Nuts and Bolts: Expand Your Surface Area

A while back at an eLearning Guildevent (DevLearn 2010), I was fortunate to attend a keynote by John Seely Brown,who at the time had just published his Powerof Pull. Among my takeaways? His advice to “expand your surface area.” Onegreat way to do this is to increase your nonfiction reading, or join inconversations, in areas perhaps not directly connected to your immediate workinterests.

Naming names is bound to get meinto trouble, especially when so many of my friends are industry authors, buthere are some suggestions that might prove useful in helping you push past theboundaries of your daily line of sight. Please do use the comments area tooffer suggestions for other resources.

Interested in eLearning and/or training design?

Try Joel Katz’s Designing Information. With hundreds of images and explanations ofsuccesses and failures, Katz offers ideas for getting at the heart ofinformation and presenting it in a concise, useful way. I love the way he, interms that should be plenty familiar to the average instructional designer,breaks information into the categories “probably true, probably not important,and possibly interesting.”

Stanford’s Design School’s Bootcamp: Adventures in Design Thinkingclass has spawned a fabulous, free, cookbook-ish resource, the Bootcamp Bootleg. It’s an evolvingcurated view of activities to support human-centered design. Available as afree PDF at https://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BootcampBootleg2010v2SLIM.pdf.

What about social learning?

There are a number of fields thatcan help inform understanding of community and how we learn in communities.Take a look, for instance, at material from social anthropology and socialpsychology. I’m partial to Li & Bernoff’s, Groundswell, Peter Block’s Community, Dan Ariely’sPredictably Irrational, Heath & Heath’s Made to Stick, and DanPink’s Drive.

Or learning in general?

I’ve said for years that we need tospend less time asking, “How can I teach that?” and more asking, “How can theylearn it?” A couple of first-person books tightly focused on how a learnerlearns are:

• Atul Gawande, Complications. This is an excellent account of learning in work.This is what happens in the spaces between and after formal training events. Thetitle suggests the reality of work, which despite protocols and processes anddecision tools is still often fraught with exception handling. Gawande isunusually cognizant of recognizing about his own learning as it is happeningand reflecting on it later.

• Stephen King, On Writing. There’s a movement in current popular businessliterature away from the idea that talent is less important than practice orattitude. King’s work, his own musings on how he learned to write, begs thequestion “Can everything be taught?” This one also highlights the way otherexperiences, events, and beliefs, often from far back in a person’s history,may be brought to bear on thinking and performance.

Other ideas?

I love to pop in on Twitter chats that arebeyond my usual world with people I rarely, if ever, see elsewhere. Forinstance, the #CustServ chat hosted by Marcia Collier, Greg Orbach, and RoyAtkinson (Thursdays, 9 pm ET) often discusses ideas relevant to my own work,such as whether empathy can be taught or learned and whether humans inempathy-requiring roles can really be replaced by machines. Educator Joe Mazzahosts #PTChat Wednesdays at 9pm ET, offering a conversation space for those interestedin helping parents and teachers connect. Talk is largely focused on ways tobuild bridges using social tools. I don’t even have kids and I find the chatincredibly useful. Twitter’s not your thing? Look around for a LinkedIn orFacebook group or some such where conversation stretches beyond your usualwalls.

What ideas do you have, or what areyou currently doing, to expand your surface area? Please offer your ideas inthe comments section.

Note:New #lrnbk chat coming! Fromtime to time some Twitterers with L&D interests join up to host a #lrnbkchat. This happens asynchronously with a number of questions posted every fewdays over a couple of weeks. Everyone can join in regardless of time zone, andas we’ve learned, people often want a bit of time to reflect and go back to thebook rather than just participate in the usual rapid-fire Twitter chat format.We’re launching a new #lrnbk chat starting Monday, January 19, based on Kio Stark’sDon’t Go Back To School. Mark Britz (@britz) and I (@JaneBozarth) arethrilled to be joined by Australia’s Helen Blunden (@activatelearn) andMichelle Ockers (@michelleockers), and England’s Rachel Burnham (@BurnhamLandD).Follow the @lrnbk Twitter account and the #lrnbk hashtag for details. Plenty oftime now to get the book before we begin!