Rapid Idea Improvement

Reporting is vital in organisations

I want to highlight 2 very different ways of reporting … and it’s consequences:

Status reporting : where do you stand versus plan ?

“Theory reporting”: What are you solving? How ? And why ?

Small diversion into the 2 main epistemological theories: Justified True Belief and Critical Rationalism/ Fallibilism

And why being fallible is good news in organisations (!)

What is "We should ... -management" ? 

What are its mistakes and how to correct them ?

Contents:

The best ideas are not the ones that come from the smartest people

Also, the first version of an idea is irrelevant

What matters is HOW an idea evolves !

An idea can evolve along these content elements:

But what are the relevant drivers for optimum evolution of an idea? (What makes that it evolves in the best way - as opposed to less good ways?)

In this episode I go into 2 quotes of the philosopher Sir Karl Popper:

What is fallibilism ?

What is it’s opposite?

Why is it relevant for management ?

What are drawbacks?

How to overcome the drawback ?

Ideas, and only ideas, are the primary ingredient for any type of improvement we seek

This episode deals with how and why ideas get killed in organisations, and then do not make it into solutions that deliver the improvements we sought for.

Out of scope in this episode:

Linkedin version of the podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bart-vanderhaegen-46a6971_ideas-business-change-activity-6672453919261655040-sQto

Enjoy

Bart

Flow is the optimum experience … as coined by the psychologist Mihaly Cszikcentmihaly.

He did very interesting work in trying to figure out what the explanation was for this experience, what the causes or drivers were.

He came up with 3 key drivers of Flow.

The experience itself can be looked at from different perspectives as well and I want to go into one which is often underrated:

To illustrate this we need to look at the third condition for Flow: the balance between skill and difficulty. This condition implies that Flow is something dynamical, that you can always fall out of Flow and get back into Flow during your activity. The reason being that both skill level as well as the difficulty of the task is dynamic and not static. Any activity has phases of varying difficulty … and your skill level is also dynamic: the more you do something, the better you become in that activity and therefore your skill level increases.

Now if both skill and difficulty are constantly changing over time, how do you keep them balanced in order to maintain the experience of Flow ?

Both types of knowledge creation are the essence of optimum learning, and as it goes with knowledge creation: it’s fallible, never right the first time, and takes a lot of error-correcting to get closer and closer to the kind of knowledge that is useful. In this case useful to maintain Flow (by either understanding how to get out of either boredom or frustration)

I use the term “problem solving” a lot, as a synonym for "work", and it needs some explanation.

It’s not negative ! on the contrary, it’s positive ! It’s what you need in the first place to make progress !

Ignoring problems is ignoring opportunities to make progress.

Or worse, or more dangerous, consider that all new problems are the same as old problems and that therefore can be solved with old knowledge …

But then, why talk about problem solving when you can just talk about “performing work” ?

Well that would be oversimplifying things

Suppose we don’t create knowledge while performing work, then either work would be 100% repetitive which is impossible or we would never be able to make any kind of progress.

If you really believe that you don’t create new knowledge while doing your job:

So … we don’t just “perform work” … “we solve problems in order to be able to perform our work”.

In fact, this makes work interesting, you don’t just say “I sell computers” … you can go deeper into what makes that job so specific ? What problems you encounter and what specific ideas you have or are working on to solve them ...

On a broader level, and when thinking about “how to make more progress” … which is the ultimate question at the end of the day … we can ask ourselves many very interesting questions:

The point being: if we look at work as “just performing the work I am responsible for performing” … we neglect all of these interesting questions … we neglect all of the optimisation potential that is opened up through these questions. We basically rely on oversimplified rules for how to organise work or “who should do what and report to whom”.

I hope to get into all of these specific questions in future episodes, it will take us some time because they open a variety of different and new aspects such as the theory of knowledge creation, and principles behind behaviour change

Hope you hang on to discover and relate to it!