Category Archives: Learning

Causal Chains

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The method for Multi-Hypothesis research that Jabe Bloom describes in his Failing Well session is very useful for exploring ideas and gaining new insights to problems.

The main idea is to use ambiguity by presenting factual statements to a group and allowing each person to form their own opinions and conclusions about those facts.

Causal Chains

We ‘unpack’ what thoughts may have led to the original opinions and conclusions, some thoughts will be certainties that the facts are right or wrong and others will be guesses and doubts.

  • Guesses and doubts are then explored to find ways that we can conduct tests or experiments in order to learn – the focus being on the smallest effort we can invest in order to learn something useful, regardless of the test failing or succeeding.
  • Certainties are sometimes worth testing as well – in the picture above, we try to invalidate gravity by throwing a ball – if it did not fall, we would be surprised and have a great opportunity for learning.

This workshop method can be completed in as little as 60 minutes with a small group, 90 minutes is comfortable for a group of about 10 people. It is a great way to get a lot of ideas in a short time and to shed some biases in our thinking by allowing many different points of view.

Approaches

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There are many ways to improve the way we work.

Approaches

Agile, Lean, Cynefin, Lean Startup, Kanban, XP, TDD, BDD, Srcum – these are just a few.

There are also many ways to apply these approaches to the way we work.

Ways to Approach

As a ‘pure’ method, a set of principles, a staring point, assembling a mixture of approaches appropriate to the problem we are trying to solve.

The great thing is that it gives us many combinations to try so that we can find solutions that suit the outcomes we are aiming for.

The down side is that it can be very hard to choose an approach – what has worked for one place, can be difficult to apply to another and get the same outcomes.

Learning in the Cynefin Domains

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If you are not familiar with the Cynefin Framework by Dave Snowden, you might want to have a quick overview by watching The Cynefin Framework

Different management methods work better in some domains compared with others, so I was wondering if different learning styles might also be more effective in some domains than others.

Learning mapped onto the Cynefin Domains

Notice that the lower two domains, Chaos and Simple, focus on learning by repetition and the upper two domains, Complex and Complicated, focus on higher forms of learning (and unlearning).

In disorder, meta-learning might be more useful or perhaps the act of learning is one of the things that pull us out of Disorder into the other domains.

Learning in the Complicated domain is how we develop our expertise – the more patterns and interactions we can learn about, the better we get at predicting how to get good outcomes and avoiding re-work and waste.

Unlearning is more important in the Complex domain – the more patterns and predictions we are good at, the less likely we are to notice the emergence of something new.