Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Note-Taking for Learning and Innovation

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Do your notes bore you? They shouldn’t if you’re serious about learning.

Note-taking is among the most powerful, accessible, and portable means to support innovation and learning. Yet, most of us do it poorly. Do you review your notes after you take them? Do you know why you are taking notes in the first place?

There is an art to good note-taking and to using notes effectively. Notes capture what happens, what is discussed or observed, and record insights and commentary — but only if we use them.

Let’s look at ways to improve this.

Tools of the Trade

Fast Company has a remarkably detailed and useful guide to selecting a notebook. The New York Times annually reviews the best pens. Your choice of both can make a big difference to your willingness to use them. That is the key. The best tools are the ones you use.

If pen-and-paper isn’t your thing, consider using one of many apps. In his new book, Building Your Second Brain, Tiago Forte explores how apps and systems can help us better record and retain information. The secret is that the best app is the one that matches the way that you learn and use notes in your practice.

Forte has conducted research into the use of note-taking apps by canvassing the thousands of people who attend his workshops and he’s found that the top tools are:

  1. Evernote
  2. Obsidian
  3. Notion

These aren’t the only ones out there, but they are the most used. Each of these map on to three different note-taking styles such as those suggested by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, which we’ll explore below.

Note-taking Styles

Anne-Laure Le Cunff from Ness Labs has written extensively on note-taking — read her detailed explanation here. She reviews the literature and suggests a variety of strategies that work depending on your goals and preferences. She also provides recommendations on which app to use based on the kind of note-taker you are.

Le Cunff proposes three main note-taking styles:

  • The architect. They enjoy planning, designing processes and frameworks, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily structure their ideas.
  • The gardener. They enjoy exploring, connecting various thoughts together, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily grow their ideas.
  • The librarian. They enjoy collecting, building a catalogue of resources, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily retrieve their ideas.

The best way to learn is to design your systems to match your needs, preferences, and style of note-taking.

Systems of Use

Once you’ve got tools and matched them to your preferences, the next is building an actual use system. This means getting serious about learning. Learning will fail in bad systems as illustrated in a post over on Censemaking.

We suggest asking yourself the following questions ahead of any learning-based activity like a course or webinar:

  • Will I create the time to review, integrate or reflect on what I am exposed to?
  • Is the delivery of this course suited to the ways in which I make sense of the world and develop new skills?
  • Am I invested in the product — a certificate, degree, or outcome — or the process?
  • Am I engaged with this program (course, webinar, tutorial) to escape from asking myself difficult questions about my work?
  • Do I have a system in place to revisit, re-work, and apply what I’ve learned in place before I start?

A good learning system involves the following:

A good learning system is something that:

  1. Reduces distraction (preserves and hones attention to find, gather, synthesize and sense-make the most useful information)
  2. Protects/creates/utilizes time (is fit-for-purpose in connecting our knowledge to our purpose and our strategy)
  3. Articulates care (creates principles for practice)
  4. Fits the culture of your organization (creates space for integration)

Learn By Design

As you can see, any good learning experience involves good design. Our choice of tools, motivation, and systems all shape what we learn, what we retain, and whether it’s of practical value.

Learning is easy to say, more complicated to do. But it is something we can design into our organization.

You can learn to learn better by design. Remember: the best system is the one that you use.

If you want help creating a learning system for your organization to help get the most out of what you do every day, reach out and let’s grab a coffee and learn from one another.

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

Developmental Evaluation, Learning and Innovation

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What does it mean to undertake a developmental evaluation (DE)?

DE is simply another way to say evaluation for learning and innovation. That’s really all it is in practice, although anyone looking to do DE might want to look a little closer to see if it really is the right approach for them.

In this post we look a little closer to help you understand what it means to do evaluation for innovation and what developmental evaluation has to do with it.

Understanding Innovation


Innovation is a word that can mean much and requires clarification when it’s used because of this. When we speak of innovation, we refer to this definition of learning transformed into value through design.

Developmental evaluation is a concept that was first put forward by Michael Quinn Patton through many books, articles, and other teachings. It’s now become a popular approach within social innovation and the public sector.

DE is often referred to as a means to strategic learning because rather than assume the conditions of whatever is being evaluated (e.g., program, policy) are stable, it assumes some level of complexity. This is dramatically different from what most other forms of evaluation do where the assumption is the ‘thing’ being evaluated is stable – it’s the users of that thing that might change.

Because DE is focused on learning it assumes that there will be some kind of change with the actual process of learning itself on the way from one state to the next. 

Understanding Design’s Role in Innovation

What DE does not do well is account for the role of design in supporting innovation. If we come back to the definition of innovation presented earlier, design is really the means by which innovation occurs. In most of the literature on DE the matter of design is not discussed much, if at all. 

With much of DE the assumption is that those doing DE know how to take what they learn and transform it into value. From our experience, this is an assumption that rarely holds up. The reasons are many, but most central to this is that most people think of design as beginning from a standing start when in practice much of what do when we innovate takes place from a moving position.

We sometimes refer to this as developmental design, but more appropriately expand how we see this relationship between DE and design as something called Design-driven Evaluation. In this case, design and evaluation are intimately connected and the processes of using both to mutually inform one another are embedded in the innovation process. 

Understanding Evaluation’s Role in Design & Innovation

Evaluation is the means to provide the necessary feedback to contribute to innovation. Evaluation determines the quality of the design in achieving its purpose. If your design is meant to change behaviour, evaluation is the means to assess whether that happens and to what degree.

Evaluation also is the means to document the circumstances in which this takes place to help you assess whether the implementation of your innovation goes as intended. Without evaluation, your innovation is a wish, not a result. Evaluation is the means to determine what the results of your innovation are. 

Evaluation is also the means to assess the quality of your design work. It’s one thing to develop something and put it out in the world, but is it any good? Is it fit for purpose? Many innovations fail to deliver value because they don’t provide the means to learn about the quality of the design itself. They don’t achieve a positive impact because they were never designed to in the first place. 

To innovate is to learn and to learn is to evaluate. Design is what ties them all together. 

Next time you’re looking to embark on a new program of activity, create a new product, it’s worth considering how these all go together and whether DE alone will help you to get there. 

For help in generating powerful design-driven approaches to innovation and evaluation, contact us. We can help

Multimedia Visualizations For Strategy and Impact

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Multimedia visualizations are powerful ways to convey a lot of information in a small space and with little time. The use of a visual — a map, a drawing, a picture, sketch, or collage — provides layers of information beyond words. When dealing with complex situations, visualizations provide clear communication pathways.

Unlike some of our other posts, this is not pointing us to a specific tool or technique, rather a general approach to thinking about and engaging with content.

Let’s look at the benefits of adding more visuals to your work to help your strategy, evaluation, and program design efforts.

1. Relationships. One visuals can help you with understanding proportions, distance, and other relative characteristics. It is useful to position things next to one another – whether that is choice alternatives, network connections, or even contrasts. Seeing things in relation to one another on a visual canvas provides our brains with new information that is difficult or impossible to gain from more abstract thinking without visuals.

2. Colour and Texture. How something looks and feels can tell us a lot about what it means. By adding colour to something we apply a simple lens that can convey meaning. Colours like green invoke environmental imagery, red is well-known to have many meanings in different cultures, while blue can be relaxing. Texture can do the same thing. To illustrate, consider New Zealand-based Icebreaker who makes wool-based clothing and uses texture-rich images of sheep’s wool to highlight how its products are natural in composition. Use of texture in the imagery gives a sense of integrity, warmth, and a feel to fabrics even when the buyer might only see them online.

3. Variety. As more people work remotely and digitally than ever before, the visual landscape for many of us has changed in most workdays. We lack contrast in our environments and also in our digital screens. By increasing the visual constraint and variety by diverging from text and boxes toward photographs, graphic images, videos, or some other form of visual media we draw attention. When so much feels the same, few things are more valuable than attention.

4. Abstraction and Narrative. Words offer us a restricted set of options due to the need for us to be linear in our the way we speak. With a visual we can better draw abstract themes from an object and use things like metaphor to describe scenarios that allow us to transcend words.

There are many ways to use visuals and software tools like online whiteboards such as Miro and Mural, visual organizing tools like Milanote, and tools such as Jamboard or Trello to showcase information in ways that extend beyond text.

Consider bringing more details into your next project and discover what visuals can do for creating richer, more vibrant ideas and creative opportunities to your work.

The Art of Gathering

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Innovation work from identifying problems in need of solutions, generating ideas, creating things, and simply providing the inspiration and mutual support for doing the work often requires gathering.

Whether it is face-to-face, online, or some hybrid option the same general rules apply for what makes a good gathering when it comes to the up-front work.

Priya Parker has made the art of gathering a focus of her life’s mission and work and has pulled together some brilliant resources for those of us who are looking to bring people together.

These opening questions are the starting place by asking some fundamental questions about the purpose of gathering (something too often forgotten about).

Here are Priya’s recommended questions to help guide you in gathering:

  • Who is this for? What is it that this person loves to do? 
  • What are the various gifts or talents or skills of the people invited? 
  • How do you actually want to spend the time? 
  • How will you create a “moment of focus”? 
  • If this is a digital gathering, what are simple ways you can have guests bring something or wear something that connects them to the purpose, the person of honor and each other?  

Among the most valuable assets engaged in any innovation effort is time and attention and by asking these simple questions we can best use and respect both.

Perspective Taking Circles

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The power of perspective is one of the things that differentiates high output and impact innovators from others. It’s easy to get lucky or have good timing, but it’s another to create value when those things don’t happen.

One of the ways we do this is by engaging in some perspective-taking. This simple exercise and question set can help build some of the ‘thought muscles’ that can help encourage us to see, imagine, and engage things differently for creative benefit.

The Exercise

This works best when physically in the same space and can work online as well. What you need is to create a space where people can re-position themselves against a central object that can be almost anything except a ball (because it looks the same from every angle). Place your participants around the object with a comfortable space to sit or stand.

You can do this virtually using a dynamic space like Kumospace or some other virtual reality-like environment. It can also work using a board like Miro or Mural with some designed object in the middle, but it is more awkward.

The idea is that everyone has a chance to literally see things from a different point of view.

This can be done as an observation exercise but is more enhanced when it is combined with drawing. Asking people to draw what they see — no matter what kind of skills or abilities participants have with sketching — is a great means to engage people in thinking more deeply about their perspective.

Once individuals have had time to observe and reflect on what they see, the next step is to have everyone share their perspective. This is where drawings are useful as people can speak to what they drew as drawing focuses us on certain elements and provides a means to account for those perspectives. It also allows others to point to the drawing and make specific, not general comments.

It’s that specificity that is key to illuminating and articulating differences of perspective.

Uses

The role of this method is to reveal how where we sit in a system — even a small one of people interconnected around a shared experience of an object — can have remarkably different perceptions of the same thing in the same space.

It begins to build cultural practices around creating space for exploring and sharing perspectives within an organization and can serve as a base for better organizational design and learning.

It’s simple, engaging, and revealing in its method.