Humans + AI

‘’We shape reality by what we notice and choose to pay attention to.’’ – Tim O’Reilly About Tim O’Reilly On this episode we learn from Tim O’Reilly, definitely one of the most influential people in the development of the Internet as we know it. He is the founder and CEO of technology publishing giant O’Reilly Media, and has played a seminal role in movements including open source software, Web 2.0, maker culture, and government 2.0, and is author of the excellent book WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. Website: Tim O’Reilly Facebook: Tim O’Reilly LinkedIn: Tim O’Reilly Twitter: @timoreilly Slideshares: Tim O’Reilly Books  WTF? What’s The Future and Why It’s Up To Us Welcome to the 21st Century What you will learn If information comes by, it must be important (01:51) Vectors and Bayesian probability in mental models (04:29) Creativity is noticing what other people don’t  (06:48) If your dog could talk, it would show you a whole new world (08:56) Only when you have all the pieces can you put the puzzle together… (09:35) …what is the art behind it… (16:47) …and does framework help you find the pieces (19:56) Selfish individuals versus altruistic groups (20:36) Crypto is not decentralized (22:28) Tim finds out somebody else built his idea (27:48) Tim compares himself to Cookie Monster! (28:57) You will succeed when receptivity and striving are in balance (31:03) It’s all about tackling the hard things (33:03) Episode resources Lao Tzu The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu Wallace Stevens Eric Raymond Christine Peterson John Maynard Keynes The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke Transcript Ross Dawson: Tim, it is a great delight to have you on the show. Tim O’Reilly: Thanks for having me. Ross: You have lived a life immersed in information and helped others in many ways to point them to, and digest that information. How do you think about that idea? How do you approach unlimited information and being able to make that into something valuable? Tim: Well, to understand how I think about it, it helps probably to say that I don’t have an approach where I really try to keep track of information, or gather information. It means certainly some ways I do, but my working principle was expressed very well by Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, when he said, “Good news will stay, and bad news will refuse to leave”. In a certain way, my approach is that things come by, and if they keep coming by, they’re probably important, and if they don’t, then maybe they weren’t. But there’s a bigger piece of it, and this is maybe explainable by reference to something like Google Maps, where people follow the map, and they stop noticing where they turn, versus people, who, in the old days, had to learn and observe the world around them to the level of where you think about the South Sea Islanders, who could navigate by watching the ocean currents, and the stars. They were their own GPS, and they were continually taking in information, and noticing how it was different from what they expected or the same as they expected. I work a lot like that. I have a mental model that I try to build of the world, and that model is inductive. Basically, I’m taking things in and I go, Oh, this is different, this doesn’t fit. A lot of the work that I’ve done over the years has simply been trying to construct a map by looking around. You pay attention to things and the things that start… with a soft focus. This is an idea, I think from hunting and things like that, you watch with a soft focus. Of course, I’m not a hunter, but I once read a book called “The Tracker”, and I took a workshop with one of the founders of this tracking movement. You’re just receptive and you’re open, and then certain things just pop out at you as anomalies. That’s what’s interesting. Ross: That is the same as my thesis around how it is that we build these models of the world. I think, when people talk about mental models, they often talk about discrete heuristics, in a sense, whereas, a mental model is really, I think, more holistic. It is a mental model of the entire world or the entire world of business, and how that works. How do you frame this mental model that you have built in, are building? Tim: Well, first of all, I do have a set of frames for it. One, I wrote a little bit about this in a recent piece. I also wrote about it in my book “WTF”, all thinking in vectors. This idea, that there are forces that are moving things along, and a vector has both a direction and a quantity, so what you’re looking for in a certain way is acceleration in a particular direction. You’re looking for how those directions collide with other vectors, and what the resulting outcomes might be. In this piece, “Welcome to the 21st century”, I wrote about one of the big impacts of the pandemic might well be that we never go back to the office and sure enough, that’s turning out to be a possible future. That’s the other thing, I have a mental model that comes from scenario planning about imagining very different futures. Then when they start to come true, you go, Oh, okay, that one was more right than the other one. You start to solidify. Again, it’s very Bayesian. It’s simply, you have a set… I think part of it would be to say it’s a Bayesian system in which you have multiple overlapping sets of priors that you’re willing to accept, loosely. Then they collapse differentially. I think that’s the thing I don’t think people think enough about in Bayesian probability systems. It’s not just one set of priors. It’s a set of overlapping sets of priors, that could collapse in different directions. Ross: Ones where you’re, of course, continually chained to the things which don’t fit and could help you modify those frameworks. Tim: Yeah, I do think a big part of it is building your own map, and there’s a creativity to that. So much of the model of creativity and our culture is, it’s making stuff up. I think creativity is noticing things that other people don’t notice because it’s ultimately a kind of scientific process. Just think about something that we think of as traditionally creative, like music, somebody, they’re making something up because they saw a possibility that wasn’t there before. They didn’t just make it up for the hell of it, they made it up because they were seeing what the new possibilities were in… maybe it’s in an instrument, maybe it’s in a cultural milieu, but basically we shape reality by what we notice and choose to pay attention to. I’ve always been a huge fan of the poetry of Wallace Stevens because that’s what he’s all about. There’s this underlying reality, and yet, we shape it. He described reality as the quest for supreme fiction, something that we could all agree on. But the contention between people is for visions of the future, and you certainly see that in the political realm, but you also see it in, say, paradigm shifts in technology or physics. Somebody basically convinces other people that this is the right way to think about the world. Ross: Yeah. I think that way of “we make the world by how we perceive it”. Tim: That’s right. We have this bit of an illusion in the West, that somehow our quest is towards the one true reality. When I go, Yeah, but tell that to my dog. We’re out there looking at things, and it’s like, what are you people looking at? This is a really good smell here, you’re not paying any attention whatsoever? I think that’s one of the things, of course, in science fiction; It’s like, how do we know that there aren’t completely different and equally valid, and maybe even more productive ways of looking at the world? Ross: Absolutely. In “WTF”, you mentioned, compiling the pieces of the puzzle, before you put the map together. How do you find those pieces of the puzzle? Or identify them or recognize that they are pieces of the puzzle? Tim: Let me back up and give you a little bit of color on that analogy. The point is if you imagine doing a puzzle, and all the pieces aren’t there, you can’t actually finish it. Very often, when you’re dealing with something new, the pieces literally aren’t there. I thought of that very vividly around my work with open source software, because I was thinking a lot about the fact… the first thing you think back is, Okay, what did I notice that other people weren’t noticing? I noticed that the Free Software Foundation didn’t talk about a lot of the software that I was selling really popular books about, they were also free software. They talked about Linux, they talked about the GNU utilities, they don’t really talk about Perl, they don’t talk at all about DNS and BIND, and all these tools out of the Berkeley Software Distribution, because they had a map that was all about the license, and it was particularly our license. I’m going, Wait a minute, they don’t include the worldwide web, which was put into the public domain, something is wrong with this picture, they don’t include Sendmail, they don’t recall the DNS, they don’t include all the TCP/IP protocol suite and implementations of that, so it goes, something is clearly wrong with this picture. I thought, well, I’m going to bring all these people together to talk about what’s wrong with the picture. At that meeting, Eric Raymond says, Oh Christine Peterson came up with a new term three weeks ago, and she was open source, and we debated it. I was like, I identified a gap. I didn’t know that there would be a new name for it that was going to show up, but it showed up just on time. If I had done my meeting… and I kept going, why am I in… there’s an intuitive part to this, there was a part of me, like, why am I delaying having this meeting? Am I just being a slacker? Then you look at how it worked out, the timing was perfect. Another one that was a little bit like that was when I started thinking about the licensing wasn’t the key to open source, it was really collaborative software development, it was a way the internet was enabling new kinds of collaboration, including software collaboration, and distributed computing, and things like SETI@home with distributed computation, and Napster with file sharing, they all started talking to me about, there is a new paradigm emerging. I kept following, tugging on that thread, and trying to integrate into some new map that would make sense to me. I eventually came up with this notion that we’re building an internet operating system and it’s going to be based on data. As a result of that, I launch the Web 2.0 events, but then I launched one called Where 2.0, and I was like, guess what, location is going to be one of the big subsystems of this internet operating system. It was great. We’ve been promoting the event, and a month before we went live, Google approached me and said, Hey, we’re doing this new thing, any chance that we could introduce it at your conference? That was Google Maps. I saw that there was a logic to this thing. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t have some inner intelligence on what Google was doing. I wasn’t really paying attention to the news, they just showed up because I’d actually built… this is what I mean by the pieces of the puzzle suddenly showing up and you go, Oh, there’s the piece that was missing, and you dock it in place, and everything starts to make sense. Ross: The word “framework”, I think, is really relevant, because that’s exactly as, for example, the frame of a painting, what goes in and what goes out. The framework is the frame, where you can see what are the pieces, which fit within that frame. In that case, I don’t know whether it is you personally or it came up with the term Web 2.0… Tim: No I didn’t actually. Ross: But then there is this name, or is this something where you can have a label or something where you can then communicate about what that frame is? Tim: Yeah, that’s right. I think that’s absolutely right. The name often… it doesn’t match. Web 2.0 had a lot of baggage. Here, I’m talking about the internet operating system, and it was just too geeky. Then Dale had already come up with the name Web 2.0 in a brainstorm meeting with Craig Klein. They were trying to come up with a way that our two companies could do an event together, and we were thinking, what could we learn from them, somebody else was doing events. Dale was like, well, it was really around the second company of the World Wide Web after the .com bust was what Web 2.0 stood for. Dale had developed a series of things that it was about. Then I just really fleshed it out with a bunch of the ideas that had previously been calling the internet operating system, and the name took off. There was also an aspirational piece that I think was very interesting about that because Dale and Craig came up with that in 2003… I had been doing this internet operating system stuff since 2001, had this P2P conference, and then that emerged into this thing we call E-tech, the emerging technologies conference, which is really exploring this idea of how the network was changing the way we would all interact. I guess it wasn’t that we had thought everything through but we had a model into which the future shows up and it starts to make more sense. Again, another analogy I use is a little bit like a hologram. You have the big picture there, but it’s fuzzy. The more data points come in, the clearer it gets. Ross: You may have already answered this, but if you’ve got the pieces of the puzzle, and you start to see those map out, and then you can see the framework is there, then what is the art of putting the pieces of the puzzle together to form something, which is a whole? Tim: I think the one piece of the art is patience. Lao Tzu, the author of the “Tao Te Ching” says, he’s talking about the qualities of the wise man, and he has a bunch of them, I say, winter fare on an icy stream, I forget what they all are, but then the last one is… but also this, royal does a torrent. Why royal does a torrent? Because sometimes there’s nothing to do but wait until the stream clears. I think that waiting quality has been a big part of what I’ve done, where I haven’t rushed to try to make a story where there isn’t one. That progress for me from open source to Web 2.0 was a seven or eight-year process. If you look at the history of the talks I was giving, I was feeling my way towards this new paradigm. Then how did I get from there to the Gov 2.0 stuff, I started thinking about the lessons for the government from technology platforms. It was a set of conversations with people and somebody would show up with a piece of the puzzle and I’d go, yes! I still remember the conversation where I got off on government as a platform, but then continuing down that path that led me to all the work that I’m doing right now about marketplaces and anti-trust. I kinda threw this idea of algorithmic regulation, which is something else that I came up with. Again, not all of these things catch, but the point isn’t… because I’ve had some things that have really taken off, everything sets the objective. It isn’t really, the objective is, just for me, to make sense of the world. Ross: Absolutely. I think that’s the same in my own way, I create frameworks myself, and I happen to share them, and sometimes people happen to like them. But that’s the secondary aspect. Tim: Yeah. Ross: Coming back a step. Is this some kind of framing purpose that helps you find these pieces of these puzzles, these maps which unfold? Have you framed some way in which there’s an intent or around what it is within your purview of what you are considering? Tim: Well, I guess there are definitely some big picture things, and they are more values than anything else. Again, I’ve just recently got some interesting new language for this, from evolutionary biology. David Sloan Wilson has been doing a lot of work on what he calls multi-level selection, which he sums up, I guess, it was he and Edward O. Wilson, who was one of his teachers, they’re not related, even though they both have the same last name, Wilson, which is, selfish individuals can outcompete altruistic individuals, but altruistic groups outcompete selfish groups. There’s a lot of fabulous research on these alternating levels of what he calls multi-level selection, where there are certain behaviors that are at the individual level and others that are at the group level. That notion of the alternation of individual and group actually goes all the way back to some early learning I did in the 70s, in a context that I don’t want to unpack here, but that was very fertile ground for me, but I’ve always thought about cooperation, and what encourages cooperation. We have a metaphor in our society that says it’s about winning, that this capitalism is all about competition, and winner takes all. I guess I have a set of values that I, in some ways, I guess, I’m always trying to explore and justify why that isn’t true, which is why I was attracted, say, to open-source software. I was like, you say, it’s all about competition, but guess what, look over here, Microsoft was so competitive, they killed all the innovation, and all these people went off, and they just started fighting around with the internet and open source, because hey, they could, they could cooperate, there was this new model. But even looking back, again, I guess, in some ways, one of the big shaping maps of my technology career was watching the alternation, where IBM was dominant. I came in, actually in the tail end of the minicomputer era, not in the PC era, and I watched the PC blow up, because there’s this democratization of access, then I watch Microsoft win, and replay that the tragedy. Then an explosion of innovation and decentralization gives us the internet, open source, and then you watch Google and Amazon and the like, replay the centralization, and bit by bit abuse of power model, and I go, well, I’ve seen it now three times. I go, so value is going to go somewhere else because I guess, one of the basic… I have this big picture idea that if you take too much of the value, the system breaks down, and people find new niches. That’s actually a fundamentally ecological concept. Again, there’s a lot of analogies that are not exact but help shape your thinking and your map. Ross: The more analogies you have access to, the more you’re able to perceive things, which can be useful for framing things? Tim: Right. Oh, this is like that; Oh, that means that this is probably interesting. It can lead you astray. For example, because of my centralization versus decentralization narrative, I’ve probably been more skeptical of cryptocurrencies than I should be. Because everybody was like, Oh, this is all about decentralization, I go, Yeah, it re-centralized faster than any technology in history and it fits exactly the pattern where… Here’s IBM, that’s got their centralized power of the computer industry by control over hardware. They don’t realize that this changes, when they have commodity hardware, they release the specs for the IBM PC, they don’t think it really matters, software is just something that goes with the hardware, but Microsoft basically makes a new explosion, a new power center, that center on software, they’re all about control of software API’s, they become dominant, they don’t realize this new thing, where software becomes commoditized by open source in the internet, then it’s all about data. Now we’re in this paradigm shift around AI, we don’t quite know what that means. I see some things that I think are really interesting, where the models that are being released, often by the big companies, I think are going to undermine them in the same way that the PC undermined IBM, and the internet undermined… so I’m aware of that. Everybody was saying no, the next thing is crypto. Maybe, but what I saw was centralization. Once again, the centralization is not in the original model. The centralization came through energy, not through… so that’s interesting, because of course, that starts to intersect with the whole world problem, the energy is going to be one of the critical pathways that differentiate whether we survive or not. There are some arguments that maybe crypto will accelerate that because people will go oh, well, this is a great way to make lots of money, but we need to have super cheap power in order to do it, but we’re not there yet. But you go, Oh, there’s something interesting though, this repeating pattern, maybe crypto is the way forward, but maybe because it centralized so quickly, that won’t happen. Ross: Part of it is that the technologies are decentralized, but the economic manifestations of them are centralized. Tim: Yeah, that’s always the point. The internet was also fundamentally decentralized, but the economic models became centralization. This goes back to this multi-level selection played out in culture, which is that we are seeing this dance between competition and cooperation. Ross: Which I think is something which can help frame those models and whatever frameworks. Some of the powers of thriving and overload or filtering and focus, I get the sense that… at the beginning, you alluded to essentially allowing the wash to come over you and what comes, what you see, the things that you see are the ones which are the things which are relevant, I mean, are there any… Tim: Yeah, I think that’s right. Ross: But are there any particular tools, approaches, routines? Tim: Well, first off, I will say that there is a real downside to my approach. Because I’m not very goal-directed or my goal is to make interesting things happen for other people, I miss a lot. I have this one very funny experience where there was a startup I heard about, that had been funded by a friend of mine, and I went, holy cow, that’s super interesting. I reached out to the guy who’d given them funding, and I said, Can you introduce me? And he introduced me to the founder and the guy was like, Tim, it was your idea that we built, we came to see you and we had a bad idea, and you didn’t like it, and you told us what we should be doing, and we went and did it. I go, Well, how do I manage to not then have them come back and tell me, we’re doing your thing. I would have invested in it, it would have been a good exit. But I just don’t think that way a lot. I sometimes laugh about myself, I’m a little bit like this episode, I saw when my kids were little of Sesame Street in which the Cookie Monster won some game show and he’s now at the section where he gets to choose his prize, and behind door number one is a million dollars, behind door number two is a Chateau in France, or something like that, behind door number three is a cookie, and we all know what he chooses. For me, the cookie is just interesting people doing interesting work that seems to make the world go better. That’s why I tend to surround myself with people who pick up on things that I find interesting, and then pursue them methodically because I don’t. Ross: Yes. Coming back to when I was asking about purpose, I mean, in a way, you’ve framed it just now, and the side effects of that purpose are wonderful. Tim: Yeah, I just love to have… at my events, I like to connect other people. The things that I get so excited about is hearing that, Oh, you guys met and cooked up something amazing. Again, we did put something, for example, a planet, the satellites, it was sort of formed as a result of our science fruit camp and that led… we did actually invest in it through our venture fund, but it wasn’t because of me, I was just like, hey, let me put these interesting people together. These guys from NASA are making shoe box satellites, that’s super cool. Let’s invite them to this event. There’s a lot of things like that. That’s, as John Maynard Keynes used to say, my jam. Ross: Yeah. That, as you well understand, is how the future is created. Tim: Yeah. Ross: Any final words of advice for anyone who is struggling with far too much information and trying to make sense of it? Tim: Well, again, maybe I’m spoiled because, of course, I’ve been quite successful, and I’m not there like an early-career person who’s trying to make their mark in the world. But I think we try too hard. Again, lots of my mentor says let life ripen and then fall, will is not the way at all. This is the wonderful Witter Bynner translation from the 50s or 60s, I’m not sure exactly when it was. But we need to have an attitude of receptivity for any of this stuff to work. That’s not terribly compatible with a certain kind of striving. Now, again, striving really works. I mean, there are people who are way more successful than I am, who are hyper-competitive, and they’re trying to make some particular thing happen, so there’s more than one way to do it. As Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl programming languages used to say, I can’t tell you that, my way is the best way, I can tell you that it’s been good for me, and it helps me align my work life and my personal life. Again, you’re trying to make something happen, but you’re also trying to listen a lot, and it’s finding the balance between the two. I guess the other thing that’s been very shaping for me, is this wonderful poem of Rilke, called “The Man Watching”, in which she says, this is my rough translation of somebody else’s English translation from German, but saying that, Jacob, in the Old Testament wrestling with the angel, and Rilke says, what we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small, what we want is to be defeated by successively greater beings. I think there’s certainly a point where everybody thinks that it’s about success, and if you have the perspective that we’re all ultimately defeated, again, Rilke’s phrase, we come away stronger from the fight, you’re going to tackle hard things, and it’s not about winning. Rilke says winning does not tempt that man or that woman. It’s just like, you are about engaging with the world in a way that’s productive in the process, not necessarily in the outcome. Because ultimately, we don’t win. We can just leave things a little better than we found them. Ross: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely relevant for everyone in these times because there’s no such thing as a win, in a way, as you say that. Tim: Yeah, and that helps you select what to pay attention to, because you can start to say, Oh, my… if your fundamental goal is to make other people better off, then you value things like cooperation, you value things like making connections that allow people to do things that you wouldn’t be able to do by yourself, you realize that, Oh, you value telling a story that lets other people make sense out and see opportunities that you couldn’t pursue. That’s why at O’Reilly, one of our slogans has been “create more value than you capture”. We put together information that helps other people to do things, and that’s the heart of our O’Reilly online learning platform today still. It’s just like, how do we teach people to follow what they want to do? And it’s not directive, it’s enabling. Ross: Absolutely. Tim, it has been a delight and an honor to have you sharing your insights. Thank you so much. Tim: You’re very welcome. I enjoyed talking with you, too. The post Tim O’Reilly on noticing things other people don’t notice, the value of soft focus, framing open source and Web 2.0, and patience in building narratives [REPOST] (Ep54) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Depending on the environment I’m in, whether I’m sitting at my desk here, and I’ve got my two screens in front of me or whether I’m walking the dog on the field, and I’ve got like no internet connection, I don’t want there to be a friction point in any environment that I’m in. I select tools that help me do that.” – Danny Hatcher About Danny Hatcher Danny is a YouTuber, Blogger, Author, and Podcaster helping people be more intentional and organized with their time, and sharing useful insights from the latest in educational science. Website: Danny Hatcher YouTube: Danny Hatcher Podcast: Personal Knowledge Management Podcast Discord: Educational Science LinkedIn: Danny Hatcher Twitter: Danny Hatcher Facebook: Danny Hatcher Instagram: Danny Hatcher What you will learn A comprehensive understanding of sports coaching beyond the stereotypical image of a coach with a whistle (02:18) Introduction to two different perspectives in the educational science field when it comes to learning, memory, and understanding (04:17) Understanding cognition and learning as part of a dynamical system, and the role of technology in building an extended cognitive environment (06:09) Emphasis on the importance of visual perception and attention in understanding ecological dynamics in learning and skill acquisition (07:52) Rereading books for deeper understanding (10:20) Choosing a productivity tool that offers a seamless and effortless user experience in various settings (11:37) Using a mind map called a Canvas in Obsidian for mapping out ideas and note-taking (13:35) Using folders, tags, and links in Obsidian for note-taking and organization (15:59) Obsidian being the top choice when it comes to retrieving information due to its powerful search functionality and intuitive linking system (20:08) Differences between Notion and Obsidian (25:17) The need for a collaborative effort between developers and users with AI integration to enhance the existing tools (30:00) Following one’s curiosity to enjoy the learning process (33:00) Resources Notion Zotero ChatGPT Obsidian Roam Research Canvas Microsoft Word  Google Docs Tana Nimbus Note Milanote Transcript Ross Dawson: Danny, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Danny Hatcher: Thank you for having me. I’m excited. Ross: You are an expert in, let’s call it information productivity, using tools, expanding your knowledge, and being able to be effective. I’d love to just hear the story of the journey. How did you come to be where you are? Danny: Yes. For a bit of background, my undergraduate degree is in sports coaching. Some people may assume that’s a guy with a whistle on the sideline but that’s far from the truth. Most of my research is in pedagogy, andragogy, epistemology, philosophy, and then all of the other related learning fields inside of a sport, which, are biomechanics, anatomy, and physiology, so it covers essentially every element of human learning, and human development, which has a lot of information, a lot of knowledge. When I was coming toward the end of my undergraduate degree, I found a tool called Notion. It was in beta right at the very start, it didn’t have any databases, which is what most people are familiar with now. I was a very early adapter. As I went through my master’s degree in strength and conditioning, I carried on using it. It was useful in picking out information. But I was struggling to connect some ideas and link things and I was losing information. I fell into a trap of having to create all of the databases and all the pages and do loads of stuff with Notion. I ended up doing more with Notion than with information. I was building out templates and building out databases, and I forgot what I was actually meant to be working on. I did a switch from Notion to what I now use, which is Obsidian. My research is in a similar field, I still look at educational science, but it’s much easier and quicker to manage information with the system that I currently have now, which is what I share online, which is on youtube; mainly on youtube. Then I do have a podcast where I talk in-depth about some of the other related concepts, which I’m sure we’ll allude to today. Ross: Fantastic. Part of it is building your knowledge, part of it is also building your method knowledge as it were, the ability to be more effective at having been able to create and build that. Danny: Yes. The educational science field is, I wouldn’t say split, but there are two perspectives or paradigms of thought when it comes to learning, memory, and understanding; one being cognitive psychology, which is very popular that encompasses neuroscience, neuropsychology, and all of the, what I would class as, traditional, general population knowledge where people see learning, I have a shorter working memory or my short term memory is bad, that is cognitive psychology. Then the view, the perspective that I personally favor and lean towards is ecological dynamics, which is from ecological psychology. That takes a different route. It ends at the same point but takes a different perspective. That mainly comes from skill acquisition and motor learning, so learning physical skills; and that’s where a lot of the research is at the moment. My personal approach to using ecological dynamics has changed the way that I use my tools, use Obsidian as my note-taker, as it were. Then I use Zotero, which is a reference manager to bring in all of the..I don’t want to say information because, in ecological dynamics, information isn’t the same as when we’re talking about cognitive psychology information. Information for me is patterns that I’m seeing in an environment, not just a word, it’s the pattern between the word and the environment, or the environment and the organism, in my case, me. Zotero is my content manager, not necessarily my information manager. Hopefully, that makes sense. Ross: The ecological you refer to, I think, we could reframe that as the environment and so the idea of the extended mind, where the mind or the learning is then beyond what’s inside our skulls. Danny: Yes, extended into the environment, I wouldn’t say learning is extended, as in into the environment, I would say the environment is part of cognition, depending on the mark of the cognitive that you choose to use with extended cognition, whether it is everything inside of my brain is cognition, or it’s everything inside of my body, so embodied cognition. I’m counting with my fingers, is that cognition, or is that not quite cognition? And then you have the fully leaning one way where everything is cognition, everything in your environment is which I don’t think that’s true, because then I could say the wall in front of me is part of cognition, which I don’t think it’s logical or rational to think about. There’s got to be a barrier or a line to say, this is part of my cognition. Inside ecological dynamics, there are parts that build up systems, which is the dynamical systems element. I am a part, my phone is a part, and my computer is a part inside of this system of learning. When my phone is on, it’s part of the system, when it’s off, it’s not part of the system, which is why it’s dynamic. What I do is create an environment using the tech on my computers, so Obsidian is part of our learning environment, Zotero as well. Then with all the tools, now you’ve got AI coming into being, and you’ve got ChatGPT. When I’m using those, they are part of the extended cognitive environment that I’m working in to help me understand the information that I’m seeing from social media, academic articles, blogs, journals, podcasts, videos, and all the content sources. Ross: This way of thinking, was that informed by the fact that you’ve come from a sports background? Or is that not related? Danny: I think it’s heavily impacted by my sports background, because ecological dynamics is, as I mentioned earlier, only prevalent inside of skill acquisition research. When you try and find ecological dynamics on the internet, you have to look for ecological dynamics in skill acquisition, otherwise, it will come up with ecology and ecosystems of animals and nature; it’s related, don’t get me wrong, it’s still related because it’s part of dynamic ecosystems. But the ecological dynamics inside of learning is mainly skill acquisition because it comes down to visual perception, what is perception? How does the information… so indirect or direct information? How is that perceived? And then how do we, trying to avoid jargon here, but how do we attune our attention to certain information that we are perceiving from the environment? I’m using my prior knowledge, which is cognitive psychology, I’m using my memory, instead of using all of the prior knowledge to create a prediction of what can happen, I’m using prospective control. I’m looking at all the information I have inside of the environment, and that’s enough because it’s direct information. I’m still using information that’s not in that exact moment in time because we do have stuff stored. When I’m learning inside of an environment, I’m using the information and perceiving the information straightaway. Then I’m creating the environment, and information or ideas are emerging from the environment I’ve created. When I’m consuming content online, for example, that’s part of the environment, I’ll pick out, I’ll attune my attention to something that’s notable. That achievement, the metastable attenuation, bringing the jargon, but essentially, the focus that I have, on certain terms will change with my expertise, my bias, and my focus at that point in time. When I’m reading something for the first time, and maybe I’m familiar with it, I’m not that attuned to the information inside of that article. I’ll take out information, and put it in Obsidian. The second time I read it, I may have higher expertise in that field, in that environment, in that idea, I’ve consolidated some thoughts, so now my attention, my attunement of information is slightly different. Now I’m noticing things that I didn’t notice the first time around, which is why I don’t read that many books, I reread books because they’re teaching me something different each time I look at them because my own understanding of whatever the concept they’re talking about has shifted in one way or another. Ross: This goes to what I frame as knowledge development, the process of knowledge, it accretes, grows, and builds on itself. Sometimes there’s a substitution as replacing existing frameworks, or mental models, but often it is building on or getting greater refinement or doing that. It gets us to this part of your expertise. How it is that we can best capture those elements on which we can build or which can inform us or can make us develop our skills, develop our capabilities? Let’s just start at a conceptual level and then perhaps dig into the tools at the moment. What do you look for in your tools for thinking, and how do you implement it? How do they fit within your cognitional perception or daily life? What is their role? How did they become part of you? Danny: The easiest way for me to explain this is I want it to be as simple as possible. I don’t want to have to worry about what buttons to push, where to store things, how to save anything, or worry about how the tech is working, I just want to add it, which, simply put, is by pushing a plus button of some sort, typing in whatever it is that I need to type in or speaking, however you capture the information, and then it is stored somewhere that I can find quickly. That’s all I want tech to do is just store it somewhere; capture it easily, store it somewhere that I don’t have to think about, I can just carry on with whatever the train of thought is that I have. Depending on the environment I’m in, whether I’m sitting at my desk here, and I’ve got my two screens in front of me or whether I’m walking the dog on the field, and I’ve got like no internet connection, I don’t want there to be a friction point in any environment that I’m in. I select tools that help me do that. Ross: So there’s the capturing, and I think one of the things which you emphasize in your work that I’ve seen is the networks as in what are the connections between the ideas. So…part of it is being able to capture that, then it’s being able to build that connected structure of these ideas as seamlessly as possible, in the way it’s useful to you. Danny: I think this is the misconception with those familiar with Obsidian and Roam Research with the graph view and how the connectedness is beneficial and useful. I see that graph behind you, it’s great for an overview. But oftentimes, when you’re working and you have expertise in a field, there are so many connections, it’s very difficult to see what’s going on. I personally don’t use the graph view tool inside of Obsidian. I am using a more recent addition to Obsidian called a Canvas, which is essentially just a mind map. But that is specific in the environment I’m working in. If I’m working on an essay, then I will mind-map stuff out. When I’m capturing information, I’m not thinking about what this can relate to or what this can link to, I’m just consuming the information and going on wherever my mind goes at the time. If I’m listening to a podcast, and I have a question about it, I write the question about the comment that was made inside of the podcast, inside of what I call a source note, a capture note, literature note, you can call it what you want. But it’s just a place to put the information that I can go back to. The reason it’s a source is because it has got a link back to wherever it came from, whether that be an article or video podcast. That stays a source note, it stays just by itself individualized. I don’t want to edit the source note because I want it to be specific to just that environment, just that thing, so if I do go back to it, I can see where it was, like a checkpoint, as it were. The connections come with sources and then bringing that information into something tangible and useful, which to me is a research note; the logical step as a researcher source and then research. Ross: A couple of the ways that you have addressed in your work around the connections or the relationships is in tagging. Folders or hierarchies are fixed and structured, and unwieldy tags can be a superior way to be able to have multiple ways of relating or clustering different concepts or notes. How do you use tags or other tools to be able to group things together in a meaningful way? Danny: I see folders and tags as very structural, they’re less dynamic in the way that you can use them. Because when you tag something, you don’t know exactly why. If for example, I click on a tag and I get 10 notes, I don’t know exactly why note one is related to note three. It is just implicit because it’s in the tag. I would need to open note one and note three and try and work out why it’s linked. Whereas if I create the link inside of the text, and for example, have a sentence saying ecological dynamics is different from information processing, and I have ecological dynamics as a link and information processing as a link. When I say link, it’s essentially a hyperlink when you click on something, but inside of an application like Obsidian, it takes you to another file inside of the app, that is explicit, I know exactly why ecological dynamics and information processing are linked. You can do the same with a shopping list. Why is an apple on the shopping list? Oh, I don’t have it for today and you can link it to the days when I didn’t have apples in the house at that point in time. It can be expanded in lots of ways. The way I see tags and folders are structures and organization structures. If you do need to find something, you know roughly where it’s going to be. But because of Obsidian, I very rarely use either of those formatted structures because search is so powerful. I can search any word that’s in a file, I can search any word in the entire folder system of Obsidian because Obsidian is local. It’s like a folder on your computer. I can search for any word inside any file inside that folder. I don’t need to go into folders and look down the tree, I just search for the word, and it will tell me where it is. Or I can search for a file very quickly which in Obsidian is called the Quick Switcher. If I have a file, for example, on fake news, I can just type in fake news, and then it will show me exactly what that file is. If I was to search for anything, it’s very, very quick. Tags and folders, I use folders for categories of information. I have a research folder for all my research notes, and a source folder for my source notes, but I never open them, I never go into them. They’re just there so they’re stored in some structural way. I only use tags because of a feature, a plug-in inside of Obsidian that allows me to add what’s called metadata or information specific to that type of note. A source I know is going to have a URL, it’s going to have a link back to wherever the source was. But my research note won’t have a URL, because my research note is going to have a variety of sources all over the place. Essentially, the links are the sources. A tag gives me that information. The tag source says, Okay, you need a URL for this, you need the authors for this, and you need a title for this. But if it’s tagged with research, I don’t want any of that. I want what’s the priority of this research file. What’s the stage of this research file? So I use tags as types of notes to add specific parts of information on that type of note for me that’s beneficial in my research work. Ross: You mentioned earlier that you started off with Notion as a tool and discovered the potential of being able to capture information in useful ways. You then started using Obsidian. Then at a certain point, I gather you stopped using Notion, with Obsidian being where everything happens. I’d love to hear about that journey, particularly the transition point when you felt that Obsidian could do it all for you. Danny: Yes, I must admit, to start with, I was all in on Notion. I’d used it for three years by that point. I was completely sold as Notion is the best thing ever. I was deliberately avoiding the issues that I had inside of Notion, which were the databases. Yes, they’re very powerful. But I lost things. I forgot things. The linking was a little bit clunky. I just didn’t accept that that was a problem. When I first saw Obsidian, I saw a lot of code. I saw a lot of marked-downs, hashes, and symbols. I was like, I’m not a developer. I’m sports. I can’t do this tech stuff. They’re talking about code blocks in javascript stuff and I was like, no, not for me. Then I saw the graph view. I thought that looks cool. Let’s have a play. I had a play. I didn’t like it much. But what I did like was the speed. That immediately got me because Obsidian is local, and it’s extremely quick. It’s like Microsoft Word versus Google Docs. Google Docs is online. If your internet’s a bit slow, or you don’t have internet, Google Docs is slow or unavailable. It’s the same with Notion whereas Obsidian, it’s fast, like, always fast. I have a vault folder in Obsidian that has over 100,000 files in and it’s just as quick as my active vault with about 5000 files. The 100,000 files, well, it was a test file to purely test how Obsidian manages with all the plugins and stuff, but it’s just fast and quick. I thought, okay, I can deal with this, I can manage this. Obsidian to start with was just like Microsoft Word but gave me the folders, and the folder searches inside the app. That’s how I used it to start with. I just type stuff into a file, just like a Word doc. Then when I wanted to switch files, I just went to the folder system and switch to the file rather than having like seven or eight windows of Word up on my computer trying to navigate which one it was when I was writing essays at uni because you can’t write inside of Notion for an essay because of citation and bibliography formatting, which you can do in Obsidian, which I do. Having experienced the speed, and then the ease of just switching between files, I thought, you know what, I’ll explore this a bit more; two years later and I’m very familiar with the tool now with many of its capabilities. Ross: Indeed. Most of the things have courses to help people to get started, to build, and to use it well. Danny: Just as a point, I think something with Obsidian that a lot of people will see, not just Obsidian but a lot of other tech tools, are people using massively complicated spaces because they’ve got all these queries, plugins, community plugins, buttons, and different looks and it’s very hard to see. That doesn’t look like mine because they’ve got a different CSS theme and some different snippets and they’re using some code. You don’t need any of that to use Obsidian. It is, quite simply, files on your system that you type in. If you come up with a problem, something Obsidian has, Notion doesn’t have, from what I’ve experienced, is there’s a massive community in Obsidian that will just solve your problem. If you can’t do this, use maybe this plugin, or maybe combine these two things together, and you’ll find the answer. I’m yet to find something that you can’t do in Obsidian. But then the question becomes should you do it in Obsidian? Ross: Notion is essentially a database. It’s a relational database with a lot of lovely stuff on top of it. That’s quite a different frame to Obsidian, which, as you say, is files, texts, links, and connections. Were there any database-style things that you were using on Notion that you’ve been able to put on Obsidian? Or just you weren’t using those tools well, or doing something else for those kinds of data? Danny: The easy answer is no, no, I don’t use them but you can. If you want a table, you can use a table, if you want a Kanban, you can use a Kanban, you want a gallery, use a gallery. What I found in Notion with the databases, though, was I had loads of databases, loads of link databases, loads of views; I’ve got a gallery, a calendar, and a table all for the same information but I never really used them. All I’ve used was the list. I’ve done this, I’ve done this, I’ve done this, or I need to look at this then I go to the Notion page and then just write. Even though the databases were nice, I never really used the views to do anything apart from just show me information, which in Obsidian, I can do through search, I don’t need a database view. With the canvas plugin, and core plugin inside of Obsidian, which is a mind map, I now don’t need any database star view, because I can have them all in one. For those that can’t quite visualize this, essentially, it’s a mind map with a table view on one spot, I drag my mouse to another spot, and now I’ve got a gallery view or a Kanban view. Or I could make a Kanban view inside of the Mind Map and it adds the information to the carts. I get all of the database store views with added flexibility with the canvas. But then I get all of the complexity that I want if I want it with Obsidian, which you can have in a Notion database, but you’re slightly restricted. A technical example inside of Notion is, you may be familiar, you can have a roll-up. A roll-up brings in information from a relation property. But you need the relation property to start with. You then start building out all these properties. You can have a database in Notion with 20-30 properties. But inside of Obsidian, you can do the exact same thing with 4 or 5. Because it’s text-based and it doesn’t require all of the linking between databases to work because Obsidian is just files. That’s something fundamental to Obsidian that makes it fast but makes it very, very easy to customize, edit, and change so the databases aren’t needed. But a lot of people coming from Notion to Obsidian I can understand why they’d be more familiar with that. Yes, you can do it. But I don’t. Ross: Yes. Certainly, the introduction of Canvas to Obsidian has significantly expanded its usefulness and usability to a lot of people. That’s a whole space where you can play visually, whatever dimensions you want, it adds a lot. Again, this is something that is not there in Notion native but it provides another frame or perspective, which is valuable. One of the things, a lot of people use Notion as a multi-user system, so it’s for companies that can do workflows or social media calendars, or a million other things. I’ve experienced Obsidian very much as a single user. Is that something to consider as Notion? Yes, I don’t think that Notion and Obsidian are that directly comparable but the multiuser thing is one frame on it. Danny: There are pros and cons. Notions, shareability, yes, it’s easier with Notion hands down. But the privileges that you get with Notion are restricted because you have to give access to your databases. Then you have to work out what database do I give them. What page can I give them? It becomes a bit of a Tetris game of fitting all the pieces together so everyone has the right privileges, and working out what workspace to use. There is a bit of trust you have to have with that. Obsidian, you can share because they are just files, it’s just like sharing a file on any cloud service. You’ve got Google Docs, you’ve got Dropbox, and all those sorts of things. I personally use collaborative sync, which is using Obsidian sync. But it allows you to add if the other person or other people have sync on their account. They just have a vault on their computer, so a vault folder on a computer that synced, which, for those familiar with Obsidian, is just like the normal sync, where you can sync up your computer with your laptop, with your phone, except the other person’s account is treated as another device. If you have a folder, a vault folder for work, then you can sync it with another person. That’s how I work collaboratively with Obsidian. The only negative is that because it is synced and it takes a second, maybe two, you can’t do live collaboration as easily out of the box. You can do it but it does require some technical understanding using something like VS code or using the live share plugin which gets technical. If you’re working in a big team, with lots of people editing the same file at the same time, Notion. If you’re a big team, but everyone has their own space, their own thing, you can still use Obsidian. Would I recommend it? Probably not. I think it depends very much on what you’re doing. But for researchers, I think it’s invaluable because you can connect Zotero, which has shared libraries with Obsidian, so you can share your research in Zotero, then share the notes inside of Obsidian and then work together on a manuscript on something rather than having to go backward or forward with Word doc drafts, which is a pain. Ross: Indeed. We’ve had a massive explosion in thinking tools over the last four years, a bit more maybe, we have the Notion, Roam, Obsidian, a whole array of other tools coming out at the moment. What would you like to see in the next year or two, either with the development of Obsidian or other tools? What’s missing now that you think would really add to what we have in terms of thinking tools? Danny: I think AI has to play a part because of the way AI is moving forward. The way I see the tools for thought space at the moment is not what I want to see more of but actually what I want to see less of because there are so many tools trying to do the same thing. I wish they would just communicate and work together a bit more. You mentioned Roam, you’ve mentioned Obsidian, but you’ve got things like Tana, Nimbus Note, Milanote, and all of those other tools that are out there trying to do the same thing. As a youtube creator, I get emails from lots of developers saying we’ve created this new tool. I always respond to them and say, why would I use yours over Obsidian? And I have not found a response yet where they say Oh, well, we can do this that Obsidian can’t. My question is okay, why are you creating a new tool when you could develop and enhance the ones that already work, that we already have? What I would want to see is more of a community effort to build out the tools that we have, rather than building more tools to pick from. Ross: I think it’s a great point, though, I’m not sure that the world’s gonna listen. Danny: No, everyone wants their big app to be the one to go to. Ross: Yes. Danny: I don’t want to say don’t develop your own app, because obviously, you need to develop the skills as part of learning. There is certainly an issue with adding to the community because of the community plugins in Obsidian, I don’t want to say it’s a meme, but it’s certainly an issue inside of Obsidian where you onboard someone and you say, Okay, have a look at the community plugins, there are almost 1000 now to look through. A lot of them do the same thing. There’s the same problem inside the plugin community. Then you have the same issue with searching online information, Oh, do I want this plugin? Do I need that plugin? Which one do I use? Which ones don’t I use? Fear of missing out? Do I need to use this one? Everyone else is using that one. I don’t want loads of people to suddenly create loads of plugins and a lot of them do not have much value that then the value is in the eye of the beholder. It may be valuable for 10 people, whereas something like a data view may be valuable for 500,000 people. I would want people to develop, but be cognizant that not everyone can use every plugin at once. But yes, it’s a difficult question inside of the tech industry, and matching, the developers want to add stuff. The consumers want to just do the work. Ross: Yes. To round out, talking beyond tools specific, just more generally, people who are living in the world of lots of information, they want to develop their knowledge, and keep on top of everything, what’s any high-level advice you would give for people who are on that journey saying, alright, well, what is it that I should do? How do I become more effective at this? Danny: My go-to, the thing that’s coming to mind first is enjoy the process. When I say that, I don’t mean enjoy the process, as in Oh, yes, I’m watching loads of TikTok videos, I’m enjoying this. I mean, enjoy thinking about something. Everyone, naturally when you’re born, is curious, and you want to learn, children want to learn. That’s why they’re asking why and poking things and making mistakes and failing all the time. Then they go to school, and the education system has some quirks. I just leave it like that. But when you’re enjoying the learning, you follow your curiosity, you follow those questions. That’s what I would urge you to do. If you do get distracted, you’re like, oh, actually, that’s a really interesting question. Find a place to write down the question or write down your thoughts or just record an audio clip on your phone or wherever and just have fun exploring the information and asking questions, because inevitably, you’ll gain expertise just by exploring what you’re interested in. Ross: I think that’s fabulous advice. I think the human brain is extraordinary. It’s the most amazing thing we know of in the universe. I think we can easily enjoy using it more just by digging into the things that we find and discover and imagine along the way. Thank you so much for your time, Dan. It has been a fantastic conversation. Danny: Yes, thanks for having me. The post Danny Hatcher on skill acquisition, ecological dynamics, from Notion to Obsidian, and exploring interests (Ep53) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I’m very particular about what information I pull in and what I leave out. I think that is one of the most absolutely critical things that people need to do.” – Thomas Baekdal About Thomas Baekdal Thomas is the founder and publisher of Baekdal Media and a leading media analyst. He is the author of books including The Shift, about the news industry’s transition from print to digital, and advises leading publishers about the evolution of the media industry. Website: Baekdal Media Twitter: Thomas Baekdal Facebook: Thomas Baekdal LinkedIn: Thomas Baekdal What you will learn Media analysis requires vast information to understand media and related areas. (00:53) Efficient information management is crucial for media analysts, and building a tool can help manage information influx. (02:00) Why Thomas built his tool to manage information overload as a media analyst. (05:01) A computer science degree is essential for media analysts to handle complex and varied data. (08:31) Accessing raw data is crucial for deeper understanding and analysis of patterns and inconsistencies. (09:48) Transforming complex data into practical actions is a significant challenge for media analysts. (16:01) News importance fades quickly, leading to JOMO and news avoidance for better mental state. (18:05) Setting up social media filters can manage an individual’s mental space and reduce information overload. (21:27) Diversity in sources, including gender and expertise, is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of issues. (25:02) Aggressively selecting sources and maintaining a manageable number of sources is necessary for effective media analysis. (27:45) Resources INMA Reuters Institute Digital News Report Notion Obsidian FOMO JOMO News Avoidance Transcript Ross Dawson:Thomas, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Thomas Baekdal: Thank you. Glad to be here. Ross: You’ve been working, analyzing the media industry for a very long time now looking at the future of media. Thomas: I started professionally doing this in 2010. It’s been 13 years. But, I worked 10 years before that as a digital media manager for one of the largest fashion companies in my country. That was on the other side of the media, but it was still media. Basically, I’ve been doing this since the year 2000. Ross: You’re, of course, working in a very rapidly moving landscape following the evolution of media and there’s plenty to follow. Thomas: Yes. Ross: But the nature of your choice, you are deeply involved in information and making sense of the world. I’d like to hear a little bit more about the history of your relationship with information. Thomas: It’s a funny thing because what I do as a media analyst is I try to do all the work that publishers don’t have time for basically, to try to figure out what is happening around the media and around… well, basically, whatever thing, and that requires a tremendous amount of information. You notice as well with your work that if you want to see what’s ahead in the future, you can’t just look at a few studies, you have to be in information all the time on all of it so you can get a bigger picture of it. I spent all my… every day just looking at reports and studies and data and all kinds of things. It can be quite daunting sometimes. Well, it’s fun also. Ross: I’d love to dig into some of the details. I’m sure there’s not a typical day, but what’s your inflammation day look like? How do you start? What do you look at? Do you have any patterns or structures and what do you spend time on? And where do you look? What does your information day look like? Thomas: Well, first of all, there is no day that’s the same, it depends on what I’m working on. But one of the things that I have changed for myself because of trying to manage things is I built a tool. I have a tool that is built by myself where I gather all my main sources. That’s all my podcasts or my newsletters, all the reports that I know are coming in. Also, other sources like websites where I know that they’re publishing things I need to know about, for instance, INMA, the news organization; they publish a lot of blog posts. My resource to get us all that up automatically, I have a script, that is waiting every 10 minutes that is looking for if there is something new. What I do when I want to look into things is I start there, I’ve simply built a tool trying to make sense of things. What this tool is doing—it’s sites are just having all these different sources in one place is and it has a note-taking tool right beside it. If I see a new report, for instance, I can go through it and read it. Then I can take screenshots or take quotes and put them into my note-taking tool right next to it. When I’m working on something, when I’m trying to figure out what is happening, what the trends are, what the things are, that’s what I’m looking at. Then the following days, if I’m working on a specific project for a publisher, or if I’m writing an article, I use that tool to go in and look at what notes I’ve written about things. In the note-taking tool, I have a search feature. I can say I want to look at what did I write about the subscriptions, for instance, and it will show me a list of the notes with reference to which document was a newsletter and which report it was from. That clearly gives me a very quick, but also very efficient way for me to get that information and organize it if you feel. Then, of course, we have… I mean, when we get into the really very specific, that’s just hard work. I will spend hours, days, maybe even weeks, just looking at things. If I have a question I don’t really know something about, I will just spend tons and tons of time trying to find things and there are no simple ways to do that. It’s Google, it’s all my auto sources, it’s some of the sites that I maybe know, maybe they have some data about it. It’s a mix of everything, but my research tool is my starting point. That has been critical to my information management. Ross: That’s really interesting. There are many, many tools out there to do parts of what you’ve done. Why have you made the choice to develop your own? Thomas: Two reasons. First thing is that I happen to know how to code. I learned that back in the 90s. Every single time I’ve looked at one of those standard tools, they are all very impressive, but they don’t necessarily do exactly what I needed to do. In order to optimize it for me, I built this tool so that I could get it to do just what I wanted. I mean, one critical element of it is how it’s doing things automatically. I don’t have to add anything to it. Well, I can add it manually if I want to, but for 99% of it, it is being imported automatically with some scripts and some code and some things. That really saves some time because the problem is if you have one of the standard tools, not only do you have to use them to figure out what you want, but you also have to spend an enormous amount of time bringing the data in and every single day, I get what 30-40 newsletters alone. If I had to manually put them into a note-taking tool, I also figure out what it was, I will never get that done. Here, I have it into the tool. It is searchable. I can add notes to it if I want to. I just decided to create a tool that for me just was super optimized to the way I work. That was what I found to be the most important thing. Ross: Fascinating. Have you ever considered putting this out to market? Thomas: Well, I’ve been asked by several people about it. The problem is it’s not designed for it. It’s designed for me. One of the things I’ve also done, not related to this, but I’ve also built my own site. My site, when people visit that and all the things that are on that, all the code for that is built around, built that too, including the backend system, including the database and the CMS and all that. When I built this resource tool, it’s just built on top of that. Basically, the resource tool took one day to build. It was that quick, but it was only that quick because I built it on top of the system I already have. I can’t sell it without complete reengineering it. People have asked me about it. But yes, I have no plans for it. Ross: That’s fascinating. It goes to the point that for so much of our lives, we adapt ourselves to technology. It’s nice to be able to say this is what I do, this is what I want to do, in your case to have the capabilities to create the technology to do that. Thomas: Yes. Ross: I’ve had many conversations with people who say I like Notion, or I like Obsidian, and I’m going to choose which one is the best one. But it doesn’t have these features, so they’re adapting themselves to the tools. Thomas: Yes. But I will always say that today, it’s almost necessary to all to be able to do a lot of things because when I do my analysis, for instance, if I want to do some data analysis, I could open Excel and do something but sometimes it’s just easier if I have a really large data set to just build a script for it, and do the analysis that way. It has become just part of the way I work that I have the data in front of me and the report in front of me and if I want to do something, instead of trying to do it the hard way, I can just write some code for it. That makes it efficient once you can do it. It’s an important thing. The future analysts, I will always say they need a computer science degree because it is so much about how we are able to work with the information we have. The problem is it’s not just data, it’s not just a simple database; most of the data we have is completely chaotic. We have to figure out a way to somehow manipulate that in ways that isn’t just something you can do with Excel. Coding is one way to do it. I want to clarify here, I don’t just code everything. I have this specific tool and it’s really helping me but 90% of my time, I do the same thing as everyone else is that I look over the text and the reports and those things manually and I try to figure things out. Most graphs and data we get is probably in a PDF file, and we can’t even convert it to data. It’s rather hopeless to work with it as a script. Ross: Yes, it’s not that difficult to suck in a lot of text and build some structure around it. But one of the interesting points here is that you are pulling it all together at once so there’s a lot of data, a lot of information, as opposed to being very selective about what you incorporate. Thomas: Another thing that’s also very important is that when it comes to the information that I use, I always try to get the data. One example we recently had is the Reuters Institute, the digital media report, they produce it every year. It’s really great. You go to the website, you will see all the graphs and everything is really amazing. But I went out to Reuters and I said, could you give me the data? And they sent me the data. So I have something like, I think it’s 22 gigabytes of data from Reuters. I have the ability now to go behind the reports and to look at okay, the thing about all these reports is that they’re picking the things they want to focus on and Reuters is doing a really good job of it. But very often, you want to look behind it and you want to see, okay, what was the question actually when they asked it, and what was the data that they didn’t include? That may also show some kind of pattern so a lot of the time when I try to figure out how to do things for information is simply to get back to that raw source. It’s the same thing we should talk about, some kind of political analysis. I don’t do that that much. But if I do, I want the raw polls, I don’t want what’s in the newspapers, that’s useless. I want the raw polls, I want to be able to see what they actually asked, and I want to see how they defined it. That is much more helpful. Ross: Absolutely. It’s fantastic that Reuters has been good enough to share the data with you. In other cases, you can look for the data source and find it yourself. Thomas: Yes. Ross: Increasingly, the sharing of data behind the charts is extraordinarily valuable. What are the interesting things that you read in reports, you mentioned that several times, significant information sources. I read reports too, probably not to the same depth as you. What’s amazing is that not many people read reports, because they’re so long. I’d love to hear what’s your process of reading and distilling and digesting and taking what is useful from a good report. Thomas: Well, it depends a lot on the report. If we were talking about the Reuters Institute report, I’ve spent weeks just looking at that. I probably get a report every day on average, and most of them are about something either very specific or something in an area that I probably can’t use. In those cases, I’m just like everyone else, just glancing over it. I’m not really reading the text in full, I’m just finding the graphs and I’m seeing if there’s something interesting, and if there’s not, I’m moving on. But I would be out of time in no time if I tried to read every single report in there. But every single time when we come across something where we see, okay, this is really interesting. Like, for instance, how we’ve seen in the media industry, we have this thing called a stop rate. A stop rate is how effective newspapers are at stopping people and asking them to pay. What we found across multiple reports now is that the stop rate is a very strong indicator of how successful newspapers are at converting people into subscribers. Once we started seeing that pattern, that was when I really dug in, and then I read, I go into the report totally, fully read everything to see if I can see something. Then we find other reports and other things. I did the same thing with news avoidance, another big topic I’ve been focusing on. News avoidance, there are so many reports about it, but they are incredibly inconsistent. To understand what happens with them, you have to dig in to see what are the differences between why is this data saying that it’s 70%? Why is this data saying it’s 40%? And why is this data saying it’s only 15%? You can’t just look at a graph and say, okay, all these different numbers, they don’t add up, you have to go in and figure out what was the reason for this massive difference. Often it’s how they ask the question or the circumstances, all these different things. Ross: This goes to the point of sense-making, you’re seeing a lot of information, you’re seeing a lot of depth to that information, and your role, of course, is to make sense of that to be able to see the patterns, to be able to pick out what are the directions, what’s meaningful in the evolution of the media landscape. How do you do that? How do you pull all of that into something which is truly at the level of sense-making, or building this model of the bigger picture? Thomas: Yes, I wish I could say I have some really smart system for that, but I don’t. What I’m basically doing is the same thing that AIs are now doing today. We hear about AIs all the time. What the AIs are doing is they’re just gathering your information. Then through that information as a whole, we start to see a direction and it’s that direction I then cling on to and try to figure out. Take news avoidance, for instance, and news fatigue. I could directly point you to Reuters Institute, and they have a really good report about it. But that’s not the only one. What I do is I look at all these different reports. The numbers can be all over the place, but there’s usually some kind of pattern, and there’s usually some kind of direction and some kind of momentum in all of them. What I then do is I say, Okay, on the whole, this is the direction things are moving in so that is what I need to focus on and look into more or talk about or write about other things. What I also do, when I get to a point where I don’t really know how to make sense of it is I try to turn it into some kind of action. News avoidance is a really good example of that. The first article I wrote about news avoidance was back in 2010, so I’ve been talking about this for ages. But I really started looking at it in 2019. What I found back then, was that all these different reports were so inconsistent, I couldn’t really get a sense of it. Instead, I decided to do an experiment. The experiment was that even though I’m a media analyst, I cut myself off from news entirely for months, completely, totally, entirely.I could see the reports, I could see what people who have been answering and people were saying, but I couldn’t see why. By doing that experiment, trying to get the feel for it, suddenly, I discovered a lot of things. With news avoidance, what I discovered was that it is astonishing how bad news is for you. That is painful for me to say, as a media analyst, because it’s my industry. But once you cut yourself off so completely as I did, you realize that 99.9% of the news you see all the time is completely meaningless. It has no value for you, and it’s just filling up your life. That was a real eye-opener. One of the things I did with that experiment also, because I’m an analyst, I don’t just do the experiment, and then forget about it. I had a system, again, we talked about, there was a bit of coding, but I built a script that automatically took a screenshot of all the newspapers I usually follow. Every single day for that month, it took a screenshot of the front pages. I didn’t look at it at all. But after a month, I went back to it. I started looking at it. My idea was that I will write down all the articles that I had missed that were really important for me to know. What happened was I didn’t write anything down. That actually came as a shock to me. When I moved into it, my assumption was that I had missed something really important. But it was the opposite that all the news even the thing that was important, there was a terrorist attack and kind of thing, but if you read about it a month later, it’s over. Right? You can’t use it for anything, you can’t do anything with it. That really defined what this trend meant for me. That’s basically what I do. I look at a report and everything and if I don’t understand it completely, I try to do something, try to figure out what it means. Ross: That’s absolutely fabulous. This goes exactly to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s quote, which is something like “Spend time reading last week’s newspapers so you realize there’s no real point to anything that you read”. Thomas: Yes. But you’ll see just today. I don’t know if you’ve read the news this morning. But today, we had Biden going out and saying that the three balloons they shot down in the US over last week were not Chinese, and they were not surveillance. They were probably just private balloons by someone. We have had a week, if not more, of news coverage about these balloons, only to now realize that there was basically no story. It’s astonishing when you think about how much time have you spent over the past week looking at these things, reading about these stories, and filling up your brain and your life with this kind of information. Always realize you can’t use them for anything. It’s completely meaningless. Ross: This goes to our human propensities. We do want the novel, we do want to keep on top of the latest. I think it’s hard to transcend that and that’s part of what we need to work on to transcend our propensities for lots of information, which is not necessarily serving us. I think it’s great that you’re doing this kind of experiment to find this out properly for yourself. Thomas: Exactly. We have a word for it, it’s FOMO, the fear of missing out. In my article about news avoidance back in 2019, I wrote that what I realized after doing that is that we have a new word, and that’s JOMO, the joy of missing out. That’s really what changed things because before, I’m a media analyst so I’m a news junkie. It’s my profession. But it was astonishing, not just in terms of how much it was filling up my life, but also how it felt, in terms of my mental health. I would wake up in the morning, and the news is so negative, so I will always have this negative mood, every single time I finished reading the news. But when you cut yourself off the news for a month, you suddenly don’t wake up being annoyed. That was, I mean, wow. That was a big, big thing to realize. It has changed. One of the reasons why I have to organize my information this way today is because I’ve realized that just having a constantly flowing information, filling up your life, is not beneficial for you, it’s much more useful for you not just in terms of getting information and being informed, but also in terms of your mental state, to have that information organized in a way that makes more sense. It’s the same thing about social media, because the way everyone uses social media is you just have this constant feed, and it just flows your way. But one of the things I wrote about a couple of years ago, was that the most important thing people should do on social media is to set up filters. Every single topic that starts to dominate your awareness in ways you can’t use it, needs to be filtered out. That’s not about creating a filter bubble or anything like that. That’s simply about managing how much of any specific topic that starts to fill up your life. On Twitter, I don’t use actually use Twitter in a while, I have had enough of about Musk, so I dropped Twitter. But on Twitter, I had 200 filters. Obviously, there were things like Trump, that kind of thing where you’re just totally bombarded with it every single day. But every single time you have a topic where you really can’t use the information for anything, it’s just filling up your mental space, I created a filter for it, even if it was something that was basically useful or something that’s interesting, something that didn’t bother me. But if it was dominating me so that I couldn’t focus on other things, I filtered it out. I want to say… this is very important. When you filter something out on social media, it doesn’t mean it goes away, some people think that, but if, for instance, I filter out Trump, but I probably still see a post about Trump every single day, the difference is that without the filter, I would see it 20 times through a day. Ross: I’d like to pull back to the big picture, I’m sure you already have some insights on this. What would be, from your experience and your analysis, the most important things that people can do to manage the onslaught, to make sense of things? In addition to what you’ve already talked about, what are the recommendations you would make for people to thrive, to do well, in this world of unlimited information? Thomas: I have a personal history around this. The history is that I totally and completely collapsed with stress, many years ago. I actually got to a point where I had to change my life, otherwise, I couldn’t get back. What I did back then out of necessity was that I really spent some time thinking about what is important for me, for my health, for my work, for my focus, for all these different things. What I’ve done since then, is that I have been exceptionally aggressive about that. This is about everything. It’s about when I read the news, it’s about which sources I pick out. If there’s a source that is not useful, it goes away. I’m very particular about what I pull in and what I leave out. I think that is one of the most absolutely critical things that people need to do. The other thing, to put it in the other perspective, is also to have a wider view. One of the things I did a couple of years ago was that I realized that on my Twitter profile, again, I don’t use Twitter anymore, but back then, something like I can’t remember the number anymore but something like 80% of my information was male-dominated, so it came from men about men, all kinds of things. I sat down and very specifically created a new kind of following, the people I follow, so that it had a better mix. One thing was the gender difference. It was astonishing the difference that makes because suddenly we men, might sound very fancy, but we have a very same way of thinking. Once you really start to bring in a more diverse gender profile, you start to see things that you’re just wow, I didn’t even know this was a problem. The other thing I also did was that I started looking at more specific sources outside my field of expertise. I’m a media analyst. I’ve been focused on media, and I follow a lot of media people. But I decided to go out and figure out okay, in other areas that influenced the world, about your health, or automotive or other things, how can I follow people in that space that can tell me about patterns and things that are happening that I might not see in the media. The media, generally, I love the media, when I’m a bit critical about it, it’s not because I don’t love it. But the media is itself always in the filter bubble. The media is not very good at changing and thinking about new things and seeing new directions. It’s really important for me as a media analyst to see all these other things from other people. That’s something I spend a lot of time making sure that I have that kind of information coming into me, and also that it is diverse. I want to say one more thing about diverse, when I say diverse, I mean valuable diverse sources. In the media, when they talk about diverse sources, it means taking the most horrible people, and some not-so-horrible people and mixing them together. That’s not useful. We can use that information for anything. Ross: That’s a great distinction. I’d say the bigger point here is just to be conscious. What am I actually doing? Is this useful to me? Maybe I need some other sources. Let’s mix this up. Let’s make this work. I think that the meta advice you’re giving is the conscious of what you’re doing and try different things, and see what’s most helpful. Thomas: Yes, exactly. Seriously, just be extremely aggressive about what you pick and what you don’t pick. Twitter is a good example again. I don’t use it so it’s actually a horrible example. But back then, I only had about 400 things I followed, 400 people or companies or things. Even when I changed my focus and tried to get in more women, tried to get in more other sources, I kept that number at 400. I removed a lot of men I used to follow because they didn’t really add that value I wondered from them. Then I brought in these new sources, but I didn’t increase my total volume. Because if you do that, you just end up being overloaded. I think it’s really important that people be very mindful about how much they bring in and where they bring it in from. I’m not some kind of Guru or expert in this. It’s a constant struggle for me also. I think those two things are really important. Ross: I think that’s fantastic advice. That’s a great way to end up. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Thomas, it has been fascinating. We really could talk for a lot longer. We’ll try to get you on another time. Thanks so much. Thomas: Yes, no problem. The post Thomas Baekdal on custom research tools, going to source data, JOMO on news, and source diversity (Ep52) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Bryan Jenks, an information specialist with over 300 certifications, talks about beginner mindset, optimizing everything, neurodivergence, and using Obsidian for note-taking and organization.

“The more connected and participative you’re going to become in your foresight practices, the more useful the effort is, the more meaning it would give. How they recognize change, how you recognize change, and what gaps are there, to understand those, whether it’s an information gap or a knowledge gap, you need to be among those people to create that comprehension.” – Puruesh Chaudhary About Puruesh Chaudhary Puruesh is Founder and President of the NGO AGAHI, co-founder of Media Development Trust, and Senior Research Fellow at Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad. The global recognition for her work as a futures researcher and strategic narrative professional includes being named as Global Shaper by World Economic Forum, acting as advisor to the World Futures Society, and being on the planning committee of the Millennium Project. Websites: AGAHI Karachi Futures Foresight Lab LinkedIn: Puruesh Chaudhary Twitter: Puruesh Chaudhary What you will learn How to focus your research effectively (04:55) How to use data from the past and present to form insights for the future ? (06:33) How can we be more discerning about the credibility of the media that they choose to consume? (12:38) What does a typical futurists information day look like (17:11)  How do memes change us, shape our minds? (21:35) Aside from data, how can social engagement lead to foresight? (26:08) Why it is crucial to understand our and each other’s perspectives (28:04) Transcript Ross Dawson: Puruesh, it is a delight to have you on the show. Puruesh Chaudhary: Ross, thank you so much. Ross: You are amongst other things extremely well-regarded futurist globally, you work on geopolitical and other very complex topics, and you have a very deep background in journalism and setting standards for journalism. I’d love to just hear your background, what is your relationship with information throughout your life? Puruesh: I feel the relationship started during the days when my father preferred that I read newspaper headlines. The one reason that he wanted me to do this, and my siblings also at the same time, was to ensure that we don’t lose out on Urdu as a language. In most cases, while reading those headlines, even though to just do it for my father’s sake, I realized that I understood very little from reading those headlines. That’s what my starting point was. But also at the same time, my mother is an ardent reader of all the novels that she must have, so we used to go to the libraries. My connection with reading books, and reading literature was quite ingrained right from the beginning. How I transformed during my time working as a communications person in different corporate entities was that that translated into reading a lot of research work. From that point, it is then that I actually moved into media, working as a reporter, working in the editorial side, it helped me understand how critical information is, and how important it is to convey the message that people would want to be informed by. That gave me the sense of understanding the work that is important in terms of forming public opinion. But also the energy and the valor required to ensure what you’re taking to the public is something which is of the highest quality in terms of its credibility, in terms of its trustworthiness, and in the process, we in the editorial space are held accountable for what we actually put out there. In a nutshell, that’s what the relationship has been like. Ross: Another perfect description, as well as a futurist media leader, is, a researcher. Puruesh: Yes. Ross: You have this intention for research. That’s worth digging into in terms of what is it that informs how you go about your research. Puruesh: I recently found out that I’m an entrepreneur because I’ve been working for myself for the last 12 years, and you realize, okay, you’ve never labeled yourself as such, but to make sense to the world, you need a certain vocabulary to put out there. There is this driving curiosity, which becomes your motivation to figure out things, things that do not make sense to you. That’s where the element of research comes in. When you cannot make sense of something, then what is the question? That question leads you to all sets of possibilities, whether be it consulting scholars, looking, reading out certain research journals, or whether bringing in your sense into how you put together your ideas. Curiosity leads to looking at what the question is, the question helps you figure out what the potential idea could look like. I feel that’s where the research dimension for me comes in. Ross: When I tried to describe what it is to be a futurist, people say, oh, where’s your data? I say, well, the data is all about the past. That’s one of the interesting things about the futurist role, is you can research and you can find out a lot about the present and the past, but then you have to cast that into some insights which are useful about the future. How do you research to be able to gain insights into the future? If that’s not the bigger question. Puruesh: I am imagining what is the process that I go through to look at… I do a lot of anticipation and imagination exercises, as an individual also, so I want to visualize the space that I feel needs to be created. To do that, a lot of that has to come through your gut intuition. A lot of times we futurists do not want to rely on certain instincts but those are important too. Whether meditation takes you there, whether being spiritual takes you there, it could be religious, it could be any of those aspects that make you rise above the physical plateau and take you at a meta-level. To do that, to arrive at that, you have to be fully conscious of who you are, what you’ve become, and where you’ve been coming from. Once you grasp the true essence of your own identity, it helps you place a little better in terms of the future you want to craft. For that craft to become effective, you need to have those ideas backed by certain research elements, then that research elements, if they’re about the past data, it’s about the data you want to create in the future. Essentially, you’re not even relying on past data, what you’re basically relying on is the vision that you have in the mind. That vision, how do you bring it into reality? What language, and what visuals are required for it, that’s what essentially futurists like ourselves basically do. It’s a very elaborate description. But I feel like that’s what we plug into in terms of the larger discourse, as to where the foresight community is. It may seem practical and vague at this point but wait till things start becoming a regular part of the discourse. Ross: In this case, you’re describing what is often described as normative scenarios, ones where it is what it is you want to happen as opposed to what it is you think could happen, those are different tangents but imagining that, so you have a scenario which you can envisage, which you think is supported by your intuition as to what is possible, as well as desirable. So how do you then marry that with the research you have today and being able to either point to the directions or to see whether that future is possible or plausible, or, how you would bring that to pass? Puruesh: I’ll give you one recent example of the research work that I’m currently involved in, in terms of really understanding the dynamics of trust in Pakistani society and what does that mean in an information ecosystem? The hypothesis was and is that the more you suppress human expression, the more spaces for elements of disinformation or mal-information or misinformation practices can actually take place. Expressions can be in different forms and formats. It could also be what another would believe to be slightly misinformed, let’s just put in, but an expression in itself is a way of… individuals dealing with their own context and their own realities. Now, putting this hypothesis to the test, what are the counter strategies? Although I don’t appreciate the word in itself fully, what are the kinds of strategies for disinformation? To respond to this whole question of what trust looks like in Pakistan came about, you have to understand what those dynamics and underlying factors are to really build. What am I hoping and what I’m envisioning as a desired outcome, is that we need to be able to create an environment where there are more trusting societies as compared to people with a low level of trust, high level of security, safeguarding more of their personal selves. Then how do you become a society where you trust your institution, the people, and the community you’re with? What are the missing links in the process? How does that research plugin, that’s the desired space that I want to take the research in, but as far as what the present condition looks like is that we live in an era, that a lot of people call a post-truth era. As that takes form in the current circumstances, what does that mean? Are the institutions misleading the public, are the politicians spreading… or other source of disinformation? Are there factors within your society that really want to defame individuals or groups of people by really creating elements of mal-information? When you deal with that, when you grapple with that, you need to have certain answers. I feel that to one degree, this research could give you a glimmer of what that answer could look like potentially. Ross: In a minute, I want to dig into your information habits and daily practices. But before we get to that, you’ve been involved in creating this media credibility index. That’s pretty relevant today, as probably much or more than ever, there’s a variety in credibility in the media that we access. Some are more obvious than others, and sometimes very established media are not as credible as we might like them to be. Try to pull this into something useful for individuals, how can individuals be thinking about the credibility of the media that they choose to consume? Puruesh: A lot of that has to do with your biases. What you believe as an individual is credible, basically boils down to what set of values you share with that media entity or media personnel. Although it’s a very transactional relationship in terms of the information we consume, for the individuals to determine what is credible is essentially coming from his/her personal biases. Those biases could be based on certain value sets that they associate with that particular entity. Yes, credibility is very specific to the needs of that individual. But how can we structure that in a meaningful way where we can make that distinction within the cognition that what you feel is what is credible but is not really credible? These are the parameters that make anything or anyone credible enough. When they slowly make that distinction, it becomes part of their mental model too. It’s not replacing, it’s making space in the existing mental model for them to really question what is that they think is credible. That element of doubt, that element of curiosity, what if the other person that I’m not watching or I’m not reading has an alternate view, which could be perhaps a much more logical fact-based view, to create that space requires a lot of effort on developing those frameworks. The media credibility index is that framework that offers an understanding of what is really happening, what is being discussed, who are the players that are discussing those issues, and in terms of how many people are watching those players at the same time. It’s a real mishmash of different indicators put together to make sense of the media environment in the country also. That is something that I feel at an individual level, it’s very personal, and to make space in that personal mind, the language plays a very important part. I cannot be talking to you in Urdu and expecting you to make space for me in your mental model. You do not understand the language, presumably… Ross: I don’t. Puruesh: But had you understood it, perhaps you had paid attention. Attention plays a critical…how do you create that distraction in a language that can be acceptable and palatable to that individual? So not expecting you’re going to hammer the information in but just create enough room so that the attention is paid. Ross: I’d like to switch to your thing, your work. You do a lot of work on a very macro level in terms of futures at a national and international level, very complex topics, and you work on specific research projects, and no doubt have a whole wealth of interests. What does your day in information look like? If there is a typical day, what information sources do you use? Or what times of day do you use those? How do you pull those together to be able to gather your insights? Puruesh: I don’t need insight every day. Insights are very subjected to what I want to do in life and who I want to become. Insights are codependent on the platforms that I’m developing. I’m not going to be consuming everything. The bulk of my information is basically infotainment, memes that make me smile, memes that make me think, it’s extraordinary how humans actually can plug in certain information in a format which is practically less than a second, it’s a GIF, and it makes all the difference, and it’s able to trigger that emotion. A lot of the entertainment is content that I’m able to share with my family and friends. That’s what an average day looks like. Days where I’m engrossed with the researchers that I work with, with the partners that I provide services to, or with the clients, that day particularly boils down to what the ideas are. Much of the time, those ideas are really supplemented, the sort of insight that I would draw in from are leading practitioners in that subject matter. If it’s a foresight, I would be consulting the leading practitioners in that area, based on the sort of framework that I’m using, the methodology, and the technique. For instance, I would look at the evolution of how foresight methods and techniques are evolved: Who are the new constituents? What are the new constituencies that are contributing to the research work that is required to develop new techniques and methods? A lot of journals focusing on foresight futures, journals that are focused on strategic communications or communication just in general, theory and practices. Those are the elements that I’ll be really looking at, training techniques, how do you engage the public? Different market segments? So really just looking at three or four broad areas that are essentially my core strength, and how do I really be on top of these things? A day in life would be just memes, entertainment, and content. Professionally, it will basically be research and new books that would interest those sorts of work areas that I’m looking into. But yes, essentially, that would be it. A lot of movies, otherwise. When I feel like I’m brain-dead, I would watch something on repeat, so that I don’t have to think. A particular area that would interest me in terms of really complementing how I do my work is neuroscience; that really captures my interest. I would really like to learn about how different diseases of the mind are being dealt with, whether it be mental health or whether it be a purely physical form of dementia, Alzheimer’s, ADHD of the mind, all these elements would really interest me because that means that I live in a space where information is abundant, and attention, if it’s a resource and if I get like 10-15 minutes, how do I capture it? Ross: I’m interested in the memes piece. There are more memes than people on the planet, and always flowing around. I think it’s, yes, some lovely ways of thinking about this whole as a living entity, all of these. Meme was created by Richard Dawkins as this analogy of the gene, so yes, these propagate, some successfully, some others not, a meme can be inspiring, it can be painful, it can educate, it can take many forms, it can make us laugh, of course, which is a lot of what they are, but in laughter, there’s always a nugget of some truth. Puruesh: I feel memes are very context-dependent. What I may find funny, perhaps you wouldn’t, and vice versa. The context is shaped by our own personal experiences. One particular meme in at least South Asia would probably resonate more with South Asian than compared to people living in the Western end. You have that distinction where memes can be very context-dependent. And, with that, the smart part that I find quite interesting is how uniquely dots connect for certain people. There’s this one meme where a dog has been stuck in a herd of sheep, and that’s a meme for suffocation, if you look at it, it has a very deep meaning to it, and yet it’s just an image. It has a whole language attached to it. Ross: It evokes things. That leads to my question, which is, how do memes change us? How do they shape our minds? Let’s say there’s somebody that says, alright, I’m only going to read serious things, and another person that gets involved in a world of memes, and they follow their curiosity, and so on, how does spending time with these kinds of memes shape your mind or your outlook or your perspectives or the way you think about the world? Do you have any reflections on that? Puruesh: From a personal point of view, I feel it relaxes you a little. It creates empathy within yourself. That empathy comes from the fact that you have somehow raised the level of understanding within yourself for the people that you interact with. You’re able to … Ross: Weave human truths in there? Puruesh: Yes. I feel that you develop a far more meaningful human connection through it also. Because the one who shares it, and the one who reshares it, it shows that there is some level of association happening there. There is some shared experience that is there. Those shared experiences help you understand, oh, there’s someone else who thinks just like I think, or who feels just the way I feel. That creates a whole space in your mind to allow a different perspective. Otherwise, if you’re stuck in hard research work, I would have very little empathy if I’m going through sets of data from different variables, forecasting those data sets. There is very little human connection in that whole process. Ross: So then memes are a tool for social cohesion? Puruesh: I feel that it could be both, it could be for social cohesion, and social unrest, depending on what the political agenda is. It can go both ways. Ross: Cohesion within subsets perhaps? Puruesh: Yes. Absolutely. Ross: Do you ever create memes? Puruesh: I don’t. I’m a consumer. I consume. Ross: Calling back to as a leading futurist, what are some of the insights you would share with people around good practices to be able to have the breadth of understanding, to be able to gain insights into a rapidly changing world? Puruesh: I think to understand charge is very important, and not just to talk about it. You talk about things because you see things, you hear about them, but to truly understand them, you have to be amongst people; you have to be amongst people who are participating in that process to connect the dots, whether they understand that this is not only changing them but changing other people around them. The more you understand that foresight is a very human-dependent phenomenon. The more you integrate them into your practice, the less you make that effort, the more frustrating your scenarios are going to become, and the more frustrating your outlook is going to be. My outlook on the whole phenomenon is the more connected and participative you’re going to become in your foresight practices, that’s what I’ve done in Pakistan, the more useful the effort is, the more meaning it would give. How they recognize change, how you recognize change, and what gaps are there, to understand those, whether it’s an information gap or a knowledge gap, you need to be among those people to create that comprehension. Ross: So it’s foresight through social engagement rather than studying the data. Puruesh: Oh. Absolutely. Data just gives you a linear view of one thing, what makes it complex is the human factor. That’s what gives you a much more nuanced outlook. Ross: So then a lot of your work is founded on your social interactions, just the conversation and the ideas. As you say, how people are changing, I think that’s one of the most things, people need to perceive change but they also need to experience change, and their changing in the changing world. Puruesh: Yes. But you see, a lot of people do not really have that. We’re lucky in the sense that we’ve acquired that level of understanding and education through our experience and exposure to help us do that. But not many people have the ability to do that. An engineer who’s been taught engineering his whole life and that’s the only… for them to really look at things that are changing, it’s really difficult, it’s really hard for them to do that. You cannot blame them. They just don’t have those frameworks, those techniques, that capability that would make that distinction for them. For them, a broken lamp is, I’m going to fix this lamp. For us, a broken lamp would be something completely different. It’s the context. Would we need this lamp in the next week or not? If we don’t need it, do we still need the light? Our question becomes bigger and our context is very different. Ross: To round out, any words or any recommendations, tips, ideas, or things to share with the audience that can help them in a world awash with information? Puruesh: Learn to understand your own true feelings and understand why you’re motivated to act in a certain manner and whether is that good for the community that you’re living in. Ross: That’s fantastic. It’s like, know yourself. You need to know yourself in order to know what information is relevant to you at the starting point but I love what you’re saying about knowing your community as well. Because we all live in communities of whatever kind, and that’s what makes the information relevant or not relevant to us. Puruesh: Sure. Ross: Fantastic, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you, Puruesh, thanks much for your insights and your time. Puruesh: Thank you, Ross. The post Puruesh Chaudhary on research processes, information ecosystems, trusting societies, and contextual memes (Ep50) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“I think a lot of times we want to shortcut and jump to the middle or jump to the end. But there’s so much to be learned by taking a breath and stepping back and going: What am I really trying to do here? Whether it’s going for a walk, or painting or cooking or gardening, give yourself the space.” – Stephanie Barnes About Stephanie Barnes Stephanie is founder and chief chaos organiser of Entelechy, a global network that works with organisations to solve problems in creative and innovative ways. She has a background in knowledge management IT and accounting, and is also a successful artist.  She now uses art as a catalyst for helping people do things differently, and empowering individuals, teams and organisations to resolve complex business challenges. Website: Entelechy Portfolio: Stephanie Barnes Art LinkedIn: Stephanie Barnes Twitter: Stephanie Barnes What you will learn How is art and knowledge management connected? (02:16) How can we bring art into our organisation’s learning practices? (07:18) How do scribble drawings open your mind to form new connections? (10:37) Will these creative practices work even for those in non-artistic professions? (13:04)  How can we improve our ability to pick what is worth casting our attention to? (15:59) What are individual knowledge management practices to enhance our knowledge creation? (20:02) How are mind maps superior for organising information (22:39) What are radical practices that you can start or experiment on? (28:32) Resources Knowledge Management Keith Johnstone John Hagel Albert Einstein Mind Maps Dragon Naturally Speaking Transcript Ross Dawson: Stephanie it’s wonderful to be talking to you today. Stephanie Barnes: Thank you, Ross, I’m so looking forward to catching up with you. Ross: So, we encountered each other a very long time ago and what I think were called knowledge management circles at the time, though, I always thought of you as a learning person more than knowledge management, but now you have turned your attention to art. And so I’d love to hear about that journey. Stephanie: Oh, yeah, arts is a long way from my undergrad in accounting and my MBA in IT that’s for sure. Painting or art came I’m gonna say relatively late in life because it came out of a workshop I was in in 2011, a leadership workshop. But we painted as one of the leadership activities to develop our leadership and I like: Oh, this is fun. How do I do more of this? And I was already self-employed by that point, and had been for, I don’t know, eight years or so. It’s hard to shift your focus when everybody knows you for one thing. And so it became, how do I bring this into the knowledge management consulting that I was doing? I started just doing little playful, creative interventions, 5 to 10 minutes scribble drawings, and this kind of thing in my workshops. I notice right away, the shift in the energy and the engagement of people from these say stupid little scribble drawings that people throw in the garbage on the way out. But they were so much more excited and engaged in the material. And I got much better responses and more thoughtful responses. And I just kind of went, there’s something here. And so I just kept pulling that thread and doing the research when I had time and talking to other people that are in that intersection. And that’s one of the great things about moving to Berlin in 2015 was I got connected to a whole bunch more people here in Europe that are in that space. And I painted. I went out the next day after this workshop and bought paint and have painted ever since. So it informs everything: it informs my life, my knowledge management consulting, yeah, it’s part of who I am. Ross: So this is still part of knowledge management for you. So describe how that is part of knowledge management, or how that evokes the frame of mind for people. How is that connected? Stephanie: Sure, I call it Radical Knowledge Management. First off, because it’s about going back to the roots of how we learn. In as much as I didn’t think of myself as a learning person when we originally met, I have definitely become a learning person through this process. And so Radical KM and bringing creativity and arts into knowledge management is about learning and reinvigorating how we learn, and going back to those roots. As children we were playful and creative, and we do all these crazy things, because we don’t know we’re not supposed to. All of that curiosity and iteration in that fearlessness around failure gets educated out of us, and we become very fearful and now it’s got to be the right answer. We got to have the right answer. I’ve worked with so many clients that they’re like, just tell us what the right answer is and we’ll do that. But you have to discover what the right answer is because the right answer just depends on the organisation and the situation and so many factors. So bringing art and painting, and I love to when I have longer workshops, we can do painting and it really brings that curiosity back and and enlivens people in and helps them engage with things in a different way and in a more meaningful way, and helps them ask different questions about their work about their life sometimes. The painting and the creativity comes in on the knowledge creation side and that learning side of things. It’s good fun and has really opened people’s eyes up to the things that we’ve lost. Ross: Yes, indeed. So I love the quote from Keith Johnstone, commonly described as the godfather of improvisational theatre saying that children are not undeveloped adults, but adults are atrophied children. And I’ve experienced and seen educational institutions beat out lots of things out of us, including our creativity. But now, of course, we live in a world where we require lifelong learning, we all need to learn for all of our lives. As John Hagel puts it, the successful organisations are the ones that have not have scalable efficiency, but the ones that have scalable learning. So given the context of the of given around art being an enabler of learning, how do we bring that into our own learning and that of organisations? Stephanie: Well, for me, it’s about helping get focus on what’s important, and giving some clarity around what I should be learning, what I need to learn, where are the blocks, what are the mindset blocks about? Oh, I can’t do this, so why can’t you do this? This is what I talked about with my Radical KM stuff: People are like “oh but what if you do this?” Or “what if the organisation is a bunch of lawyers or scientists, and they’re never gonna let me do scribble drawings with them?” I’m like, they’re human beings, give them some credit here. We all need this space, we all need to re energise and help looking at things differently. I mean, Einstein played the violin, right to give himself space and help reflect on things and look at things differently. So if Einstein was doing it, surely the rest of us could give it a try. It really helps give that focus. Tapping into the intuition, the things that they’re maybe afraid to say, and it gives them some confidence to say, well, this came up, or I thought of this, while I was doing the scribble drawing. I’ve talked about scribble drawings all the time because I’ve had people have real breakthroughs on problems that they were struggling with. And yet to look at them, the scribble drawing takes five minutes, and you literally scribble on a piece of paper, and you can throw it out at the end. They’re nothing, they’re not going to hang in the Louvre, this is not the point of, of any of this work. But people have these insights and go: “Oh, I’ve been struggling with this problem for four months and couldn’t figure it out. After five minutes of doing a scribble drawing, I’ve got a solution.” This is the power of this stuff. Ross: So one of the I suppose central powers of capabilities I see in both thriving and overload creating value in this world is synthesis, how it is we pulled together the many disparate strands, the ideas into something which is coherent, and part of the thing is, how do we get into that state of mind? Well, how is it that we create the conditions, whereby those, you know, we have the aha moments, where we connect the dots and so, so it sounds like what you’re describing here is you’re creating the conditions for, you know, the unprepared mind to become a prepared mind, or to crystallise some of these connections. Stephanie: Absolutely. It’s a process that I’ve used myself, and use myself. The, one of the best examples and longest examples was, was something that happened in the early stages of the pandemic a couple of years ago. There’s so much going on, and there’s so much, I don’t know, for lack of a better word, chaos, and uncertainty, and, and I have been self employed for just 19 years now, so 17 years then. How do I deal with this, you know, how do I adopt my consulting practice for this? I ended up painting my consulting practice. And when I started it I’ll paint you know, it’ll take me two or three weeks, I’ll create a painting, I’ll get some insights, you know, I’ll be done. And I’ll be off to the races again, with what I should do with my consulting practice. The reality was, I ended up painting five paintings and it took me till Christmas. So it took me from September 1, like first to September till Christmas, so three and a half months. But I got all these insights. That’s where the name “Radical Knowledge Management” came out of how I talked about it, how I put the pieces together. All of that came out of painting the process. And I journaled the whole time because I journal and I support people or advocate for people to journal as they paint and keep track of all the things that they’re thinking about, because the mind doesn’t like to rest. So pay attention to it and write it down. And there’s all these insights. When I started calling it Radical KM, people really engaged with that differently. And yet, I was aware of other people and other Radical things out there and like, how are people going to just think I’m copying? Then I started to get this reaction from people in this engagement from people I’m like, okay, doesn’t matter if they’re speaking to them. It makes sense, because it’s about going back to our roots and listening to our intuition and relearning that creativity. That three and a half months of painting my consulting practice was really transformative and helped me get focused on how to talk about things. Ross: I absolutely agree creativity is essential to all of us, and something which we can nurture which brings massive benefits. But there are quite a few people whose roles means that they are deeply immersed in information, lawyers, or macro investors, or researchers or so on. So you know, there is an irreducible amount of research and reading and finding the right sources. So how can this state of mind or these practices help us to be able to find what’s relevant to be able to incorporate that into our thinking as, as easily or readily as possible? Stephanie: I think it helps us tap into our intuition, and helps us to ask the question. So having those kinds of roles, those research data intensive roles, they’re important. But what’s more important is knowing the right questions to ask, and being curious. Not just dismissing things when you see an anomaly in that data just going “oh well it’s an anomaly. I’m just going to keep going”, “It’s a one off, it’s not worth looking at” and having the curiosity go, “oh wait, that’s different than I expected?” Why? Is this just a mistake in the data, maybe it is some kind of fluke in the testing or the data collection? but maybe there’s something here that’s different than I thought and it’s worth investigating and pulling that thread and seeing where it goes. So the creativity work comes in to help us be curious and help us not just dismiss things because they don’t match what we were expecting. And so we kind of force fit them to match or ignore them. Because… Ross: Building openness? Stephanie: …building openness, building curiosity, connecting to our intuition. Ross: I certainly believe that openness is a trait that is very much favoured in the current environment. If we’re closed to new ideas and information that’s not going to serve us very well when the world is changing fast. If it’s changing fast, and it’s actually probably useful to be open. So whether it’s our practice or anything else to enable us to do that, that’s incredibly useful, In terms of intuition being able to guide us, of course, we have a limited amount of information where one of the fundamental choices we have almost at every moment is “is this useful?” Do I put my attention to this or do I not put my attention to this? And I suppose this has to be informed by understanding what it is you want, what your purpose or direction is. So how can we nurture or improve our ability to discern to make, I suppose, pick between what is worth casting our attention to? Stephanie: This is the thing that I like to work with people on when we do the painting in the workshops. I say hold the tubes of paint in your hand. Pay attention to how that tube of red paint feels versus the tube of black paint. Stand there, don’t rush, just breathe into it, it’s okay. It becomes meditative in a way. And so it’s about paying attention to how things feel in our bodies, not in our heads. There’s so much noise of people and ourselves saying: “this is stupid to stand here with a tube of paint to my hand, this is ridiculous, I’m gonna go make a cup of coffee.” When you quiet your mind and start to listen, it’s like: Wait, I want to use the red one and not the black or I want to use a blue one or the purple one and not the, whatever the other colours. And so tapping into that and listening to that and learning how that feels with paint, and then transferring that over to when we’re doing the research and going: Hope there’s something about the citation, this author, the title of the article, or the author’s names, there’s something there, I mean, ultimately, we’re all connected, right? So pay attention to those little serendipitous happenings and go: Look, that words come up again, I feel like I should pay attention to this. This is the fifth time I’ve seen this word in the last few days, the universe is trying to tell me something. Ross: It sounds in a way like being in tune with yourself. Stephanie: Absolutely. Ross: One of the great faculties we need to nurture is saying do I know myself as in saying, well, it is the red that I feel like, or it is this idea, or it is this information or whatever, as opposed to being too routine which is just all happening at a conscious or habitual level. Stephanie: Or because somebody else told us, because our parents told us, or our partner told us, or one of our colleagues told us, so we just do it because that’s what they said to do. It takes the decision making out of our hands. Yet it’s really important to know ourselves and to know what’s important. Our parents certainly when we were children have our best interests at heart. But we only know what’s inside of us and as a starting point with our parents and their guidance. But this is part of becoming an adult and listening to what’s important to ourselves, to myself, and going from there, and that’s useful. From all these other people and things and articles, all these things outside of me are important data points, but they’re just data points, and I need to be in touch with myself, and what’s important to me and execute on that, move forward on that way. Ross: So knowledge management, you know, has always implicitly organisational knowledge management, and, and then the term personal knowledge meant, as we came up with say, as an individual, how do you manage knowledge and I know manage is not a great word to stick in there. But let’s say knowledge and individuals, and you’re working with knowledge management, and you’ve taken this Radical, new approach. So, let’s say somebody says, “All right, I want to enhance my ability to create knowledge.” What are some of the recommendations you would give? What are the things that you would suggest to them? What are the pathways that they can take? Stephanie: I always say, get in touch with what’s important to you, what’s your purpose. You’re allowed to talk about purpose and I never really thought about purpose when I started on this journey. I go back to when I finished my MBA in the late 90s. That was something that I did because everybody said I should do it but it wasn’t something that I really wanted to do. It seemed to be a means to an end certainly but it was because I had all these voices. So I started to think after that about: “Hold on here, what do I really want for myself in my life” and I just got curious. This is when I started really playing with creativity and different things. If I want to create knowledge for me, it’s about getting in touch with what I want, and then that helps me focus on what kind of knowledge do I want to do, what topic, what areas, what things interest me. The creativity really helps me refine what’s important to me, what I find interesting and has other benefits, certainly too. I would start with that, like getting in touch with me, myself. My experience has been the more clarity you get around, well the more clarity I’ve gotten around what it is that I want, then the opportunities come up. I meet the people, I make the connections, I get invited to write a journal article, I get invited to do a project, whatever it is, these opportunities come up. So there’s a synchronicity about it, the more in touch and focus that I get the, the more things just kind of fall into place. Ross: So let’s say you are innovation intensive, you have a clarity around your purpose, you’re scanning lots of information. Is there any particular way that helps in terms of being able to capture that? To be able to draw connections? To be able to make lots of information into, you know, dive in really developing your knowledge? And what are some of the, I suppose, techniques or practices, I suppose to, to really develop knowledge from the information you have, and from the purpose, which, as you say, must be the starting point. Stephanie: The practice, the other stuff aside, I like is mind maps honestly. I like to go through the bibliographies and references on papers that I have, or books that I’ve found interesting and useful and go: Well, this book that I found really useful, has some really good references. This is one of the things I pay a lot more attention now to than I did, even when I did my MBA. Who are these people referencing and what can I learn from them and go back to that source and create the mind maps. I have so many mind maps. I like the mind maps, because I can just put things down and organise it all later. When I write lists of things, inevitably, I get stuff that I want to have in two places, or I want to show them the connection. So making some kind of point form list just doesn’t ever work. When I discovered mind maps, that was a big, big deal. I can colour code them and do all kinds of things with the technology that way, because I do use technology and don’t draw them by hand. Ross: You do mind maps on screens? Stephanie: Yeah on my laptop or my iPad. Ross: How do you start? Do you have clarity on what is the central node in the mind map when you begin? Or does that evolve? Stephanie: I definitely start with something, it does have a tendency to evolve. So I try to start with the question that I’m starting with or the topic. It does evolve, sometimes I go back and edit it, or I create a new one because it goes off in a completely unexpected direction. Or I just start a new mindmap because one of the branches just goes crazy. So just move it all onto another mind map and start over again, or start round two. That helps, shifting things around and going: “Hang on this, this belongs over here.” Or I need to connect to that because they’re right in the right branches, but there’s a connection between the two. So I like to be able to do that. Some of my mind maps get a little hairy, But then it’s so easy to go: okay, so now I’ve got this great mind map and all these things. And I’m going to write an article, I’m going to write a book, I’m going to create that knowledge, create a webinar or create a presentation, whatever it is, I’m going to do with it. I’ve got all the framework built out. I wrote my third Radical KM article this way. I had started with a mind map. I was going to write something like a 500 word blog post. And I end up with this mind map and I thought, you know I’m just going to dictate this article because the voice, the translation, the AI translation tools have gotten way better than they were 10 years ago. I wrote my first book dictated into Dragon Naturally Speaking, and you had to train it and all that stuff. But now, you know, there’s a couple of different tools that I use the AI translation tool, there’s no training involved, they do a really good job. So I started to start with his mind map, and just dictate this and I’ll have the 500 word article, and I’ll do the little bit of editing that I need to do. By the time I got done, I had I think it was 2500 words and I like: So much for my blog post, who might be interested in publishing this as an article? And I ended up getting it published, because the journal I contacted had an author cancel out, they weren’t gonna be able to publish. And so they were actually kind of glad that I had sort of spontaneously generated this article by accident. I say that it’s by accident, because it started out as it was supposed to be a blog post. So yeah, but so the AI and the mind map and yeah, it’s, it’s a dangerous thing. Ross: That’s fantastic. I’m personally looking for those enablers of crystallising content. You have taken lots of ideas, have lots of ideas, but it’s getting those out. And I think that’s wonderful that it works for you. But I think that combination, be able to capture ideas in a mind map, and be able to talk and capture some of the ideas and pull those together. That sounds like a wonderful approach. Stephanie: Yeah that’s gonna be my next book. Ross: I look forward to that! So to round out from this frame of, you know, what’s your I suppose this Radical approach, which you’re bringing, what are any, I suppose, what are some of your own practices, or that you would suggest to people to potentially try out that they may find useful? I think what you’ve just talked about, and using the mind map, and the transcription software is wonderful. So what are any other practices or even just ways of thinking that you think that people could sort of try that on to see whether it works for them? Stephanie: I think a lot of times we want to shortcut and jump to the middle or jump to the end. But there’s so much to be learned by taking a breath and stepping back and going: What am I really trying to do here? And whether it’s going for a walk, or painting or cooking or gardening, give yourself the space. We’re so engulfed in this I have to be busy and I have to look busy to everybody else, and I have to be doing something all the time. We’re human beings, we need a bit of space to breathe, to relax, to question, to really reflect. Reflection is so important. So don’t try and shortcut it. And don’t go: I’m just going to do this because this is the way I’ve always done it. No, take a step back. What makes sense? The world has changed, we have changed, maybe our decisions need to change too and do things differently. Give yourself permission to take that step back and ask what’s really important. Ross: That’s fantastic. Advice. I think we all should do exactly what you said. So where can people find more about your work? Stephanie: The easiest thing maybe is RadicalKM.com. short and easy. They can find me on LinkedIn for sure. My my LinkedIn the end of my LinkedIn profile is Stephanie A Barnes. So either places is good. And certainly you can find me from the web page on LinkedIn. I’m really active or fairly active on LinkedIn with posting and sharing and commenting and things. So that’s definitely a good place to connect to me. Ross: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time and your insights Stephanie Stephanie: Oh, you’re welcome. It was fun. Thanks, Ross. The post Stephanie Barnes on radical knowledge management, the power of art, tapping intuition, and building curiosity (Ep49) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“It’s more than the Great Resignation, it’s more than the Great Reset, it’s more than Quiet Quitting, this is all about reimagining. It’s an opportunity to create something better, to be better than we were before.” – Bob Johansen About Bob Johansen Bob is Distinguished Fellow and former CEO at the Institute for the Future. He has worked as a professional futurist for nearly 50 years, including in the 1970s exploring the social and organizational implications of ARPANET, which evolved to become what we call the Internet. He is a frequent keynote speaker and the author or co-author of 12 books, including his latest title Office Shock: Creating Better Futures for Working and Living. LinkedIn: Bob Johansen Book: Office Shock (get a 30% discount. Use the code “OFFSHOCK” at checkout) What you will learn What is the office verse? (02:56) Where might we prefer physical or remote collaboration in information value creation? (06:28) What are the factors that drive information productivity? (10:37) Are there design factors for organisations which drive the ways they create value? (13:23)  How can we augment ourselves to create better organisations? (18:36) How can we design the work within organisations to be pleasant and avoid overload? (23:39) What are some practices to create insightful books and guidance for leaders (26:59) What are practices to engage with information throughout the day ?(31:52) Resources BorgWarner WalMart Joseph Press Future-back 37signals ChatGPT Institute for the Future DALL-E 2 Midjourney Google Glass ARPANET Blue Zones Project Transcript Ross Dawson: Bob, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Bob Johansen: Great to be here. Ross: You have a book, just out, Office Shock, which looks at how offices are changing and what they will become. Perhaps you can just give us the thesis in a minute, we can dig into how they can help us to thrive on overload. Bob: Sure. Office Shock is an abrupt, unsettling change in how, when, where, and even why, even why we work. Office Shock has been invoked, it has been scattering us as a result of COVID. But it’s much deeper than that and it’s much more than just “when do we go back to the office?” We think this is a historic opportunity to rethink just how work happens and how work is integrated with our private lives. Ross: One of the ways in which offices are shifting which you describe in the book is the “office verse” which is beyond any particular place, I understand. Bob: Yes, definitely. The term metaverse has become quite a pop culture term. Those of us in Silicon Valley realize that one big corporation has tried to own the term metaverse. We’ve decided to coin our own word, the officeverse, and it’s actually a sequence. We think of the office as the place, the buildings, officing as the process, the verb, and officeverse as the way it all fits together, the anytime-anyplace mix of how we work, and indeed how we thrive. I love the title of your book in terms of Thriving on Overload. The notion of the officeverse is an attempt to create, and it’s not just an attempt, it’s now a requirement to create ways of working anytime, anyplace. We’re futurists, our hope is to create a work environment that’s better than we’ve ever seen. Ross: I always think that an organization is a set of individuals working together, as you point out in the book as well, with a common purpose and working to be able to achieve that. That’s the context. The officeverse is the space for an organization with an aligned purpose and to be able to create something. Is that the case? Is the officeverse where an organization resides? Bob: That’s right. Yes. It’s an interesting way to phrase it, where an organization resides, it’s where individuals reside as well, and it’s where we work and live. The opportunity that’s presented now is a historic opportunity to rethink all the basics, where going into COVID, for the past 50 years, there have been efforts at remote work and terms like telecommuting and telework, and all these different options, then, of course, the internet made the connection possible, and the technologies, including the one we’re using right now, they didn’t just happen with COVID, they were developed over a 50 year period and it took roughly 50 years to be an overnight success. The overnight success was forced by COVID. We were scattered from offices, it wasn’t an option, it was forced. Luckily, the technology was good enough to function in a surprisingly productive way. Even though there was very little preparation for this, it was pretty productive for most organizations. It was actually very productive for some individuals. It was also very unfair. For some individuals that didn’t have a good place to work at home or had little kids around or elders they were caring for, it wasn’t a good thing. But for many people, it was a good thing. It’s more than the Great Resignation, it’s more than the Great Reset, it’s more than Quiet Quitting, this is all about reimagining. It’s an opportunity to create something better, to be better than we were before. Ross: There are some work environments that you do require to be physically there, the classic assembly line which Ford used to run or there are some people that do need to be on-site for a nuclear power plant. But most people are dealing with information. This can happen physically where you’re next to each other and you’re bouncing ideas around, you may be assisted with the trust or the other things which give you that ability to throw around ideas better, but a lot of that information can also be done virtually. In that context of physical versus remote and this idea of information being the element which we are using to be able to create value, what are the differences or where might we prefer a physical or remote location in that collaborative information value creation? Bob: Yes. Great question. To begin with, you’re exactly right, that some things just have to happen in person. When I’m talking to the CEO of BorgWarner, who’s one of our clients, the world’s leading supplier of auto parts, 160 factories around the world, we refer to that as the “factoryverse” because the center of the world for BorgWarner is not the office, the center of the world is the factory. We also work for Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. When I talk to their CEO, I refer to this as the “retailverse” because the center of the world for them is the store and the next most important is the distribution center, so we think of that as the “retailverse.” Now to come back to the offices, in the officeverse, what we know from research is that in-person meetings, could be at offices or other places. In-person meetings are best for orientation, trust building, renewal, early-stage creativity, and culture building, particularly for young people. When you’re young, you need to travel, you need to visit places, you need to be there in person, cross-generational mentoring is very powerful. In-person is really important. That’s why we should have offices, but we don’t need them all the time, we don’t need them nine to five, and we don’t need them for many other things. One of the big questions, when I am introducing the Office Shock book to CEOs, I just talked to one last week, I said what I just said to you about the importance of in-person meetings for orientation, trust building, renewal, and early-stage creativity, he looked around and he said, our office isn’t that good for any of those. If that’s the reality, you gotta rethink your offices. My co-author in this book is Joseph Press, who is a Ph.D. in architecture from MIT. He was a workplace architect early in his career and became a digital transformation expert later in his career. Architecture is so important. Office shock is a shock for commercial real estate. It’s a shock, that says we’ve got to rethink the offices we do have, and almost certainly if you think future-back, which is what we’re doing, almost certainly, we’re going to have fewer traditional offices. Good riddance, they were not that good, to begin with. Almost certainly, we’re going to have fewer. The offices we do have are going to be different. They’re going to be designed to facilitate early-stage creativity, orientation, trust-building, and the like. The negative scenario is that CEOs pull people back into the office, and they go into their offices, close the door and have zoom meetings. That’s the worst scenario. Ross: There are of course, many substantial organizations that are completely virtual, or remote-first, whatever terminology they use, in which case, hopefully, they’re enabling good places to work, wherever they are, be there at home or co-working spaces, what it may be. But this becomes then a purely information-based organization, you’re dealing with technologies to collaborate on documents, to throw around ideas to be able to create outputs, value-generating software or other things, so what are the factors that drive what I describe as information productivity? The information being more productive in this completely virtual context? Bob: I’m not sure how it’s going to match out in terms of completely virtual, I think most environments are going to be mixed. We’ve got a map in the book about this territory from the office building to the factory to the retail store to the home office to distributed. It really is a question of which medium is good for what. Leaders and organizations and individuals are going to have to be really graceful in all the different media options. As they’re trying to figure out how to thrive in this information-rich environment, they’re going to have to be able to choose when do we meet in person, and it isn’t always going to be at the office. There’s this very traditional company we studied in the Midwest, which is pretty much gone all virtual. But three times a year, they bring people into the home center, they call it the homecoming, and they don’t always even meet in offices, sometimes they meet in resorts or hotels or whatever to try to encourage the orientation and the trust building and the renewal. The real challenge is, what’s the mix, what’s the right mix, and that mix can help people thrive in an information-rich environment, can help them be more productive in an information-rich environment, and can also help them avoid being overloaded in an information-rich environment. Ross: Was that 37signals? Bob: I wasn’t thinking of them. This was another company that I can’t name at this point. But it’s a large, very conservative company that would surprise you. Ross: Okay, interesting. So then the times when it comes together are those of trust-making, of building the collaboration, being able to do the things you can’t do virtually? Bob: Yes. Ross: But a lot of the work does happen virtually, and that is when these information-based flows. How is it that we can maximize the productivity of organizations beyond the aspects of bringing together the culture, are there design factors for organizations or how they are configured which will drive the ways they can create value? Bob: Yes, definitely. We’re just learning those ways. I think it’s going to be a mix of in-person and virtual. I’m a public speaker, and I used to be on the road all the time pre-COVID. Now, I’m still a public speaker; I still write books but I’m inviting people into my study. The metaphor here is, I want to be better than if I was on stage so I’m inviting people into my study in a way that I couldn’t if I was on stage. I’ve got VR headsets up there if they want to shift into VR. I’ve got a story around everything in my study. I’ve got a local videographer I work with to produce videos for pre-watching and post-watch. I can be interactive in ways I couldn’t be if I was on stage. Everybody has to figure out for themselves how to best do that and how to do what their intent is. We talk in the book a lot about purpose and you do in your book too. What we say is, the question that many people are asking today is when do we go back to the office? That’s a legitimate question. But for us, it’s number six in a list of seven questions. The first question is, why do you want an office at all? What’s the purpose of the office? As I said earlier, there are good reasons to meet in person but that should be a question asked, not an assumption made. That’s what I’m talking about, you have to begin with the purpose. Then in the book Office Shock, we’ve got seven spectrums of choice, which we present in order. The first question is, why do you want an office at all? The second is, what are the outcomes you’re seeking? The third is, the most important outcome over the next decade is climate; if we don’t deal with the climate issue, we’re out of the game in some serious ways; so we focus on climate in the third spectrum. Then we ask the question of belonging. As you were asking Ross, what are the ways you build a corporate culture? How do you create a sense of belonging? Traditional offices weren’t that good at that. If you walked into a traditional office, everybody looked alike and talked alike and dressed alike, it’s not facing up to the reality of the next decade which is diversity will be everywhere. We’re going to be in a diverse world. That’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity. We ask in the question, how can we be purposely different to create a sense of belonging no matter how different we are? Then we ask the question of augmentation, number five on our scale. What we’re saying is that if you look future-back 10 years from now, we’ll all be augmented, and the only question is, how will we be augmented? I don’t like the term artificial intelligence. I think that’s quite misleading. We use in the book augmented intelligence. The key question is, what are the things that humans do best? What do we want to keep for ourselves? Then what are the places where we need to be augmented in? I’m a writer, I write books, and this is my 13th book, I realized that if I’m going to be a big-time writer 10 years from now, I’ve got to be augmented. We use GPT-3, the new chatbot, that was just released a couple of weeks ago. We used an earlier version as we wrote that chapter on augmentation. Writers are going to have to be augmented, it’s just going to be a cost of entry. Then we face the question of place and time, when do we work? Where do we work? What’s the mix? Then finally, the seventh spectrum is agility. How do we hold it all together? How do we animate our account activity in a way that’s more future-ready? Ross: Take me into a couple of those. One of them is augmentation. Bob: Yes. Ross: One of the spectrums you have in the book is around human to technology, I’d like to think there are many facets or dimensions to how we can augment ourselves. Again, taking this information perspective, humans are information-processing animals, and machines in various guises do the same. In combination, they can do that in a whole variety of, as you say, augmented ways. What are some of the ways in which you see that we may augment ourselves individually or collectively to be able to create more effective organizations? Bob: That all begins again with purpose. What’s the purpose? What’s your own personal purpose? What’s your own organizational purpose? Then you ask, what are the capabilities of augmentation? For example, we did a custom forecast a couple of years ago for the world’s largest rental equipment company, United Rentals. They rent large-scale equipment for constructing big buildings and other big projects. If you imagine construction workers 10 years from now, they’ll all be augmented in some way. Exoskeletons will be practical, you see this, particularly in Japan, where you have an aging society, and you want people to be able to work longer without getting hurt. Some of these exoskeletons for construction workers in Japan are just elegant. They’re really nicely designed. The best ones we have in the US are in the military. They’re more for helping injured warriors recover. Sometimes they’re used on the battlefield too. But it depends on your purpose. Then you ask, well, what are the capabilities? In information companies and for knowledge workers, we have to ask questions like, how can we augment the things that we’re doing? The release of the ChatGPT three weeks ago, that’s a very significant signal. We talk about signals at the Institute for the Future. We refer to the Gibson quote, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”. GPT-3, the Chatbot is a signal of how we’ll be able to interact with augmented resources for information to create pretty good things. We’ve got a group at Institute for the Future now, we’re the longest-running futures think tank in the world so we’re always questioning our methodology. We’re methodologically agnostic. We’ve got a group at the institute using ChatGPT to do what we do. Basically, we’re pushing ourselves and saying: “Ok, what would it take to have a chatbot do a custom forecast, like what we do at the institute? What are the things we do best? What are the things we may be able to have a chatbot help us do, or even replace us in certain areas?” I think all of us in the information business have to be thinking about that. The other thing I’m interested in is DALL-E, Midjourney, and the other texts of visualization. We’ve got a visualization in the new book, Office Shock, about the officeverse. We recruited young artists from all around the world to help us tell the stories of these seven spectrums of choice. We weren’t happy with what we were coming up with, with human artists. We pulled in Midjourney. My colleague, Joseph, who is an architect and an artist, worked with Midjourney to create that image. I think all of us need to be asking that kind of very serious questioning of our own ability and saying: “What do we do best? What do computers do best?” Thinking future-back really helps you do that. That’s a really important element of this book, where most of the talk about offices now is based on the present. But the present is so noisy. If you think future-back, it just gives you a much fresher view. In this case, the fresh view is what do we do best as humans and what do computers do best. How can we partner to become augmented? Because in a real sense for us, 10 years from now, we’re all going to be cyborgs. The only question is, what’s the mix? In a real sense, we’ve already begun that. You and I both wear glasses, 10 years from now, those are going to be souped-up glasses. Google Glass failed, but it failed in an interesting way. Ross: One way you can think of the offices as an architecture within which we are literal or metaphorical architecture in which we are working. One of the functions and dysfunctions of those is meetings. There are certainly many organizations where particularly in the last few years has been an excess of meetings, this whole back-to-back meeting syndrome, and a whole array of other ways in which we’re working, which contributes to overload. The overload is of information, overload of meetings, overload can be simply people are allocated too much work. How is it that we can design the work within organizations, wherever that may take place, so that we can avoid, as much as possible, this feeling of overload to be able to be functional, to be able to work in an environment where we have the feeling of going beyond overwhelmed to when we are comfortable, and where we can operate in a place, like, this is a work environment where I’m comfortable and happy, and not overwhelmed by everything is being thrown at me? Bob: It’s a great question. I think meetings are really critical. We’ve got to figure out a way to do them better. I’m a sociologist by training. I’ve studied group dynamics my whole career, and a lot of that has been studying group dynamics through electronic media. My Ph.D. is from Northwestern and I was there as the internet was just being born in the days of the ARPANET. One of the big realizations is meetings or video conference meetings, it’s not a clean, independent variable. If it was a clean, independent variable, then we could say, well, video conferencing is good for this, or in-person meetings are good for that. The big challenge is the quality of the meetings. It’s rarely too many meetings. It’s badly-run meetings. That’s really a key element. It could be frequency, but more often, it’s quality. Leaders have to be great at running meetings. There are good meetings, there are lousy meetings, and lousy meetings lead to information overload. Well-run meetings mean you’re able to manage complex information much better. The key question to me is not how many meetings, it’s how good are they. It’s a little similar: you don’t hear a lot of people complaining about Zoom or complaining about Microsoft Teams. I’m sure there’s some relevance to those critiques, but mostly what they’re talking about is badly-run Zoom meetings or badly-run Teams meetings, it’s not the medium, or PowerPoint, you say death by PowerPoint, well, that’s lousy PowerPoints. That’s the fault of the author, the fault of the designer. We have to unpack those things a little more I think and get into not just the medium, but the quality of the use. Ross: I’d like to turn to you, Bob. You have been looking at the future for a very long time. You are the author of any number of books. I’ve got at least one on my bookshelves around here. I would love to hear in a nutshell, what are some of your practices for thriving on overload, for taking the universe of information that you’re exposed to, to create insightful books and guidance for the leaders you speak to, and your other information outputs? Bob: Sure, I’m happy to do that. I’ve thought a lot about this. I love what I do. That’s probably the beginning. The research that came out during COVID by the Blue Zones project, I thought was really instructive. What they found was that purpose-driven people are happier, they’re healthier, and they live up to seven years longer. People who work at purpose-driven companies are happier, healthier, and they live up to 14 years longer. Purpose-driven companies tend to perform better. I’m a purpose-driven person. I became focused on being a futurist in my 20s when I was a Ph.D. student. I went to Divinity School before that, and that was actually where I was introduced to futures thinking. This is very early. Later in life, I got to interview the management guru, Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker, at that time he was 94 years old, told us at that time, the first half of your life, do many different things and work with many different kinds of people, because you don’t know who you are; the second half of your life, it’s pretty optimistic, he was 94, and he was still going strong, so roughly 50, by the time you’re age 50, you try to figure out what your clarity is. Then you only work with things you’re passionate about and only work with people you love to work with. I was really lucky. I found what I wanted to do in my 20s. When I joined the Institute for the Future, I joined a community of people I love to work with. The earlier you can find that, the better. I think one of the big personal guides for me is to stay focused on purpose. The other thing and this is more unique to futurists, I focus my life 10 years ahead. I am not that interested in the present. The present is really noisy. I’m not an expert in the present. Fortunately, in my career, I’ve got people around me who take care of the present for me. I’ve got a calendaring assistant, a human, I’ve got a research assistant, and I’ve got 50 colleagues, who are constantly filtering for me and constantly looking out for me. Then periodically, I’ve got co-authors. Of my 13 books, I think half of them were co-authored, so there’s always that as another filter. The essence to me is the principle. You want to be very clear about where you’re going but very flexible about how you get there. I’m very clear that I’m focused 10 years ahead. I want to write books. I have chosen to live on an island. During COVID, I moved to Bainbridge Island from Silicon Valley. I’m looking right out at the Puget Sound. I’ve chosen to live in a natural, beautiful environment to figure out how to be better than when I was on stage as a way of pacing myself at this age and continuing to do what I love to do. But everybody needs to do that at some stage. What is your clarity? Then how do you go about pursuing that clarity with flexibility and with humility? Then you build in your values. I value kindness, I’m really seeking out people who are not only good at what they do, they’re doing good things. Ross: That’s fantastic. I think a lot of people just get lost in information about the present, which is, as you say, probably a very little interested person like you thinking about 10-year’s future but probably very little value to them as well. Bob: I’m not saying the present is unimportant. I’m just saying I’m not good at it. I’m really good at thinking 10 years ahead. Ross: You’ve chosen not to be good because you’ve got other priorities. Just in a nutshell, what are your daily information habits in terms of sources, types of content, formats, digestion, or flowing, what are some of the ways in which you choose to engage with information throughout the day? Bob: Let me just get real personal on this. I think sleep is really important. I sleep more than a lot of people. I sleep maybe eight or nine, sometimes 10 hours a night. But I wake up in the middle of the night, and I’ve always got a journal by myself. One of the ways I filter information is by understanding what keeps me up at night. What keeps me up tonight is often the most profound. Usually, when I’m writing a book, when I’m in the middle of writing a book, I wake up with three or four pages of notes, a few kernels of which are actually useful; not everything is useful in the middle of the night. But I really believe in that notion of sleep. I also believe in the more ancient concept of second sleep, that you do the first sleep, then you pause, and that’s where the big ideas happen to me, in the middle of the first sleep and the second sleep. I think that’s really important. A lot of the high-powered people I work with don’t sleep nearly as much as I do. I think sleeping is really important. That’s the first thing. Then I think having people around you who serve as filters, who look for different things than you do, the criteria I use for who I work with is I want to work with people who are different than me in an interesting way. By interesting, that links to my purpose, so people who help me understand the world 10 years out working back those are the people I want to hang around with. I filter out everybody else. I’m not very social, I’m more introverted than extroverted. I don’t spend a lot of time at parties. I don’t spend a lot of time without reach. I’m quite selective. I’m new to this Island as of two years ago. It’s a very rich Island. There are artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and amazing people, we’re just a ferry ride from Seattle. What I’ve done is volunteered for groups that I’m interested in, like, there’s a group here doing Bainbridge Island 2035, and a group called Bainbridge Prepares, that’s all about preparation for wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like. There’s a group called the Bainbridge Island Land Trust, and I’ve volunteered. I don’t do boards, I’ve tried boards of directors, I just find those not a good use of my time, but I volunteer for them to bring in foresight and to do things. Then I select from that, people I would like to get to know, and I ask if they’d like to go for a walk with me. I’ve developed a handful of really good relationships by selectively meeting people. I think that’s an important part of information overload. They’ve now become my sources of the kind of information that I want to pay attention to. I don’t make systematic filtering use of a lot of online tools. I have colleagues who do, and I’m close to them. But again, I think that’s partly an age, a skill, and a career decision thing. It works for me, but I’ve got resources that a lot of people don’t have. Ross: That’s fantastic. I absolutely agree with the sleep thing. I’m a big believer in sleep. Despite the 4 AM mantra, many of the most successful people do sleep a lot. I think that’s a wonderful description of the specifics of how it is you’re building what I describe as personal information networks, of course, they’re far more than that. It is a community, and personal connection, but they are information networks. Bob: It is community. I think you’re right. The other thing I didn’t mention but I should is exercise. I think exercise is way more important than most people think it is. I was a college athlete. I went to college on a basketball scholarship and played Division One at the University of Illinois. I wasn’t great, but I was good enough to get a scholarship. I wasn’t good enough to be a pro. It meant that I had to come up with a new identity when I went to graduate school. But I do think physical exercise and having some kind of exercise routine is critical to every great thinker I know. Yet again, it’s often overlooked. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Bob. Office Shock is an important and insightful book. I think as a leader, you should use it as a resource to get an insight into how they will create the officeverse to achieve their purposes in the organization. Thank you for your insights. It’s been a great pleasure talking to you. Bob: Thank you, Ross. I really appreciate your book and your effort to help people learn to thrive. We’re both in the thrive business. The post Bob Johansen on the officeverse, augmented intelligence, thinking future-back, and people as filters (Ep48) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“It’s kind of a “sleight-of-head” exercise if you will. Because again, we tend to get very narrowly focused in our way of thinking. I’m sure you’ve heard of confirmation bias and availability bias. We tend to think in very narrow paths, and you need to be able to literally kickstart your head in different directions and this is one creative way to do that.” – Chuck Frey About Chuck Frey Chuck is a PR and online marketing expert who focuses on innovation, creativity, business strategy and visual thinking. He is the founder and publisher of The Mind Mapping Software Blog, and the author of books including Up Your Impact and Creativity Hacks. Website: Chuck Frey Blog: Mind Mapping Software Medium: Chuck Frey LinkedIn: Chuck Frey Twitter: Chuck Frey Newsletter: Catalyst Newsletter Books: Power Tips and Strategies for Mind Mapping Software Up Your Impact Resources:  Second Brain for Content Creators Course The Ultimate Guide to Visual Note-Taking Tools FAST Framework for Effective Mind Mapping Course   What you will learn What are the origins of mind mapping software? (02:20) What are ways to make mind mapping as useful and valuable as possible? (05:11) Other than mind maps, what are good alternative visual tools? (07:21) What are the most interesting recent developments in thinking tools? (09:43)  How do you build up a set of tools to use which works for you? (12:04) What is a note? Should it be a sentence? A link? A phrase or an idea? (13:52) What are ways to enhance serendipity thinking for the ideas that we find (17:04) What is the process to write compelling content on topics outside your area of expertise? (20:52) How can you connect ideas to create a narrative? (22:56) What are ways to keep focused attention for long periods of time (25:25) What are daily practices to improve your information gathering (27:44) Resources Success Magazine Miro Mural Evernote Notion Obsidian SparkNotes Napkin ContextMinds AYOA formerly iMindMap Roam Evernote Notion MindMeister Second Brain for Content Creators by Matt Giaro ThinkerToys by Michael Michalco Transcript Ross Dawson: Chuck, delighted to have you on the show. Chuck Frey: I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for the invite. Ross: We have a lot to learn from you. We’ll try to dig in and get as much from you as we can. We want to start with your backstories. How did you get to this? In 2007, you set up the mind mapping software blog, and that may not have been the beginning. Is this something from when you were a child that you were looking at and thinking of? How did you come to these thinking tools, visual concept mapping, and all of these ways of approaching this? Chuck: Probably in the late 90s, I came across a handheld brainstorming tool in Success Magazine of all places. I’ll try and make this as quick of a story as I can, because I know we have a lot of ground to cover. I didn’t even know that there was such a thing. I reached out to the developer of it, who was from Chicago, and started doing some publicity for him to help promote it. It opened up a whole world to me of tools and resources and methods to think differently, to think better. It seemed to me that even 20 years ago, the pace of change was accelerating and there was a need for people to know more about this. My background is in PR and marketing. I had the opportunity to join a trade association to help put them on the web. Eventually, I took what I learned and built my own website focused on creativity and innovation, and just happened to be in the right place at the right time, that grew like crazy, to the point where it was the world’s largest site focused on that. I spent a lot of time on tools, thinking tools. One part of that was mind mapping software, which seemed to be growing rapidly, but nobody was covering it full-time. That splintered off from the innovation tools site. Eventually, innovation tools went away. There’s a bad joint venture involved there. That’s a story for another day. As we were talking before we got on this call, these tools are very powerful, they’re really useful to knowledge workers who need to be able to gather, organize, distill and share information, and doing that in a visual way helps you connect the dots, helps you to see what you’re missing, helps you to get clarity quicker, make better decisions, and to think at a higher level. Since then, that’s expanded to include other types of visual thinking tools. Since COVID, these sticky note-based whiteboard tools, they were around before that, but they took off overnight because suddenly teams could not get access to their traditional whiteboards anymore, and this was a valuable substitute. As you know note-taking has taken off quite a bit and there’s a whole new sub-genre of that, that are visual note-taking tools where you basically have combined the card base note with an infinite canvas. Now once again, you have the ability to connect the dots and see things in relationship to each other that weren’t possible before. Ross: Let’s start with mind mapping. As you say what you cover is far broader than that. What are some of the tips or the ways in which somebody who is already minding mapping could enhance their practices? What are some of the ways to make mind mapping as useful and valuable as possible? Chuck: I actually have a four-step framework that I’ve promoted, and I have a course that I call “The Fast Framework”. You basically need to start out with the right foundation, actually having a goal for what you want that map to be. One of the challenges comes in that not everybody knows or understands mind maps. As you create a map with all these branches, you understand the context and the thinking behind it but if somebody else is viewing it, if you’ve shared it with them, they don’t have that. You really have to think through it very carefully, what’s the objective of it? What are you sharing? How are you going to make it clear to others? Fortunately, as a thinking tool, it works the way your brain does by association so you can very quickly build out branches and cover a lot of areas. But again, you have to have a goal. Are you planning a project? Are you trying to make a decision? Are you simply brainstorming and then trying to evaluate all the ideas you’ve come up with? And then from there, step back almost like a painter would from the canvas and look at a high level of what you’ve created, figure out what’s missing, what needs to be added to or clarified. Then there are some things that you can do to enhance the map that a lot of people don’t even bother with; things like icons or symbols, task information, tagging, and things that enable you to visually classify your information. Then as you’re putting this together, the first arrangement of your topics shouldn’t be the end result, you can move things around, it gives you a great deal of freedom to rearrange your map, and to play what-if with the topics. The interesting thing is, when you move a topic to a new location on the map, it is suddenly surrounded by a constellation of other topics, and you’re able to look at it in a different context, and often that spurs additional ideas. Those are just some of the things you can do to improve a map. Ross: Fantastic. It points to three major visual diagramming tools, mind mapping, concept mapping, and systems diagrams, each with a different frame for how those connections are made on the page. Other than mind maps, what else would you point to are useful visual tools? Chuck: Concept mapping, you mentioned. A mind map is very hierarchical. It’s got a central topic, and then branches that come out from it. It’s almost like a visual outline like you did in school. But not all information is aligned with that model. A concept map enables you to show more complex relationships where some topic might have multiple parents or multiple children. You can add notes onto those connector lines, which creates some contexts. I mentioned earlier, the sticky note-based whiteboard tools that have become so popular, like Miro and Mural, that really enable teams either in real-time or asynchronously to brainstorm, to start working through a thinking process, to do the planning. Again, it’s a very flexible canvas, you can do a lot of things with it. There are some very popular note-taking tools that have grown to millions and millions of users and billions in valuations, things like Evernote and Notion. But now there’s a whole sub-genre of tools that’s come into play, just in the last year or two, that I call visual note-taking tools where you take the card base note, and now you place it within an infinite canvas once again so you can start moving things around and seeing your ideas in relationship with each other and connect them either implicitly with lines or with tags. I get really excited about that because it helps you to think better, to think more creatively, and to take advantage of serendipity. One of the things that I’m particularly excited about recently, and I wrote about on my blog is the canvas that has been added to Obsidian. Even before that, the Graph view enables you to see notes that are somehow related, but you may not have connected them yet with backlinks. But you can filter that view to a very high degree and again, see connections between these SparkNotes, these germs of ideas that you can join together and create new things out of. Ross: You mentioned Obsidian, which is one of the current generations of thinking tools. You said around 20 years ago, you were interested in thinking tools and you just did a post on your newsletter recently saying that the time of the thinking tools has come, which I very much agree with, where suddenly there’s this whole lot of energy and recognition that it’s something we need to do, and a whole bunch of tools are emerging. What do you see of most interest in the thinking tools landscape at the moment? What’s emerging? What are people taking notice of? Chuck: In the last year one thing in particular that I’ve seen that really caught my attention was the introduction of AI to these tools. In the visual note-taking space, there’s one called Napkin, in that as you’re working on one note, it is displaying related notes in the periphery of this canvas. They could be notes that you have explicitly linked to that note, but not necessarily. The AI is doing some semantic analysis and displaying things to you that it thinks may be related that you might want to see. From what I understand when you get up above say 150 or 200 notes, the magic starts to happen, and you start to see things that you go wow, I put that in here a year ago, and I completely forgot it was there but it’s really useful to me now. In the concept mapping realm, there’s a tool called ContextMinds that has added AI to it. What it does is as you add topics to this map, there’s a panel on the bottom of the screen where it displays related words and concepts. You can drag and drop those into your map. It doesn’t force you to take these things on, and it doesn’t draw the map for you but it gives you the choice to decide what’s related, and what else should be added. Then in the mind mapping realm, there’s a tool called AYOA, it used to be called iMindMap, it’s been around for a long time, but it transitioned to being a web-based tool and the developers have taken it in some new directions, and they have added AI as well. In this case, if you’ve got a topic in your map, you can tell the AI tool to add five topics, and it’ll create new sub-branches with suggested words on it, again, based on semantic analysis. Ross: One question is we’ve got all these wonderful arrays of tools available, these are just a handful, the ones you’ve mentioned. How does somebody choose what set of tools they use? What’s the process of being able to say, I’ll this tool, or I’ll use these in combination? Would somebody use one of the ones you’ve mentioned plus an Obsidian, Roam, Evernote, or Notion? How do you build up a set of tools to use which works for you? Chuck: Two starting points. Number one, what is it you need to get done? Are you writing? Are you planning? Are you trying to brainstorm things? Are you trying to make decisions? Secondly, what’s your work style? Does it tend to be more visual or more text-based? In the mind mapping space there has been a great divide for as long as I can remember of people who think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and then a whole other group of people who think it’s frivolous and their documents and spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks work just fine, thank you very much. But at some point, people realize if I want to make a bigger impact, I need to think in some different ways than I’m used to doing because I’m wearing these invisible blinders on my thinking and if I want to reach that next level, I really need to step up my game. I would start out with something simple. In the mind mapping space, I always recommend one of the web-based tools like MindMeister, where for a very low monthly cost, you can experiment. You can’t really know before you go into it if it’s the right tool, you have to try it, and see if it fits in with your workflow and the way you like to think. There’s a little bit of trial and error, to be honest, but that’s the way to find out what’s going to work best for you. Ross: Fantastic. A couple of things I want to dig back into. One is this idea of the notes. You mentioned 150 notes, whatever. What’s the nature of those notes? Would that be a sentence? Would that be a link? Would that be a phrase or an idea? Of course, it could be any or all of those. But what are your suggestions as to the nature of one of these atomic units that are connected in these platforms? Chuck: I think it’s a very individual thing. Again, serendipity is important. I’m the poster child for this. I’ve been using Evernote for over 10 years. I probably have 6000 plus notes in it. But it ends up being I call it a sarcophagus: ideas go there to die. I’m working full-time. I’m trying to do these things on the side, I don’t have a lot of spare time to write and do these other projects. I haven’t done as much linking and searching back into my archives and finding these nuggets of gold as I should. I’ve been using it right along as a writing platform, I found it really useful in the sense that I have an iPhone, and I use Siri to dictate ideas, I find those can hit me anytime. I learned a long time ago that it’s wise to capture those immediately, even if it’s just a germ of an idea. Then I can iteratively go back into Evernote and build those up. I’ve been toying around with the idea of moving to Obsidian but I didn’t understand how it would benefit me, particularly as a content creator. I came across a course recently by a guy named Matt Giaro, called Second Brain for Content Creators, that really opened my eyes to what was possible, particularly with Graph view. The whole idea of working in atomic notes, just taking things down to this basic level so that you’ve got building blocks literally like digital Lego blocks that you can combine in different ways to build up content more quickly than sitting down with a blank note and trying to come up with something and then doing a Google search to try and find more bits and pieces to join with it. If you’re doing this right, if you’re really passionate about an area and you’ve been doing this collection or curation, and It’s a lightweight system, it doesn’t require a lot of rigor. But again, if you’ve been building up this repository of ideas, you can then dip into them and accelerate your writing process by quite a bit and improve it, coming up with ideas that aren’t just a regurgitation of what everybody else is writing about, but with your own unique perspective. Ross: Absolutely. You mentioned the word serendipity a couple of times, which is also one of my favorite ideas and concepts. For example, the AI tools you mentioned, facilitate some serendipity, they make connections you might not see. But more generally, just thinking back as a thinking tool or a thinking process, what are ways that we can enhance the serendipity of our thinking of the ideas that we find? How do we connect them? What are some of the things that we can do? Chuck: In my opinion, it’s very much a mindset thing. I try and cultivate what I call an inside-out look. As I consume things, I hear things, I listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, or read a newsletter, I’m always asking myself, what does this mean? How can I use it? How does it fit in with the rest of what I understand about this topic? Does it challenge it? Is this something I should save? Just having your radar up looking for things, you’d be surprised at how much you come in contact daily with the things that might be somehow tangentially related to something you’re trying to get done or takes your thinking in a new direction, or helps you come up with a new angle on something you’re trying to write about. Ross: One of the things I like to do is find different seeds: starting somewhere you would normally start and often a different direction. It’s like: can you find a person or a topic or an idea or a source which is outside, what you normally wouldn’t find? Then use that as a starting point to see where you stumble across that can be relevant to you. Chuck: One of the things that I’ve been pretty rigorous about over the years is collecting creative thinking techniques. There’s one book I recommend to your audience in particular called Thinkertoys by Michael Michalco. It’s a fun book. It’s not a dry academic read, it’s delightful. It catalogs all these thinking methods that he has come across, and that he has used in his consulting. I’ll just share with you one very briefly. You talked about a different starting point, one of them is called Board of Directors: Imagine that you’re standing in front of a group of the smartest people living or dead, famous or not, that somehow influence your thinking, say, you’ve got Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and a former college professor sitting in front of you, and you briefly explain what your challenges are. Then you wait for their advice. Based on their background, and the way they think, and a lot of this is very public if they’re famous people, there have been books written, and you imagine what advice they would give you and how to solve that problem. It’s kind of a “sleight-of-head” exercise if you will. Because again, we tend to get very narrowly focused in our way of thinking. I’m sure you’ve heard of confirmation bias and availability bias. We tend to think in very narrow paths, and you need to be able to literally kickstart your head in different directions and this is one creative way to do that. Ross: I love that phrase “sleight-of-head.” I absolutely agree. Since I was a child, I felt that most people are living their lives with blinkers on. It’s natural, we’ve got things to get on with. We implicitly put our blinkers on and don’t look around. Part of the challenge is to make sure that we take the blinkers off from time to time and look from side to side or outside what’s just right in front of us. Chuck: It’s ironic, Ross. You write about dealing with overload, we have had to create these blinders just to be able to survive, we have to filter out what’s coming at us by necessity. Ross: Just coming back to content creation. Your profession is creating compelling content. You mentioned this before, I’d like to hear about how to use all of these wonderful tools or approaches or frameworks to write better. What does that flow look like for you in terms of being able to write some compelling content, perhaps particularly on something which is outside your area of expertise? Chuck: I have to put my professional hat on here because in the world of content marketing and content strategy as a starting point, we’re all so inundated with information. Step number one is to deeply understand your audience. What are they struggling with? What are their pain points? What keeps them up at night? What are some of their aspirational goals? You can build personas around that, just do a Google search on audience personas and you’ll find a wealth of information out there on how to do this, it’s not hard. But you’re really trying to get into their head so that you can start writing things that help them solve problems, help them get things done, help them remove blocks from their life, or whatever they’re trying to do. You really need to focus on that first. Then the real practical things like figuring out where they’re gathered? Where are they talking? Are they in communities? Do some listening to what they’re talking about, and then start to focus content development around those issues. Maybe you survey them, there are all sorts of ways to get that input like one-on-one discussions with people. I’ve always believed that people like you who are podcasting, you’re talking to so many brilliant people, and getting so many perspectives that you get this incredible generalist view of the world that is so multifaceted just by having come in contact and deep conversations with these folks. Ross: Once you’ve got that framing as who you’re trying to serve and how you’re trying to serve them, as you’re doing your research, let’s say, it’s a new area, as you’re doing research, how do you piece together all of those things that you discover? And how do those fit together to be able to draw a narrative? One of the interesting things is that writing is linear. It starts and it continues and keeps on till it ends, presuming people read it that way whereas ideas and the landscapes we’re talking about, there are connections all over the place. How do you take that whole rich lattice of connections of ideas as you pull them together and all of the connections and frames to create a linear piece of writing? Chuck: Usually, creating the personas and understanding what their journey is as they try and get things done naturally suggests topics to write about. I’m a big believer in either mind mapping if it’s a bigger project, or just doing a traditional outline of what I want to write just to create some constraints on it. Because otherwise, as you said, you could go in a million different directions. You don’t want to overwrite, you want to be fairly concise, because people don’t have much time to read, and frankly if you don’t hook them and keep their attention, you’re going to lose them pretty quickly. Again, it’s part of this filtering mechanism. I don’t want to invest a lot of time in this if I don’t see a payoff. That’s a good way to keep the writing focused. Within that, you can be fairly creative. It also helps to constrain the research because you can really go down a rabbit hole as you know, doing Google searches and things like that. But it helps you to make some decisions about what’s relevant to the story you’re trying to tell, what’s not, what’s within scope, and what’s outside of scope. Maybe in the process, you find a few new ideas that you just jot some notes on and put them away in your system for future exploration, but it helps to keep the writing focused. We live in a day and age that if you’re a content creator, the tools that you’re using to publish also provide a whole toolset of engagement. You really need to take the time to look at what people are connecting with, what are they sharing, what are they liking, what are they reacting to, commenting on, and that can give you a sense of if you’re actually meeting those needs, and maybe where you need to go deeper and spend some more time focusing on with your content. Ross: Are there ways in which you practice focused deep work or focused attention or awareness? Do you meditate? Are there other ways in which you try to keep focused attention for periods? Chuck: It comes naturally to me because I’ve been writing daily for decades professionally and for my own projects. In terms of my diet of information, newsletters play a big part, I know you’ve talked to other guests about source selection, and for me too, that plays a big role. There are certain things I’m looking for around creativity, change, technology, visual thinking, and note-taking. I subscribe to many newsletters, but then a fairly quickly cull them down. I’m looking for value, and I’m looking for insights that I can share or build upon. If I’m not seeing that, I unsubscribe. As I said, I’m always in the habit of capturing ideas as they come to me. I just came across something this week that blew my mind. I’m focused a lot on content creation but I was always wondering if a course like the one I talked about earlier could have use for professional content creators, and content marketers working in corporations. Right now, the course that I referred to earlier is mainly focused on individual creators who are trying to write on Medium, Substack, or wherever. I came across a subject, I’m trying to think of what it was called. The whole idea is that task-based work isn’t the only way to organize anymore, that there’s actually a content-based approach to gathering information and getting work projects done, which I found really fascinating because I never really thought about connecting the two. Apparently, task-based work has reached a point where there are some limitations to it, and the whole concept of teams, permanent teams working together for long periods of time, isn’t as flexible as it needs to be anymore. It’s opening up a whole new rabbit hole for me to go down to understand what people are7 saying about this and how can I connect it to what I’m trying to do. Ross: Pulling back to this idea of Thriving on Overload, you have a wealth of insight and advice, but just want to distill, what are some of the things that you do, that you think that others might benefit from in bringing into their daily practices? Chuck: I’m always looking for a better way, I guess that’s the first thing that comes to mind. As I said, I realized I had some limitations in my Evernote approach. It was serving me adequately. But again, I have limited time to work on things, and I need to figure out how to create better ideas. Mind mapping has been around for over 20 years. I hate to say it, but I wouldn’t say it’s dying but its popularity as a business tool is starting to wane a bit. I’m at a point where I’ve reached a certain plateau with my audience in terms of views and newsletter subscribers, and I’m trying to figure out how to build it up to the next level with better ideas. I’m trying to improve my information gathering, my writing, curation, all these things, to try and bring more value to my readers and hopefully, to a bigger audience of people. Ross: I think that the most critical thing of all is that whatever you do, you can improve. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about what they do and some of them are amazing, including you, but I think that everyone can improve, I can improve, that’s the critical thing, is that whatever you’re doing, you need to be able to think about and try things to work out what it is you can do better. Chuck: Again, we’re real habitual. There usually is some trigger event that convinces people to need to do something differently. Maybe they missed out on a promotion, or they got laid off from a job, or something just didn’t work out right for them, or something they tried failed, and it’s like, well, maybe I need to take a look at this from some different perspectives and different ways of doing things and maybe some different tools to help me do things more efficiently in a more focused way. Ross: You have a wealth of resources that you share with the world. That will all be in the show notes. But where are the best places for people to find you and your work? Chuck: Mind Mapping Software Blog is one. It’s mindmappingsoftwareblog.com. I also write on Medium. You can just look me up by name and find my writings there. About a year ago, I started up a newsletter called CATALYST. Again, every other week, one idea, not fairly concise maybe about six or eight paragraphs, an idea to help creators and entrepreneurs think better, think more creatively and consider new perspectives. In some cases, I’m just sharing my own observations. In a lot of cases, I come across ideas that just blow me away. Somebody’s got a new metaphor for looking at the world, and I share that in my own interpretation to that. You can find that on my LinkedIn. I also publish it to Medium. Those are the main places right now where you can find me. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Chuck. It’s been a great pleasure. Chuck: Likewise, thanks for inviting me. The post Chuck Frey on visual mapping, creative thinking techniques, choosing tools, and sleight of head (Ep47) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“You need to recognize that technology is not going to solve that feeling of overwhelm that I think is honestly intrinsic to being a human being in an era where the world comes at us faster than we are wired for. If you try to solve it all with meditation, you are going to miss your spreadsheet. If you try to solve it all with spreadsheets, you’re probably not going to heal your existential angst.” – Alexandra Samuel About Alexandra Samuel Alexandra is an authority on remote work and the digital workplace, a speaker and a data journalist. She is the co-author of Remote, Inc: How To Thrive at Work….Wherever You Are and the author of the Work Smarter series of books published by HBR Press. Website: Alexandra Samuel Medium: Alexandra Samuel LinkedIn: Alexandra Samuel Facebook: Alexandra Samuel Twitter: Alexandra Samuel Books: Remote, Inc.: How To Thrive At Work…Wherever You Are Work Smarter, Rule Your Email Work Smarter With Social Media Work Smarter With Evernote Work Smarter With LinkedIn Work Smarter With Twitter and Hootsuite What you will learn How organisations can set structures for their people to thrive on overload (02:11) How to block time for private focus or sharing information with others for synthesis? (06:55) How to make an overwhelming amount of information effective in any role (10:03) Should organising information be taught as a foundational skill? (13:17)  How to use tools to develop your knowledge with new ideas, information, and concepts (18:27) What are habits or practices for getting information that enhances your work? (24:28) How do we shift our responses to the feeling that we are not keeping up or FOMO? (29:16) Why building a toolkit to seize opportunities is crucial to thriving on overload (33:23) Resources Zoom Slack  Microsoft Teams Matt Mullenweg Automattic Sprinklr Evernote Coda Zotero EndNote Scrivener Zotfile Duo-Tang Feedly Google News Search Superhuman Transcript Ross Dawson: Alexandra, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Alexandra Samuel: Thank you so much for inviting me. Ross: Overload today is a pretty omnipresent issue and the shift to hybrid has played an important role in that. I’d love to get your insights in an organisational context, people working all over the place, how organisations set up the structures or processes, or whatever it is that gives people the space where they can thrive or at least do well in this world of overload. Alexandra: I hear from so many people who have really struggled with overload since that overnight shift to remote work at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been a real flashback for me because I started working remotely before it was even really a known thing. In mid-1998, I moved to Vancouver, and I started working for a company in Toronto, and it was a super weird thing to do. I didn’t go completely crazy but I did drive myself into a pretty intense depression because I was so isolated and I was working all the time to try and notionally keep up with these folks in Toronto who, of course, were waking up three hours earlier than me. I think some version of that has really been what a lot of people have gone through over the pandemic, the sense that you’re supposed to be at your desk by 9 am but if you don’t get to your desk until 9 am, you’re never going to have a chance to answer your emails, because you’re going to be on calls all day from nine until five, and often booked into multiple calls in the same window. Then people are Slacking you at the same time, and you’re getting emails at the same time, and you’re supposed to do these deliverables for your clients. Then five o’clock comes around, and if you’re lucky, your meetings end at five, and then your workday begins and it sucks, it’s totally exhausting. Not to mention the fact that it’s incredibly depressing and isolating because if you are living that pace at home, you’re not seeing other humans, and for good or bad, we are wired to be around other human beings and most of us pretty get cranky when we don’t see them. It really is up to organisations to reset expectations and norms and to, first and foremost, reduce the volume of meetings and the normalisation of nine-to-five video calls, which has had the effect of pushing so much of our work into after-hours. That comes down to making a mental shift we should have made at the beginning of the pandemic, or arguably 20 years before the pandemic when we discovered the miracle of email, the miracle of texting, and document collaboration, all of these tools have made meanings far less necessary because we do have other ways of working together. But we are so used to working like it’s 1964, the only way to get things done is by putting people in a room together that we never really stopped to look and ask “Does this conversation need to be a meeting or can I just send you a Google Doc and get your comments?” The pandemic should have been the moment to reflect on that but when everything else turned upside down, keeping our cadence of meetings was one way to preserve normalcy. Then, of course, there were even more meetings, because the stuff that used to get dealt with serendipitously in the hallway, suddenly had to be a zoom call as well. The bottom line is if people are in meetings more than four hours a day, and I’m pulling that a little randomly, but think about it, if you’re on Zoom calls more than four or five hours a day, there really is no time to get other work done. It’s exhausting. There’s no time for email. You’re probably not making the best use of those four or five hours of Zoom calls either frankly, that’s just a lot more focused, exhausting interaction than most people are capable of in the context of the video. The one question that needs to be normalised in every organisation is, does this need to be a meeting? And even in a way before that, it’s just get away from the idea that a meeting is a default, and start with the assumption that everything is going to be handled asynchronously. Our normal way of working is to exchange documents, exchange Slack messages, exchange Teams messages, exchange emails, and if we need a meeting, it’s for a very specific reason, and we have a list of reasons in our heads and even better yet in some kind of shared documentation of what actually warrants a meeting. Ross: Matt Mullenweg of Automattic, of course, has famously talked about the shift to asynchronous. That is the nirvana organisation. But beyond that, I think that’s almost the first step is to say, alright, let’s not just do back-to-back meetings, that’s probably a good start, and give people some space in between the meetings, but what are any specific ways you can give blocks of time for focus or to share information load by allocating that amongst different team members, what are any more specific things beyond asynchronous we can do to make this work for individuals? Alexandra: The knowledge sharing you allude to is definitely table stakes. If I describe a need for an internal wiki, I guess I’m dating myself, it’s not what we call these things anymore. Every organisation that has a significant volume of remote employees or where a large number of employees spend a lot of their time communicating online, which is, at this point, most organisations that are in the service, and even a lot of product businesses, any organisation like that needs to start with a question of how do we create information flows that are indexable and searchable? It shouldn’t have to be that everything you know goes into a wiki and you have to figure out where it belongs and you have to make sure your document is in the right part of the shared drive, all of that is great but most people aren’t librarians and there can be sincere disagreements even between good librarians, so a system of knowledge sharing that depends on everybody putting their stuff in the right place with the right keywords and then also depends on people going and looking for the right stuff with the right keywords is pretty fragile. It’s a lot more realistic to think about tools like group messaging, like Teams and Slack where just by adding a hashtag or even just by exchanging your message on a public channel as opposed to a direct message, you create indexable information that becomes available to the rest of the team in perpetuity. I will say one of the things that have been transformational in my own productivity in the past few years, I’ve been very fortunate to have a long-running working relationship with a company called Sprinkler, and to be part of their internal Slack channels. At a certain point, I was several years into my working relationship when somebody on the team I was working with pointed out that the question I just asked her she didn’t know the answer to but I could probably find an answer to in a particular channel that I was then added to. That has become my go-to source for all kinds of questions that come up in the course of my work with them. I think that’s a pretty typical and realistic scenario for how people can find information. If other people have asked the question in the past, you shouldn’t need to ask it, you should be able to go and find where it’s already been asked. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to ask a question that other people haven’t asked if you’re working in a large organisation. Ross: I’d like to switch gears a bit, perhaps we can still incorporate the organisational themes, to your practices. Amongst other things, you’re an expert, researcher, and author. You have a lot of information, you’re working with your clients, which gives you even more information. I’d like to get a sense, perhaps dig in saying how do you take that overwhelming amount of information to be able to be effective in your role? What’s the starting point for you? Alexandra: There are a couple of things. First of all, when I was 11, my mother literally bribed me to take typing in an adult secretarial school. I sat and cried every single day as I sat at my typewriter, but she was right, by the age of 12, I was a fluent typist. I’ve been typing for almost 40 years now. It sounds like a trivial thing but I’m amazed when I am a faster typist than almost anybody I know, and it is actually a transformational practice because if you type as quickly as you think, and to be honest, I think pretty quickly as well, then it becomes possible to capture everything. The other part of that is I’m like an incorrigible voice reminder dictator, everybody I know makes fun of me because I’ll be walking down the street, and I’ll be like, Oh, remind me to order gum today at 7 pm, or somebody will say something, I’ll say, Oh, just a second, remind me to talk to Ross about why information overload is a problem for so many people. I run my whole life actually off of reminders now. What’s really effective about that is it feeds thoughts and information back to me at a moment when it’s actionable and if it isn’t, as it turns out, actionable, if, at seven o’clock, I’m actually in the middle of eating dinner, I have the whole cascade of snoozing features and places to send things so that might bounce back to me for a couple of goes before I can put it somewhere to find it again. But eventually, that idea goes into my list of ideas to think about turning into stories or that idea goes into the structured documents/spreadsheet where I keep information related to data journalism. I have several repositories that I have maintained in different forms for several years. I’ve been an Evernote user for 15 years now I realise and almost all my random stuff goes in Evernote. I’ve been a religious user of a platform called Coda for about three years, I like to describe it as Google docs on steroids, it lets you combine spreadsheet functionality and document functionality, and to essentially build your own apps. I have built coded documents around every single major aspect of my life, some of them in incredible depth. That means that even though I am in 18 different directions and working in many different organisations and contexts, there is a home base for each aspect of my life. Ross: I’d like to dig in a moment as to how you use Evernote in particular. But are these skills we should be teaching individuals? Should we be teaching people how to use Coda or giving them some templates or saying, choose Evernote or whatever note-taking systems, and here are some ways to tag or structure that? Are these some foundational skills that people haven’t been taught? Alexandra: Yes, 100%. It’s embarrassing what happens in my household, my 19-year-old has not only taken to using Coda but has become a Coda evangelist, and knows that the surest way to curry favour with Mom is to come home from their day at art school and explain how they’ve gotten a whole bunch of art students to start using Coda today to plan their projects. And my 16-year-old, bless his heart, last year got really tired of the repetitiveness of his math assignments and just built a series of calculators in Coda to do his math homework for him. Every time I see them do something like this, I think like, who the heck knows? Is he ever going to use grade-10 math in real life? Maybe, maybe not. Is he going to use the ability to build his own little DIY work tools in an online platform? Absolutely. There are a lot of aspects of my parenting I would not necessarily recommend to the general public but my kids are amazingly adept at using these different tools. It’s because they’ve grown up in a household where that’s just how we do. We have 14 different platforms we routinely use as a family. You do not want mom to catch you using a table when you should be using a spreadsheet, that is like bad news. I wish schools spent more time on this. It’s one of the things that made me super upset about the whole transition in Google Suite is I have a huge problem with the corporatization of education. It is disturbing to see schools relying on a commercial platform, but also, if kids use Google in their school, and they’re using Google Sheets, or using Google Docs, they’re getting used to the platform they’re going to use as adults in the working world. I think that having kids learn how to use digital tools in these playgrounds that are designed for K–12 environments and then have to go and learn a totally unrelated toolset doesn’t make any sense. Let’s get schools and kids running on the kinds of tools that adults use or should use. Ross: I suppose there aren’t that many adults that are familiar with Coda. Alexandra: I’m working on it. Ross: There are a lot of people struggling with saying they’ve got paper, or they’ve got Google Docs, or they’ve got all sorts of things, and no one has ever given them any guidance or said this is how you can organise or structure your life beyond whatever we throw at you. Alexandra: That’s absolutely true. Some of that can be addressed by organisations being explicit about tool choice, providing examples, providing resources, providing training, supporting people with templates, and getting started guides, and all of that. All of that would help. But I also have to remind myself that not everybody’s idea of a fun Friday night is “Let’s try seven different task management apps and make notes on which ones have which feature.” That is my idea of a rip-roaring good time but most people do not enjoy messing around with software as much as I do. The world is full of people who don’t like spreadsheets, also, I’ve learned that. I can’t even begin to describe how much I love it. I feel my brain is a spreadsheet. One of the things that have been interesting to me, my younger kid is autistic so I periodically connect with other moms of autistic kids. You would not believe how many moms I’ve met in the autistic community are also big Excel nerds. There is possibly a genetic component here. I’m not saying everybody needs to fall in love with spreadsheets but I think that if people can find tools that are genuinely a joy for them to use, you don’t have to use 482 different things the way somebody like me does, but if you think about how much time you spend holding your phone or at your computer, if you’re not working in an environment that gives you joy, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be a slog, so you want to encourage people to take ownership of their tools as part of taking ownership of their work. Ross: This goes to knowledge frameworks. I describe them as concept frameworks or sometimes visualisations. It sounds like you’re using Evernote and Coda for that. From this frame of developing knowledge, as in finding things and building the connections between those, is that something you do? Or if so, how do you use your tools? Or even just your cognition as ways to develop your knowledge as you encounter new ideas, information, and concepts? Alexandra: It’s interesting. I don’t think about either Evernote and Coda as knowledge as much as ideas. I keep a lot of web clippings in Evernote. I do often find things in Evernote that I saved seven years ago or whatever that are still useful. From a knowledge and ideas point of view, what’s probably more relevant, I’m a Zotero user, I used to be EndNote user a hundred thousand years ago, I’m a huge fan of people choosing. But if you do knowledge work, if you do reading of any sort using a bibliographic software program, Zotero is probably the one to beat now because it’s open source and has a really big user base, it’s pretty powerful. You take all your notes on your reading, you save your reading sources in one place, that’s where you highlight articles as you read them, you can extract those highlights and export them to other programs. One of the most popular pieces I’ve ever written, at least in terms of the passion of the people who find it and write to me about it, I wrote this piece for JSTOR Daily a few years ago about how I use Zotero and Scrivener together. Scrivener is a writing program for long-form writing. I even use it to write my newsletters and my articles now because it’s just so much easier in a lot of ways than using a word processor. Not easier to learn but more powerful and faster once you learn it. I use them together. I’ll save an article to Zotero, annotate the PDF in Zotero, use a tool called zotfile which is an add-on to Zotero to extract all the annotations and turn it into ultimately a Word document. Then I import the Word document into Scrivener so that each annotated section appears in Scrivener as a little mini document within Scrivener, and then I just rearrange all those quotes until I figure out the pieces I want to use in my article, and bam, I’m almost done with the first draft, it’s a little more fidgety than that but that’s been really significant for me. I think the knowledge management piece is very therapeutic. I always feel embarrassed that I’m such a pack rat. I’m a pack rat from a long line of pack rats. When my grandmother died, we had her great grandfather’s clippings books still around. One of the lessons I learned from that is, if you keep it for your lifetime, you’re a pack rat. If the next two generations keep it, then it’s like an heirloom. You just have to keep it long enough. I have every essay I wrote in college in a cupboard upstairs printed out on dot matrix printer paper, in little Duo-Tangs and I still refer to them sometimes. I can open any file I created within the last 20 years, maybe a little longer, and not just open it, I can find it. I have a heck of a huge, 32-terabyte file server in the house, which is big enough to actually have room left over. Of course, I have most of my stuff stored in the cloud. I’m constantly opening documents from 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and 14 years ago, repurposing a little bit of this or that. Just that ability to not replicate things I’ve already done is so powerful. Ross: Do you use any tagging system or any structure to Evernotes like an overarching taxonomy or anything? Alexandra: I have notebooks within Evernote. When I was first an Evernote user, I was extremely religious about tagging and notebooks. It’s been years since I even really bothered to use notebooks, it’s all just a big pile because search is so effective in Evernote, maybe it’s not perfect, and it can be a little messy. The only thing I do that is really religious is years ago, my husband, this is one of these practices that no longer fully makes sense because computers have evolved but back in the day when things didn’t necessarily have reliable date stamps, he got me into the habit of starting every file with the date in the format, year, month, day, so today would be 2022-12-6. I actually have a keyboard shortcut in my computer and on my phone that I can quickly add at the beginning of any file, and it’s now automatic that every time I start opening a file or start an Evernote note, I hit that keystroke combo and it starts with the date. Yes, in theory, the date created, date last modified, whatever, should always be visible within a file but I’m telling you, man, every time I move computers, all the date stamps get screwed up, so that ability, and when you have it in that format, year, month, day, it means you can always sort by file name, and then it ends up in date order. File order is date order. That has saved my bacon many many a time. Ross: Awesome. Let’s go into inputs. You get lots of new information to come into your consciousness every day. I’d love to just hear about are there any specific regular sources you use. Do you have any feeds? How do you look out and discover the edges of the world? What are your habits or routines or practices in terms of getting the information that feeds your ability to do what you do? Alexandra: It’s funny, I often joke that my husband is the input device and I’m the output device. We have worked very closely together at various points in our careers. We ran a business together. I have also had periods of my life where I did have a very structured daily news scan, I had an RSS aggregator, I’ve gone through various things over the years, Feedly, and so on to use RSS aggregation to bring keyword searches to me. I do have a standing Google News search for stuff related to remote work. I use an email program called Superhuman. Within it, I’ve set up a category for regular news and a category for remote news so my newsletters go into the regular news folder, and my Google News search, and a handful of newsletters I subscribe to on remote work, go into the remote news folder, but I really don’t look at either of them very consistently. I’m trying to deal with this, I would say for me, the biggest problem with information overload is less cognitive and more emotional and psychological. For me, part of that has to do with transitioning the field that I work in. I’ve had a really weird career in a lot of ways. I’ve always been interested in stuff too soon. I was in the Political Science Ph.D. program in the mid-90s, and I decided in 1996 that I wanted to do a dissertation on the political impact of the internet and my department thought I was like bananas. I ended up taking a few years off coming back and doing a dissertation on hacktivism in 2001 and finished in 2004. It was before Anonymous. It was crazy early. Then I got interested in what we now call social media before it was called social media. My husband and I literally started the first social media agency in the world, because we hung out our shingle in 2005, and said, we’re only going to do Web 2.0 projects. I’ve had this career where I’ve been unprofitably ahead of the curve, and where usually what I’m working on and writing about, other people are working on or writing about. When I started writing about the personal psychological impact of using the internet, the only other people who were even talking about this at all were in the evangelical community, and I followed a handful of people who were trying to think about how do you speak tweet in the spirit of Jesus, that kind of stuff, long before all the Buddhists, the mindful tech started happening. Working as I have in the past two or three years, taking my long experience of remote work, my long experience of helping organisations figure out how to build community online, taking my experience of helping people with information overload, with productivity, and turning that into a book about remote work and a pretty active career writing and speaking on remote work has been really disconcerting for me because I’m suddenly in a conversation that hundreds and thousands of people are talking about. When I was writing about hacktivism, there was no Google News search yet. But when I was writing about social media and digital overload initially, I had searches set up on digital fasts and overload, some of these keywords, there was some stuff, but it wasn’t like a colossal waterfall of other people writing about the same topics. Now, if I look at my Google News search for stuff on remote work in hybrid, I’m like, way too neurotic. It’s like, oh my God, these are like 45 great articles and I didn’t write any of them and like, I suck, they’re great, I need to go crawl into a hole and die. Maybe everybody, maybe a lot of people are like that, maybe that’s part of what makes information overload so difficult. I just think as humans, we are the first generation to be continually immersed in what everybody else is doing that we’re not. It’s pretty tough to live in the constant stew of your own opportunity costs. Ross: Yes, you’re absolutely right. Human cognition is not really geared for this particular environment. But a big part of that is emotional in the sense that we feel that we’re missing out, we want to try to keep up, but it’s impossible to keep up, and this leads to not good emotions. How do we shift our responses? Some of those are processes or structures and one of those is really adjusting our attitudes. I talked about this idea of we have to be able to let go, and that’s not an easy thing for us to do. Alexandra: No. My thinking and understanding of these challenges has been so profoundly influenced by my journey with my kid who was diagnosed with autism pretty late. We spent a lot of time reading a lot of stuff about ADHD and other kinds of sensory disorders, as they’re sometimes called. I’ve read a lot about autism and spend a lot of time paying attention to people in the neurodiversity community who often make very effective case for all the talents and gifts that can come from having a different way of approaching the world. It’s made me very aware of how we fall into a lot of errors of assumption around what we’re supposed to be able to handle cognitively, at a sensory level, and emotional level. Again, the mismatch between what comes at us and what we’re wired to handle. A lot of the tools that have helped me learn to deal with that in my professional life have really come from my personal life. To just give an example, we went through a very, very difficult time, in the middle of COVID, there was a survey here in British Columbia where I live, of families with autistic kids and literally, every single family in the province that was surveyed said, we are in crisis because of COVID, because there was such a loss of community support and scheduled routine and a lot of things people rely on. That was certainly the case in our household. We went through a really difficult time, and I had a pretty established repertoire of resources to work with, and I needed more. I started working with a therapist who specialises in hypnosis, and then later with another somatic therapist to develop essentially some very physiological practices for self-regulation, just starting to notice what happens in the body. Because what had happened to me was we had such a series of crises that I was kind of in permanent fight or flight mode. I had to learn how to turn that down. Having tuned into that at a physiological level and learn to notice like, oh, I’m feeling tightness in my chest, I feel my forehead is tight, I can feel what’s happening in my eyelids as I’m having that response, and then learning very simple techniques like, I’m going to pick an object in the room, and I’m going to really focus on it, and I’m going to look at the color, the texture, I’m really going to turn on my sensory experience to pull my brain out of that panic mode. That feeling I have when I open my inbox, that same routine now comes into play. It’s not necessarily conscious, I don’t think, oh, no, I’m panicking over my inbox but it’s now become second nature to notice the physiological response so that instead of identifying with panic, I can observe it a little bit and not let it drive me. Ross: That sounds like a fantastic tool. Our ability to control our attention is fundamental and I think those specific techniques are really powerful. To round out, what are any recommendations you would give from your deep insight and expertise as to how listeners can thrive on overload to function well in this world, which is very overwhelming, to be frank? Alexandra: It’s funny. I’m just reflecting, is the solution a spreadsheet or a Buddhist retreat? I can’t decide. I honestly do think that you need to look at both sides of the coin. There’s a lot of advice out there about decide what you want, be really clear on your intentions, you’ll manifest, blah, blah, blah, I actually have moved away and come to find it’s much easier to learn to float on the river and accept that the complexity and pace of our world is almost too much to be able to set really firm intentions. Instead of thinking this is the thing I’m going to go for and I’m going to have this super linear way of going about it, if instead, you think about building a toolkit that allows you to float on the river and seize the opportunities that come your way, then you realise what you need is really, as I say, both sides of the coin, you need to build the technical tools that let you filter, triage what comes in, rediscover the resources you need to reuse, organise your writing and your work effectively, and you need to recognize that technology is not going to solve that feeling of overwhelm that I think is honestly intrinsic to being a human being in an era where the world comes at us faster than we are wired for. If you try to solve it all with meditation, you are going to miss your spreadsheet. If you try to solve it all with spreadsheets, you’re probably not going to heal your existential angst. Ross: So a combination of technology and mindfulness? Alexandra: Something like that. Ross: That’s a fantastic way to round out. It’s a true and hopefully pragmatic advice there. Thank you so much for your time, Alexandra. That’s been a wonderful, really insightful conversation. Alexandra: It’s fun talking with you. The post Alexandra Samuel on resetting for remote work, Coda evangelism, tool workflows, and combining technology and mindfulness (Ep46) appeared first on Humans + AI.

“Because there’s so much information to pass and so many transactions that we need to transact every day, having that moment to properly think and work through a big idea is challenging. I find that especially difficult in my work today as a venture capitalist where synthesis is the core skill. It’s important that we find the time to think and the tools to help us think.” – Phil Morle About Phil Morle Phil is partner at major deep tech venture capital firm Main Sequence Ventures, where he focuses on health, food, environmental companies, and leads the Feed 10 Billion People challenge. Prior to Main Sequence, Phil co-founded the first tech incubator in Asia Pacific, Pollenizer, and was the CTO of file-sharing company Kazaa. Website: Main Sequence Blog: Phil Morle LinkedIn: Phil Morle Twitter: Phil Morle What you will learn How to enable synthesis whether alone or with others (03:10) What are some good information sources, and routines? (06:32) How to gather an information “mise en place” (09:50) What is the Roam app? (13:20)  What is the fundamental difference between Outlook and Gmail? (14:56) What is the difference between Roam and Obisidian? (17:28) How do venture capitalists manage their information overload? (20:46) Why clarity of purpose is crucial to thriving on overload (27:54) Resources Obsidian Roam Research Tana Readwise John Borthwick Tools for THINKing Rob Cross Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse Oblique Strategies Cards by Brian Eno Oblique Strategies for iPhone Oblique Strategies for Android Transcript Ross Dawson: Phil, wonderful to have you on the show. Phil Morle: Glad to be here, Ross. Ross: This is a topic you’ve been thinking about for a long time. I just dug up something which you wrote in 2007, saying we are becoming good filters but poor philosophers. We are good at information retrieval and storage, but not so good at the long thought. We need time to think. Do you still agree with what you said 15 years ago? Phil: I do, and if anything, it gets harder, doesn’t it? Because there’s so much information to pass and so many transactions that we need to transact every day, having that moment to properly think and work through a big idea is challenging. I find that especially difficult in my work today as a venture capitalist where synthesis is the core skill. It’s important that we find the time to think and the tools to help us think. Ross: You just mentioned synthesis. Let’s get to that, there are a lot of elements that precede the act of synthesis. How do you enable that? Is this a state of mind? Is this giving yourself the space to think as we mentioned? What is it that enables you to synthesize all of the signals that you get? Phil: I’m a real thought hacker, and I’m just trying everything, every notebook, every tool, every meeting format. I do have a system that I like and it’s ever-evolving. I must say that coming out of COVID, one of the things I like the most is getting back in front of a whiteboard with a bunch of people because synthesis really happens wonderfully with a team. For example, I just spent some time with the team working on the pitch deck and just workshopping that with them. Because we were in a conversation, all this stuff was coming out of their mouth which was super rich and super interesting and was much more valuable than the very dry stuff that was in the pitch deck which is the kind of stuff you do natively and powerfully when you’re sitting on your own in a room with a screen in front of you. Of all the tools that I have, sometimes the best tool is a whiteboard, a marker pen, a couple of people, and ideas. It forces yourself into other spaces. When we go into digital spaces, that’s where I need that equivalent of other people, like, what are the prompts? What are the processes on rails that pull you through, that forces me to do that rather than just to get my emails done and just transact, transact, transact all day? How do I force myself into that position of thinking like I’m with some people on the whiteboard? Ross: I’d like to come back to the process but first of all the whiteboard. If you’re on the whiteboard and you’re having a wonderful conversation, what does it look like afterward? Do you have any patterns for the sorts things you put on a whiteboard? Phil: I’m a very visual person. I like connected tissue, so I suppose mind maps would be the most likely outcome for me. I’d say my whiteboards are either a mind map spider or a grid with a timeline with different dimensions to the timeline. From a venture perspective, so much of what we do is about what might be the story that plays out over time and what are all the different layers to that story. That’s what might get us to the grid, but the synthesis really comes from the mind map. That’s where you get all these strange connections in a graph that you might not have thought to do had you not co-located those two bubbles next to each other. Ross: You have mentioned more recently as well as earlier in all of the wonderful stuff that you share online that you do have some processes and workflows. The one we started at the beginning as in input, what information sources do you find? Are there particular times of the day or any particular approach that you take to getting the crude, raw inputs that go into your thinking? Phil: This is really important for me because come eight o’clock in the morning, I start getting smashed from every digital channel, my phone rings, the emails come in, about 10 different portfolio companies and their Slack channels light up, one company might have a big win, and another might be having a disastrous situation, and the day just goes right out of control and it’s all inbound information. The first thing that I do in my life, which I found really helpful, and I enjoy enormously now is I start my day really early. I start my day at four or five o’clock in the morning. It’s me-time, it’s synthesis time, it’s reading time, it’s putting together the plan for the day, it’s making sure I’ve collected everything from yesterday that I haven’t got to yet. The collecting of information and things to do and insights is something that just has to be incredibly quick, and frictionless because that’s how I don’t get stressed about it, I know I’ve captured it, and I know that my process will have a loop at some point where I come to it, I might pick it up, and I put it somewhere, and I do something with it. I’m one of those people who doesn’t like an open loop and doesn’t like feeling like I’m in somebody else’s open loop, so I don’t like to do that to other people. I have a whole series of tools that I use for doing this. The biggest change for me over the last year is to become a disciple of tools for thought as they’re becoming known. This is tools like Obsidian, Roam, and now a tool called Tana, which has become the epicenter of my work. You can think of it as an outliner, in its simplest form, but every bullet in the outline is a node in the graph, and all the graphs link together. If I say, I’m having a meeting with Ross Dawson, then the word Ross Dawson leads me to the entire history of everything we’ve done together. In that same thing, we’ll be making notes about all kinds of things and they all start linking together. It’s not a structured database, it’s a graph. This really helps me to think, and throughout that, there are prompts. I think of it as having a habit like a chef comes into the kitchen, and you prepare your tools for the day, chop your carrots, prepare your herbs, have everything lined up, partially cook some things, so you’re ready. Then people start coming into a restaurant and the world goes mental but you just grab the knife because it’s in the right place, you grab the carrots that you’ve already chopped too, you’re ready, and you’re not panicking trying to find the basic things. Every day when I open up my Tana, I have a prompt that asks me if I’m playing the infinite game, this is my reminder each day to behave a certain way. I then have a startup routine that I have to do. For example, there’s a series of checkboxes. The first one is start music. The reason I have that is that I have to focus, and I struggle with that sometimes, I can have just a noise of tasks in my mind and priorities, all competing, or I just might be brain-dead, still half asleep. I know that if I put my headphones on and I press play with the right playlist, it’s like an ADHD tablet. I’m just voof, I’m zoned in. It’s amazing how without the prompt, I’ll think, today, I’ll just sit here quietly and listen to the birds outside. That’s what I’d like to do. Every time I do that, I have a really ineffective hour. Some people would say, maybe you should do that, Phil, allow yourself to have an ineffective hour. I know if I put the headphones on, I’m in the zone. Ross: What’s the right playlist for you? Phil: Just a number of electronica, some experimental soundtracks, the theme is no lyrics. I almost don’t have any famous artists, I just go into this voyage of discovery into all the worlds of Spotify, but, just having something with a little bit of a pulse to it, just gets me into the zone, and then I can start getting things done. Then I just literally have checkboxes for just basically where all my inboxes are. I have some inboxes in Notion where team things come in, I have inboxes in my email, I have things to read in Readwise reader, so I collect those. Then, if I can get it all done in the morning, I’ll literally process those things, I’ll go through it, I’ll reply. One of the most important ones is just “review yesterday.” In Tana, I can just click a link, yesterday comes up, I can see everything I did, and I can do a search of all the tasks that came up yesterday. I have this little list that I call the snowball, which is just all this stuff that’s not been done in the last three days that’s accumulated. It’s my whack-a-mole, just to get those things done. That whole process just keeps me on rails, I know where everything is, I’m collecting everything as I go, so when I do have a moment to synthesize and think and process, I know I’ve got everything now and I haven’t missed something. Ross: You’ve written as far as I could find six posts about using Roam as a VC. Roam is something that could be described in many ways. I’d like to hear you describe what Roam is. Most of the listeners will probably not be using Roam but tell us a little bit about how you use it. Phil: Roam is a brand new paradigm that’s really difficult to describe, you know why it’s valuable when you start to use it. I think most people are familiar with hypertext and the way the web works, you can make a link that shows up in blue text or whatever on a website, and if you click on that link, it’ll take you to a page that you’ve made at another URL behind the link. But you have to manually go and make that page. What happens in Roam is this idea of these two-way links. In Roam, it’s two square brackets. If you go at meeting with [Ross Dawson], it’s immediately made a node in the graph for Ross Dawson. Then at any time, I can click on Ross Dawson and see the entire ledger of activity that Ross Dawson and I have been going through over time, and it’s by date and any other tagging and everything that I want to do. What that means is, you’re never trying to decide where to put something. It’s like the difference between Gmail and Outlook. Are you an Outlook user or a Gmail user? Ross: Gmail for some time now. Phil: Outlook users are frenetically trying to manage this folder system, where it has got these folders down the left-hand side, you’re going, where does this email go? And then Gmail said forget about that, let’s just make the search really good. This is the same. You just tag things as you go. and everything just shows up at the right place. Next time I go meeting with Ross Dawson, I’ve got my entire record of all the other meetings we’ve had instantly there, doing no work for it. You can also do things like time travel. You can say, meeting with Ross Dawson in two days, and then write some notes underneath. What happens then is in two days, those notes show up, right when you’ve got that meeting. It’s just fantastically powerful. The reason you understand it later is you just start using it. In the beginning, you feel really uncomfortable because it feels like, I’m not filing anything, I’m just making notes, I’m putting them down everywhere, and then three or four days later, you meet the same person the second time, or you go back to an essay you were writing, or some research that you’re doing, and all the information there is just automatically clustered. It’s incredibly valuable. I converted a lot of people that work into it, and my son is a devotee as well. It’s very good software. Ross: You also mentioned Obsidian a little while ago. Obsidian is usually considered an alternative to Roam. Are you using both? Phil: I did try Obsidian. Obsidian is beautiful software. From my perspective, the difference between Obsidian and Roam is Obsidian is not a graph-based database, it’s a much, much better version of Evernote, to put it very, very simply. Still, you’ve got a series of markdown file notes that you’re collecting, and you’re having to think about where things go, but it’s very, very powerful. Many people use Obsidian when they’re writers, for example, and it’s got a very nice interface for writing longer-form documents and things like that, and still having some element of a beautiful, easy-to-use note-taking system. But Roam, I tried to leave Roam because it’s ugly and hacky, and Obsidian is beautiful but it didn’t work like my mind, these things come down to that in the end, you have to map to what’s going on in your own brain, so I went back to Roam. That’s why I’ve now moved to Tana, you can tell an early adopter, crazy person here, but Tana is basically building upon the Roam paradigm. At the heart of Tana is this idea of a super tag. For example, here, what I’ve done is for this session, I’ve got a meeting with Ross on productivity, and I tag it as a meeting, which is just one that I’ve made, and then because of that, it has automatically dumped in all the metadata underneath for all the things I want to get out of this meeting. It’s the life on rails again. Ross: Are you using Roam concurrently with Tana or have you shifted completely to Tana? Phil: No, moved all over. You can import Roam. My Roam graph is in Tana now. Ross: I use Obsidian, so still need to play around with other alternatives. But now a profusion of tools is coming out so if you’re trying to keep across what there is, there is this wonderful thing. Interestingly, John Borthwick of Betaworks, his latest camp has been “THINKing” tools. That’s his latest investment theme. As he does it, there’s still an enormous opportunity in the space. It’s still very fragmented. All of these mentioned tools, Roam, Obsidian, and Tana are still basically for geeks. Phil: Yes, they are. You’re right. It’s a paradigm that maybe goes back to how we began this conversation that it gets harder and harder to synthesize in a heavily transactional world, and what are the tools that are going to help us to do a better job of that and this whole tools for thought category has emerged. Ross: I think that venture capitalist, VC, is like the epitome of information overload because you not only need to keep in touch with your own industry but also your portfolio companies, and be able to keep across new companies coming up but also the underlying technologies that are driving all of those domains, and particularly with you working in deep tech, everything is new whichever way you’re looking. You do refer in some of your posts particularly how is this relevant to VCs, and I’d like to just unpack that a little bit. What are the things which are specific, or informed by, or where the VC world can teach us about useful processes or workflows? Phil: I describe it as being like a fire hose of information. From the first encounter with a human in the morning to the last encounter at the end of the day, it’s just this information coming in. My calendar app has this feature called rewind, which I looked at last week, and it told me that I met 1788 people this year. Then for each of those people, they were talking about really complicated things like making proteins or enzymes that recycle plastic in different ways and things like that, so collecting the information that comes out and synthesizing it. With some of the people, there’ll be very quick meetings, there’ll be like a 30-minute quick meeting to try and find a fit, understand where someone’s coming from. I have a principle where I want everybody to get some value out of every meeting. I try and think about how to do that, which means I can’t use the whole 30 minutes, just small talking. It’s just a massive amount of information. Again, that’s why this need for inputs is really important. How can you effortlessly capture something and drop it into the system to do something with it later, and collect a record of everything, that’s why these tools for thought are just beautiful for venture capital. A lot of venture capitalists use them. Ross: Do you build any meta frameworks as in thinking about a particular domain, and try to build a lattice of knowledge around that particular area? Phil: At the simplest level, what I like to try and do when I live my life on rails is even when you’re having a bad day, how do you perform at your best? Even if I’m tired and fed up or stressed about something but I have to meet a founder who’s working hard on their business and it’s really important to them that it comes across well and they want to get some value out of the meeting, I make sure I’ve got a good framework that asks me questions and also helps me ask them questions. Then I collect it all in a similar format, and it’s just a scaffold, it doesn’t have to play that way but it means I can if that’s what I want to do. Then that also means that as we go through, I can start looking at things on aggregate, which takes us back to the synthesis, I can start querying things based on the similar answer to the same question that multiple people create, which is quite interesting. The other thing that I try and do throughout is I have a journaling and insights framework, which again, I can just collect it very quickly into these systems. Then at the right time, when I’m doing my weekly planning and things, it all comes up to the surface again, so then I can see something that was just quickly collected whilst I was walking down the street, or in between meetings, or in the middle of a pitch session or whatever, I can just collect it, move on, and then I can think more about that insight at some other one of my five o’clock in the morning sessions. Ross: Are there any particular elements that scaffold that you described? Is it a series of questions or particular facets of what it is you’re trying to uncover? Phil: Yes. For example, a new thing I’m doing at the moment is, because so much of my work is in a meeting with somebody, I’m trying to figure out which ones fuel me, and which ones drain me, of course, you still have to do some of the ones that drain you whether you like it or not, that’s life, we’ve got to do a mix, but what I’ve started doing in my scaffolding is every meeting I have, I have to give it a score, like, whether it drained me or fueled me. Then what I can do is when I’m doing a bit of a review, I can just look at my week and go, okay, look at this pattern here, this meeting just keeps coming up and it’s draining me, so what do I do? Maybe I don’t need to be in the meeting? Or maybe I can redesign how the meeting actually happens so that it’s more impactful and more fun and things like that. Again, if you just collect it in the scaffold, it’s just a very simple thing, it doesn’t add much, there’s zero workload, basically, it just takes half a second. But then the insight that gives at the end of the week is terrific. Ross: That could be valuable to other people, I did some work with Rob Cross, he was at the University of Virginia at the time, around energy and networks, where essentially, you can map organizations by whether people are perceived as energy givers or takers, that actually provided some pretty strong insights into organizations, but also context. Because again, it’s not just the individual, it’s also the context, somebody who may be energizing in one context but not in a particular type of meeting, for example. There’s a lovely lattice of information that you can get if other people follow that as well. Phil: It’s good just to be mindful of it and understand what’s going on. I’ve been having this conversation recently, for example, here we are, it’s the first year on the other side of COVID, we’ve all rushed out gobbling up the world again, nearly everyone I know has been phenomenally busy this year and is exhausted, and to your point about the meetings and energy givers and takers, each face you’re seeing around the room or on the Zoom screen or whatever is loaded with stuff on there at that moment that you don’t generally acknowledge in a meeting, but it’s in the room. Ross: In a minute, I want to get a summary from you, and also anything which we haven’t covered. But to your point about making sure that you get as much value as I have from this conversation, hopefully, part of it has been able to share, be aware of what you’re doing but are there any questions you have for me or anything, which would help you make this a useful conversation? Phil: You’re the expert. I’ve told you some of the things that I’m doing. How do I level up what I’m doing to get better at this fire hose? Ross: The big thing for me is always that you have some clarity. This is what I describe as a personal information plan. This maps out for me saying okay, defining your purpose, and whatever ways. There are a couple of layers to that, from The Infinite Game through to what is the impact you want to achieve, framing different aspects of your life, thinking about your relationship to the areas of expertise you want to develop, what those are, your ventures, your well being, your family, what in the news more broadly is relevant to you or not. From that, the time boxing for where it is you’re focused, in terms of information activities, where it is you are making time for regenerating. It’s an interesting thing. I did refer to the improvisational theatre in Thriving on Overload, the book, as just one tool for how it is we get to a state of mind of synthesis. You have a background in theatre. That’s something where it’s not just that activity, but there are also other spaces that we can put ourselves in. Synthesis is, yes, partly being able to have all of the pieces of information connected but part of that is also how do we find for ourselves what are the spaces or the states of mind in which those can things, and what are the right times of day to be able to do that? How do we get to those places? This is the conscious-unconscious nexus, and how we pull that together? You’re probably better than most having lived in arts and technology and business and pulling that together. I think part of it is making the whole as much as possible. Again, in Thriving on Overload, the book, there are many tactics or more broadly, this framework of starting from purpose and flowing through all of the elements of the information inputs in the frameworks you build, and enhancing your ability for attention and ending up at that synthesis, which in a way goes beyond the conscious mind or anything that the technology can support. Phil: One of my favorite hacks it’s called the Oblique Strategy Cards that Brian Eno wrote. Ross: I haven’t seen those. Phil: They’re designed for if you get stuck, if you get writer’s block or artist’s block and you’re procrastinating, and the idea is you just pick a card, and then you do what it says on the card. This one says courage, this one says accept advice, this one says voice nagging suspicions, use an unacceptable color, and it’s great. When you get a bit stuck or a little bit bored, you might be writing a dull report for somebody, you can pick a card up and make it a bit more fun, so that’s quite a good thing to do. What about “The Infinite Game”? That’s a new thing for me. I’m very interested in it. Have you seen this in play in the world in any interesting places? Ross: I read James Carse’s original book, Finite and Infinite Games, a very long time ago. It’s been implicit. The quote which I have used in more keynotes than any other is finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries. I’m always attuned to that. Just an example of that is my first book, I’ve gone into the field of knowledge management, and the first thing that hit me is this is all about internal, how about outside, knowledge outside and across organizations and relationships? I wrote a book about that. I guess all of my framing has always been going beyond the boundaries or playing with the boundaries. What is delightful today is how organizations and value creation and ecosystems and everything is going beyond boundaries. In a way that finite and infinite game almost best expresses the ecosystem because it has to be, in fact, you are participating, you’re not separate from everything else. Phil: That’s right. You’re at the service of something bigger and it is unacceptable to get to the end because if you’ve got to the end, you’ve made it too small. Ross: Yes. Phil: I love it. It’s a good reminder. Whenever I feel too competitive or feel envious of somebody or something like that, the reminder that I just need to play the infinite game helps me get through. Ross: Any closing comments or recommendations or things we haven’t covered that could be useful to our listeners? Phil: I’m a bit of a nutcase when it comes to these systems. I’m sure listeners can tell, I’m an early adopter, and I’m an early adopter because I’m constantly looking for what’s going to give me that extra edge, that extra 10 minutes, that extra bit of ease, that extra ability to capture things and not worry about them. There’s something a little bit obsessive about it, and I find the balance that I have to have is how to then let go of it. What I do is I find myself going into a phase where I lock in a new habit, and the new habit gives me a new capability of some kind, it either works or it doesn’t work, but then I have to consciously step outside of it for a while and let it just relax a little while. Life is on rails, it’s helping me because it’s on rails, but it doesn’t have to be on rails, I can step off the train if I want to do that, and I think that’s important as well. Otherwise, I’d just be a bit of a robot. There are some amazing tools out there to help us today. Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Phil. I really appreciate it. Phil: Thank you, Ross. Great chat. The post Phil Morle on synthesis in venture capital, thought hacking, thinking tools, and the infinite game (Ep45) appeared first on Humans + AI.