Passionate Explorers: Lifelong Learners
Photo Credit: Kevin Jordan, Bay Farm Island, Alameda, CA | March 22, 2022
Greetings -
I hope you, your families and friends are doing well! For those of you enjoying or about to enjoy a spring break holiday, I wish you great adventures, relaxation and meaningful time with your family and friends.
Learning is a life-long endeavor. Be curious, ask questions, develop informed points of view grounded in the data and facts that you acquire on your learning journey. Simple, yet profound words from the excellent leaders and mentors that have so thoughtfully shaped my career and constantly pushed me into new, uncharted (and often uncomfortable) waters.
Developing the "passion of the explorer" - a dedicated commitment to achieve long-term impact, meet and rise above unexpected challenges and foster new connections to increase our impact - allows us to inhabit a world of abundant possibility and strategic growth.
In this edition's featured article, What Motivates Lifelong Learners, John Hagel III, explores what he terms "the right kind of learning;" those who create new knowledge rather than just passing on existing knowledge and skills. "Cultivating the passion of the explorer enables innovative thinking in the organization at a whole new level. The institutions that restore our humanity in this way will unleash a much more powerful form of learning among all workers that will lead to exponentially expanding opportunities. But harnessing that opportunity requires us to move beyond fear and to find and cultivate the passion of the explorer that lies waiting to be discovered in all of us."
I have culled a wide variety of additional reading and listening perspectives to consider. With the exception of the Articles section (which goes a bit deeper in the learning space and then pivots to a variety of work-life perspectives), there is no particular overarching theme; just a variety of ideas that interested me and further sparked my curiosity. I will share these and others pieces over the coming editions.
As always, happy reading and listening!
Be well, take good care of your families and community.
-kj
Articles
Harvard Business Review: Manage Your Organization as a Portfolio of Learning Curves. "Use this approach for talent development, succession planning, and team configuration."
Big Think: How To Use Learning Pathways To Close Skills Gaps. "Whichever capabilities they teach, learning pathways are critical tools for ongoing professional development and can be used as a central element of any training program. They offer employees the chance to explore and practice new skills, cultivating a sustainable growth mindset across the organization."
Harvard Business Review: How to Motivate Your Team When People Keep Quitting. "When teammates leave, it’s an opportunity to recalibrate and solidify your foundation as a team to help maintain, or even improve, team members’ individual and collective morale and performance. [Using these six strategies] can help mitigate further attrition and keep everyone motivated and engaged."
Gallup Workplace: Percent Who Feel Employer Cares About Their Wellbeing Plummets. "Fewer than one in four U.S. employees feel strongly that their organization cares about their wellbeing -- the lowest percentage in nearly a decade."
The New York Times: A Two-Year, 50-Million-Person Experiment in Changing How We Work. "The office was never one size fits all. It was one size fits some, with the expectation that everybody else would squeeze in."
Gartner Insights: Creating Organizational Culture In a Hybrid World. "The organizations that get this right will understand the new drivers of culture and how culture is operationalized in the environments in which we are now spending more time. They will embed culture into the new way of working to help employees understand the desired culture, believe in it, and live it in the new hybrid or remote environment."
BBC Worklife: The realities of the four-day workweek. "A shorter workweek is being hailed as the future of employee productivity and work-life balance. Is it that easy to make work better?"
Blog Posts & Opinions
Seth's Blog: Expertise vs Attitude. "If this is so obviously true, then why don’t organizations hire for attitude and train for expertise?"
The Guardian: Workplaces Are In Denial Over How Much Americans Have Changed. "Employers are trying desperately to ignore that we’ve become fundamentally different humans."
Big Think: Tearing Down Maslow’s Hierarchy: Why Self-Actualization Is Impossible. "If you want to be an authentic person, embrace reality. Don't try to clamber your way up Maslow's hierarchy of needs."
Podcasts
HBR Presents: The Anxious Achiever: Why Conflict Is Necessary and How to Manage It (with Amy Gallo). "How to make conflict a force for good in your work and life."
Reboot: What Does It Mean To Step Back and Let Others Lead? "The more we work with clients, the more we see leaders longing for pieces of wisdom around the parts of the job that aren’t necessarily in any playbook. In this conversation, Ali Schultz sits down with Jerry to explore the question: What does it mean to step back and let other people step up and lead?"
TED: 4 Kinds Of Regret -- and What They Teach You About Yourself. "Regret is one of our most powerful emotions -- and also one of the most misunderstood. Over the past two years, author Daniel H. Pink has collected a trove of more than 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries in an effort to better understand this mysterious emotion. He shares the key patterns that emerged (it all boils down to the same four core regrets, he says) and explains how to transform your own regrets in order to create the life you've always wanted to live."
Arts, Music, Culture & Humor Corner
The British Museum: The Museum of the World. "See how our history is connected." [Great interactive exhibit with lots of amazing visuals!]
The New Yorker: Michael Stipe Wants to Make Mistakes. "As a photographer and artist, the former lead singer of R.E.M. has continued his struggle for imperfection."
The Drift: What Was the TED Talk? "Some Thoughts on the 'Inspiresting.'"
Paste: TV Rewind: Night Court and the Theater of the Truly Absurd. "Litigation may not seem like the most humorous backdrop for a sitcom, but back in the 1980s, chaos and disorder in the courtroom were comedy gold."
Reflections
"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence."
- Abigail Adams
"Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does."
- Margaret Atwood