Chimps, Grapes and the cultural power of social learning

Came across this article on the BBC website today. 

Interesting to read the interpretation that power of “social learning” in the chimp community is so strong that  the chimps stopped innovating and adapting, and complied with “what they had learned” – however inappropriate and suboptimal that approach was.

Now we can all smile at the chimps with their sticks and grapes – but I can see some parallels here with how culture develops in organisations, and what we learned once about something which works, left unchallenged becomes a barrier to future adaptation. Which in turn, is why I have such a struggle with the term “best practice”.

Reminds me of the old apes, the banana and the water spray story.

Here’s the BBC article:

Copycat chimps build their own tools after watching video demonstrations.

During a study, the animals were shown footage of a trained chimp combining two components to construct a tool that enabled it to reach a food reward.

When given the same two components, the chimps made their own tools and used them to drag over a tasty treat.

Reporting in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, scientists say this demonstrates what a “potent effect” social learning has in the primates.

Elizabeth Price, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, led the research.

“With video, we can control exactly how much information the animals see, so we can understand exactly how much information they need to work out how to do the task,” she explained.

This type of behaviour is very rare in the wild Elizabeth Price St Andrews University

Dr Price and her colleagues put the chimps into five groups during the test.

One of the groups was shown the whole demonstration – where a chimp was handed a rod and a tube that it slotted together. The demonstrator then used this longer composite tool to retrieve a grape from a platform outside its cage.

The other groups were shown progressively less information – with one group just shown the chimp eating its grape.

The researchers then recreated the set-up for the subjects.

They placed a grape on a platform against the outside of each chimp’s cage, and handed the animals a rod and a plastic tube.

“Those chimps that saw the full demonstration learned better how to construct the necessary tool (to reach the food),” Dr Price told BBC News.

“The fact that they can learn how to build a better tool for a particular task is very exciting. This type of behaviour is very rare in the wild, and it’s an essential part of human tool use.”

Watch and learn

“A handful of the chimps that weren’t shown the full demonstration learned how to make the tool on their own,” said Dr Price.

Chimpanzees usually modify sticks by stripping them of their leaves

“What was interesting about this group was that, when we presented them with the grape at different distances from the cage, they made the appropriate tool to reach it.”

Rather than faithfully copy the demonstration, these animals switched between using the unmodified tube or rod, and using the combined tool, depending on how far away the grape was.

“Those that had been shown the full demonstration, and had socially learned to make the longer tool, continued to make it even when the grape was so close that it was more awkward to use,” said Dr Price.

“It could be that social learning is such a strong force for the chimps that they apply a blanket rule of ‘go with what you’ve seen’ (rather than work out what’s most appropriate for the task).”

The team is now planning to carry out the same test in young children to find out how much they rely on social learning.

What the team still do not know why this type of tool-building is not seen more commonly in the wild.

“We’ve shown that they’re clever enough, so there must be something else at play,” said Dr Price.

“It may be that when chimpanzees reach an age at which they are… capable of performing these higher level techniques, they may be too old to have access to sufficiently tolerant demonstrators.”

 

Elvis has left the Forum…

Elvis McGonagall - Performance Poet

I had the pleasure of meeting “performance poet” Elvis McGonagal at the annual Henley KM Forum meeting last week. (Yes, he did wear that jacket.)

Elvis did a fantastic job of summarising the inputs from the likes of Bill Lucas from the Centre for Real World Learning at Winchester (who was inspirational), Leif Edvinsson, Raj Datta from Mindtree and Verna Allee, plus a number KM Forum projects from the last year – in a uniquely delivered poem.

He picked up from Vanessa Randle, of Thinking Visually, who has provided a brilliant visual summary of the conference for the last two years.   This year Vanessa taught the forum participants how to draw- one of these days I’ll post my attempts up here…

Here’s the final offering from Elvis, entitled Mister Know-it-All:

I’ve eaten all the fruit from the tree of knowledge

I know what’s what, I know who’s who

I know my onions, I know the ropes

I know a thing or two

I know the way to Amarillo

I know the way to San Jose

I know who let the dogs out

I know the time of day

I know what happened to The Likely Lads

I know what happened to Baby Jane

I know what’s eating Gilbert Grape

I know the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain

I know who’s been eating your porridge

I know who ate all the pies

I know which side my bread is buttered

I know the wheres, the whens, the whys

I know a hawk from a handsaw

I know chalk from cheese

I know they know it’s Christmas

I know “thank you very much” in Japanese (”domo arrigato gazaimas”)

I know where the bodies are buried

I know whodunnit, I know the score

I know what it’s all about, Alfie

I know the capital of Ecuador (Quito)

I know how many roads a man must go down

I know where we go from here

I know why birds suddenly appear

Every time that you are near

I know the known knowns that I know I know

I know the unknown knowns that I don’t

And as for Mr Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns -

Will I admit I don’t know I don’t know? No I won’t

I know that unlike Barack Obama

Most politicians don’t have a single scruple

I know that one of the speakers today

Used to be a roadie for Mott the Hoople

I’m a walking wikipedia

I’m a mobile reference library

I’ve got more knowledge than a London cabby

I know the quickest way from Highgate to Highbury

But little do you know that I know that you know

That I know what I know is no use

Unless I pass it on, put it over and get it across

There’s no mileage in a mastermind recluse

For facts are fine as far as they go

As long as new ideas come from what we glean

Just knowing stuff is not enough

We gotta innovate – know what I mean?

And even if we know who wants to be a millionaire

We know they know that others must cooperate

That they’ll have to ask the audience, they’ll have to phone a friend

Communicate, convey, collaborate

We’ve got to work as a team, pull together

Join forces, pool resources, play ball

We gotta sail in the same boat baby

It’s all for one and one for all

So – I know who put the “ram” in the “ramalamadingdong”

I know who put the “bop” in the “bop-sh-bop”

But the best piece of knowledge I’ll share with you today is -

I know when to stop

by Elvis McGonagall

for the KM Forum Conference

January 2009

 

Learning in the NHS – from Pilots and F1!

Great to see the National Health Service looking beyond its boundaries for techniques to improve its learning…

From bbc.co.uk last week:  The lessons pilots can teach surgeons

Which reminded me of this great story from Great Ormond Street: Ferrari pit stop saves Alexander’s life

I wonder what lessons surgeons can teach pilots?

 

Taking lessons back to school…

I’ve been thinking recently about “Lessons Learned”, and how widely that term is used and abused, both inside and outside KM and Organisational Learning circles.  How often in the press do we see Government departments, Football managers, Chief Police Officers et al utter the immortal words:  “we will be learning the lessons from this…”?

I wonder what this really means.  Is a lesson learned when it is identified by a reflecting practitioner, after a specific experience?  Is it learned when it is codified and made available for others, in specific or abstract form?  Or is a lesson learned when another individual has applied it, and experimented with it?

That was the basis of Kolb’s learning cycle…

…but I’m not sure that I could point to many examples of organisations where this cycle of organizational learning represents the norm.  Not really.

The Centre for Wildfire Lessons puts it nicely: 

“A lesson is truly learned when we modify our behavior to reflect what we now know.”

What I do see a lot of is something more like this.

Let’s call it “Collison’s Ignorance Spiral” (I hope the name doesn’t catch on!).

Somehow, the “abstract conceptualisation” bit seems to wear a bit thin – too many motherhood statements in lessons learned reports which fester on electronic shelves.   Now it might be that a deliberate abstract conceptualisation step can be short-circuited completely, through storytelling and the rapid exchanges and collaboration available through social media.  Perhaps abstract conceptualisation is a personal, subconscious step, rather than a clumsy organisationally imposed process. I need to think more about that one. 

But I’m still left with a lingering doubt that we just aren’t very good at designing lessons with a (future) learner in mind. I’ve been in a number of lessons learned reviews where the intent of the meeting seems to be catharsis for the team or compliance with the process, rather than learning for the organisation.

So, just for fun – what does a well designed lesson look like in a school? 

Let’s take a primary school lesson as an example (especially as I have a primary teacher conveniently sitting beside me right now!). I am reliably informed that a well designed lesson will have the following components.

Introduction – explain what you want them to learn; clear objectives.
Test past learning, build on the results of past learning.
Provide exemplar expectations – what would “good” look like?
Be accessible to different learning styles (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic).
Be capable of differentiate to multiple levels of capability.
Combination of activity-based learning and theoretical-based learning, individual and group.
Have a list of accessible resources.
Conclude with a  plenary to summarise and test what has  been learned.

How do the lessons in your organisation measure up to that checklist? 
Perhaps I should spend more time in the classroom…

 

Bridge-building in Bangalore

I had the pleasure last week of spending two days in Bangalore with Robert Bosch India Ltd, running a number of seminars and workshops on different aspects of Knowledge Management.  One of the highlights was a bridge-building exercise designed by Learning to Fly co-author Geoff Parcell, during which the participants apply the principles of learning before, during and after, and captured knowledge to demonstrate an improvement in performance.

The picture below shows the new record span in this exercise – congratulations to the associates at Robert Bosch!

It was my first trip to India, and, although I was warned to be ready for an “assault on the senses”, and it certainly was – especially the traffic. I’m still getting over it – a whole new take on choas and complexity…

What struck me most though, was the insatiable appetite for learning and improvement demonstrated by my companions for the two days.  Robert Bosch India is already a strong performer in knowledge management, but their dissatisfaction with “good”, and unswerving desire for “great” made them a charmingly demanding client to spend time with.  There aren’t many companies in the West who could fill a conference room at 18.30 on a Friday evening for a two hour seminar on”creating a learning culture”.  Watch out Buckman Labs and Novo Nordisk…

 

Dubai invests $10bn in a “knowledge-based society”…

Saw this interesting full page advertisement describing one of the largest charitable donations in history in today’s Times.  Sounds like a laudable goal…   We know what a learning organisation looks like – but what about a learning Kingdom?

10 Billion Dollars

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced the establishment of his foundation with an endowment of 10 billion dollars, focusing on human development in the region. The foundation will facilitate and promote knowledge creation and dissemination, and will nurture future leaders, providing them with equal opportunities with the aim of building a knowledge-based society.

Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation

www.mbrfoundation.ae   

More background from bbc.co.uk here

 

Judgement day…

It’s been a healthy last couple of weeks.
I attended a “Patient Harm Conference” last week (provocative title, eh?) – organised by Tricordant, for the NHS and a number of health-related organisations all focused on improving patient safety. I had the privilege of hearing leadership speaker Alistair Mant discuss complex systems (using frogs and bicycles) the subject of Judgement (not in the biblical sense – that’s another story!)

Alistair came out with a couple of quotes which made me think:

Judgement is what you do when you don’t know (and can’t know) what to do – and you know you need to do something fast!

Good judgement is based on experience;
experience is based on bad judgement…

I guess I’d better be the judge of that!

 

CQ + PQ > IQ

Whilst on holiday last week, I finally got around to finishing a book I’d started to read a while ago – The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. All 569 pages!

I’d petered out earlier when Mr Friedman had turned his focus onto the consequences of the flat world on the US specifically.

Anyway – I’m glad I picked it up again, for the gems relating to “Curiosity Quotient”.

To quote Thomas: “I have concluded that in a flat world, IQ- Intelligence Quotient – still matters, but CQ and PQ – Curioity Quotient and Passion Quotient – matter even more. I live by the equation CQ+PQ>IQ. Give me a kid with a passion to learn and a curiosity to discover and I will take him or her over a less passionate kid with a high IQ every day of the week.”

It reminds me of a discussion we had in BP in the late 90’s – do we recruit drillers who can learn, or learners who can drill?

With Friedman’s focus on China and India, I was also struck by the telephone conversations I have been having with a client in Bangalore over the past few months. I have been conscious for a while of the intensity and detailed attention that I was receiving – feeling that every word I spoke, or had written in “Learning to Fly” was being unpacked, weighed, set in a new cultural context and applied with a fervour. It’s that fervour – hunger to learn – that I have rarely experienced with clients in the UK and Western Europe in general who are more often inclined to display the book up on a shelf near their desk, and (I fear) leave it there. A kind of intellectual trophyism that I’m not entirely immune to myself.

So my mid-year resolution is to finish the books I’ve started, to see what else I’ve been missing out on. That 11 hour flight to Bangalore should be a good opportunity!

 

In-know-vation

I was with the Henley KM Forum last week running a workshop with Christine Van Winkelen. I’m part of a project team looking at the relationship between knowledge management and innovation, and in particular, at the way in which KM practices can support innovation.

A number of the members organisations conducted local research drawing out their innovation stories, which were scanned for recurrent themes. As a group, we then put some “flesh on the bones” and created a self-assessment tool (maturity model) , based on the combined experience of the room, plus an analysis of current research. I thought I’d share the high-level headings here:

Recognising/finding high-value opportunities to innovate, Re-using Knowledge, Internal collaboration, External Collaboration, Learning from Innovation activities, Building a learning organisation.

Next step is for the member organisations to self-assess and identify areas where they can share and learn from each other using the “River Diagram” approach – setting off a number of new conversations, and a whole lot of new learning…

 

How to work better… (Fischli & Weiss)

We visited the Tate Modern just before Christmas, drawn by the family appeal of Carsten Höller’s slides in the Turbine Hall – great fun! One thing which caught my eye was a 10 point manifesto by Fishli and Weiss (I’m sounding much more cultured here than I really am!) entitled “How to work better”.

As I continue to learn from my blogging experiences, I wonder whether you could substitute the word “blog” for “work” (and perhaps “challenge” for “change“) in Fischli & Weiss’s manifesto below, and end up with some principles which were relevant for “blogging better”?