My notes from 33: understanding change & the change in understanding by Richard Saul Wurman<\/p>\n
4 Sentence Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n Articulate what you really need – describe the performance needed from a person or product to solve the problem. Learn more by understanding more through asking \u201chow something performs.\u201d Build a model with the intent of making constructive demands for an improved better-working environment. Designing your life is the big design problem.<\/p>\n Five Star Ideas<\/strong><\/p>\n (p15) (p15) (p17) (p17) (p20) (p20) (p22) (p29-30) (p31) (p32) (p34) (p37) (p39) (p40) (p41) (p43) (p46) (p50) (p51) See Also<\/p>\n
\nBy organizing information, he said proudly, you create new information.\u00a0 Nothing has changed; you\u2019re still the same people. And that\u2019s the same with everything else in life.<\/p>\n
\nIf you don\u2019t ask, you don\u2019t get . . . all of it pointed in one direction: Learning.<\/p>\n
\nYou don\u2019t remember something you haven\u2019t learned and if you\u2019re not interested, you don\u2019t remember; therefore, you don\u2019t learn . . . as courses did not come from a wellspring of interests of those being taught.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cNow, as I said, everybody\u2019s got a pretty good idea of what the problems are, and they\u2019re certainly not shy about telling you.\u00a0 But the difficultly seems to be that nobody really knows how to say what the real problems are. It\u2019s as though there are only two words in everyone\u2019s\u00a0 vocabulary:\u00a0 the word \u201cNo\u201d and the word \u201cMore.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nInnovation, creativity and invention are about what! How I do something is design.<\/p>\n
\nWe have the problems and we have the questions, but the only questions we seem ever to ask are the ones that can be answered \u201cmore\u201d or the ones that can be answered \u201cno.\u201d So, if you look at it that way, you could say that first of all, we don\u2019t know what our problems really are. We don\u2019t know how to articulate what we really need.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know how to describe the performance we need from a person or a product to solve the problem. We don\u2019t know, in other words, how to make the constructive demands for an improved, better-working environment.<\/p>\n
\nWe live in fear of our ignorance being discovered and spend our lives trying to put one over on the world.\u00a0 If we instead could delight in our ignorance, use it as an inspiration to learn instead of an embarrassment to conceal, there would be no information anxiety!<\/p>\n
\n\u2026they could begin to concentrate instead on communication drawings which conveyed real information about how physical spaces would perform and feel.<\/p>\n
\n\u2026once people began to realize that if they were going to do anything about the world they lived in, they were going to have to learn about it.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cI am never content until I have constructed a model of the subject I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand; otherwise I do not.\u201d \u2013 William Thompson<\/p>\n
\n\u201cMost things don\u2019t work and if you don\u2019t ask, you don\u2019t get.\u201d \u2013RSW<\/p>\n
\nI love technology . . . I choose my assistants well and I know creative thoughts come from me and not my tools.<\/p>\n
\nDesign wasn\u2019t a problem or a challenge; it was a way of life \u2026 the big design problem is not designing a house \u2026 it\u2019s designing your life.<\/p>\n
\nDo good work \u2026 the ultimate is to do good work and that\u2019s all we try to do.<\/p>\n
\nAsk someone to talk for an hour, they\u2019ll do it right away. Ask someone to talk for five minutes, it will take them months to prepare.<\/p>\n
\nHailing failing will get you where you need to be! Hailing, failing yet still sailing was, in fact his motto.<\/p>\n
\nSo much useful and productive activity, so many good ideas, so many conceptual breakthroughs, had come about as the result of the strange embrace between the so-called creative person and his experience with and reactions to failure.<\/p>\n
\nThe disease of looking good is confusing aesthetics with performance . . . the cure: ask how something performs!<\/p>\n
\nAdministrativitis: This disease . . .\u00a0 where the individuals think they are running the system but in actuality just he opposite is the case . . .\u00a0 is characterized by a preoccupation with the details of the operation \u2013 administrative issues, salaries, square footage, supplies \u2013 and a neglect of the purposes for operation.<\/p>\n