Weakness of Strong Signals
Massive signals everywhere that are noise on their own. AI and our new automated culture of writing and production is making it hard to know what is signal, what is noise.
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education & learning
Education and learning
Strategic Design: Bridging Complexity, Planning, & Evaluation for Impact
In this latest in our series on strategic design in complex times, we look at the ways in which design methods, tools, and thinking can shape systems and channel our intentions. This is strategic design. For more information, check out the earlier posts on complexity, strategy and introductions to strategic design. The aim is to
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Design, Systems and The Settings That Influence Us
Space shapes systems, so systems change requires we understand space. In this post, I’m going to use two contexts to illustrate why and how settings affect so much of our lives and why any systems change must account for them if we are to be successful. Take two examples: education, and healthcare. In an educational
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Monitoring as Motivator: Harnessing the Progress Principle
If you’re stuck in the daily grind of human services delivery, leveraging evaluation data can help you see and chart your progress. Among the most difficult things healthcare and human services professionals deal with is progress. Whether you’re an ER nurse, a front-line social worker, or a palliative care doctor, seeing progress is something that
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Learning is Not a Luxury
In times of uncertainty, disruption, and change it’s easy to view intentional learning as a luxury. It is not. Complexity — situations when the relations between causes and consequences are unclear and dynamic — requires we learn in order to thrive. Our ability to sense and respond to what we perceive and experience is what
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The Neurodiversity of Work and Perils of Planning
When we recognize the diversity in our nervous systems, the problems with most organizational planning models become more evident, and we can start designing them for humans, not ideas. If you work with more than one other person — and how many of us don’t? — you encounter diversity. When we design systems to improve
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Leading As Design And By Design
Learning takes our exposure to new things and transforms our thoughts and actions. How we do this is – and whether its done well — is where design comes in. Our learning is framed by where we are and where we want to go. The volume of content available to people puts attention at a
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Unlocking Organizational Change: Learning from the Cultural Phenomenon of Dutch Cycling
The famous Dutch cycling culture didn’t always exist; it was designed. A look at how this came to pass can help us to understand what it means to transform culture and keep it healthy. There are lessons to be learned whether you’re building a bike culture or transforming your organization. If you think of life
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Are You Using Teaching Models or Action Models?
The confusion between whether something is used to teach or to guide underlies much of the dissatisfaction with the use of models to inform the way we work, learn, and behave. Let’s talk about systems and models — but stick with me, this is a practical and not just academic matter. I’ll start with a
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Lessons Taught, Learned, Forgotten, and Ignored
It’s easy to say a lesson was learned and far more difficult to show it to be true. What can we do to best to learn from what’s happened to us and not allow often difficult, painful, hard-fought lessons to go unlearned? When the student is ready, the teacher will appear Unknown A lesson is
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