As my wife is away tonight, Smallsteps and I spent the time doing homework, talking and making some origami cranes. After the success of the very simple bookmark on the weekend, and making some special paper planes yesterday (a model my father taught me), this was the next step. Obviously a seven year old doesn't have the precision, nor the power in their little fingers to get a clean result, but it is part of the learning experience that everything takes practice. And if we want to learn something, we have to have the patience to build understanding, and the acceptance that we are likely to fail along the way.
Learning something new is always uncomfortable to some degree, because there is always some level of uncertainty, some unknown, as well as the known potential for failure. And while no one likes to fail, it is possible to learn how to deal with it and recover from it faster, especially when the opportunity of the outcome, is greater than the cost of the lesson. The earlier we learn good process, and how to continuously improve what we do, the farther we can travel.
But, learning styles is as much about nurture as it is nature, perhaps more so even. This means that we can be conditioned into holding processes from childhood for a lifetime, and instead of feeling like they are something we can change, it becomes a part of us, something we identify with. And, the processes we apply are the same for all things, where we do something a certain way, as if that is the way we have to do it, even though we haven't worked out if that is true, or if it is even the best way for us. This means when any thing arises that questions our process, we feel personally attacked.
For instance, a client today was telling me how his working process is different to his colleague's, where he gets smaller tasks out of the way as they come in from project managers, while the other person lets them pile up and does them in batches. What he has noticed is however, that the project managers are pushing more work his way, because it is being done on a shorter schedule than from the other person. The preference to have a queue of jobs waiting might suit his colleague better, but their preference means that they are a bottle neck in the organization and due to this, they are creating another bottleneck, because my client is getting overwhelmed with requests.
It is an interesting problem that made me think about how our preferences and processes can unintentionally impact on others, but we don't necessarily see how it affects them. So, we keep doing what we do, the way we do it, because it is the way we have always done it, even though the cost to others will eventually turn back and become a cost to ourselves. Essentially, the colleague is becoming an untrusted node and is getting bypassed, which means that they are reducing their possibilities, because of their process.
Now, perhaps my client has in-built mechanisms as well as early conditioning to have that continuous improvement mindset. Or perhaps it is because over the last few years he has obtained six sigma "blackbelt" status, which is at the level that he can lead an improvement strategy in an organization. Whatever it is though, he has improved his processes over the last few years a lot and I play a role in this improvement process also, because I offer perspectives to reflect on that he doesn't find elsewhere.
Behavioral changes take a long time to happen in most instances, because there is a process of retraining involved and the muscle memory is there to keep us returning to our defaults. Even with intentional activity, it can take 18 months or more for some people to change even relatively simple activities, and even longer if it is the type of change that is "part of us", where we have been conditioned from adolescence and maintained and reinforced it for decades. In some respects, it is like shaking an addiction - once an addict, always an addict.
I think that a lot of parents want what is best for their kids, so try to teach them right from wrong. The problem is, that as things are always changing, a lot of what we might think of as right, might become wrong in the future, like advising pregnant women to smoke to relax. However, while we are teaching children what we want them to know, we don't really do a very good job of teaching children how to learn, or how to improve what they know, or how to improve the way they apply it. Knowledge is just not enough, otherwise we would all be doing incredibly well, since we all have the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips.
If we can't apply it, it is useless to us.
Folding paper tonight reminded me of a post I wrote in the first couple months I was writing, called 24 Folds. It is about how we fold ourselves like a piece of paper in ways that mark us, that leave creases on us. But, we are also able to unfold ourselves and fold in new lines, new directions. We are still the paper, whether we are in the shape of a plane, or the shape of a crane.
Fold a piece of paper 42 times, and its thickness would reach the moon.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
