I make a lot of decisions on instinct and I rely on my memory a lot to inform how I will approach given situations. The fault in this system has become pretty apparent as I look at my classmates’ blog posts with several references to the other books we have read and are intentionally weaving a string through them.<\/p>\n
There is a shelf dedicated to the books we have read for this course and it’s slowly getting longer as each week another book that I’ve scribbled notes in gets put to the side but if I want to remember something specifically from each text I would need to open it up, find the page I think my note is on and then hope that I’ve remembered it correctly.<\/p>\n
There’s no time to start like the present and I’m making a commitment to be more intentional about relating each book to the ones we have already read. It’s not a secret. Our lead mentor, when reviewing a colleague’s post each week talks about what makes it great and often in includes references to past texts.<\/p>\n
However, after having read Thinking Fast and Slow[1] by Daniel Kahneman, I am mostly reminded me of some great books on marketing I’ve read. I bought this book in March 2021 to read on that summer’s vacation. I picked it up because I was really interested in what he might be able to teach me about influencing other’s behaviour. As a marketer, it’s my primary concern: how to get you to take the action I’d like you to. I was particularly struck by Kahneman’s repeated reference to a great chess move as a System 1 brain activity (but only by a chess master), where upon seeing the opportunity to make a great move, the chess master wouldn’t even have to think of what to do but instantly know it and do it.<\/p>\n
In Chip and Dan Heath’s, Made to Stick[2], they dedicate a chapter to making ideas concrete. How can you share an idea that it makes it really easy for the viewer to remember it and visualize it in their heads. In the March 2022, the science community reported that an asteroid – the size of half a giraffe[3] – hit Iceland. They were doing their best to let us laymen know how big the asteroid was and they figured instead of saying it was 10 feet, or 3 metres wide, they would give us the half a giraffe description.<\/p>\n
The Internet exploded with jokes about the description. Tweets with links to article would change the headline to read “Asteroid 1\/5 the size of a Chili’s restaurant hits Iceland,” for example. I am still not sure exactly how big this asteroid is or if it’s particular large or small compared to others that have hit the earth.<\/p>\n
This description violates the Heath’s rule of keeping ideas concrete but was what I thought of when reading about heuristics in Thinking Fast and Slow. From now on, anytime I read about an asteroid I’ll wonder how big it is in comparison to half a giraffe. As an aside, the recent balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina was described as being the lengths of three busses, which is far easier to imagine[4]<\/p>\n
The point I’m trying to make is because I haven’t been intentional about creating a document to keep all our readings connected, I can only rely on texts I have burned into my brain to the point they live in System 1 as I write blog posts. Last week, when responding to Edwin Friedman’s\u00a0A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, I knew immediately how I wanted to challenge his take on empathy because I have spent 15 years reading and advocating for empathy training. I didn’t connect the learning to any of our previous readings in this program because they’re so fresh, I would need to jump into System 2 brain and be super intentional about making notes and connections.<\/p>\n
As Kahneman writes, our brains are lazy and doing System 2 work is hard.<\/p>\n
I’m not beating myself up about it though. I’m doing this doctorate work for me, not for anyone else. And while there is a rubric which lets us know how to do well based on the learning outcomes and expectations of the course I’m still indeed learning and ideas like threshold concepts[5] and the fallacy of how we read numbers and those are definitely informing my professional life.<\/p>\n
[1] https:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/books\/9780374533557\/thinkingfastandslow<\/p>\n
[2] https:\/\/heathbrothers.com\/books\/made-to-stick\/<\/p>\n
[3] https:\/\/www.sciencetimes.com\/articles\/36593\/20220314\/asteroid-half-size-giraffe-hits-iceland-2-hours-astronomers-spotted.htm<\/p>\n
[4] https:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/chinese-spy-balloon-two-three-022650411.html<\/p>\n
[5] Ray Land, \u00a0Einstellung Effect (Threshold Concepts in Practice, pg. 25)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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