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business culture digital transformation ways of use

the fallacy of thinking about doing

Theory and knowledge isn’t real. That’s why we always look for empirical evidence. It’s also why you would never qualify as a car mechanic having only read about engines. You need to get a feel for things. You need to practice doing. Doing the actual behavior we’re studying, trying to fix or do more of. Don’t really know what to think about this:

When I ask him how he knows what he knows about these new platforms, he says, “I’m not active on social media; I am a student of it,” and waves an arm at a wall of his office covered in dozens of color printouts of pie charts, tables, line graphs full of digital metrics—proprietary information that he asked remain off the record. “I spend a lot of time thinking about the trends that are reshaping our industry. I spend a lot of time talking to people on the front line of those trends,” he tells me, “and a big part of my job is making sense of that.”

– Arthur Gregg Sulzberger of NY Times, in Wired

Why cut off some of your senses? Thinking about doing things does not provide sufficient understanding of the doings studied. The most bewildering part of this is why on earth, given there’s no cost associated with it (only learnings and benefits), would you not throw yourself out there to feel what it is we’re dealing with? Beats me.

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flicks just a reflection technology what is around us

the side effects of new technology

modern day knitting

When trying to make sense of new technology and use it the right way for all different purposes, it’s important to look deeper than the visible technology and go for the behavior underneath. Technologies change fairly quickly, but the needs, and however those are met, behaviors, stay. We update our means to our ends.

At the same time, new technologies have brought about new behaviors as well. It didn’t bring about socializing, but it did bring about the swiping of the thumb and tapping of the index finger to socialize. And knitting has been around for a long time, but not knitting with headphones. That’s big in the 21st century.

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just a reflection what is around us

how we think

a fake trap of plastic bubble wrap

I planted this trap at work today, to see how people reacted (kind of a case of bad research – I didn’t really know what I was looking for), just for fun. And it was. The majority of my colleagues avoided walking on it some just walked right over it saying something like “oh, I’m trapped”. Some people said it was a rational decision to not walk on it. “I thought; OK this is probably something I shouldn’t step on because it goes pop and it’s ruined”. Others didn’t really have a good answer as to why they avoided it. Just “Oh, I don’t know”. Fair enough.