Islamic mosaic pattern (Jörg Reuter/flickr.com)

Patterns and trends

Reda SadkiLearning strategy

How do we navigate these rules while achieving intended purpose? When we need new knowledge, where do we go? How do we go about it? How do we limit our exploration to ensure that we can still deliver on our tasks? What if we need to upset or question assumptions about how we work in order to find the answers we need (learn)? Wherever we may sit in the organization – from the headquarters in the capital city to the field –, our field of vision cannot possibly span the global complexity we face. When we analyze a situation or a new problem, we are looking for patterns. We build the “muscle” of pattern recognition through practice. This is where we mobilize our experience, which sometimes manifests itself as intuition. As we gain experience, we learn to trust our intuition and deepen the insights we bring to dialogue with our …

Old rusted anchor chains at Falmouth Harbour (StooMathiesen/flickr.com)

Anchoring

Reda SadkiLearning strategy

 “Hitting a stationary target requires different skills of a marksman than hitting a target in motion.” – George Siemens (2006:93) We are all knowledge workers who struggle with knowledge abundance – too much information.   Our ability to learn is heavily dependent on our ability to connect with others. How well are we able to collect, process, and use information? Individually, we have learned the behaviors that enable us to anchor (stay focused on important tasks while undergoing a deluge of distractions), filter (extracting important elements), recognize patterns and trends, think creatively, and feel the balance between what is known with the unknown. These behaviors “to prioritize and to decipher what is important” are “a bit of an art”, we say. How do we learn them? These knowledge competencies – and the learning processes that foster them – are central to our everyday work, and require explicit reward and recognition (for example, in job …