What does it take to design a course?

One fine morning in March of 2016, I took over the Michael Polanyi College. I’d been involved with the college for a couple of years and loved it. Its premises included a wide and breezy terrace that overlooked the green mall at Universidad Francisco Marroquin (UFM). Breathing in the clean forest air while having a dialogue on topics ranging from philosophy to technology and economics has been by far one of my favorite professional experiences. It has also led me to question my educational journey and what the future of education should look like.

Over the past few years, I’ve given a lot of thought to how to design the ideal learning experiences. That was a key element of my job at the Micheal Polanyi College, after all. After four years of designing learning experiences, reading and reflecting, I think I have a good idea of the main components of what that ideal learning experience is like. I want to write these principles down and then provide a few examples of what they would look like when applied to a learning experience.

In short, these principles[1] are:

• Learning happens when we create a concept or chunk in our long-term memory. Chunking is a slow process.
• The first step to learn something is to look at a problem and try to solve it without having the tools to solve it. That is, learning is very problem-specific (which makes sense because the brain evolved to help us survive and learning is a key aspect of survival). It is difficult to learn something that has no meaning for us or is taken out of context.
• When learning, we need to repeat a concept to ourselves from memory several times, with a day or two in between. This is called spaced repetition using recall (not rereading notes or a textbook).
• Exercise, particularly cardio-vascular exercise, is extremely important to learning.
• Interleaving: mix learning one subject with learning other subjects at the same time.
• Socializing: learning must happen in some sort of social context. This context changes in nature depending on the person who’s learning.

These principles are crucial to designing effective learning experiences. They’re also the key to understanding what’s wrong with “traditional” education.

[1] A Mind For Numbers, Barbara Oakley

Make It Stick, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, Mark McDaniel

Brain Rules, John Medina

As the blast of raw energy brings forth into life a new being that crawls into existence and stares at the face of its maker, it has but one question: what am I? Who am I? And at such a moment the maker steps forth onto the ledge and peers down the abyss, suddenly coming to the realization that those questions need answering, but all that comes to his mind at that point is more questions… Such is the experience of the founder of a startup after going through the process of customer discovery, much akin to the experience Viktor Frankenstein experienced upon seeing his Creature.

But to the founder’s aid comes the Generalist. After creating a product and finding customers for that product, a founder finds that he must now build a company that can create, distribute and sell that product to scale. The challenge is then how to do those things and, as Steve Blank says: a startup is not a miniature version of a large company. The Generalist, then, is a person who has the qualities of an inventor and an explorer. Much like the elite parachute divisions of modern armies, the Generalist gets thrown into action wherever he is needed: sales, marketing, human resources, finance, operations or general management.

What, then, are the character traits and tools of the trade of a Generalist?

In terms of character traits, the generalist thrives in chaos and knows how to do battle with it. Within minutes of encountering a situation, the generalist will have a pretty good idea of the structure of a problem. The generalist also loves to experiment and be very interested in the causal relationships that drive problems that need to be solved. In addition, the generalist has an insatiable desire for knowledge about the startup in general: its product, strategy, operations, finance, HR, etc.

As for the tools of the trade, a generalist knows a bit about everything without wanting to be placed into a neatly-defined role. This person will know about the things listed below but will be an expert at curating the sources that will enable him or her to learn the necessary skills quickly:

• Change Management and Leadership:
  • Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail (hbr.org)
  • Managing Investors (hbr.org)
• Finance and Accounting:
  • Free Financial Modeling | ASimpleModel.com
  • The SaaS CFO – Ben’s posts on Saas Metrics and Forecasting
• Strategy:
  • Crafting Cases – Consulting Case Interview Preparation
  • The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy (hbr.org)
  • Amazon.com: The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (8601300047348): Christensen, Clayton M.: Books
  • Amazon.com: Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Good to Great Book 2) eBook: Collins, Jim, Porras, Jerry I.: Books
  • Amazon.com: Principles: Life and Work eBook: Dalio, Ray: Books
• Customer Discovery and Validation:
  • Amazon.com: The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company eBook: Blank, Steve, Dorf, Bob: Books
  • https://www.talkingtohumans.com
• Process design and basic project management:
  • A New Approach to Designing Work (mit.edu)
  • The Scrum Guide

All successful products fall in the “magic quadrant:” they solve painful problems by providing tools that are easy and intuitive to use. But how are these products conceived of in the first place?

Last week, I spoke a bit about magic: how good technology closely resembles magic in that it seems to solve problems effortlessly. There are several reasons why this is true, but I will go over them in another post. Today, I’ll focus on a few frameworks or brainstorming techniques that have helped me come up with good products in the past.

First though, we need to agree on what is a product.

A product is a discrete result of a process that begins with a customer demand. I am here speaking of products that get exchanged for money between individuals or organizations. A product is always a result of a process, it involves the use of resources and transformation of materials into a finished thing that can be shipped or given away. This thing can be material or immaterial, it can be an experience or a piece of code, a bottle of juice, etc. The most important notion in identifying a product is that it was conceived in the context of a marketplace by a person or group of individuals who seek to aid another person or group of individuals, and in order to be exchanged for money. That is, if I sell or provide products, it is in response to a need I see and am trying to provide for that need.

Most of us will probably think of products within the context of an organization we already work for or built ourselves. I will therefore speak of creating products from within an organization.

Organizations can either do what they already do in a better way, i.e.: improve their products, or do something that they’ve never done before, i.e.: launch new products.

The quadrants may be good to categorize products in the making but, you may have noticed, they lack a crucial success factor: how do we define and measure pain and ease of use? If we don’t have clear definitions for these two axes, then the utility of this guide is null. We therefore need to define them in objective ways that teams can agree on in order to produce great products.

Some memories have a way of being stored in the brain under the same category. Taking a stroll down memory lane, one will tend to see side streets diverging with names such as “pubescent me” or “mom tips.” I happen to have a particular street labeled as “the pompous interlocutor:” the person who, at dinner parties, seems to come up with an incredibly bland or popular-mechanics sort of answer to anything that requires deep thought. And so I can picture this pompous interlocutor replying to a question such as “what is technology” with an all too boring answer such as “why, it’s a tool, silly!”

Well, I’d like to think about technology because it is not merely a tool. See, my hammer doesn’t really have the same characteristics as the internet or my smartphone. It would surprise you, perhaps, to learn that I classify many things as technologies that you would not conceive of being called that way. Would you, for instance, classify language as a technology? If so, is language a tool? If it is a tool, then it is one which is of inordinate importance for it seems that complex thinking, the most elemental of human activities, seems to be impossible without language.

The first time I came across this question was when I read Heidegger. The sensorial experience of reading Heidegger to me comes with the taste of beer, the heat of a Texan summer and the weight of an inexpensive paperback, fleeting images stored in my memory as “undergrad experience.” But the notions that reading Heidegger inspired have lasted over ten years and are stored as “life-changing experiences.”

I described (and I apologize for I did a terrible job at that) last week Aristotle’s four causes. Heidegger relies upon that concept to explore what technology is and his answer is surprising. Heidegger says that technology is a constant stream of revealing the truth, a way that is always present in our activities and which reveals to us forms of existence that would otherwise remain hidden. We are, in a sense, chained to technology and cannot escape it. Technology is a way of being, not a tool.

If we think of ourselves as having parts, we could at least come up with two kinds of parts: our bodies and our minds. Within the latter we have another sub-division: the intellect and the will. If technology is a way in which we reveal the truth to ourselves about the world, then we are concerned with the mind and the will. To be engaged in understanding the truth has implications that are far reaching and impact our ethics, morals, work, and endless other human activities. It implies that, at every waking moment, we decide whether we want to look at the world in one way or another, always making tradeoffs.

In the next post, I will explore further what Heidegger says and what these tradeoffs are, so that we can further engage with them and come to terms with the existence we have been given.

Most humans spend their mornings deciding whether they’re going to be trees, onions, squirrels or just plain old humans. They wake up every morning and don’t remember at all what they did the day before but simply start fresh. Today, as you go about your daily business, you may thank your morning self for not choosing to become some of the lesser forms of being that result from natural digestive processes that are better described by biologists or certain, very wise and observant toddlers.

“But, hold on,” you might be thinking to yourself, “that’s not at all how it goes and I’ve never forgotten, at least not entirely, what I was up to the day before.” And I would most emphatically congratulate you for you have just begun the first step on the journey to become a metaphysician.

Metaphysics began as a serious attempt at understanding change: why is it that we are able to recognize some features as staying the same but others as changing? Almost instantly, other questions arose, such as: why do some things come into being? Why do things become what they are? That is: why does an acorn become an oak and not an ice cream? And, finally, what is being? On the quest to answer these questions hinges much of what many would recognize as the true drama of human history.

And now, to some answers.

Plato and Aristotle came from a long tradition of thinkers before them that had tackled these questions, with varying degrees of clarity and all sorts of creative answers. It was with Plato and Aristotle, however, that the conversation shifted to an actual study of being, from whence answers to the other questions could come. For Plato, being came from the Forms: the abstract, immaterial, eternal and unchanging realities that give being to everything in the world. Plato, however, wrote in dialogues and not in systematic treatises. We therefore have many and sometimes conflicting ideas as to what these forms are exactly and what the process of interaction between them and the “created” world looks like. It is on Aristotle that we must count on to get a more thorough explanation of what is being and how change comes about.

Without going into too much detail about Aristotle’s work, suffice it to say that he came up with a basic framework to define being and change: things have essential qualities and accidental qualities. That is: things have that which makes them be what they are and things about them that can be different at different times without changing what that same thing is. To put it more bluntly: if you get a haircut you’re still going to be a human being, just wearing your hair differently. There is also a way to determine what each of these two qualities are in each being. That is through the four causes.

When a thing exists, it can be described as having its being in four ways:

1. Its material cause: the material composition of a thing: metal, wood, bone and sinew; i.e.: the bronze that a statue in a public square is made out of.
2. Its efficient cause: the immediate action which brought about the existence of a thing; i.e.: the craftsman or artist that carves out a statue.
3. Its formal cause: that which gives a thing its “whatness,” what makes it be what it is; i.e.: in a statue this would be the form of a human, such as a general on horseback.
4. Its final cause: that which gives a thing its “why”; i.e.: a statue that serves as a memorial of a past event.

Through Aristotle’s framework, we can more or less determine the nature of a thing and see what it should be, according to what it in fact is. This is called teleology: the notion that things have a definite nature and that the mind can grasp when something is deviating from its nature. It then becomes possible to define what the correct way of life for a person is: since a person can be definitely defined and identified, it follows that it should live in a certain way. This framework eventually gave rise to the idea that to be truly happy, a person must live an ethical and virtuous life.

Naturally, not everyone agreed with Aristotle, but his view became more or less standard for the next 1,700 years or so.

Now, if any trained philosopher reads what will follows (and, to some extent, what I have said above), he would probably bring a lawsuit against me and bring me to trail for all the grave misrepresentations and over-simplifications that I am here going to make. I will nonetheless proceed and, in very general terms, provide a sketch of how the rest of the history of metaphysics sort of became an answer or a coming to terms with what Aristotle said.

I had been avoiding reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy for many years. I somehow had the impression that it was boring, but 40 pages in and my mind has been blown already. In any case, now that you’ve read into the third line of this post, I might as well tell you that this post is not about Foundation and its fascinating reflections on the nature of power. That post may be forthcoming but it might also not. This post is about magic.

While reading Asimov, I came across this passage: “A man in glaring blue and yellow uniform, shining and new in unstainable plastotextile, reached for his two bags. […] ‘The Luxor Hotel,’ said the driver.” To give you some context: a man who had just gotten off a spaceship that could travel millions of light years, had just gotten off a taxi that had to be driven by a person. And here we are in the 21^st century with no colonies in Mars but have driverless cars zooming around in some cities with the hopes of taking this technology to scale in less than two decades. As I read that passage, I thought to myself: how would I write about a futuristic society and achieve “technological foresight immortality”? And by this I mean: how would I write something that doesn’t seem dated forty or fifty years down the line?

Questions like this might blow up the internet, naturally, but this question brought me to another passage in another, quite different, book:

‘And you?’ she said, turning to Sam. ‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?’[1]

This is the encounter between Galadriel, Frodo and Sam in Lothlorien. I then asked myself: why does Galadriel not understand what magic is? For those who’ve read some of Tolkien’s essays and letters, you’ll know that this has to do with his “metaphysics” or the underlying structure of the world he created. Without going down the rabbit hole with this notion, suffice it to say for now that the interaction between an elf’s mind and the world around him is not limited in the same way that a hobbit’s, or a human’s is. That is, elves have a certain control over matter and nature that enables them to shape the world through images and notions in their minds.

Herein lies the secret, I believe, to writing about technology: the more perfect a technology is, the less there is a barrier between a person’s mind and the world around him.

I hope to follow up on this notion with a few ideas I explored in my thesis a long time ago, where I relied upon Heidegger’s analysis of technology to explore the nature of the internet and its impact on how we perceive ourselves.

In the meantime, I highly suggest reading Asimov 😊

[1] Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord of the Rings: One Volume (p. 389). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.