Midday yesterday my wife and son headed out for Alaska in a fully packed car; Austin will continue his meteorology studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I arrived home from Miami an hour after they left. I will probably fly up to Fairbanks at the end of the month so Uta and I can drive/float home together. The floating is taking a four-day ferry trip along the inland route from Skagway to Bellingham, Washington. At first I was hesitant to blow off two weeks on the journey but this morning I awoke with a fresh perspective.
There are so many things I don’t have time to do. This trip is making time for them. (NB: How to make time.)
I plan to read Patty Anklam’s new book, Net Work. I will also be reading Mobilizing Minds, Creating Wealth from Talent in the 21st-Century Organization by Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce. And I want to catch up reading my feeds and some white papers.
I’m in the midst of re-inventing myself as a businessman who knows a whale of a lot about learning. I’ll be seeking an audience of managers, not trainers. Better to be a small frog in a big pond than a big frog in a small pond, especially when the small pond seems to be drying up. This evokes John Muir’s observation that whenever you try to change something, you always find that it’s connected to everything else. So repositioning involves changing the websites, essays, imagery, the Jay brand, my mental models, etc.
What I’m giving up is models that constrain my thinking…
Give a kid a hammer model
…in favor of open-ended constructs that enable me to pursue opportunities wherever they may appear.
Open-ended models
A model from a single discipline will never fully explain a multidisciplinary, interconnected world. I prefer to make meaning with small models, loosely joined.
Auf wiedersehen, ADDIE.
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Hi Jay,
I wasn’t able to send a trackback to your post, so I decided to write a brief comment. I totally agree with you about the convenience of loosely joined models. What if we start thinking about ourselves as “beta learners”?
Regarding reinventing yourself as a business man – this post gave me a strong feeling of deja vu with regard to some things Don Norman said a while back, relating to the Usability crowd. He exhorted them to get where the action is – i.e. to come to the table with business skills so they could actually influence companies to see the value of usability work.
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