• List of cognitive biases:
  Distortions in how we see reality
  Keywords: Psychology
• WordPress Hooks:
  A directory of WP PHP hooks
  Keywords: WordPress/Plugins
• ScrumWorks:
  Tool for managing your sprints and backlogs
  Keywords: Project_Management/Scrum
• Comment on Information Archtecture as Scaffold:
  It’s all about context – without it documents are rarely re-usable…
  Keywords: KM, mycomments
• Another comment on Information Archtecture as Scaffold:
  Not only is it about capturing context, but it’s about making that easy…
  Keywords: km, mycomments
• An Alternative Release Burndown Chart:
  Taking account of changes to the backlog when you predict delivery date.
  Keywords: Project_Management/Scrum
• Evaluation of WYSIWYG-editors:
  
  Keywords: Web_Architecture
• WordPress – USB:
  Putting WordPress on a USB stick
  Keywords: WordPress

Just got around to reading Blink. It’s a quick read – as usual with Gladwell the book’s central theme, the human ability to make almost instant decisions based on the unconscious mind and previously-acquired experience, is presented lucidly and with plenty of examples.
He structures the book in three broad areas:

• Evidence of human ability to make accurate decisions very quickly – faster than conscious thought
• The strengths and weaknesses this gives us
• Ways to develop skill and improve the accuracy of your instant impressions

Although Gladwell includes notes on sources, my frustration with books like this is that they only present one side of the argument, in favour of the core theory, and don’t really explore what else may be going on. However as an entertainment with a basis in science it’s a fun way to spend a couple of hours, and a good source of anecdotes to recycle in a “did you know” sort of way.

• ‘Sleeping on it’ best for complex decisions:
  Research from the Netherlands that supports the idea that complex decisions tend to have better outcomes if made by the unconscious rather than by conscious deliberation.
  Keywords: Psychology

I’ve played a little with dialogue a few years ago as part of a (now defunct) group that was looking at how a group of independent professionals could develop a self-sustaining, learning, network – we had a few good results but the group dissolved. So I was very pleased to get the invite to “Common Sense – an invite to join a group dialogue into the possibilities for deeper connections within a group”.

In this short account I’ll try to give a sense of how the evening went, at least from a personal perspective, with a few thoughts about the flow, how to increase the chances of it happening again and some questions.

The experience

Ten of us gathered at the venue – an alternative business space called The Hub in Islington. This was slightly out-of-comfort zone stuff for me, but it rapidly became apparent that no-one knew everyone – for all of us at least some of the group were strangers. After some initial ice-breaking we sat in a rough circle of chairs…. and began to talk. Inevitably a little bit about the possibilities for groups to connect deeply to make things happen, but soon the conversation began to have a life of its own.

At first I felt a little self-conscious (others reflected back that they had similar feelings), but (reflecting from afterwards) it was clear that within about 20-30 minutes I was beginning to lose awareness of myself and become absorbed into the talk. It was from about this time that the group began to have long silences in between conversational exchanges. During the silences (which felt quite comfortable to me) I began to be aware of some of the feelings that I associate with being in a state of light trance, i.e. a sense of relaxation, reduced pulse and breathing, a feeling of being happy to follow the group wherever it went, combined with a feeling that if I had wanted to act in some particular direction I could have done so. Unlike trance there was no feeling of drowsiness – rather at those moments the sensation was one of awareness and concentration without effort.

These moments were fleeting, and within a few minutes we would be back into a flow of conversation – and to me these conversational interludes immediately after the deep silences often felt very much “in the head” as opposed to the grounded bodily feeling of the silences. However as the conversation went on, the silences became deeper and, almost at the end, there was a sense, hardly more than a fleeting glance, of the trance-like feeling carrying over into the conversation and suddenly it was as if we were dancing a piece we all knew. The nearest sensation I can describe where I have felt this before was many (many!) years ago when I used to do a lot of cycling, when occasionally a small group out on a ride would fall into a pattern of “through and off” without any kind of instruction, and with concentration keep it going for several miles.

And then it was the end. And something left the room, some energy suddenly wasn’t there.

In our final conversation, as people made their individual exits, I noticed, and commented, that I felt energised and refreshed. Although nearly two-and-a-half hours of intense listening and concentration had passed since I’d arrived, slightly late, somewhat frazzled by a rush-hour journey across London at the end of a full working day, I felt more awake at the end of the session than at the beginning.

Pre-framing

Clearly there were a number of factors that contributed to the success of the evening. Not least of these, in my opinion, was that we were a self-selecting group who by the very fact of being there had an interest in experimentation, probable prior experience in working in ad-hoc groups and an interest in Dialogue. Secondly, the invitation had pointed us at three specific pieces of reading: the original David Bohm Proposal On Dialogue, Alok’s own paper on The Group Unconscious and The Conditions for Thriving Conversations by Kathia and Alexander Laszlo.

Some questions

I think many of us would want to repeat the experiment. Some of the questions that go through my mind in regards to this:

• How quickly could we start creating the group trance / dance next time?
• What difference would it make if the group membership were a little bit (or a lot) different?
• What else could we do to encourage the rapid forming of group flow?

Where’s your future?

Where’s your past?

Puzzled?

Let me re-phrase that.

Think of something mundane that is going to happen tomorrow – perhaps brushing your teeth in the morning. Notice where you represent that idea, in the space around or inside you. Think now of something a little further into the future – next week perhaps – and notice where that is.

Repeat for a couple of other things, perhaps your next birthday or Christmas.

Now think about the past – an event yesterday, last week, last year, earlier in your life. Notice where in the space around or inside you that you think of those things.

Imagine now a line that joins up all of those points – from your furthest past memory through the current moment and on into the future. In NLP that imaginary line is called your time line, a metaphor that is used in a great many forms of powerful personal changework. For the moment just notice where the current moment is – specifically is it inside or outside your body?

Metaphors of Time

All languages use space or position as a metaphor for time. The idea that the metaphors we use are closely bound to the way we structure our thoughts was first expressed a quarter of a century ago by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Inspired by Lakoff and Johnson the early developers of NLP began to create the time line model.

Many processes have been developed that use the metaphor of Time As A Line to change the way people think about the past, the present and the future. Metaphor is a meta-stating process (i.e. a thought about a thought) so immediately adds a level of [bliki]disassociation[/bliki], a powerful tool to allow people to think about challenging events in their lives without being swamped in feelings.

As a coach I find that talking people through an exploration of how they think about life using the metaphor of a time line to guide reflection, re-consider past events or rehearse alternative futures is a very powerful conversational intervention.

In-Time and Through-Time

Remember I asked you to pay particular attention to where you represented your sense of the current moment? Lakoff and Johnson observed that in Indo-European language-speakers there is approximately a 50-50 split between people who think of the current moment as being inside their body and people who think of the current moment as being outside their body, usually just in front of them. NLP labels these two most common representations of the passage of time as [bliki]In Time[/bliki] and [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] respectively.

A lot of changework processes use manipulation of these mental models as a way of accessing new ways of thinking. For example how good are you at future planning? If you feel that you could do better then try imagining future events in a more [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] way i.e. mapped out in front of you as if on a wallchart or planner and see what difference that makes. Many people find a positive difference from this sort of work, but nearly everyone expresses some inner tension or discomfort when they first try to think of time in a different way – these models go right to the core of our way of being in the world and change can have significant effects on the way we perceive things.

The Connection Between Language and Thought

Further work by Lakoff and Johnson, and many others in the field of cognitive linguistics, has extended the thinking – for example this study.

New research shows that the metaphor which is used could depend on the native language of the person concerned. Laura Spinney, in the Guardian article How Time Flies [via Tom Coates] reports on research by Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser with the Aymara people from the Chilean Andes. There’s more detail in this presentation from Vyv Evans at the University of Sussex which summarises the field and has a long list of references to follow.

The Aymara study is the first documented research finding evidence of a group of people with a reversed sense of time. When talking about long time spans the Aymara seem to have a [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] model, when talking about shorter periods (up to several generations) they seem to exhibit a reversed [bliki]In Time[/bliki] model, with the past in front and the future behind:

When they talked about very wide time spans, their gestures indicated that they conceived of it spanning from left to right, excluding themselves. But when they talked about shorter spans, several generations say, the axis was front-back, with them at point zero. The gestures of the old man and the woman discussing their grandparents confirmed that they really did think of the past as in front of them.

This particular and (so far) unique way of modelling time seems intimately associated with the Aymara language:

In 1975, Andrew Miracle and Juan de Dios Yapita Moya, both at the University of Florida, observed that q”ipüru , the Aymara word for tomorrow, combines q”ipa and uru , the word for day, to produce a literal meaning of “some day behind one’s back

[...]

Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”

If these markers are left out, the speaker is regarded as boastful or a liar. Thirty years ago, Miracle and Yapita pointed to the often incredulous responses of Aymara to some written texts: “‘Columbus discovered America’ – was the author actually there?” In a language so reliant on the eyewitness, it is not surprising that the speaker metaphorically faces what has already been seen: the past.

From an NLP approach we might predict some consequences from this model – in particular we might speculate that the Aymara would not have a well-developed sense of future planning because the future is literally behind them – this seems to be born out by Miracle and Yapita’s observation of the “great patience” of the Aymara. (The Aymara Language and Its Social and Cultural Context)

Making Time Work For You

So how do you think about time?

What happens if you move those representations around?

Play with your timeline and see what happens…

She’s taken on the challenge of documenting “Which personal development techniques actually work”, and amongst other things is documenting a self-experiment on the positive affect on mood obtained by abstaining from watching television news.

She says:

I’m not certain why this may work, but suspect that:

1) The bias of most news is depressing (eg an emphasis on crime, disaster, problems, etc)….(And yes, I know that the media can do tremendous good by highlighting poverty, disasters and destruction, but if in the end we’re all too depressed to respond, that isn’t, in fact very useful).

2) Most of this is illustrated with pictures (which people’s unconscious minds just lap up).

3) Watching television is known to induce an alpha-brain-wave, trance-like state

(the very same state in which it’s also easiest to create positive emotional change too).

4) I watch most TV news at night…which is also the time I think of for both myself and my students as being the most powerful for personal development and changework. (Something to do perhaps with tiredness after the day inducing that all-important alpha brain-wave state again.

Try it for yourself!

Updated link to Clare’s new location at http://www.selfworks.net/blog/doesitworkdiary/

This reminded me strongly of the concept of well-formed outcomes – one of the foundation stones of NLP. I find that often one of the most powerful coaching interventions is simply helping someone gain a clear view of what they want to happen and the nature of the first few steps. Something very powerful gets triggered in the unconscious mind by a clear view of what you want and many people report that change begins to happen shortly afterwards.

The tool itself seems relatively straightforward (I have used both cognitive mapping and mind map software before so this may not be a fair assessment of how a beginner would get on) – the trick I suspect is in learning a methodical approach to applying it to a specific task.

I experimented trying to map out the exchange of views in the recent “Hierarchy” exchange (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) [order may not be quite right] between Dave Rogers , Jon Husband and Euan Semple but ran out of steam partway through analysing the second post. I don’t think that is a comment about Compendium, more a facet of the difficulty of mapping this sort of writing especially when you are very rusty at that sort of thing.

This will be the problem with creating the semantic web, it’s completely conceivable to have nice well-formed RDF triples as a way of navigating information that is already structured but the vast majority of human knowledge is tied up in messy human-written text.

My gut feeling is that most of us, most of the time, don’t analyse information to the depth that is needed to make good use of a tool such as Compendium. Certainly my tendency is for a strong degree of pragmatism in my learning – I’d suggest that generally knowledge-workers dig just enough to get a sufficient gist of things for the immediate purpose – as long as I have good enough knowledge for the task in hand then why seek more precision?

The willingness to stop digging could be increased by the illusion of explanatory depth. This tendency for people to over-estimate their knowledge of a subject where there are attractive intuitive explanations was identified in 2002 by Frank Keil and Leonid Rozenblit. I’m probably doing it now of course!

The next area to try Compendium will be working the other way – assembling a set of facts or assumptions about the world and seeing if it helps extrapolate meaningful abstractions. The obvious application of this will be in strategy development.

Wiki page for evaluation notes: [wiki]Compendium[/wiki]

This reminded me of the work published by Chris Argyris, Peter Senge and others on the [bliki]LadderOfInference[/bliki] . I wonder how we could encapsulate this thinking into the world of the blog?

In the comments to Ming’s post there are a range of views expressed but two themes emerge:

* using the tools available today to _filter_ incoming information and tasks, allowing you to concentrate on the important things
* there is indeed a very sharp limit to the power of conscious processing to handle multiple tasks (Miller’s [bliki]SevenPlusOrMinusTwo[/bliki]) but the unconscious mind is capable of many many simultaneous activities.

From my own subjective experience I would suggest that one reason why having too many things to do “simultaneously” hits productivity is because it ignores the way the mind transfers things into unconscious processing.

The trick seems to be to concentrate on one thing sufficiently long that you build up a whole set of pathways relating to it, then “put it down” and move on to something else – the unconscious will still be working away. Do this and you will be surprised how often the answer “just appears” a few hours or days later.

Time-slicing too finely in the conscious domain seems to have the effect that no topic creates enough energy to engage the unconscious learning circuits, so I’m left relying on the distractable power of the conscious alone.

It would be interesting to explore the neuroscience of this a bit further…

From a [bliki]TheoryOfConstraints[/bliki] perspective it would appear that conscious attention is the constraint, so useful questions to consider might be:

* How do I get the most out of my conscious processing power?
* What else do I have to change to allow my conscious attention to work at its best?
* How can I find other ways of processing information (e.g. exploiting my unconscious mind)?