Learning Irregulars

Learning Irregulars conducted its first f2f session last night in Berkeley, a BarCamp. As with all meetings like this, the people who attended were the people who were supposed to attend. What took place is the only thing that could have taken place. We started at the right time, and when the meeting was over, it was over.

We swore allegiance to the Law of Two Feet but no one left.

I introduced the Learning Irregulars as a network of people dedicated to accelerating innovation of organizational learning. Our means is dialog. Our purpose is pure (we’re non-profit). Personally, I’m thinking that our agenda is de-industrializing training, but that’s a topic for future conversations. Jerry Michalski emailed me that irregulars is a misnomer; no one left our session for the bathroom.

Talk is cheap; transition is required. For our second hour together, we struggled to describe what we’d done as individuals to make a change in the last three months. The conversation was all over the map. Insight bubbles up in free-form dialog that is absent from structured events. It’s unruly, but sometimes it takes hold. This morning I awoke with a reverb of one of the evening’s exchanges. It grabbed me. I can feel it altering the direction of my life. What more can you ask from a three-hour session with no set agenda?

Our friend and networker extraordinaire, Bill Daul, took the photos.

We’ll be back at the NextNow Collaboratory in ten days for a session entitled Re-thinking Learning.

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and care about learning in organizations, please join us.

The online forum on this site just died of neglect. Socialize instead on our Facebook pages.

Join us for a session in Berkeley this month. You have two free gatherings to choose from:

March 12, 7-10 pm. Unmeeting at NextNow with the Learning Irregulars

March 24, 7-10 pm. Re-thinking Learning

Howard Rheingold and I spent some time today walking and talking our way around the Berkeley campus. He’s discovering the same basic truths on campus that I am finding in corporations.

Here’s a mash-up of corporate learning culture and the oldest continuous culture in the world. The comparison comes out of left field, yet it has helped me gain insight in the corporate arena.

What other mash-ups should the Learning Irregulars explore?

I was pointed by Harold Jarche to Dave Snowden talking about the coming age and the characteristics of what it will take. He documents a shift from mechanistic to systematic, and posits that the coming age is chaotic, requiring a new approach.  Dave terms this ‘praxis‘, a continual cycle of experimenting on the basis of theory and reflecting, rather than pre-determined approaches.

Harold wondered whether this counted as meta-learning, and I’d have to say yes.  You not only are looking at the outcomes of your intervention, but you’ve got to be paying attention to your process, and revising the theory and the practice as well as the problem-solving.  It may seem like an awful lot of overhead, but these skills become practiced, and the outcomes are far better in the long run.

Things aren’t slowing down.  I was reflecting earlier today on how quickly the ‘iClones‘ came after the announcement of the iPhone.  Things are moving faster, we’re being showered with more and more information, and asked to do more and more with less.  Most importantly, the fundamental game changes, where a whole industry is upended by a disruptive innovation, are getting so frequent that there is no longer a period in which to adapt to a steady state: change is the steady state.

Everything of any value at work will be adapting to change and solving problems. The processes you’d execute against will be out of date by the time they’re codified.  You’ll instead be applying frameworks, and monitoring the results while you refine the models and your approach.

At a personal level, this means meta-learning: learning on an ongoing basis, developing your learning skills and continually problem solving.  It’ll also mean collaborating, as it’s no longer sufficient to assume you can do it yourself; there’s power in numbers, when managed right.  So you’ll also have to develop and evolve not only personal learning, but learning to learn with others.

This naturally implies the skills of larger groups of people, and at the organizational level it means continuing to experiment as well, and providing the tools and the space to learn.  It also means being systematic and continuous about review.  (Doug Engelbart, ahead of the curve as always, has even suggested another level, where nodes of meta-learning collaborate to review the meta-learning!)

It’s attitudinal, too, as you’ve got to keep it from being scary, and let yourself remember that learning is fun.  As Raph Koster tells us, learning is fun (at least until we kill that thought with schooling).  So, let’s start having fun!

Mr. K. taught himself to write upside down so he can tutor more effectively.  (He typically sits across from his students when tutoring 1:1.)  Impressive.

More video.

Backstory.

First we make our tools, and then our tools make us. WordPress and the forum software were experimenting with divide the world into Admins, Editors, and Subscribers. The people who attended the foundation meeting and some people who were there in spirit are being dubbed “editors,” but experimentation is what we’re really after. You have to start somewhere. Editors are hereby by granted editorial license to provoke innovation in learning however they see fit.

Three evenings back,  Etay Gafni, Kevin Wheeler, Clark Quinn, Sandeep Sood, TingTing Zeng, and I enjoyed dinner at Renee’s Place in Berkeley  to discuss a non-profit effort (paid in karma) committed to making the world a better place by accelerating innovation in organizational learning. We named ourselves the Learning Irregulars.

We will be happy to enlist you in our cause. We operate in the open (a fishbowl). We host conversations that mash-up different disciplines. We are a feisty group, unafraid to buck tradition. One name that didn’t make the final cut: Now What? However, it did capture our self-image as guides and connectors who point out what works.

Welcome to the club. Please add your thoughts. Slide show