Internet Time Blog » Internet Time Lab http://www.internettime.com Mon, 06 May 2013 16:36:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= Learning my work http://www.internettime.com/2012/08/learning-my-work/ http://www.internettime.com/2012/08/learning-my-work/#comments Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:10:23 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=7231 I’m having a great time writing white papers and articles for companies. It’s fun distilling complex issues down to essence and then discovering the right metaphor to render them easily understood.

Given enough time, I enjoy writing like a novelist, taking flights of fantasy and letting my characters tell the story and sometimes duke it out. Then I’ll rein myself in, dump most of the text, and sift for nuggets, occasionally finding a zinger sound bite or several paragraphs worth saving for the final paper. This limbers the mind. Good writing requires jumping through hoops.

This evening I was writing about how managers can make the most of the 70 and 20 of 70:20:10. My inner Gordon Gecko shoved me off the keyboard and began writing…

“”The world of business is undergoing a phase change.”

“We’re the frog that doesn’t jump out of boiling water because we started with tepid water and increased the temperature verrrry slowly until we had a boiled amphibian. Similarly, earth-shattering forces have snuck up on us humans, answered some of our wishes, and that genie is never going back in the lamp.”

“Work and learning have merged. Few people have noticed although some have complained of warmer weather this year.”

“Complexity rules. Nothing is predictable. Information is spewing out of control. Network connections gird the earth. The denser the interconnections, the faster the cycle time, and things are evolving, morphing, and changing shape so rapidly that everything’s a blur. Work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections, both learning tasks. Thus working is learning. We learn on the job to do the job. In an era of warp speed, learning is as vital as breathing. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter. Learning is working. This is the big change: WORKING = LEARNING and vice-versa.”
Patting myself on the back, I thought. Wait a minute. These aren’t new thoughts. They’re a dog’s breakfast of residual thoughts going back years.
The phase change in business haunts me. It is a rare opportunity or a chance to fail really, really fast. That’s always threatening to burst out because it’s a total game-changer.
The frog thing is a video I’d like to shoot but PETA would probably burn the house down.
The WORK = LEARNING; LEARNING = WORK appears on page 226 of my book on Informal Learning. I’ve been playing around with a relevant quotation from Picasso: “I do the things I do not know how to do in order to learn how to do them.”

]]> http://www.internettime.com/2012/08/learning-my-work/feed/ 0