Massimo Curatella

Tag: research

  • Spending time with people to learn and getting inspired

    Reflecting on my search for an audience, I realized that I can focus my communication efforts on real people around me. The first “persona” is myself. It’s one of the many possible personas, meaning, when addressing my content to myself I am intentionally orienting my communication to things and topics which interest me. In a similar fashion I can look around me, to people close, friends and acquaintances. What do we share? What interests do we have in common? How can I research some of the topics relevant to them and produce meaningful content?

    It would be a “bottom-up” approach to select very specific topics to investigate, research and detail so I can make explainer content, for me to learn better, for them to appreciate some relevant knowledge.

    That’s the part when the old dear Design Thinking approach becomes useful. How do you know what to design if not researching what your users want, need, desire?

    In the end I should be more intentional and propositive in spending quality time with people I love trying to learn them better. It can be an occasion to have life experiences together, improving our bounds, bettering us as persons. It seems to be a great motivation to learn, develop relationships, acquire knowledge, develop new content and create new opportunities. Isn’t that exciting?

  • The Knowledge Creations Process

    Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.

    Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.

    But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.

    And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?

    This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.

    I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.

    How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?

  • Deep Reading: Authors and Sources

    I am starting to have a good pace with my private writing practice. Early morning, instead of late at night. I decided to pick a book and to slowly, accurately and deeply read it page by page. By going slow I was able to collect so many questions and connections that I got already a lot of inspiration. Even before getting into the first chapter.

    Checking the background of the authors give a sense on their authority on the subject. When it’s an anthology or a collection of already published essays, it helps to trace it back to the original source. How is the collection curated? Are those the best articles? Is it worth it to find the original publications of to follow in their next issues? It’s a great way to gather sources around the book topic.

    It’s useful to compile lists of the mentioned authors and books. They can be cross-referenced or selected to be read when you want to go deeper.

    It’s also important to put the book in the context of the time when it was published. How was it relevant? How is it considered today, if it is not recent? The publications at the source of the selected essays are still published today? What’s their reputation.

    I’ve only read the introduction and I feel like I’ve learned a lot.

  • Reflecting on Podcasting, Blogging, and Independent Research

    Reflecting on Podcasting, Blogging, and Independent Research

    I am really confused about my latest article: Simply Complexity Podcast with Kevin Richard and Massimo Curatella. I spent a lot of hours at night, stolen from my resting time, to carefully transcribe, revise, and highlight the discussion that went on between me and the host. I’ve found a lot of anchors to link to notes and previous articles. And many other refinements and prompts are there still to be done.

    But the article and the podcast received very little interest. I think, asking for 60 minutes of continued attention is too much, nowadays. What’s the latest 60 minutes podcast I’ve been listing to? I remember the one with Naval Ravikant by Shane Parrish, many months ago. It was astounding and I enjoyed it while having a beautiful walk. More or less improvised conversations can be really interesting and engaging but you need to be really caught by the topics and the speakers have to be fluid, relevant, insightful.

    I feel that this conversation was like venting off, for me, after years of thinking about the topics treated without the possibility to interact about them. I am naturally tending towards understanding the complexity of nature and its relationships, to go beyond the surface of things, to make connections between diverse fields and disciplines. I basically enjoyed it so much that I wasn’t even thinking to an audience or to make an article out of it. It was good and useful for me just for the sake of having a deep conversation with another person strongly passionate about the same topics.

    Ramses Oudt on Twitter

    I am proud and satisfied with having had this conversation in public and it’s only now that I am questioning the purpose and the usefulness of publishing that event online, on my blog.

    If recording and writing thoughts and conversations are not enough to build more connected thoughts, the next step, then, would be exactly to extract the key topics and connect them into my already existing notes. I need to have the patience of growing “knowledge piles” by tidily and neatly accumulating knowledge blocks by topic and by connection. My usual concern is: if I am exploring and connecting in all directions, at 360 degrees, how much time will I need to have a solid thread of knowledge, thoughts, and reasoning on one single topic?

    If “too much” is the possible answer, then, I am not doing it well. I have to, not only curate my thoughts but also to create an information architecture in which the pillars, the key topics, are emerging, clear, and easily recognizable.

    artificial intelligence books collaboration collective intelligence communication complexity creativity CREAZEE Sprint critical thinking design design leadership design strategy design thinking drafts education facilitation facilitation methods free-flowing future thinking how innovation instructional design leadership learning networks newsletter note-taking notes personal development personal knowledge management poetry problem-solving professional development reading research Ship 30 for 30 short stories storytelling sustainability systemic design systems thinking thinking what writing zettelkasten

    Assigning tags to articles is not enough. Writing notes dedicated to topics is not enough. I need to create continuity in a dialogue about a single topic. What are the experts thinking about it? What has been said about it, in the past? What’s the current situation? And, then, finally, what can I add to this dialogue? What’s my novel and useful contribution to that thread?

    Isn’t that just the work of a researcher? If yes, what am I researching? If research is something well established as a discipline, what do I know about it? What do I want to acquire and use as a practitioner? What’s the role of having conversations about the researched topics in the public? What’s the added value in transcribing and blogging about a podcast? How do you know when your research is valid, good, useful? How do you do research outside of academia?

    Another way to escape the routine or to get lost.