meta-cognition – flowingmotion

If you care enough, you can build it, and they will come

Published November 6, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I am amazed by what I wrote months and months ago. You really should keep a blog and write and write. At the time, your posts may be rough, but they will clarify and when you reread them months late, you will be surprised by your insights.

It seems that some months ago, I jotted down some of my thoughts on using Twitter in classrooms. In the course of the post, I jotted down three critical features of developing flourishing communities like thriving classrooms.

#1 Conversations

Talk to someone. Work with someone. If there is no one else, feel the ground under your feet. Listen to the birds. Pay attention! As we pay attention to the world, we ourselves come alive and the world pays attention to us.

Managers & designers: Start the conversation. Provide tools and opportunities for people to talk to each other. Watch the range of conversations and help people join in. Also watch the content of conversations and help people extend their conversations – to more people in and outside the organization.

#2 Community

Be positive. I don’t mean gushy and airy-fairy. I mean talk to the facts, including your own negative emotions, but don’t exclude other stories. We should own our negative experience but not think they are the whole story. Keep a gratitude diary because if you don’t, with the best will in the world, when shit-happens, and it does, you might find you cannot see the good with the bad.

Managers & designers: Set up “positive” procedures – which are procedures that allow us to recognize negative events, which ensure that we never disrespect anyone by ignoring how events impact on them, yet which acknowledge what is good and true and that we want to do more of. Abandoning the negative art of “gap management” takes thought and disciplined work. Falling out of love with our own tempers takes practice and like-minded friends. But unless and until we can achieve positivity : negativity ratios of 5:1 when things are going badly, we will not predictably sustain communities where we will flourish. The key to flourishing communities begins with us and our loyalty to our members.

#3 Meta-cognition (talking about)

As people settle in, watch out for discussion of the “rules of engagement” and the purpose of our existence. Everyone will have an idea and they need to be heard. We need to listen to others to allow them to hear themselves and to help them relax sufficiently to hear others. We need to be patient because this takes time and some people aren’t good at it. Once advocacy is balanced with curiosity, the group might begin to thrive as a group. Blogging, of course, as a form of talking-about – of putting our experiences into words and making sense of them.

Managers & designers: Help the group move through the five stages of group formation (forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning) and move as fast or as slow as they do extending the conversations appropriately but listening to the relevant concerns that people have at each stage though, quite rightly, these concerns are very different from yours. People move on faster when they are allowed to complete each stage to their satisfaction.

Leading takes work. No doubt about that! It is not as glamorous as it looks.

If you have read this far, you’ll have noticed that I am making little distinction between classrooms, businesses and for that matter, my own life. I don’t. I think the three points

talk to others
keep faith with others (even when it taxes your patience)
and put into words what we are thinking and experience

these three simple points are guides to building any community that you care enough to build.

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Group consciousness: the goal of leaders and organizational theorists

Published September 28, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Without good governance, life is solitary poor, nasty, brutish and short

So said Hobbes of countries. This philosophy also underlies organizational theory. Without good structure

“. . . organisations, particularly large ones, are not very conscious. There is not some malign [in]efficiency at the core of them, rather semi-conscious shuffles and bodges in various directions, which are beyond the ability of any single individual to do much about. I think that animal-herd behaviour is much the best model to describe collective humanity, however intelligent and aware the individuals within it may be.”

The goals of organizational stewards is to help us be aware at an organizational level

The goal of those of us who are organizational stewards is to create organizations that are aware at an organizational level. How do we know what we do and the effects of our actions? This has been the subject of organizational theory since armies began and certainly since Henri Fayol wrote down how to manage the managers in his coal mine at the turn of the century.

The “cleft stick” approach in classical organizations

Until the emergence of the internet, we concentrated on designing the communication systems within the organization on a “cleft stick” basis. Who spoke to whom? Who had the right to decide? Who must be consulted? Etc, etc.

To bring it all together, we followed the apex of the organization and indeed one of the most important rules of organizational design was showing the link between each person and the person at the “top”.

We all know how well we did on the ‘classical organization project’. Most organizations were not stewarded well and there was little attempt to manage communication properly. Even where communication channels were well designed, in reality, information was often not passed around as it needed to be ~ sometimes with horrendous results.

The networked organizations

The internet creates another way to provide group consciousness. We can all talk to each other directly; and we can use search engines, such as Google to find information much more quickly than ever before.

Google is an example of a company run this way (see Gary Hamel interviewing Eric Schmidt on YouTube). There is no need for the cumbersome organizational structures of the past precisely because there is another way of creating group consciousness.

New skills for organizational stewards in the networked world

It takes new skills, of course, to develop this raised consciousness. We are very likely to be savvy as internet users and creators.

We also have to understand how to read the results of the internet – judging provenance and the reliability of information.
We have to read the mood.
We have to learn to influence through this medium.
And we have to show that we can deliver results in the ‘real world’ through this new organizational ether.

It is time to develop the curriculum!

Who is in? These are the questions that spring to my mind. Who is working in this field? What are the classical case studies? What are the central ideas? What are the best ways of exploring the ideas?

What is the best way of generating consciousness in the field itself?

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

Doldrums to OK to fantastic classrooms

Published September 26, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Positive communities are important in learning

I’ve taught in colleges and universities for 25 years. One thing I am reasonably certain about teaching is that a good class has a strong sense of community. It is common sense that a good social atmosphere will be more attractive than a cold, totally clinical atmosphere. There is also a clutch of professional ideas explaining the impact of group norms, collective efficacy, belonging, system boundaries, and so on.

Why, though, do we so much prefer a 500 person auditorium to a pod cast?

What I’ve not been able to put my finger on, until today, is a tight model explaining why communities are so important – why for example we prefer to listen to a lecture in an anonymous 500 person auditorium than on a podcast.

Today my Google Alert flashed up this article on Twittering in Education. A US College Professor set up a class channel on Twitter. Twittering lead to more discussion between students and ultimately to writing a book “online” with completely voluntary help from students as far afield as China.

The post also describes the mechanism.

Meta-cognition & meaning

Conversations lead to community (And v.v. We know it is important to seed a social media channel with conversations.) The conversations lead to ‘meta-cognition’ – talking about the course. And talking about the course helps us understand why and how the course and the material fits into our lives. Greater clarity and shared understandings leads to more community, and more community to better conversations.

Do we get phase states?

Though the article does not say, I suspect that at some stage, the energy moving between conversations, community and meta-cognition (talking about) reaches a tipping point and we see greater levels of learning and action. So we move from the struggling, to the satisfactory, to the spectacular.

I rather suspect that this is a fractal model, such as we see with Happiness. The three characteristics of the class – conversations, community and ‘talking about’ – interplay. When this interplay is healthy, it moves through the broad swathe of emotional space. When we have done well, we celebrate, for example, ultimately ending with someone suggesting we get back to work. When things do not go well, we grieve, ultimately ending with someone suggesting it is time to start living again.

My thoughts on this glittering sunny day in autumn in rural England are to ask:

are these the three critical variables: conversations, community, and meta-cognition?
do they interplay with each other in a self-correcting manner going from positive to negative and back again as the need dictates?
is it right to use a phase state model where we look for the tipping points which take this energy system from the doldrums to OK and then to fantastic?
do the three variables co-affect each other through a set of Lorenz equations, and if not, how do they inter-relate?
how can we explore these variables in a field study?

Enough for now. The sun calls. I would love to hear from anyone interested in building communities with or without social media like Twitter.