Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens by Barbara Oakley, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Alistair McConville.On Goodreads.
I enjoyed being an early reader of this book’s draft as a reviewer, and I was eager to buy the final book when released. Exchanging directly with the author has been a further occasion to learn more and better about the tools and practices.
Although it is aimed at kids, I tested most of the techniques in the first person: any learner of any age can benefit from them. The approaches proposed by the authors are coming from their field of research in neurosciences and their teaching practices. I was delighted by the effectiveness of some techniques because they are addressing many of my weak spots: memorizing, avoiding distractions, getting the best out of learning materials. Knowing more about the inner workings of our brains helps in understanding why specific learning and organizing techniques are working better than others and why we should take care of aspects and things that might seem unrelated at first.
For instance, the book explains the importance of reading and summarizing with your own words, taking care of a good dose of sleep, the effect of the environment (the place, the light, the sounds), the immense attention-destruction power of distractions, and how to prevent it.
I love this book, and I am including many of its suggestions in my teaching, facilitation, and training practices: I am also doing my best to improve the learning capability of my son by suggesting the application of Learning “How To Learn”’s gems.
“How to understand & explain complex topics?” is the impossible subject we will tackle together. We discuss our need as designers to understand & explain complex topics to enable collaboration –while #complexity cannot be reduced or simplified by definition.
Enjoy the video recording, with a summary of the key point that emerged. Oh, and that pandemic haircut style has gone, for now.
Index of the topics discussed in the podcast
0:00:00 Intro
0:01:05 Massimo’s self-introduction & topic
0:03:46 Easing the learn/act (thinking/doing) tension
0:05:39 A good designer is also a leader
0:10:25 Making complexity actionable
0:14:38 Sensing & changing a company’s culture
0:22:31 The need for persuasion
0:24:52 Becoming an agent of change & collective intelligence
0:29:24 Overcoming the space-for-action barrier through complexity
0:39:15 Leading through uncertainty
0:51:14 The link between critical, systems, and design thinking
0:55:04 Is “metacognition” or “metathinking” undervalued in design?
1:01:15 Conclusion
A Summary of the podcast
Edited and summarized for your convenience (and your English grammar sensitivity)
01:05 Max introduces himself
Massimo Curatella
I am Massimo Curatella, Max If you want, I live in Rome. And I am a designer of systems. I am specialized in service design, UX design, and interaction design. Although I am basically having experience in doing the entire workflow. I’ve been a software engineer for 25 years then I went to the other side of the Force. I have also experience in facilitating, in writing, I was a technical journalist and I have been teaching in different universities.
I decided to take the challenge of picking an impossible topic: simplifying complexity. By definition, complexity cannot be simple. So my question is, how can you make complexity manageable and understandable? It’s a huge topic. It’s absolutely surreal for me to face it in 60 minutes. But I think it’s really productive and inspiring to talk about it, especially with a person like you because I really appreciate your blog and the things you publish and the links you share. It’s really informative and stimulating. So that’s the right place to be.
Kevin Richard
Thank you. It’s totally likewise, I love what you’re writing. I love what you’re sharing in general. So I think this is the reason we are discussing it together.
03:47 Designers are philosophers with hands.
Kevin Richard
I read somewhere “designers are like philosophers with hands,” like people who can act, not just think. How do you learn things that are actionable? It’s like a dichotomy between thinking and doing.
05:26 Designers are Systems Leaders
Massimo Curatella
You’ve touched a lot of good starting points, especially when you talk about learning, designing, or being “a philosopher with hands”. I was thinking of another metaphor: a good designer is also a leader. Because if you think well, and if you build the right path for other people to understand well the context, you are leading, you’re showing the way. The problem is when you think about a designer in the ivory tower, imposing their hands,” this is what you need to do”. Rather I would say a designer as a leader is a Systems Leader because they can understand the context in which they are moving, together with the stakeholders, the clients, the end-users, the colleagues and they are co-designing possible solutions. They are making sense together of what is the environment.
06:36 Sensemaking as driving at night
Massimo Curatella
How do you write a novel? Or how do you do anything? It’s like driving at night, maybe you know the road but you cannot see far away, to the horizon. You have your car lights, and you can travel like that until you reach your destination. Designing, when you are in our complex settings, –which is basically always– it’s almost like driving at night. You must have the skill of being able to drive, you need to be careful, you need to stay awake, to be in good health, but you also have to look around you as things are happening. And this is really a good metaphor for design or for understanding complex topics because, of course, it is important for you to have a background, to be qualified, to do your research. But most of the time it’s difficult to make sense out of something and to produce a synthesis that is brief, elegant, and smart and smooth.
This is the philosophy at the foundation of Design Thinking, Iterative Design, or Design Sprints. According to what I can discover together with you we can learn together the problem we are studying. We need, sometimes, to make decisions that are sharp and well defined. Some other times you need to put in place some experiments to see what happens if we do this or that. And that is really the craft and the skill of a designer because there you need to have the skill, the capability of being fast and quick in prototyping and really be a master of tools.
Digital Tools for Thinking Together
Massimo Curatella
That is the place in which I keep on experimenting with digital canvases like Mural, Miro, Figma. It doesn’t make any difference if it is posted on the wall or if it is pen and paper. I just need to be fast and effective. So sometimes I share my screen with the clients or I show my wall. Some other times I show a Google Drawing. Nowadays I’ve discovered a new tool, Whimsical, it seems to be almost a toy. But it is so limited in the things that you can do that you are forced to be tidy and clear because you have only some boxes to move on the screen. And so, simple tools and simple rules to make sense out of complexity. The great effort is to be alert, to stop and reflect: “what are we seeing?” “What did we discover together?” Sometimes this is missing completely because you don’t have time, you have to go fast and you need to deliver. You don’t have time to do a retrospective. Or to evaluate the quality of your thinking. This is the kind of creative pressure, the fight to be rational, systemic, and systematic, but then you have to deal with reality. You just have to do it.
10:27 Models: Making knowledge actionable
Kevin Richard
On the simplification of complexity, not in the sense of making it more simple or stupid, but more in the way that you can create a concept that is easy to grasp, to understand. This is a good way to introduce something more complex and let people maybe go deeper, but it’s enough to act upon it. And you use the metaphors to do it, like with the spotlights of your car.
This is like in science when we say, we know that all models are wrong, inaccurate representations of reality but a good model in science is one that helps you to predict some stuff. And if it does well this work, that’s enough, we don’t need more until we reach the end of the usefulness of this model.
How can we create metaphors, models that are simple enough to explain something? Models, that are also useful enough to be actionable?
We use a lot of visual stuff, visual models to explain complexity like the iceberg model. This is a really great one because, visually, you understand that there’s something on the top and in the water, you have a lot more.
Mapping and Sensemaking in videogames
Kevin Richard
I have one model coming from a videogame I played in the past, Civilization, and I loved the fact that you don’t see the map. It’s foggy everywhere. The only way to discover the map is to make some of your pawns to move on the map. Yes. Even though you discovered all the map, you see some key elements that are static, but everything which is dynamic is hidden from your view. You need to have a pawn which is close to something that is moving to see it. And this is a great representation of how far you can see. It’s limited to the field of view of your pawn, and that’s it. And as a god-like creator in this in this game, you can see all the viewpoints of all your pawns, which is already more than what you can do in reality, that I think it’s a great way of saying when you want to map, if you are alone, it will take you a lot more time.
You can draw some parallels with the co-designactivity. The more points of view you can have the farthest you can see and understand your context.
Better having more opinions
Massimo Curatella
You need not only to have the capability of looking around you in a dynamic and adaptive way according to what happens. But you need to create a network of sensors. You want to be able to have a network of probes that would send you back signals. So you can improve your capability of looking farther away, both in space and in time, it’s a superpower: you can see longer/farther than others. And that puts you in the position of having more opinions. Maybe most of them are right compared to those who have only one opinion or their strong intuition.
This is something related to my practice of design because I usually struggle and fight with clients when they say: “We have this inventory of UI pages of 150 pieces. Can you do that? What’s your estimate?” And I used to say, “yeah I can hire a couple of people. We can do it in one week or two weeks or three weeks. And I just used to do it. Then after months, I discovered that that software didn’t make sense at all. Because it was beautiful and the first impression was:” Wow, this is a cool UI, cool graphics, cool icons”. But then you click through, and you discover that there are steps missing, and things that you cannot understand, or pieces flying away. So I stopped completely having this kind of linear and restricted view on design. I need to have the broadest and deepest view of what you want to do. Either if you allow me to do that, or not, because otherwise, I’m not able to do a good job for you. And I’m not interested in just earning the money for the sake of selling pixels by the weight, And so it started the process of actually changing the culture of the client. So I started to educate them. “This is how you’re supposed to design software”. There are some well-defined steps: you need to research users, you need to empathize with them, you need to extract a synthesis of your research. To make sense out of it. You need to design according to an iterative model where you refine your prototype until it is almost perfectly fitting the real needs and desires of the users.
That is basically the UX Design mantra. But when you need to explain it to them (that is the first problem with complexity) It takes time. So you need to show use cases, and then you need to sell it.
So you need to go through the struggle of explaining why it’s important to co-design and co-create. And that’s s a change of mindset. And so piece by piece, by iterating this kind of approach in explaining “this is why I did that”. The button is there for specific reasons, and because of research findings.
Moving up the Strategic Design ladder
Massimo Curatella
This takes time. It’s a lot of effort and it changed completely my role as a designer. That’s why I like to think that I’m more on the strategic design side of the job. This is difficult. It’s really more rewarding. But it also brings you to be more selective and demanding for clients. You cannot work with all kinds of client, they need to have this kind of fertile conceptual ground.
19:13 Meaningful design is co-design
Kevin Richard
Totally agree with you. Yes, educating clients, people that are not used to work in a certain way to make them work with you, That if only we were doing our work on our side, and we could be alone and do our stuff and come back and say, Ta-da, that’s that done. There are people that that are doing the design this way, but we know where it goes to that. People struggle to implement it. People struggle to see meaning in it.
So when we need them with us during the research, we need them with us during the ideation and probably we need them with us when we start materializing those ideas into whatever screens, whatever artifacts, so they the see the connection between the steps you’re going through. And to get them here just to embark them into this endeavor. You have to come with them and you need to influence their contexts, you want to change behaviors, even before changing their mindset because you cannot change their mindset if they didn’t experience anything.
Well, it’s really hard to do it, you want them to be part of it because the experience leads them to learn with you during the steps. And it’s easier to make them change their point of view on something if they experience it in some ways.
And this is where need to incentivize them on this and changing their context when we are external to their contexts. I think it’s the point where it’s really hard. And this is why you need to be selective, In that sense. You need people where there’s already some thought process around their way of doing, where there’s something that you feel that they are ready to go into this process with you.
22:28 Having a triple positive impact by being a strategic communicator and an agent of change
Massimo Curatella
Sometimes I tend to be naive in thinking that I want to get the most out of my time because I want to have a purpose and a meaning, I want to have a positive impact. So I want to change people’s lives, whatever it is, even if it’s a small thing. So I tend to think that everybody else in the world is like me, this, sometimes, is a desire and a delusion. But of course, I’m not so naive to think that it’s the reality. So some other times the entrepreneur or the client, they just want to make money. There’s nothing wrong with it. And they want to have success, nothing wrong with that. So you need to be a strategic communicator, you need to persuade them. That’s a specific word that sometimes has a negative connotation, I don’t want to convince you about anything. I don’t want to change your mind or to influence you. I want to show you a workflow, a method that is going to be more efficient and effective and pleasurable and sustainable than what you are doing right now.
So I don’t want to convince you because I am better than you and I want to save the world and you’re not. Maybe you don’t care. And we don’t have to talk about this. This is not the point. The point is, you’re ambitious, you have a complex project that might have a strong impact. Well, let’s do things in the proper way. Let me show you what could be a proper way that is not my way, it’s going to be our way, I cannot do it alone.
That’s the change of mind. So you’re right when you say we need to change behaviors. This is difficult because it’s an actual change in the widest sense of the word. When you need to change an organization, a behavior, a habit.
Goals, purposes, principles, values for me, my family, my clients, society, the planet.
So that is the key place where a designer becomes an agent of change. At the smallest level, the smallest scale within you, yourself, your family, your organization, and then in the community or in the ecosystem where you are designing a product and a service. And that is really hard. But it’s really exciting.
You need to explain why we are doing certain things. And you need to facilitate the process because we are going to do it together. Because I don’t have the solutions. I don’t have even the right path to go through. We need to build our little collective intelligence, collective mind and we need to be aligned and effective in being fast and quick and precise about learning in the fastest and in the best way possible, but also to make sense out of what we are learning because what is our purpose?What do we need to know? everything or do we need to focus on certain things?
And this is exactly the sense of exploring complexity, sense-making together, but also design research and design synthesis, because it’s not enough to say: these are the sources where to look for information, these are the experiments, then you have to make sense out of it, are you able to explain it in a concise way, but also showing the value of it towards the purpose that we are having as an organization not because or any arbitrary point of view?
That is why, as a designer, you need to be a good communicator, a good thinker, sound systems thinker. It would help if you were good at finding the biases you might be a victim of, the mental traps. And this is hard because you’re a human being.
26:48 We can only design meaning together
Massimo Curatella
If you have the ambition of doing all of that alone, good luck with that. It’s impossible. you need to grow your organization, your network of thinkers. Because otherwise how can you grow your system of probes, of sensors?
You need to curate your thoughts, your sharing, you need to make a synthesis, and to put things in context. You need to make a connected report about what’s useful to us. And this needs to be curated, maintained, and kept alive as a garden.
Designers as gardeners: from “me” to “we”
Massimo Curatella
That’s the other beautiful metaphor of curating a product or service or a knowledge base as a gardener, you are there to nurture it, like plants, every day, you cut a little dried ranch here and there. You move things around. You take care of the sunlight, of the water of the ventilation. And that’s the most beautiful metaphor closer to be a systems leader rather than just a maker or designer. And it entails a lot of things because you need to be less about yourself, about your ego, It is less about ”me”, It’s more about what can “we” do together,
This needs to be sincere, I need to be open, available to listen to you. I need to be also graceful and tolerant of your faults, your limitations. Otherwise, how can we work together? So it’s not just a matter of “are you qualified or not?” But “can we learn this together? Can we grow together?” And this is a different way of thinking about a company and organization in which you have your cubicle. You have your role and you have your things to do. You do it with your head down. When it’s five in the afternoon, you can’t wait to go home. That’s hell to me.
29:25 Space for action within the Organizational Silos
When you hit the wall of the buyer, of the company, which are organized in a really structured way, where the constraints are here to force you to go in into the walls they created between stuff because this is the way they make it manageable. And you want to move stuff, you want to do things differently.
Unless there’s a real will to change stuff and to change how the organization allows being looser on some rules. Most organizations have a safe space for learning until so far and you’re not able to do is always as you want it to do.
Yes, so this space for action will determine what you will be able to do and where you will be able to go. And so what you will be able to discover, and this needs to be solved because it’s circular. You don’t know really where to start you have to move the space for action for the buyer, but to do it you need first to change stuff and changing stuff means hitting against this buyer.
It’s a wicked problem. It’s really hard to get through it and sometimes you have to accept you cannot change it and the fact that you accept that to maybe play by the rules At some points. Then you see an opportunity to inject something new in it. And this may help change stuff, but it’s slow. And it’s not always the easy way.
33:18 Face complexity with complexity
Massimo Curatella
I can really relate to what you’re saying. I have diverse experiences in trying to change workflows, processes, or even organizational cultures for very small or very big organizations. And I failed most of the time, but I’ve learned a lot of things. When you were talking about the fact that it’s hard and sometimes if you are an employee, you can explore and find the space for action up to a certain point. It’s true. That’s why I am usually an external consultant and I used to be a freelancer. So, I have way more space for actions because, if things are like they are, I don’t have to die in this organization, you’re just a client. But sometimes I really want to have an impact, I want to have success. So, maybe I have a long contract. So, I need to do something.
And the concept of some properties of complexity emerged and it became useful and I want to tell you how. for instance, when you talk about organizational design and development, the first thing that is important for you is to understand what is the official internal organization, in an organizational chart you can know all official roles: this is the CEO, this is the CTO or these are the managers of the first line, or you have the departments, etc.
And then you need to understand what is the real social network because the real managers are the real people doing key things and frequently they are not overlapping with the real roles.
Make the real system visible
Massimo Curatella
Now to do that, you are almost on stealth, because you are doing maybe interviews, and you have access to a sort of synoptic view of the organization like nobody else in any other place is having. So you have a superpower of seeing things like they are not seeing it. This is true for complex processes that are going across departments. So you have silos, they know the first part of the thing, they don’t know the second part of the thing, and so on.
In a project for the European Commission, we made a six-meters-by-two chart on the wall for 30 engineers, after 3, 4 months of research, and we said: “look, this is your process.” you are here, you are there. And then the leader said, “Well, I’ve never seen the process like this. I didn’t know we were doing all of this in this way.”
Leverage on network effects
Massimo Curatella
This is the first thing that you have as an organizational designer. This is a superpower that you have. And this is the place in which you have to face complexity with complexity. Because, as you were saying, it’s difficult to go person by person and say, “Look, it would be better if you do this, this and that.” Or if you ever go down from the top, the leader is imposing right now that you have to do this. And it’s going to be failing. It’s a failure. So what I’ve been experiencing was to create a network from the ground up, of the same people in this same role, but with a new motivation of getting connected with their company. So, by having the buy-in from the leadership, and starting, internal projects, they needed, following my suggestions, to establish a link with the other departments. So basically, you would have not just one top manager working in a single direction, but networks starting to mesh together. So, you would have a real internal network of forces trying to interact. And then when you set up something like this, and you are on the starting line, you can feel the power of something which is much more complex than you giving orders or imposing actions. You have people working with you trying to reach a common goal. This is the real power. Of course, if one day they say, Well, you know, Max, thank you, but we sold the company. We don’t need you anymore. It’s done. It is the end of it.
The future of organizations and the future of work
Massimo Curatella
How can we leverage this concept in our more sustainable way by building companies like this instead of having the old dear hierarchies? With the kings and queens and the slaves because this is what it is.
Or you have maybe a more modern way of putting people together and you give to the individual the responsibility of following a purpose which has a meaning to them. So they don’t have to be motivated by incentive or by money. They are doing that because they want to do it, they need to do it. This is my dream. This is what I tried to do. I failed a lot of times, but I keep on trying. If you have a company like this, you are unstoppable. Nobody can stop you because the value is not just earning the money. But we are here because we have a vision. We have our North star and our Near Star and we are doing this because we want to win together. Another dream and maybe another delusion. Let’s see.
39:11 The hard thing with hard things
Kevin Richard
This kind of organization is hard to create because first I think if it’s done is it’s always the kind of an exception to most. And this “fun” fact is enough to make it hard to make.
Massimo Curatella
That’s also the reason why we’re here tonight! To make it not only just an exemption but maybe the normality, the new normality This is the new normal that I want.
Kevin Richard
If you reach the point where you make this kind of organization, then you have to deal with the fact that people are not used to it. It creates a lot of uncertainty for them.
In an organization, there’s certainty about the rules. And so, it creates the illusion of certainty of the goals, the successes.
But if you remove this layer of rules, even if we agree with the fact that everything else is pure illusion, If you remove this layer, then people see reality like uncertainty, complexity, as you said, you have to deal with this. And for most people it’s the fear, managing people that feel uncertainty. This is the part of leadership which is challenging. You don’t have anything to control them, you cannot control that through the rules and you have to find other ways to do it.
And co-creation and participatory organization, it makes sense but then people would say “okay, but we cannot do everything in this way.”
You have all the uncertainty behind so it’s hard for people to feel comfortable with it. And then when we put people on a process, in general, this is like this as well, you say we will do some research and we will find insights and from those insights we will draw the next sections, even though we add some kind of phases and we know the kind of stuff we will do in the future, we are not certain of what will be the outcome of each of these phases and we cannot say, okay, in two months we will do this and this will be exactly lead to this kind of output and this will exactly lead to this kind of successes.
And people don’t feel comfortable with this kind of answer, because they love the illusion of certainty some way. Because everyone is setting some kind of certainty at some point.
That’s a summary of all of it. So everything you said it’s absolutely the truth. The point made by The Matrix, it’s absolutely this. Of course, it’s a movie, it’s a science-fiction movie. But think about the certainty of being an employee before February 2020. And then the pandemic. Where is your certainty? And how can you say that, since they are the CEO, they know what is going to happen in two months? I don’t believe in astrology, why should I believe in your predictions? So I know that it is really comfortable to live with certainties. And of course, people tend to live with this kind of luxury. But can we afford it? It’s something that needs to be absolutely challenged. And the other concept is the concept of control. Why are you supposed to control me? Why?
44:51 Who controls the controllers?
Kevin Richard
I still agree. I think all systems set that we have around that are rules to control are meant to control people. They’re meant to control outcomes. But as we are living through these systems and through these rules, one of the means to manage the outcomes is managing, as well, everything that leads to those outcomes. So if you want to make sure that we have a certain outcome we need, In a way, if we follow logically the philosophy of this kind of ethics, we need to control every step of the process that leads to outcome x or y. And that means people as well, even though it’s not the first point.
Massimo Curatella
This is Taylorism. This is scientific management. It seems to be something from the past, although it’s something that somebody still wants to use today.
If you cannot know your future and mine, why are you supposed to set my future for me? And if you want to get some outcomes, why don’t we build together a plan rather than you controlling the steps? Because when you had to create some simple objects in a factory, 100 years ago, of course, you need to control the steps, otherwise, you could get hurt, and you wouldn’t have the throughput. But what about creating software today? Can you control the steps? Are you building software? Can you control the steps of building software? Are you able to predict what’s going to happen every step of the way? Because this is what I’m doing day and night and nothing is controllable. We are really driving in the night on a foggy night while the car is on fire and the brakes are not working. This is today. and think about government, policymaking, healthcare. How do you wear your facemask? Like this or like that? Should it be one meter or two? I mean everywhere is like this. How do you educate your children? Is it easy?
47:12 Try raising children
Kevin Richard
Yeah, that that’s a good one. How do you raise your kid? I have just one point on this when we are teaching them: “Oh, the first rule, you should not lie,” Right? Because then you face reality and you lie, you lie every time instead.
Massimo Curatella
The human mind can learn to reason better. I talked to my kid about this podcast days ago, I said, look, I have a friend, it’s Kevin, I need to talk to him. I am basically putting myself in a difficult situation because I said I want to talk about how to explain simply, difficult things. What can I do? What should I do? Tell me, please help me. He said, why don’t you talk about ecology? The problem we have with the environment, the fact we are losing a lot of species, we don’t have to pollute, we have to take care of the fact that we are eating too much meat. And I said, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And this is a win. And I said we have hope. And this is what I like to do with any other people. If you take the time to explain things, but you have to do it in an efficient, effective, and pleasurable way. Because if you’re not fast, you’re going to lose them. You have three to six seconds. if you learn this lesson you can persuade and influence people, but you need to become a good thinker first and a good communicator, second. Otherwise, how can you do that? This is somehow my mission, my will of being present in the moment, and providing value in everything that I do. This is my challenge. Even now, even today. Even preparing for this podcast and this is making me happy. I feel alive and I feel that I am pursuing my goal, and I like it.
50:50 Learning how to think better
Kevin Richard
I agree with a lot of things and I think there was a point behind, this point about control, and all you said now is related to it. If you want to make others think and you want them to make to think about things in a proper way… there’s a lot about critical thinking around this topic. And there’s a lot about learning about your biases and how you can overcome them. You cannot remove them. but you can be more aware of them. And then find the ways you can correct yourself when you see the evidence of one of your bias is there.
Massimo Curatella
That’s another big topic. And that’s why during the years, I started to collect my interests around the magnets of systems thinking, critical thinking, design thinking, and they seem to be always together. They’re not separate. But this makes thinking and acting and designing heavier, not lighter. It’s even more difficult. If every step of the way you need to be sure, there are no biases and you are mitigating them, that you are inclusive with all the stakeholders and you are taking rational and structured approaches to get the best outcome out of it. That’s really a challenge. But this should be the aim of every human being not for designers only.
Systems-thinking: A Little Film About a Big Idea
So, this is about the metacognition, this is thinking about thinking, do you ever think about thinking? When I do that my mind blows up. If you want to analyze how you were thinking about how you should think you start to go meta, and it’s even harder. And then you discover that when you do things like that you take a distance between you and the other people who are not used to that. I don’t want to say I’m superior in any way. I don’t want to mean that. But I went through a path, a journey in which I, I tend to be aware of this. So I know when I have in front of me, people not aware of this. And they are the prey to any possible trap and pitfall, then. There, that’s the point where you can make a difference because you need to be patient and you need to facilitate a better thinking process. Longer, harder. Can you afford that?
55:03 Good design and bad design?
Kevin Richard
Don’t you think that bad thinking in design is a bit too present today in general? Because sometimes, to be honest, sometimes I feel like it’s hard to talk about this In Design. And “thinking meta”, as you said, is like, we are too philosophical, too under theories and not enough in the practice and then I don’t know where’s really the limit between the two and I don’t want to create one. But most of the time, it feels like people want to create those limits like: “design is practical, before anything else”. Maybe I’m totally wrong.
Massimo Curatella
That’s a good question. I have to say that I’m coming to design from an engineering background. But actually, I have always been doing design in the sense of understanding deeply the user needs and building something by optimizing resources in terms of actually delivering value by keeping an eye to the ecosystem. This is what is design to me. Or, better, this is what I want Design to be. If you look at people like Bruno Munari, the Italian guy who in the 50 to 60 said basically the same things that Design Thinking is saying today, so nothing new. Being a designer is a frame of mind that is a way of being. So when you talk about creating cool UI, like the dribble.com things, that is, that could be the bad thinking. That could be the bad education for a designer because you look at the cool visuals without thinking about the process, you don’t know what’s the context behind it. That’s why I like a definition of the design that I do that is interaction design, I design interactions. So before creating the artifacts, the tangible thing you interact with, I need to understand the entities, the actors, and the relationships, and we need to create a better system that will suit you. Then we think about communication design, visual design, UI design, and also the development. But I am always part of all the phases even talking with the client or making a strategy. And I got there but after 20 years. This is the place of the designer, this is where a designer should be, sitting near the entrepreneur, or the project manager, the project leader, or developer. That’s the point where designers should be. And if you think that designers are just there to receive your specs, so they can execute, this is not Design to me. Not at all, not anymore. So, I don’t know, because they could do a fantastic job. Maybe that is the place where you could do bad thinking in design. Or that’s another way to look at it. You are in the right place. You have access to users, you can gather the needs. You are conscious of the ecosystem, but you’re not applying anything that is rational. You are full of biases. (I didn’t say the word you were thinking of). So every place can be a place for bad thinking but there are certain configurations that are more strategic and may be ideal for good design. Some others maybe are more prone to bad thinking in design.
You can do bad design for instance, when you do user research, design research or interviews, If you are not able to extract the knowledge in the right way if you are not establishing a loop of verifying and assessing the knowledge and the assumptions. And there, you need to be confident in making mistakes. Not everybody is able to say, “Well, I was wrong. Let’s iterate and refine it”. This is not really well seen. You’re supposed to say, “I have the answers. And I’m right”. You’re not supposed to say “I’m a senior strategic designer. Yesterday, I was wrong. Let’s redo this thing!” you need to have guts to do that. And I do that every day. This is my job, to be wrong. And to prove to you why I was wrong because this is the value delivered to the company. But you need to be in the space for action.
Kevin Richard
That’s a good ethic, I think, in fact.
01:01:11 That was only the Table of Content 😎
Kevin Richard
Thanks a lot for this discussion. We, I think we’ve covered a lot in one hour. It’s like we can take each of the points and talk about it again, for hours. So Well, I hope we will do this exercise, more than once.
Massimo Curatella
Yeah, absolutely. We can even go deeper into specific subtopics or we can go as we are doing and I really would like to extract some highlights and insights. I want to write about it so we can have a conversation ongoing, and we can invite other people to join us.
Kevin Richard
Yes. with pleasure and to have more people can be only a good way to explore.
Massimo Curatella
Yeah, I agree. So thank you very much, Kevin, for your invitation. It’s been a pleasure and I’m really looking forward to doing more of this.
Kevin Richard
Yeah. Thank you. Me too. Bye
Massimo Curatella
Bye. Ciao.
How I prepared for this Podcast
It was fun and stimulating. I consider this an evolution of my “learning out loud” process in discovering more and more of what I don’t know about complexity and design. I’ve collected a lot of stimuli, prompts, and motivation to go deeper into my ignorance.
If you want to learn more about this adventure of mine, discover how, by leveraging on the collective intelligence of my connections on online communities and social media, I have been Preparing for the Podcast “Making Complexity Simple”.
Do you want to receive updates about my future articles?
This is an extract of the interview transcript that David Orban conducted live on the 14 April 2020 for his Internet who Searching For The Question Live.Massimo Curatella (me!) was interviewed on Personal Knowledge Management, writing and education.
I’ve made small corrections and fixes only for the sake of clarity and brevity.
Watch the recording on:
Searching For The Question Live #26 Knowledge Management With Massimo Curatella
David introduces the show, and Max
David Orban My name is David Orban and I am very glad to have all of you following the show. Before we start, I want to remind you that even if we are live you can always watch past episodes, both on Facebook and YouTube. And on YouTube, you can also subscribe to the channel. We also have a Discord community, and I invite you to join http://davidorban.com/discord. And finally, if you find the show valuable, as well as the other content that I produce and the knowledge that I share, you are welcome to become a supporter on Patreon at https://patreon.com/davidorban
Today’s theme is knowledge management.How do you manage the information flow? What are the ways that you cope with overload? What are the best tools of knowledge management?
The guest is Massimo Curatella. Max is a designer, a facilitator, a writer and also a friend. He lives in Rome with his wife and son and we met a few years ago when he came to a meetup I organized. I have the habit of setting up impromptu meetings around themes that interest me, such as technology-driven social change, decentralization, network society. Sometimes a dozen people come, sometimes several hundred. At the Rome meeting, there were not many people but one of them was very passionate, curious and skeptical. He held the Italian edition of my book, Something New, AIs and Us, full of notes and markups. On the first page, he jotted “Sono tutte stronzate?” “Is this all bullshit?” So we evidently had to go to have a pizza and several beers. And after the event, we kept talking into the night. Since then, Massimo became the Italian Ambassador of Network Society, a collaborator on several projects, as well as the agent provocateur on many of the things that I do. For example, He was the person behind the idea that gave rise to The Context, my weekly video series alongside this one Searching For The Question Live. One of Max’s passions is knowledge management. So I thought I would invite him to the show.
Welcome, Max.
Massimo Curatella Hello everybody. It’s a pleasure being here. Thank you for having me.
How to manage many interests
David Orban Let’s start talking a little bit about you. One of the things that is common to many people as a matter of fact, somebody just last week asked me for an opinion, because he is a designer and was redoing his website and he didn’t know how to talk about himself and the many things that he is interested in. You have the same problem. And I do too, except that I don’t care about it.
Is it the problem of somebody having many interests, a polyhedric personality and having some difficulty in conveniently representing him or herself to others so that he can be put in a box?
Massimo Curatella This is actually a painful experience I’ve been experiencing since forever in my life, and sometimes it becomes so painful that I cannot sustain it. And so I invite my friends and I ask them to listen to me. And what I found useful is to get out of the mess that you have in your brain in terms of passions, interests, and things that you like and you love and let your friends try to recognize some patterns. To make sense together, to me is the most valuable thing.
And something that I really appreciate for instance, in what you do, David, is that as you were saying, “I don’t care” in a way that is a provocation and a way of living and this has been always a problem with my culture, because I always been taught to be all set up perfectly, and you need to do things in the “proper way”, not specifying what’s the proper way.
This is a limitation. To fight this limitation, it took me several years. And this is when I decided that to build my online identity or my professional identity, I didn’t care anymore about being perfect or having specific titles. So I invented some ways to manage this. I started to collect labels. And I said if I want to be interesting in a certain context, and I have a label that is relevant, I will use that label. If I don’t want to talk with people, I will say the opposite. And it worked. So this is one of the ways to manage multiple facets of your identities.
David Orban We are all full people, right? We are not mono-dimensional or bi-dimensional we are multidimensional and as in the beautiful book Flatland by Abbot, talking about how a cube meets the inhabitants of a bi-dimensional world and how it is difficult for them to communicate because the cube is not suffering from their limitations. Similarly, I believe it shouldn’t be your fault that you have so many interests if you are efficient in pursuing those interests and anybody should be able to see you in a given projection. And then if you develop a deeper and broader relationship with them, that projection will encompass more and more of what you are. To establish a professional relationship that is based on just a given section and a given perception of what you are is perfectly appropriate.
Knowing wide and knowing deep
Massimo Curatella Yes, this is true, I agree, but it’s a matter of your culture and your attitude to life. I feel that in most of our contexts, especially in the Italian culture when we talk about school and how you develop as a human being, this is not promoted. This is not facilitated because you are supposed to find your place as soon as possible, you need to settle down and you need to find your title and you’re going to be your professional title. And this has been a curse to me. This is one extreme but, at the same time, the opposite of being completely open, but superficial on many different topics like a butterfly, without ever focusing on something and going by deep diving. Do youknow the metaphor of T-shaped people? (By the way, I am an O-shaped person) It’s when you can go wide and broad on topics but if you are polled on a specific concept you are able to go deep down and be able to have profound conversations about it. This is, for instance, what I really appreciate when we meet because we can talk about anything: life, universe, or c++.
The need for a culture of experimentation and innovation
David Orban What you said about Italian culture is sad because the necessity of telling a very young person that they are whatever happens to them in that moment for the rest of their lives was a necessity 100 years ago, but it is a profound condemnation today. And it really forces an entire population, not to experiment not to enjoy the alternatives possible, not to evolve with the needs and necessities of society as it is improved by technology.
So what do you do with your own children or child?
How can you tolerate this kind of violence that they go under at school?
Creating an environment conducive to creativity
Massimo Curatella This is a serious issue, and I live it every day. What I do is to try to nurture an environment that is conducive to be eclectic, and with many interests. And I try to always invite my child to anything that I do for work and recreation. And sometimes I use him as a sparring partner, as a creative person. I did that yesterday for a workshop I had to organize with 100 people. And I tested a prototype with him and I told him: “work with me for one hour, I want to see how it works”. The difference is in how you treat the person. Because if you treat a young human being like a child that needs to be fed and you have to wait for them to become persons, one day… This is what our parents were doing with us and I don’t want that. So I talk to him. When I want, as a child, as my son, but most of the time as a person, I talk with him about going to Mars or what Elon Musk is doing with reusable rockets or The Context by David Oban talking about living on the moon. And he is so excited and sometimes, it’s like planting seeds, you cannot see the immediate fruits of that. But after years or weeks, you get some returns because it comes back with the drawings, with ideas with worlds he wants to build on Minecraft. And this is fantastic, but you have to be present in everything that happens. You need to change your attitude. So educators or parents or relatives are absolutely important in the environment of young minds.
Coronavirus as a boring horror movie
David Orban How is life in Rome these days with the lock-down and everything?
Massimo Curatella It’s surreal. You would see scenes that are really familiar to any other place around the world. And the first time that I had to get out to buy groceries, it seemed to me like I was living in a movie scene from 12 monkeys. I felt like Bruce Willis, navigating this incredibly deserted world. And I was scared, you see people in long queues and they are way farther than two meters one from the other. And you can feel the embarrassment, the fear in the eyes of people.
On one side you still see the elders being absolutely not disciplined (along with the younger). One of the best scenes I was part of was a person with plastic gloves, and a mask, he went into a bakery and he bought a piece of pizza bianca. He put down the mask and he started to eat in the middle of the road like, nothing was happening. I said, so why are you wearing a mask?
On the other side, this was a month ago, the first time that I met my mother in law the instinct was to hug ourselves. And I said, Okay, no, no, we need to touch our feet. This is what they used to do in China. So this is our way of saying hello. And it was fun and sad at the same time.
Sped-up digital transformation
David Orban A lot of people who postponed the adoption of modern tools are now forced to use video conferencing and share the collaborative platforms, documents, either on Google or Microsoft Teams or maybe some open source solution as well. And they are hopefully going to realize that there is nothing to fear that it is going to be good to keep going with these tools even when the peak of the pandemic has passed and when children go back to school and, and when the workers are back in their offices.
So what do you think about the relationship between the tools of knowledge management and the ability to manage knowledge?
Becoming intentional in digital knowledge managment
Massimo Curatella This is the essential concept that we need to address for people like me who like to play with everything and experiment with everything and they keep on having thousands of ideas, everything they do. Having infinite space at the finger for free. It’s a curse. It’s like the tool you’re using right now Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, with a finger you keep on scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, it’s just like drugs. You’re addicted, you go there and you scroll for hours.Now the same is happening when you can save any piece of information. With the illusion that one day you will read it or with the illusion of knowledge since you have grabbed a beautiful piece of writing or an article or a video. You have the illusion, the dopamine boost, of being smarter. And this is, unfortunately, so easy that I frequently fall into that. And this is what I’m trying to fight by trying to be more intentional. This is the most important thing we need to nurture in our children and in ourselves, to be intentional. We should still be open to serendipity, finding things where you’re not looking for it. But that cannot be 90% of our lives. At the same time, trying to be more intentional needs discipline. So I’m doing a lot of effort in trying to ask myself, why am I saving this link? I’ve been collecting information since 1995 and I still have those collections. I still have them after 25 years, with the illusion that one day, maybe I will review them because I remember there was something interesting. And it’s like prehistory, it’s the archaeology of myself. After 20 years, I really don’t care. The difference today is not what I’m saving, but what I’m gonna do with that information.
David Orban And I like letting go of things that once I thought were so important, I feel it as a cathartic moment when I realized that it had its place and now it has a different place and I can do without and I also like Saving, stuffing the knowledge that I am not going to, for example, read the article that I am saving, but I have an expectation of an increasing utility in the tools that surround me. So that they will be able to derive the correlations among the components of the information that I am saving in order to surface in a contextual manner, what is relevant in a given time in the future and, and there are glimpses of that already. For example, even though it is a tool that we used to love and now we love it less because we believe it may not last forever and we are a little bit afraid of its proprietary nature and format. Evernote when you start writing, it’s pretty good. Bringing you other notes saying this might be relevant to what you are writing. And also, there are other tools that are doing similar things.
Do you believe that it is reasonable to expect AIs to become effective assistance? And pretend that whatever we don’t do is because we don’t want to make the effort, they will do it in our place.
Think strategy before technology
Massimo Curatella I hope so. But of course, we have to discuss what we mean by that. I’ve been dreaming about Google before it was born. I was dreaming about Yahoo groups before it became a reality. And my idea was to have my brain in a digital format so that I could share it with anybody else on the internet. I could create a connection while I was sleeping. At the same time having the assistance of Google or Alexa is, for now, a little bit more than a toy. But when you mention tools like Evernote or Notion or others, they are powerful, advanced, but still, if you are not disciplined, they are going to become a mess very soon. So we’re not there yet. I want Google to tell me, 30 years ago, you were thinking about this. Do you want to have some more information about this concept?Because there is David talking about this right now. This is what I want.
The future of Personal Knowledge Management will be in our brain
David Orban Or given your browser history, I know that whatever you attempted 30 years ago, you were not ready. But now you are ready because you have acquired the skills and what you wrote, contains certain components.
We have Sabina Spagna, saying that children must be stimulated in every context. And this is called divergent thought. And it is also a successful movie and a book hasn’t read it but I know it’s very popular.
Neuralinkis one of the newest Elon Musk companies, where he’s able to rapidly assemble an excellent team, where he gives instructions coming from his approach of first principles, redesign of solutions to achieve a tenfold or a hundredfold improvement on anything that was possible before. Neuralink wants to achieve the ability to interface our brain and our thoughts directly with computers. And with other humans at a depth and speed and completeness that would make us all for every practical purpose telepathic. But we have a problem with bandwidth. If we communicate like this, the effective transmission of information via a spoken word, it is not a very high rate, especially if I am not a good communicator. So, Neuralink wants to increase the communication bandwidth between humans and our exo-cortex.
The only people who want to go through the effort of doing that are the paralyzed. Today the first attempts with Neuralink will be on people who have no alternative. But yes, there will be a time when the system will be less expensive, less cumbersome, less dangerous, less delicate, and it will not require FDA approval and exception anymore. And that is when many of us will eagerly embrace that.
Flip education
David Orban Time is money and getting relevant knowledge needs precious time.
How can we make sure that the information we get is relevant and that both children and teachers can use the best methods available? So what do you say, Massimo, to that?
Massimo Curatella Do exactly the opposite, ask children to teach to teachers, this is the very first thing you should do.
David Orban And what is needed in order for that to happen?
Massimo Curatella We need a transition in our culture and in the system because, of course, if you are living on the salary that you are getting by giving tests and giving rating you cannot do otherwise than that. So the system needs to be changed. In fact, I think the teachers right now are victims of the system. They are not only the perpetrators of what they’re doing. So I feel compassion and I’m empathetic to them. Because when I was a teacher, I had the luxury of doing whatever I wanted. So in any class that I was teaching, I said, you don’t want to do that? You do want to do computer graphics. You want to do photography, let’s do photography! And the student, you know, didn’t pass the course. But he was so happy. And he changed his life. He did another job and after 15 years, he’s saying thank you, Max!
Systems Change starts with you
David Orban Now, what about the family pressure where they need to study in order to pass a given admission to the next school and then the next school and then the next school for 20 years, at least or you know, if somebody stops at high school after 12 years or 13 years, whatever it is there? because we are talking about children and teachers and the families right, all three have to agree that the current system is not working
Massimo Curatella When we talk about changing the system, the system has different levels, the first level is yourself, then you have to go in circles, and expand them gradually and see who you have near you. You have your family, this is still the system, and then you get outside, then you have the school, and then you have the nation-state, the government and then the world. So you cannot act only top-down or bottom-up, you have to intervene in all of those levels.That’s why it’s so difficult. That’s why I keep on failing every day.
Knowledge Management in the workplace
David Orban Since the title of this episode is knowledge management, it is not surprising that we are talking about schools and children. But the same challenges are applied also in the workplace where a very hierarchical and centralized decision system pretends to assign you tasks that you do unquestioningly and then measures the time that you spend on the task and the more time you spend, the more important the task is. And if you questioned the method, you are seen as rebellious and dangerous and set aside. Now I’m describing the worst possible workplace, but is the challenge harder or easier in your opinion to re-calibrate the minds and the culture around what we really need to focus on what matters in terms of how to cope with the information flow and what is happening?
Massimo Curatella It depends on the environment where you’re working. And workplace and personal knowledge management, they are two different things. But of course, there are similar kinds of approaches and methods. In the workplace, If you are in the old school, I don’t think you have any chance you have to follow the hierarchy. I was having some pains in working in a very strict hierarchical system where I wanted to share knowledge and share information with my colleagues higher or lower. It was a problem. It was a problem because I was not respecting the hierarchy. Now, in a very formal, scientific environment I can even think there could be some benefits, of course, because otherwise, it is completely chaotic. But I still feel that it’s a sort of limitation because it’s very old school, you get beaten on your hands, why did you do that? you have to pass by me! And even if you go a little bit lower in medium-sized organizations, even in Italy, they are still like this.
Knowledge Curation and Personal Knowledge Management
Massimo Curatella When instead you go and work with people that are more open and modern in terms of sharing and managing knowledge, what I really appreciate is where everything is transparent and available to everybody. In that case, you have other kinds of problems, because you have too much. The next step is to curate knowledge,Personal Knowledge Mastery becomes the needed approach. What do I want to do with the knowledge I’ve acquired? In the workplace, if we are working together, we need to have conversations and work actually together to discover what we need and aggregate and let the information grow. So that one day we will have clusters of something that is meaningful or relevant to us.
David Orban I really don’t like when somebody just shares a URL, and nothing else. And when they do it on their own wall, and maybe they asked me to be a direct connection, what Facebook calls a friend, I look at their walls, and it’s just a series of links with zero context, zero opinion, zero curation, as you say, and I just can’t accept, because I don’t need that human to be a collector of links. What I want that human to be is a thinking value adding actor that provides his or her opinion on whatever is important.
I want to make sure that our viewers can find you. So they can go to curatella.com Is that like a cold cut from Rome? That’s how it sounds to me. Maybe too close to dinner. That is why I think mortadella-Curatella
Massimo Curatella That’s the worst joke they used to do to me when I was a young boy, but it’s not. It’s actually a plant and it is coming from South America. I think it’s Curatella Americana. It’s herbal medicine. And it is a nice name because it reminds “curating”.
David Orban All right. So, on your website curatella.com there is contact information and people can get in touch with you. To have you design and facilitate and write and do all the other wonderful things including provoking and upsetting and disrupting. Which you do very well as well. So, as we go towards the end of our hour together, what would you like the people who are here, take away? What can they do to make our conversation actionable to them?
Building a writing habit
Massimo Curatella Oh, that’s a beautiful question. I am a technologist. I am a software developer. I do software engineering, I love technology. What I will tell you is: forget about technology, widgets, smartphones, unless you can use those toys to really augment your brain, the first thing that I would suggest is to write, you have to write, you have to get things out of your brain. Writing is painful if you’re not accustomed to it. To reach the stage of publishing on my blog, I’ve been writing a quarter of a million words, privately, nowhere to be found, only for me. And it was an immense effort.
David Orban And you posted it somewhere, and I commented, well, where are those words? Yes. Why are you hiding them?
Massimo Curatella Yes, what I suggest is to try to work on your character by building a habit. It’s even more painful than quitting smoking or sugar. But once you’ve discovered the power of having an outlet getting thoughts out of your brain, it’s a superpower, you cannot do without it, you will change, you will change your life. So, write, you will think better, publish, and then think about technology.
David Orban So, the people who should be recommending technology as the solution, you specifically recommend a deeper analysis and understanding of the objectives and of the outcomes, and only when that is better understood to find the tools but at the end tools do make us better and faster in achieving what we want to do, or even sometimes to do what seemed impossible when we couldn’t read or write. The ability to aggregate and curate knowledge was severely limited by oral culture. The invention of writing was fundamental. When we invented airplanes, we really started to do something that all humans dreamed about and almost all of them believed it would never happen and it would be impossible. So I understand and agree that analyzing in the abstract or within yourself, what are your goals, How do you really want to understand the task or the knowledge that you are managing is important, but I also think that the tools and technologies can help us over achieve With respect to what we would be doing without them.
Technology can help to build your digital brain
Massimo Curatella I agree completely I could not live without technology. And that’s why I have several thousands of digital books. I have an enormous amount of notes in several collections. And there are tools that will help you if you have your intention to collect a certain kind of knowledge. For instance, you mentioned Evernote, I would like to give you some suggestions about some tools: one is RandomNote for Evernote that would pick for you randomly every day a note from the past. So it would reemerge, you will get inspiration about something you have said in the past. Another suggestion is the Zettelkasten where this concept is taken to an extreme. This guy, Niklas Luhmann, in the ’60s created a slip-box method where every concept would be written on a card as a note, identified by a numerical ID, and every note would be connected to others through a relationship. So, basically, by following numbers, he would have been able to create a dialogue with his notes, with his brain. And that was on paper. Okay, today I would never do that although maybe on my back you can see something that wanted to reproduce that. Today, I would do that with Evernote, or with Notion and Readwise or with WordPress. I would export all the notes that I’m getting on my Kindle. and using a tool that is called readwise.io, I would get all these interesting pieces of knowledge to come back up to me, maybe in six months, maybe in three months. So technology can absolutely help. If you go on my website curatella.com/notes, that is my experiment with my second brain online. To write something publicly, you need to be confident. Am I writing something that makes sense? And then you need to connect it. That’s why I have keywords, pointing at key concepts that I want to use in the articles that I’m writing. It is a lot of work, but that’s the way to do it.
Conclusion
David Orban Wonderful. So Massimo, thank you very much for being a guest on the show.
Here on Searching For The Question live. That is what I do every day, experiment with new tools, and invite guests to take part in these conversations. And you can also vote for who would like to be one of our next guests on the URL that you see on the screen. And you can come and participate in the discord community to have conversations that we can have beyond the live stream as well. And the opportunity is absolutely open for us to keep these conversations.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OkNo
