I want to riff on this a bit, since I’m stuck on a plane and am currently reflecting on a series of case studies I just finished with the membership. twitter.com/zachweinberg/s
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Zach’s observation is indeed true. Most people need examples to grok a concept fully. You can’t just give the framework alone.
I’ve written extensively about Cognitive Flexibility Theory, so I won’t repeat myself.
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1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise.
Yes, I know how that sounds like.
No, this isn't hype.
There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.
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What’s really interesting is this claim below.
Zach’s 100% right, smart people, who come from pedigreed education backgrounds/consulting/etc tend to think in terms of frameworks.
The problem is that frameworks often instantiate in weird ways! twitter.com/zachweinberg/s
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What we’ve found when running our case study sequence is that we have to work really hard to disabuse smart folk of the notion of ‘just give me a few examples to illustrate the different instantiations of the concept.’
The issue is that concept instantiations are limitless. 😢
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Anyone who has done business for any amount of time would know this: every case study, every business problem, is unique.
What you want is to give people a library of analogies to draw from.
Problem: deep analogical thinking is … hard.
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Specifically, the kind of deep structural analogical thinking that Patrick gets at here is hard (he draws from Douglas Hofstadter’s work on analogical thinking, but there’s been a rich literature in cogsci on this topic:
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If the analogy is exactly right—ie, in a deep, structural sense—then it is equivalent to thinking from first principles
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I think what we didn’t realise, going into our case study experiment, was:
a) how to invoke these kinds of deep analogical thinking, and
b) how to present the case studies in a way that is enjoyable to consume but also potentially demanding (should the student wish to do so)
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I’m beginning to realise how important the ‘active comparison’ exercise the original CFT researchers described in their work truly is — you DO need to give the student a case library in the context of a problem solving/comparison task. Otherwise there is limited pedagogical value
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(Active comparison here means — you give the student a business problem to solve, and then give them a case library to quickly scan. Rinse and repeat, until the student internalise the most salient features of the many cases.)
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My plane is about to take off, so I’ll have to end this here.
Our next iteration will focus on finding a sweet spot between enjoyable readable cases you can read at your own time, and pedagogical value, should you wish to ratchet up.
Will see how it goes.
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Also there’s a baby screaming their head off in the plane right now and I want to see how long he/she can keep it up.
(Parents everywhere: “you’re just asking for it, aren’t you?”)
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Might there be a role for a discussion-group process? Read the case, then discuss it as group, specifically trying to apply it to either a personal case (so discussion would have to be private) or a (different) known/shared case?
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