Thursday, November 15th, 2007...12:54 pm
The rational-intuitive shift
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How do you approach learning a huge new subject that you know nothing about?
Approaching a completely new, large topic can be intimidating. Making a complicated decision or analysing a complex situation can also be quite daunting. We humans tend to be naturally wary of what we don’t know. Experience makes us doubly wary when we don’t even know the extent to which we don’t know (which is the case whenever approaching something completely new).
If you’re reading this article, you probably already have a certain level of natural curiosity, so you’ve probably learnt a great many things in your life, and developed, consciously or not, some approaches as to the best ways to do that. In this article, I present one way that I’ve “extracted” from my experience, and formalised a little bit. Hopefully, it can be useful to you, either to compare your own approaches to it, or even to use it directly.
The problem with new stuff
There are multiple problems to solve when approaching new areas of knowledge. The first one is, you don’t have a sense of the big picture of the new topic. As our minds find it hard to accumulate facts without placing them within some sort of mental framework, this means that any “items” that you absorb at a point when you don’t have anything to tie them to are likely to get lost. So you might absorb a lot of items through reading a whole book on the subject, and yet retain very little information about it, because it doesn’t fit anywhere in your head. The obvious solution would be to learn the big picture first (and that’s a common approach), but that’s not always possible. It might be that no one has taken the time to synthesise this new subject into a neat mental framework. Or you might simply not be able to tell which parts of the available documentation are “the big picture”. It might also be that the “subject” is entirely personal to you and there is no universal big picture for it, only one that’s highly subjective to you.
Another problem that is related is that it’s often not clear where to start. This is particularly the case with analytical tasks, where you’re given a whole lot of raw data (e.g. interview minutes) and asked to draw some useful conclusions from it. How do you get started when you don’t know a topic, and you don’t know where you’re going?
Yet another problem is to do with efficient use of your time. You may well be under a tight deadline to make that decision or deliver that analysis (to yourself or to others). So you’ll naturally want to not waste time reading things that are irrelevant. But, unless you have an expert at hand, it’s really hard to tell which bits are relevant and which aren’t. Inverting the Pareto principle, 80 percent of the material you have in front of you actually only contributes to 20 percent of the decision or conclusion. If you’ve only got enough time to cover 30% of the material, how do you make sure that you cover the right bits?
A solution
Here follows an approach that I have applied successfully in a number of situations like the ones above. I use it very often to make ethical decisions, and I’ve used it numerous time when I needed to absorb a new topic and deliver results based on it in a short period of time. For instance, I once had about 2 days to understand what CMMi was all about and extract all the necessary documents from a project that I hadn’t worked on, to ensure that that project passed its CMMi certification. Another time I used it was when I had a number of transcripts of interviews with people at various levels in an organisation, who had been involved in a project I was supposed to write a review about. There was a lot of information available, and I needed to fairly and accurately extract the most useful and pertinent conclusions to present them as “lessons learnt” to the senior management.
The approach can be simplified into 3 steps, that I’ll explain below:
- Begin with a brute force approach
- Attentively watch your own mind for what I call the “rational-intuitive shift”
- Start again with your new understanding
It’s usually easy to come up with a brute force approach that will be likely to deliver results far too late. Using my examples above, for the CMMi task, that brute force approach was to read through all the CMMi documentation. Surely, after reading through all of it a couple of times, I’d understand it. For the “lessons learnt” task, my brute force, analytical approach was to extract every piece of information from the interview transcripts into a spreadsheet and count the frequency at which the information appeared, to determine what was just one person’s opinion and what was a generally agreed point. Both of those approaches would have delivered the goods.. eventually (i.e. much too late).
What happened about 10% of the way into each of those pieces is what I can only describe as a moment of enlightenment, where suddenly the big picture gelled into place and everything became clear. The way I explain it is that while your conscious mind is busily absorbing fact after fact, and failing to make that much sense of them, your subconscious stores everything. Humans love to make sense of things, and while you sit there and absorb all those facts, your subconscious will keep juggling them around to try and arrange them into a structure that makes sense.
To make this work for you, you need to be aware that it’s going to happen, and watch for it. Otherwise, it’s quite easy to continue wasting your time on a task that won’t deliver the goods on time. As soon as you detect that shift (which should be fairly easy if you’re looking out for it, because suddenly everything that you’re reading will start to make a lot more sense), you need to jettison your old approach, like the spent stage of a rocket. If you keep hammering away at the “brute force” method, you’ll be wasting precious time.
Once you have acquired this new level of insight, then you can really deal with the new topic, because you now have a framework to fit it in and to decide which bits are important and which aren’t. But what you must not do at this point is get hung up on the “brute force” method which got you there. Don’t feel any emotional attachment to it. Don’t feel that you need to continue with the first approach “because you started it”. Finishing what you start is only useful if that thing is worth finishing. Going back to my examples, once I’d done about 10% of the spreadsheet, I stopped, and went straight on to writing the presentation itself. Similarly, when I “got” CMMi, I stopped reading the documentation (of which there is enough to fill a month!) and prepared the framework within which the documents would be collated.
This method has served me well, both at work and in my life. I use a variation of it to make ethical decisions - ie gather enough analytical information to “feed” my subconscious, and then switch to a purely intuitive decision as soon as I feel I can.
I hope this can be of use to others too. If you have any other methods, please feel free to leave a comment below, or post about it on your blog and send a trackback. I’d love to hear about any other approaches out there, or if you’ve found this post or this method useful.
4 Comments
November 16th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Excellently written, and describes the process for me exactly. It’s a two-pass process, the first watching for ‘interesting details’ - things that are obviously key areas (which one learns to recognise) - and the second applying focus to these areas to build on. I learned Ruby on Rails in exactly the same way. ActiveRecord, ERb, the Rails scripts, controllers, the environment scripts.. bullet points I made on the first pass to learn in greater detail in the second.
Imagine you’d never seen a car before. You see what it does as it’s being driven around, but to actually learn now it works you need to start making those bullet points. Ok, so it has an engine, it has wheels, the wheels turn by use of the steering wheel.. and you can cut the cruft with relative ease.. it’s obvious that the glove compartment has no real function in the operation of the car, so we can ignore it. The same applies to the rear view mirror - but we can flag that one for later, as it’s also obvious that it is there to aid the driver in operating the car.
It’s also interesting how you highlight the importance of feeding your subconscious to make ‘intuitive’ decisions. Familiarity is a really important factor. To use another analogy.. When you drive down the road and hazards present themselves around you, the more familiar you are with the road, the more you will be able to anticipate the hazards you encounter. If you know there is a small road halfway down to the left that leads to a residential car park where kids often ride their bikes, you subconsciously know there is a chance one of those kids could come riding out into the road, and so regardless of whether you are aware of it, you anticipate this as you drive past.
December 15th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
I agree with Cliff, this is an excellent post. I’d never thought of making the brute force stage so explicit and mechanical - I’m sure that helps get things out of your head though. I will have to try this approach next time I’m in a similar situation.
I have another strategy for learning new things. In my head I call it “Too Simple To Be Wrong”. It’s mainly for when the bullshit-to-useful-information ratio is high, so might not be much use for analysing company minutes ( then again - it might be :D ). Certainly it works for choosing diets, exercise programs, self-help programs, and management programs. The basic principle is this: in any field of knowledge, 90% of people do not really know what they are talking about, and their advice is useful to only a small number of people, in a small number of circumstances, or for a limited range of purposes.
So for example, when I read, like I did last night in a book I bought recently, “metabolic conditioning is the ability to involve the musculoskeletal and cariorespiratory systems simultaneously with intense workloads for a prescribed period of time” and then see this used as justification for the One True Exercise Workout, I think “bullshit”. When I read “the best muscle-building exercises are the ones that use your muscles the way they’re designed to be work” I think “Aha! That’s Too Simple To Be Wrong!”
When you stumble across this Aha! it means you hit somewhere in that golden 10% of things that are actually useful to know. You should then go back and re-evaluate everything else you read in terms of it. Normally all the over-complicated self-promoting garbage makes sense in a limited fashion. For example 45-minutes non-stop exercise with low weights could resemble stacking a big log pile (well, not if you saw the exercises, but hey…), but it certainly doesn’t resemble moving a fallen tree or pushing a boulder off a cliff. Since these are both perfectly reasonable things to do with your body, I conclude that the author that things lifting heavy weights is a waste of time is clearly lacking in basic common sense and should be treated suspiciously.
What it comes down to is that, most of the time, there’s a small number of fairly simple principles driving any given situation. And they are usually _people_ principles, not esoteric pseudo-scientific facts.
The problem with this strategy, of course, is that it can take a long time to identify simple, correct principles. My favourite tool for this is Amazon customer reviews - since it’s fairly easy to tell which reviewers are braindead, and fairly easy to extract the necessary information from the remaining reviews, you can quite quickly identify authors that produce valuable books. Some googling on ideas by those authors (and replies to them) can give you a set of pointers. After that it’s just a matter of reading, and hoping you come across the right stuff.
I was actually planning to make a blog post about this myself, but seeing this article has prompted me to brain dump.
January 13th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I find your blog article excellent in writing down the rational steps used for the mostly automated task of learning a new subject.
I re-analyzed my way of proceeding in the light of this article, and founded my mechanisms very similiar to yours, expecially you reminded me a recurrent situation:
When I visit a city for the first time, I like to discover it by going there a single day with no maps or guides, so that I’m forced extract the big picture by myself.
After arriving at the railway station I try to figure out if I’m in the center or at the periphery of the town, a situation that can be easily understood by watching if most of people are moving by feet or looking for a bus.
Then I usually start exploring neighbourhoods in concentric circles, trying to create a seed in my mental map of the town from where I can measure distances.
I rapidly get bored of circling If I don’t find anything interesting, but even in this unluckly case I have collected some useful information about the city like: how do the inhabitants look like? In which direction are the main monuments? Are there any sponsored manifestations on the city walls?
Then I usually aim straight to the center (if any) paying much attention on the road i’m walking, in order to find interesting sideways for the afternoon.
Once arrived in the center I took a quick look to the places that the majority of turists are watching, then I sit down and start figuring out which ones among the advertized places, nice-looking streets, suggested-by-people locations I would like to visit in the afternoon.
When I figured out a precise roadmap, I start my real trip which usually 8 times out of 10 is going to make me enjoy the city.
This is only another real-life example of the pattern you described in this article, since in this case you need to learn a new subject and fugure out your goals while learning. The main steps I can extract from my experience are:
1) Discover where you are by circling around and place a “start” pin on your mental map.
2) Look for the core of the problem with the notions you aquired circling.
3) Quickly explore the core, especially the goals that the majority of people are trying to reach.
4) Sit down and figure out what are your goals, otherwise you’ll waste the rest of your time.
4) Spend the rest of your time out of the crowd, pursuing your goals.
January 13th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Luca:
That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of applying this method to learning something as practical as “a city”. I’ll be sure to try that next time I’m visiting a new city for the first time.
Thanks a lot for sharing this :-)
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