are of this game can make the difference between success and failure.” – Tim Gallwey

The Inner Game Theory (nicely summarized here) was coined by Timothy Gallwey and is about teaching students multi-sensory awareness and then using that awareness to correct their performance. Andy Hunt brings up examples from tennis and playing music where students have been guided to observe movements, sounds, their own feelings and sensations, make certain movements and sounds, and then observe the difference in these criteria when a small change was applied to the practice. 

In the inner game theory, performance is defined as:

Performance = Potential – Interference

… where Interference is often times internal, coming from an inner chatter (negative) that undermines confidence and focus. Andy Hunt touches upon this aspect:

“Repeated negative thoughts form a sort of a TV show – a film that you can replay in endless syndication. Each time you play Negative Movie, it gets more and more real and increasingly important in your psyche. You can tell from the dialogue that this is a repeat (“You always…”, “You never…”) or by the characters (the Cable TV Police, the Net police, the Legion of Idiots…). Most of these negative movies are dramas and usually far more dramatic than real. As you start to replay one of these favourite films, try to catch yourself and remember that it’s only a movie. You can change the channel.”

“The mind is its own place and, in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” (John Milton, Paradise Lost)

Regarding external interference, often experienced as context switching, we have at least two suggestions:

• Make notes of where you have stopped
• Establish rules of engagement to manage interruptions

To improve our awareness, we need to know about cognitive biases and the lizard logic of the brain so we can notice when we fall prey to them and have a chance to bounce back.

Lizard logic is all about:

• Fight, flight or fright
• Get it now
• Be dominant
• Defend the territory
• If it hurts, hiss
• Like me ==good, not like me == bad

Cognitive biases:

• Anchoring – relying too heavily on an initial piece of information when making a decision.
• Fundamental Attribution Error – “We tend to ascribe other people’s behaviour to their personality, instead of looking at the situation and the context in which their behaviour occurs.”
• Self-serving bias – the tendency to attribute positive events to own’s character but attribute negative events to external factors.
• Need for closure – desire for a firm answer to a question and an aversion toward ambiguity.
• Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.
• Exposure effect bias – the tendency to like something merely because you’re familiar with it, over something you’ve never seen or heard before
• Hawthorne effect – behaviour changes when known to be under observation
• False memory bias – enhances or impairs the recall of a memory. Remember, every memory read is a write.
• Symbolic reduction fallacy – occurs when it is assumed that there is a single, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.
  • The use of platonic folds – very basic, archetypical elements one might use when reducing complexity (from The Black Swan book, by Nassim Taleb)
• Nominal fallacy – is a false belief that a phenomenon is understood if its named or labelled.

It can be useful to consider the specifics of the generation we and our peers come from, to understand ourselves and them better. Neil Howe and William Strauss have introduced and described generational archetypes:  

• Prophet: vision, values
• Nomad: Liberty, survival, honour
• Hero: community, affluence
• Artist: Pluralism, expertise, due process

When trying to understand differences between generations, we could observe characteristics like:

• risk taker vs risk adverse
• individualism vs teamwork
• stability vs freedom
• family vs work

These are all aspects that can increase our awareness and improve our interactions with the world. 

There are more interesting topics and practical advice in the book, but I’ll stop here. 

References:

• Cover image: https://jlvcollegecounseling.com/2017/06/27/left-brain-vs-right-brain-functions/
• Left brain|Right brain characteristics image: https://theproaudiofiles.com/have-you-left-your-right-brain/