How to Increase Your Speed of Learning
I'm writing a new book and would love to share your stories
So, after three years of work to get a book out… I’m going at it again. But this time it’s non-fiction (mostly).
I’m writing about something I believe in and have done much of my life in projects, jobs and playing with my kids.
I’ve titled it;
How to increase your speed of learning.
The goal is to show how as the pace of innovation and life in general increases, the need to learn faster, better, always is critical. How do you do it?
By speed of learning, I mean how long it takes for you to learn things. How long to run experiments (intentionally or unintentionally), get the results and learn something new.
Brief draft excerpt:
Sharing
Sharing is caring (as my mum taught me) but sharing is also good learning in a few ways. Firstly, ideas, data and most things typically get improved by sharing. More perspectives, different questions, devil's advocate and building on each other can help.
Secondly, if learnings are shared, their opportunity for impact is multiplied. You can share your learnings in a retrospective meeting, through a slide deck, into a knowledge management system, as bullet points in your companies chat platform or, if you’re feeling bold, publicly in a talk or blog post.
Even if, and maybe especially if, you are the only person in your company, in your team or who is doing all this learning, sharing it out so that other people can find it, learn from it and probably build on it will also typically help you. By presenting your learnings to others, you will often do them differently. Kind of like the Hawthorne Studies for learning. Here is my twist on it;
“Knowing that your learnings will be shared, changes the process of experimentation and increases the quality, integrity and volume of the learnings.”
So I’m collecting real-life stories of the speed of learning from people I know and admire. I'm after happy stories of success as well as sad stories of failure. If you’d rather do it as an interview, ping me.
For example, at Wooboard we used post-it notes for our first version and put them on the wall. It took us 3 days to run the full experiment and we learned a lot. While at Tangler, we took 18 months to launch the product and then we learned a lot but it was slow.
Some specific areas I'm looking for stories around:
VUCA World means faster learning (volatile, uncertain complex, ambiguous)
Failure to SOL
Successful SOL
Scientific Learning and speed
Speed of learning
Volume of learning
Quality of learning
Sharing of learning
Integrity of learning
Impact of learning
Learning laps - doing it over and over
Tools to learn
Individuals
Managers and teams learning
Businesses learning
Social impact learning
Learning on learning
The future of learning
Compound interest
Tradeoffs
When is faster worse?
Going in spirals
If you have a story to share that you’d be ok with me including in the book, I’d love to hear it. I can’t pay you but if you make it in the final cut I’ll give you 2 free copies.
Please fill out this form to share your speed of learning story.
Thanks for your help.