Book excerpts - Ch3(E20): Rapid Enlightenment

From Democratization to Accountability: The Role of Rapid Enlightenment in Learning and Development.

"stasis is not available, we conquer problems by creating knowledge, or they conquer us."

David Deutsch

Changes and transformations bring a lot of Un's into our personal and collective economies. Uncertainty, Unknowns, Unacceptance, Uncomfortable, and more, generate creative frictions and undermine progress.

In a fast-moving and hyper-informed world, our capacity to identify critical challenges and problems is vital to generating relevant knowledge and skills. But in this same world, abundance can be overwhelming and distracting. As a result, we are easily overwhelmed by easy alternatives, best practices, and distracting opportunities with so much available information.

Learning and development have changed significantly in recent years: They became more democratized, autonomous, and ad-hoc - and less dogmatic, structured, guided, or trusted as an undisputed authoritarian assertion.

But as learning and development are increasingly democratized, our moral and operational accountabilities increase. Democracy comes with responsibility. Suppose we want to keep lean, preserve and distribute efforts more effectively and avoid undesired wastes of time, materials, efforts, or opportunities. We must find the correct problems and invest better attention in that case.

Developing rapid enlightenment and mindfulness of obstacles is necessary to direct progress into high-impact engagements. Yet biases, habits, and lacunas can easily conquer our will to progress and mask our attention investments into a significant value stream.

Over the years, I've used Things To Be Done to accelerate personal and organizational learning and development. It helped me reflect on the next best actions. Even when I didn't know what I had to do next, TTBD directed attention towards a consideration or necessary novelty.

Whenever I encountered a pushback, I quickly hypothesized what was the related PRICE issue or co-discovered them using GAP sketches. TTBD was a way of spreading mindful tentacles instead of fighting (through habits), freezing (through overwhelmedness), or avoiding the dramas.

Another benefit of TTBD was overcoming the selling part of buy-in to changes and novel efforts. Instead of advocating what other people needed, practicing TTBD encouraged the innovator's self-awareness of issues and a deeper endorsement of necessary steps. Not only did TTBD inform innovators of unknown or unaddressed mechanics of change, but it also made the next steps easier to take. Eitehr by making compromises less frustrating (if they appeared to be unrealistic) or by making their necessity crisp and clear.