learning Archives

Note-Taking for Learning and Innovation

2022-07-14 by cense

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:

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:

Reduces distraction (preserves and hones attention to find, gather, synthesize and sense-make the most useful information)
Protects/creates/utilizes time (is fit-for-purpose in connecting our knowledge to our purpose and our strategy)
Articulates care (creates principles for practice)
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

Creating Glue: Viewing Change as an Index

2022-04-01 by cense

Change-making is not a singular thing, rather it is viewed more as an index. That means that the more of these different factors that are present, the greater the likelihood of change.

We recently concluded the first season of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast looking at this idea of the index and introducing the last of the ten factors: glue. Glue brings together our strategies, processes, techniques and tools (one of the other factors).

Ten Factors for Change

The previous factors that have each been profiled in episodes in that first season are:

Knowledge
Skills
Confidence
Outcome Expectations
Conditions
Environment
Social Support
Time and Space
Tools
Glue

This first season has focused on the building blocks of change. These ten factors that if applied in earnest can help us to grow and transform organizations, communities, and ourselves. We can think of these in two groups: individual-focused change and shared-focused areas of change.

A big myth that we’ve covered this season of the podcast is that we are the masters of our own change and destiny. While we do contribute a big deal to our own change efforts, we can’t separate ourselves from the communities, organizations, families, and teams around us who enable, constraint and support change.

The more of these things, we do the better, the quality of our performance, the amount of persistence and endurance of our efforts. The more likely we are to change specifically glue are the techniques, the methods and the strategies for change. They are something that connects all of these other factors together in the implementation of some type of plan to make changes.

Lessons from Season One

The first is that change Isn’t a single thing. It’s more of a combination of things that we think of less than the list and much more as an index. Second, tools, techniques, strategies, and practice are the glue that ties all of these individual factors. Third, we can design change if we know what to do, and we can draw these 10 factors together to help us innovate and create a difference in the world we’re looking to make.

This is a design challenge. Glue is the systemic design of our organizations or our own personal practices that build up strategies to leverage all ten of these. We’re rarely successful with all of these, but by viewing them as an index it gives us something to focus on for improvement. We also can optimize those things working well to compensate for those areas that are not. Success comes because we have many avenues to change, not just one or two.

This is a different way to view change, but one that we’ve seen show the truth in our many years of working as change-makers and strategic designers.

If you want to learn more about this, please contact us and we can help. Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Photo by olia danilevich

Organizational Trust and Wellbeing

2022-03-25 by cense

If you’re looking to enhance the wellbeing of your organization you first need to have trust.

Trust is the anchor of any healthy relationship and wellbeing is all about creating connections to people and self. How do we create wellbeing in our organizations? How do we create trust if we don’t have it?

Trust Creation

Trust doesn’t come through grand gestures, but small acts that are done regularly, consistently, and persistently. We build trust through creating a trusting culture. Trusting cultures are those that foster a culture of wellbeing. They are all connected.

Trust is developed through four actions:

Frequency of contact (familiarity). We trust others more when we understand and can relate to others.
Quality of contact. When we develop the familiarity with others that allow us to be intimate, trust grows.
Shared activities. Building things together brings people together through engendering a shared sense of accomplishment.
Shared vision. When we can share our values, aspirations, and our perspectives it’s easier to come together and trust each other.

Most discussions of trust focus on the fourth part: values and beliefs. However, spend time on social media and you’ll see that sharing our beliefs and values can easily have the opposite effect. This is important, just not as the first step.

Our values come into play when we have the chance to work together, share space, and spend time together. Trust comes from time spent together and we can design for it.

Time matters, but so does the quality of that time. This means taking time to ask questions and to listen to others fully.

Once we do that, we can start designing and building things together because shared making is shared learning. Learning means that I am growing and when I learn with people I grow with them. This might sound simplistic, but it’s a powerful lesson we all can apply to our organizations.

Trust Building

Some simple means to build trust include:

Create space at your regular meetings for personal sharing of stories.
Support the direct one-to-one and small-group meetings that allow people to share their experience. When we do this we also enhance the ability to use After Action Reviews and learn through complexity.
Set up physical spaces that support face-to-face interactions (or regularly use your Zoom or distance tools to create regular chat spaces) .
Support asynchronous chat and responsible use of technology to scale conversations. This means using the right tools for the right task. We recommend you read Keith Ferrazzi’s take on becoming crisis agile in our organizing.

Resilient, compassionate teams come together by design. When we create a collective space to engage collectively to build trust we do better and our wellbeing increases.

These simple steps can yield enormous benefits. We’ve used these approaches with our clients and they continue to reap dividends. This is something that we do by design and with intention because doing so creates a leadership opportunity along the way. Trust by design gives us the chance to co-create a space together and share our experiences while building a better, healthier organization.

If you’re looking to create a culture of trust and wellbeing and want help in taking this forward, contact us and let’s grab a coffee.

The Role of Support in Innovation

2022-02-16 by cense

The Beatles’ song made legendary by Joe Cocker speaks of getting by with a little help from our friends. The role of friends — associates, collaborators, trusted allies, partners — is vital to making innovation happen.

The myths about change-makers and innovators are many: The self-made woman/man, the great innovator, the great mind who works long and hard to succeed because of their own cleverness or ingenuity, the entrepreneur who transforms a market all by herself, a leader who takes an organization to new heights. Take your pick.

However, the evidence is clear: you need supporters to succeed. Whether it is early-stage support for ideas and potential or to deliver the finished product, support is critical to innovation. This was the topic that we recently covered on the latest episode of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast.

Look at the list below and you’ll see that most core items involve some kind of support mechanism either through teams, senior leadership, or markets.

Testing for innovation — https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-eight-essentials-of-innovation

Three Lessons for Support Generation

There are three core lessons from the literature on what to do:

Find a tribe, build a community, join in with others. Whatever it takes, connect with those in your market, outside your market and those you wish to serve. Engage.
Be a friend to have a friend. Share ideas, lessons learned, and assist your community however you define that. We see time and again that the best organizations are known and respected because they give from themselves. That also ensures that they receive just as much. You’re much more likely to attract the kind of knowledge that you need, the skills that you need when you share the knowledge and skills that you have. Creating a connected community of people who ‘get’ you is important.
Leave the heroes to the comic books. Heroes make for great stories, but really lousy, real life models for change. What you need is a supportive structure. Mastermind group leadership teams, peer meetups – they all make a difference in reducing isolation and increasing the amount of contact points you have so that you can generate ideas and do so in a group that understands you. These can be internal or external — but they must allow for support to be gained and received.

You can’t do it alone. Find ways to connect with others who are doing something similar to what you’re doing, that support, which will be different for everybody, but that difference makes all the difference.

If you want to build a strategy to create connections within your organization contact us — we can help. We can also help you build the kind of internal structures to learn, share ideas, and innovate.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

The Role of Knowledge in Innovation

2022-02-09 by cense

In this second in a short series on change-making fundamentals, we look at the role of knowledge. This was covered in the second episode of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast.

Knowing and Doing

There is an unspoken assumption that ‘to know is to do‘ anchoring knowledge to change. Yet, as evidence shows all around us (just look at politics or COVID-19, to name just two) that what we say, believe, know, and do are all different.

To innovate is to take knowledge and create something new with it. While knowledge is almost always an ingredient of change, it isn’t always the main driver of change. To illustrate, consider that more than 1.3 billion people in the world regularly use tobacco products even though the science on the negative health consequences of cigarette use is overwhelming. At present, more than 8 million people every year die from cigarette use. So knowledge is important, but we know it’s not the only way to get someone to change.

What’s necessary are to focus our efforts on types of knowledge and their roles in facilitating change. There are three core areas of knowledge:

Types of Knowledge

Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge we have for how to get things done. Process knowledge might be how to organize a team, or how bring things about and deliver service value.

Technical knowledge is tied to the use of tools, frameworks and their application related to the specific means of accomplishing things. Technical knowledge might be how to use a particular piece of software

Content knowledge is focused on the topics of relevance to what you want to innovate or change. It may be knowledge about the market or the particular problem of which your innovation is looking to solve.

Research and Self Assessment

Innovation doesn’t require that we are experts in everything, but it does require that we know, a certain amount of what is important. This is where self-assessment like the personal inventory method and other tools can come in handy. It’s also where design research . If, for example, you’re looking into children’s mental health, you probably need to know a little bit about how children function and what services might already be in place.

Design research helps build content knowledge and helps us to fill gaps in skills or process knowledge that we may not have. However, we don’t recommend so much research that it is no longer easy to make sense of what you are doing. Sensemaking is a key stage of synthesis and strategy for dealing with large amounts of research data. It’s also important to also remember that innovation is about something new so we may not have all the data that we need to draw clear conclusions.

The key lessons are that we can’t assume that having knowledge leads to change. With research, sensemaking, and processes to ask questions about what we know we can better innovate.

Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast is available through most places you get your podcasts.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Doing Our Homework on our Research