Unlearning 101: A syllabus

“Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.” – Mark Twain.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn”. – Alvin Toffler

Unlearning is the toughest one of the tasks Toffler mentions. With unlearning you’re on your own. There aren’t any unlearning schools, no teachers, never mind unlearning courses at school. You face the tough challenge of not knowing what you need to unlearn or even how to unlearn.

Here’s a proposal for an unlearning syllabus:

1. History and philosophy of time
2. Plain English versions of Einstein’s relativity theories
3. Survey of physics (emphasis on “the arrow of time“)
4. Survey of quantum theories (emphasis on particle/wave duality)
5. Philosophy of change (source 1)
6. History and philosophy of “the self“
7. Nondualism
8. History and philosophy of “belief“
9. Philosophy of causality (including concepts like “the butterfly effect“)
10. philosophy of logical models (including micro-logic, and counterfactual reasoning)
11. Philosophy of truth (with an emphasis on the fragility of truth statements and validation statements)
12. Perspectivism and contextualism, incommensurability
13. Anthropology of non-Western cultures
14. Critical thinking
15. Problem solving skills
16. Systems thinking (with an acknowledgment of “systems” as a conceptual construction)
17. Application of your new insights to older, personal knowledge
18. Writing your own (different) take of all of the above

Rethink -  learning, and unlearning will follow.

“Thinking” within the popular business and innovation forum

I was writing a comment to one of Bruce Nussbaum’s blog postings on BusinessWeek online. My comment became longer than I anticipated and the tiny little comment box their website provides is just annoying. So, here’s my comment at large.

Bruce and Fred,

I am happy that we are even discussing design and thinking in the context of a business and innovation forum.

I also am very happy to see national publications and international design companies address concepts  that help us raise awareness of the seemingly infinite thinking processes we have available for use. I’d like to think that this is only the beginning of a much larger awareness towards more holistic thinking processes.

I am a designer and I think that design is a great addition to the business/innovation toolbox but it is not the end-all. There are a lot more thinking processes that may be combined with design to help us produce even more innovative ideas.

So, Bruce, on the business arena, lets keep talking about design but also lets continue to add new thinking processes beyond those classified as design.

Fred,
From the design side, I agree with the need for research. We should also keep in mind that research requires funding. Funding requires awareness. So, thank you for bringing it up into the conversation. Hopefully as more folks agree with your proposal researchers will find funding to expand the depth of the conversation.

It’s inevitable that we will need research but we should also acknowledge that the research approach would serve a different audience demographic (folks that care about the nuts and bolts).

Bruce is currently introducing new concepts to the popular business magazine audience. New concepts should  function as attention-grabbers that present ideas in a form that is simple and easy to understand. Hopefully the folks that are newly introduced into design and holistic thinking processes will eventually make their way into more sophisticated, research-based material. We have to start somewhere and yes, in the popular business forum I’d say we’re still just at the start of this awareness.

Fred, on the Cartesian mind vs. body split concept mentioned in your article….
The Cartesian split has had a tremendous influence in the shaping of our past, present and will continue to have an influence in the shaping of our future.

Whether I agree with this Cartesian split or not is not the challenge we face today – this is just my ‘position’ on the matter.

I would like to suggest that the challenges are:
- to be able to identify it
- to be able to understand its function within the context
- to relate all these findings with more holistic alternatives and hopefully make these alternatives more attractive

Simply turning our back on the Cartesian concept because it is not something we agree with would be an act of denial that would not help us solve the type of problems we face today.

But once again, I thank you for bringing it up within the business and innovation forum. I see it as another opportunity to raise awareness about the limits imposed by socialized thinking and the possible alternatives .

Reconociendo los riesgos de la innovación disruptiva

Todas la ideas tienen un lado the beneficios y otro lado de riesgos.  La idea de los beneficios de la inovación disruptiva[1] han sido comunicados en muchos foros. Pero tenemos que estar atentos a el lado de los riesgos tambien.

Recientemente pense que esta estrategia de innovacion tiene estos riesgos:

1. La estrategia crea su nicho de mercado pero en una forma que tambien accelera la termina no solo el mercado inicial pero tambien en nicho de mercado nuevo. La situacion es como amarrar una soga a el competidor (y a si mismo), antes de empujarle de una montaña. Tarde o temprano la misma soga nos jala tambien.

2. La estrategia esta basada en empujar productos que son faciles de diseñar y producir. La misma facilidad ayuda a los competidores a competir rapidamente. La estrategia innovadora para un buen numero de las compañias idenficadas como las mas innovadoras del mundo es basada en copiar los productos empezados por compañias pequeñas que usan disrupcion come su estrategia primaria. Estas compañias grandes con sus recursos y reconocido nombres pueden ser segundos en el mercado con una idea disruptiva y finalmente pueden dejar la compañia chica en la oscuridad.

[1] Que es la innovacion disruptiva?

The downside of disruptive innovation (p.2)

Disruptive strategies often take the “easy route” to solve problems.

The “easy route” often becomes the crowded route as competitors find it easy to assimilate and compete against emerging disruptive models.

Today some of the “most innovative” brands that appear in the top five of many “most innovative” lists are simply copying the “disruptive” pioneers who have forged the road ahead of them.

The disruptive pioneers often become largely unknown brands by comparison to the big name competitors who often have strategic advantages and stronger brand names.

The downside of disruptive innovation?

In some cases, disruptive innovation accelerates the existing market (and its newly carved niche market) into commoditization and oblivion.

It’s like tying yourself to your competitor as you push him down a mountain. There’s some slack on the rope, but eventually the same rope also pulls you down.

It’s not necessarily the best innovation strategy in all contexts.

Interactive Mirror

Every once in a while something comes up that just has seemingly endless possibilities within personal, educational, artistic and other realms. This “interactive mirror” is one of those ideas.

http://vimeo.com/1867956?pg=embed&sec=

“Innovation” is meaningless.

The word “innovation” is so broad that it has lost meaning. Today, It’s important to talk about specific types of innovation.

Will Social Innovation Reach National Attention?

(May 5th, 2009)

White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation to Coordinate Efforts

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama, in his FY2010 budget, will ask Congress to provide $50 million in seed capital for the Social Innovation Fund to identify the most promising, results-oriented non-profit programs and expand their reach throughout the country.

Many solutions to our nation’s most challenging social problems are being generated outside of Washington; the Social Innovation Fund will identify what is working in communities across the country, provide growth capital for these programs, and improve the use of data and evaluation to raise the bar on what programs the government funds. Read the official press release

Wikipedia: “Social Innovation“.

- Daniel Montano

Adaptive Reasoning

I added “Adaptive Reasoning” to Wikipedia. Not really a new concept but it was missing from the resource. If you’re familiar with this term please add more material.

“Adaptive reasoning may refer to the adaption of thought processes, problem solving strategies, conceptual frameworks, in response and anticipation of the the changing nature of the problem being considered.”

I also added Adaptive reasoning to the List of Thought Processes.

Once again, I’d like to invite folks out there to contribute to the list of thought processes and to the Topic Outline of Thought pages. If you don’t know how to edit Wikipedia you can post the term here as a comment (please include your references) and I will add it to Wikipedia as time allows.

Metaphors and Our Understanding of the World

We use metaphors to help us communicate. Some metaphors help us communicate fairly basic ideas. Other metaphors* are more complex and they help us communicate groups of ideas. Here are a few examples of the second group:

The world as “machine“. An extension of physics and the concept of thermodynamics.

Society as “organism“. An extension of understandings in biology. This concept may have been strongly influential in the 17th century. Traces of this metaphor may be found in social theories, economic theories, and  may have been used as a model for the design of the American government and the American economic system.[1]

Other contemporary usage seems to be popular in systems theory, cybernetics, complexity theory, social network theory and many other areas of study.

The world as “a body“. This may be an extension of the “organism” model. Contemporary usage of this metaphor may be “ecological system as a body”. This is a popular metaphor in the current green movement.

The world as “energy“. This may once again be an extension of ideas from physics. More specifically, it may be a concept extended from the energy-matter relationship. In this case the world (understood as matter) is reduced to the understanding of energy. This metaphor may be found in branches of realist and materialist philosophies, science, cybernetics, and popular new age literature.

The world as physical relationships. The “theory of everything”[2] may be an example of this extension. Nobel Prize winning physicists, like Einstein spent years thinking how to explain the way that the world works through understandings in physics. (A good number of scientists are still at work on this.)

The world as a complex adaptive system. This is a macro-metaphor composed of metaphors in physics, and biology and other derivative theories.

All of these metaphors are interesting. They’re ideas full of engaging narratives that can keep a person engrossed for  life.  Today there is enough literature behind each one of these concepts to keep you reading for years – (maybe even for life).

While metaphors may be useful for understanding some aspects of the world we need to remember that they are only tools that help us understand the world – they are not how the world is in itself. Remaining skeptical of each one of these – even as we use them to understand the world may be an important habit as an exercise to keep an open mind.

Notes

[*] Macro-metaphors – “big metaphors” often composed of many other metaphors.

[1] Wikipedia: Social Organism,   See also: Superorganism. International Journal of Ethics “The Conception of Society as an Organism“.

[2 ] Wikipedia: Theory of Everything

[3] This is an orphan note. I am saving this one for a future blog posting. Goldsmith, Donald. E=Einstein

Recommended Reading

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.