The Calculus of Grit. I find myself feeling strangely uncomfortable when people call me a generalist and imagine that to be a compliment.
My standard response is that I am actually an extremely narrow, hidebound specialist. I just look like a generalist because my path happens to cross many boundaries that are meaningful to others, but not to me. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know the degree to which I keep returning to the same few narrow themes. I think I now understand the reason I reject the generalist label and resonate far more with the specialist label. Daemons and the Mindful Learning Curve. Humans naturally think about their own behaviors in terms of peak and trough performance levels, rather than means or medians.
Without any performance tracking, we know our limits in a variety of domains. Each time we attempt a performance episode in any skilled domain, these limits change, yielding a learning curve. It has a characteristic tempo, depending on the episodic performance quality, as well as a tempo across episodes, that is correlated with quality. I prefer this model of a learning curve that I made up to the usual smooth, S-shaped one with a plateau at the end. I’ll explain why in a bit. » 5 Stages of Workplace Learning (Revisited) Learning in the Social Workplace. Back in May 2010 I posted a diagram that I had created that showed what I considered to be the 5 stages of Workplace Learning.
My ITA colleague, Jay Cross, re-worked it so that I looked like this. Back in May 2010 I also wrote: ”In my opinion most organisations are in Stage 3, but as the L&D conversation circles around the concepts of social and informal learning, I’m getting the impression that many are drifting into, what I would consider an interim stage, 4 ; which is simply adding-on social (and even informal) functionality to the traditional model of learning. One reason for this, is because this is where a lot of vendors are targeting their new products.”