Stories

Tag: patterning

  • Patterns and trends

    Patterns and trends

    How do we navigate these rules while achieving intended purpose? When we need new knowledge, where do we go? How do we go about it? How do we limit our exploration to ensure that we can still deliver on our tasks? What if we need to upset or question assumptions about how we work in order to find the answers we need (learn)?

    Wherever we may sit in the organization – from the headquarters in the capital city to the field –, our field of vision cannot possibly span the global complexity we face.

    When we analyze a situation or a new problem, we are looking for patterns. We build the “muscle” of pattern recognition through practice. This is where we mobilize our experience, which sometimes manifests itself as intuition. As we gain experience, we learn to trust our intuition and deepen the insights we bring to dialogue with our colleagues.

    Patterning is the process of recognizing the nature and organization of various types of information and knowledge. As we walk forward with an adaptive mindset, we recognize trends and patterns in a changing environment.

    Our ability to recognize patterns is a critical skill that the organization must both foster and support, in order to make learning strategic.

    Photo: Islamic mosaic pattern (Jörg Reuter/flickr.com)

  • Anchoring

    Anchoring

     “Hitting a stationary target requires different skills of a marksman than hitting a target in motion.” – George Siemens (2006:93)

    We are all knowledge workers who struggle with knowledge abundance – too much information.

    Percent of knowledge stored in your brain needed to do your job
    Percent of knowledge stored in your brain needed to do your job

     

    Our ability to learn is heavily dependent on our ability to connect with others. How well are we able to collect, process, and use information? Individually, we have learned the behaviors that enable us to anchor (stay focused on important tasks while undergoing a deluge of distractions), filter (extracting important elements), recognize patterns and trends, think creatively, and feel the balance between what is known with the unknown.

    These behaviors “to prioritize and to decipher what is important” are “a bit of an art”, we say. How do we learn them? These knowledge competencies – and the learning processes that foster them – are central to our everyday work, and require explicit reward and recognition (for example, in job descriptions and performance evaluation), support, and improvement. Yet they remain tacit. The aim of learning strategy is to uncover them, demonstrate their value, and determine ways of actioning them as levers to improve continual learning.

    Figure based on Robert Kelley’s How to Be a Star at Work: Nine Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed, Times Books/Random  House: New York, 1998. Ideas on 21st Century knowledge skills are grounded in George Siemen’s Knowing Knowledge (2006). Photo: Old rusted anchor chains at Falmouth Harbour (StooMathiesen/flickr.com).