1. A dot went for a walk

    A dot went for a walk and turned into a line.
    The dot, the line, the dance, the story, and the painting had found connections. Memory became learning, learning became understanding.

    Learning is remembering what one is interested in. Learning, interest, and memory are the tango of understanding.

    Creating a map of meaning between data and understanding is the transformation of big data into big understanding.

    The dot had embraced understanding.
    Understanding precedes action.
    Each of us is a dot on a journey.

  2. Admitting ignorance

    The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't know something. Striving to be the dumbest person in the room.

    When you don’t have to filter your inquisitiveness through a smoke screen of intellectual posturing, you can genuinely receive or listen to new information. If you are always trying to disguise your ignorance of a subject, you will be distracted from understanding it.

  3. Information imposters

    Information imposters: This is nonsense that masquerades as information because it is postured in the form of information. We automatically give a certain weight to data based on the form in which it is delivered to us. Because we don’t take the time to question this, we assume that we have received some information.

    My favorite example of this is in cookbook recipes that call for you to “cook until done.” This doesn’t tell you very much. Why bother? Information imposters are fodder for administravitis.

  4. Michaelangelo's hammer

    A young man named Michelangelo stands in front of a huge granite monolith. He stands there at a time in history before the technologies that brought us the hammer and chisel have occurred. He gazes at the rock. He dreams his dream and the best that he is able to say is, What a wonderful stone you are.

    Michaelangelo now stands in front of the same rock. Thrust into his hands are a hammer in one and a chisel in the other. He looks at his hands, at the technological tools that they hold, and gazing at the same stone, with epiphanic zeal, says I must let Moses out.

    1. ​Constrained by the medium​
  5. Talking with Clinton

    When you are talking with Clinton, he is not looking over your shoulder to see who else is in the room. You can tell he is not thinking about how he is going to respond to you. He is there, present and listening.

    By the way, when you scramble the letters in the word listen, it becomes a new word: silent. We’re so often wrapped up in our own self-talk, we forget to listen and learn the information in the first place…and you can’t remember or understand something you never observed.

  6. Scales of change

    To understand revolutionary change in its full complexity – not just what happened, but why it happened – we need a model that works across multiple scales, and the disciplines that traverse them.

  7. The method

    Well no, see, that’s the tricky part. I always try to come up with things that when they find out the method, the method is as interesting as the effect itself. — David Blaine

  8. Selling your own ignorance

    When you sell your expertise - and what I mean by sell is to move ahead in a corporation, or sell an idea to a publisher, or sell an ability to a client - by definition, you’re selling from a limited repertoire.

    However, when you sell your ignorance to move ahead, when you sell your desire to create and explore and navigate paths to knowledge, when you sell your curiosity - you sell from a bucket with an infinitely deep bottom that represents an unlimited repertoire. And, you sell in a way that’s not intimidating, in a way that joins the explanation to the fascination that comes with understanding.

  9. The eyes of a traveler

    We’ve all heard that travel broadens the mind. But beneath this cliché lies a deep truth. Things stand out because they’re different, so we notice every detail, from street signs to mailboxes to two you pay at a restaurant. We learn a lot when we travel, not because we are any smarter on the road but because we pay such close attention. On a trip, we become our own version of Sherlock Holmes, intensely observing the environment around us. We are continuously trying to figure out a world that is foreign and new.

    Too often, we go through our day-to-day life on cruise control, oblivious to huge swaths of our surroundings. To notice friction points – and therefore opportunities to do things better – it helps to see the world with fresh eyes. When you meet creative people with lots of ideas constantly bubbling to the surface, you often come away feeling that they are operating on a different frequency. And they are, most of the time. They have all their receptors on — and frequently turned up to eleven. But the fact is, we are all capable of this mode. Try to engage a beginner’s mind. For kids, everything is novel, so they ask lots of questions, and look at the world wide-eyed, soaking it all in. Everywhere they turn, they tend to think, Isn’t that interesting? rather than, I already know that.

    By adopting the eyes of a traveler and a beginner’s mindset, you will notice a lot of details that you might normally have overlook. You put aside assumptions and are fully immersed in the world around you. In this receptive mode, you’re ready to start actively searching out inspiration.

    1. ​Like designing things for the first time​
  10. Cart before the horse

    It seemed to him that in pursuit of an all-purpose, all-serving health care plan, the country was designing an ocean liner before it even understood why boats float.

  11. The What and the How

    How many aspects of problem solving and design solutions are there? Many, many might answer.

    But there are actually just two: What to do and how to do it.

    Before anything else, before you consider how you’re going to get it done or how much you’ll have to pay for it or how you’ll get permission to do it — before anything else, you have to decide what you want. You have to decide what kind of place you want to live in, what kind of community, what kind of city.

    We don’t pay enough attention to the old adage: Be careful what you wish for, because you just may get it.

  12. Thinking with the hand

    The idea of thinking with your hands is not the exclusive domain of sculptors or engineers. In healthcare, for exams, surgeons have a powerful link between the head and the hands. Of course, like all healthcare professionals, their work involves a lot of deep knowledge and understanding. But it’s not all in their brain. If you were in medical school, learning to be a surgeon, for example, would you want your professor to be someone who writes about surgery or would you rather be taught by a surgeon? Many surgeons don’t publish scholarly articles. They spent time perfecting their skill with their hands. In some ways, the relationship between surgery and the larger field of medicine is analogous to the relationship between design and the larger field of engineering. Designers — and design thinkers —often think with their hands.

  13. A pattern of understandings

    The clock has no finished design and it has been made without any careful drawings or mathematical calculations. The pieces are only made if I can hold their details in my head as I make them, without reference to any set of external measures. I do make rough sketches of some parts as a path to understanding them, but never use these during the making of the parts. The clock gradually grows through trial and error and lots of physical work with metal, but out of this has come a set of principles of making that were not clear to me before doing the clock. I have finally realized that what I am actually making is a pattern of understandings of the process of making rather than the things that are actually being made. — Richard Benson

  14. #15

    How different am I, making clock number 15, from the process of natural selection laboring under changing conditions to generate the biological constructs? That ancient evolutionary system works on the basis of trial and error repeated in huge numbers over immense spans of time, with the failures discarded and the successes retained. At times it seems to me that my clock making is quite similar, as my mind, just barely thinking, sorts through huge numbers of possibilities and discards them as failures before even trying them, so the few that are made have a pretty good chance of success. Is this foresight some form of understanding? I think not. No revelation here, just enough thinking to spur the maker on to cut some piece of metal which, once made, might fail or succeed. Yet — in either case — the thing made and its creation remains the sole root of any real understanding that takes place. The clock is crude but gets built, and even in its base simplicity teaches its maker how to understand what must be understood for something to be made. — Richard Benson

  15. A classroom without walls

    The city is education – and the architecture of education rarely has much to do with the building of schools. The city is a schoolhouse, and its ground floor is both bulletin board and library. The graffiti of the city are its window displays announcing themselves, telling about what they’re doing and why and where they’re doing it. Everything we do – if described, made clear, and made observable – is education: the Show and Tell, the city itself. It is a classroom without walls, an open university for people of all ages offering a boundless curriculum with unlimited expertise. If we can make our urban environment comprehensible and observable, we will have created classrooms with endless windows on the world.