Conversation

Replying to

The source is Spiro et al’s Cognitive Flexibility Theory, and most of the examples in the paper are about medical education. (A highly applied field, albeit on a messy, complex biological system — but at least with some settled science!)

researchgate.net

(PDF) Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains

PDF | On Jan 1, 1988, Rand Spiro and others published Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains | Find, read and cite all the research you need on...

1

3

Now consider how this might apply when talking about business education. Business is messier — there isn’t ‘settled science’. So there’s probably more to be said for reading messy business biographies + the ‘case method’ over imbibing contextless business frameworks.

1

2

7

Why? The argument the authors make is that at the higher levels of expertise, you start to grapple with the fact that everything is connected to every other damn thing. Teaching concepts atomically hinders the student’s ability to apply them in real world cases.

1

4

10

So the next question is obviously: what do you do when you’re studying cases? The authors suggest something surprising to me: you mark up all the possible concepts that are instantiated in each case (and here you might need an expert) and then link to all OTHER cases.

2

1

4

This forces the learner to grapple with the real complexity of reality, instead of learning just the clean simple abstractions that frameworks seem to offer. And the reality of medicine (and business) is that everything is messier than you think.

2

2

A couple of follow-up thoughts: first, the authors write about a learning system they developed called Cardioworld Explorer, which means there’s probably some empirical results I can look up. I’m planning to dig into that later.

1

1

3

Second, this DOES sound like the ‘backlinking’ and ‘complex shared knowledge networks’ that the tools for thought people keep harping about, doesn’t it? Except the authors here focus on the cognitive science of learning, not the trappings of the tool itself.

1

11

The important thing to focus on seems to be: 1. You encode a multi-dimensional set of concepts for each case. 2. These concepts link cases together. 3. You are required to read through the messiness of each case, which is described in prose. (Though snippets may be recombined).

2

1

7

E. Andrew Taylor

Replying to

I’m just now wandering into #CognitiveFlexibilityTheory and its application in teaching/learning in the management domain. Curious if you ever found ways to implement these recommendations in a contemporary hypertext system (like Obsidian or Roam or the like).

1

1

Replying to

I’ve started work on a hyperlinked case library of business cases, but it’s still early days, I’m afraid! I think part of the difficulty is two-fold: identifying the concepts, and gathering the cases.

1

1

Replying to

and

The latter is comparatively easier, to be honest. There is a rich business literature, so there are many books and news articles to draw from, just time consuming. It’s the former that’s challenging. How do we know the concept instantiations are valid?

2:48 PM · Jun 21, 2022Twitter Web App

E. Andrew Taylor

Replying to

Thanks! And I’ve started to assemble a case library as well (in Obsidian, so tagging and linking are highly flexible and easy to change). Now considering how to store and code cases in segments rather than long form.

1

1

Replying to

On my end, I’ve found dumping or quoting passages from books, with narrative written and drawn from annual reports + articles to be useful. It gets much harder if you have to write your cases yourself. :/

1

1

Show replies