“Most adults can’t push it as far as kids can”
Talking about good learning experiences, graphic facilitation, and being aware of the ecosystem and narratives around you with Mathias Jakobsen, creator of Think Clearly.
Hi Mathias! It’s lovely to see you. Could you tell me a bit about your background?
Well, I’m from Denmark and I’ve always built with LEGO. My uncle introduced me to to software early on and I found that it was just like LEGO, but more of it because you could keep writing it. So having this Lego factory was really exciting. I had my first company at the age of 15 so I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life. But I’ve studied as well and have a degree in information technology from Aarhus University. Which sounds very technical but it was a mix of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology with some tech and organizational theory.
That’s quite a mix!
Yeah, it was all kinda loosely around this idea that when we study the world there’s so many disciplines to consider. And especially within business where people in general tend to want to divide it into the Organization, with a big O, and Technology, with a big T, and the relationship between them is impact. There’s this idea that Technology impacts Organization and any variable we can measure does something to that impact. We tend to reduce that complexity and see the world like that, in averages, and the program I was in looked at it from the opposite way. Like no, you study an organization with actual people and actual technology, which could be pen and paper and not just the electronic kind, and study the relationship between the organization and its use of technology.
And since it’s so complex it’s not a linear process and it’s not predictable. Every change you do affects something which in return affects something else. So you want to study it in a way that maintains that complex relationship between organization and technology.
That’s what led me to graphic facilitation. I wanted to say something meaningful and useful and interesting and relevant. And I realized that what I’ve been doing through teaching this type of concepts had a name and that there were books and people who were also interested in this type of stuff.
So how did you start?
I didn’t have any groups to facilitate always so I asked myself — how do I practice? And I began to practice on my own messy mind because there’s enough chaos that I could challenge myself with there. In that process it became more of a reflective practice which is what I’ve essentially been doing for the past four years and now it’s called Think Clearly and I have a newsletter. It’s all framed around that idea of how you visually facilitate your own mind.
What are you thoughts on facilitation and making it visual for a group?
I think facilitating a visual thinking space can help level a group where extroverts easily dominate and make it more of a space where introverts have the time to process before they have to speak. So you get more perspectives. When you visually facilitate a big group that whiteboard, or whatever the artifact you have, becomes an actor in the room that you can use to hold things in place. It’s fixed and it sticks in the room so you can use it to start making commitments. For example we can all agree for this meeting that we’re only coming up with crazy ideas and budget and all other questions will be for another meeting. Suddenly everybody is on board and there’s no wild discussions where everything is up for debate.
It’s about making small steps and directing the energy more and more.
I talked to Sarah Gregersen the other day about process. What are you thoughts on process over product?
I think there’s a lot of over focus on process sometimes. Because it’s never process for the sake of process. I mean, it’s very important to have a good process, but only as far as it helps with the outcome. It’s never worthwhile to completely derail the product or whatever outcome you’re striving for just to have an amazing process. Unless whatever project you’re working on is only a small part of something much bigger with the same people and resolving things now will in the long term accelerate the whole thing.
It’s an awareness around business. Think about if what’s happening when you’re working towards a specific outcomes is truly a unit independent from anything else or if it’s part of something ongoing. I would say most people act as it’s the end all and, for example, work weekends because they’re not factoring all of that depletion of resources that goes into that. Because next week there’s another thing that needs to be worked on. So you should really think about the micro and the micro. What’s incorporated in that cycle, that time unit, before you step back and reflect again? What’s the bigger scope? Is it just a cycle or is it the whole thing?
You have a Visual Thinking Bootcamp coming up where you plan on travel around the world. What is it and how did that come about?
Adapting the idea of graphic facilitation to personal reflection has been the most powerful practice, method, process, whatever you want to call it, for me. It’s what I rely on to do my work and I would love to share that with more people. I also think there are just certain things that are just better to do with people in a room together. So it’s that desire of sharing something that’s really valuable to me with a group of people.
I assume there’s a lot of learning design that comes into making these bootcamps and you’ve also worked as a learning designer at Hyper Island. What does learning design mean to you?
For me I find it easier to understand things in relation to other things — so I think there’s a lot of relationships when it comes to teaching and education. But in there there’s a whole system on what education is and around assessment, credentials, how you get proof of knowledge. As a system, the teacher and the educational system kind of steer away from how we actually learn and how we best learn. Instead we become more obsessed with how we teach and tell people stuff.
I see learning design as a conscious choice to think about how we learn.
In my program back at Aarhus University the learning design was brilliant, but by accident. It was designed to be this integrated program with a lot of disciplines but in reality it wasn’t. We were students forced to figure out that out on our own and the different professors had absolutely no intent to collaborate with each other over the disciplines. They were completely siloed. But it set the bar high and unless you took actual responsibility for your own learning you wouldn’t get anything out of it because it was just going to be random things thrown together and you’d have to figure out how it all connects. No one was going to do it for you.
You can approach it as a designer with an intent and ask “How do I design for optimal learning?”
I’m curious to know what you think makes a good learning experience.
I think a good learning experience is fundamentally built around an understanding of how human beings actually learn. We’ve all been dragged through this biased education systems all of our lives. But when I look at how learning happens I look at my kids and they, for the most part, can be really frustrated when they for example learn how to crawl or walk. But looking at that is a primary example of self-motivated driven learning.
I would say that most adults can’t push it as far as kids can. Kids don’t know how to scale back and move slow. They’re pushing the envelope of how quickly they can learn all the time and that’s why they’re frustrated almost all the time. No adults I know are willing to be that frustrated for that long just to accelerate their learning. We all want times when we want to fell good about ourselves and feel in control. But kids, as soon as they learn to crawl they try to walk.
What else is important do you think when it comes to learning?
Good learning builds around respect for where people actually are. So we’re not trying to walk if we haven’t even tried to crawl. Or maybe you’re not even interested in learning how to walk yet. It all has to fit with where you are, what it is you actually need and experience what you need, and then making enough resources available. But it’s important to not make it into a smoothie so people can just lean back and kind of tv-style gulp it down. Because then it’s not actually learning, then it’s just consuming and entertainment.
Yeah, there seems to be such a focus on the end goal.
I mean, it doesn’t matter if my son walked when he was 12, 14 or 16 months. What matters is that he’s making progress, if he’s a little bit better this week than last week and then be a little bit better next week. So as long as he’s making progress he’ll keep on going. It’s the same with rock climbing. That’s a thing where you get unambiguous feedback on your performance. Like, did you make an extra move this time around or not? You can keep trying and experimenting and see if you’re getting further along each time. And it doesn’t matter if you can’t do something and somebody else can. Or even if you can do something. It’s just you against yourself.
So how can you become more aware of your own needs?
First of all, we live in a world where ongoing media narratives and expectations and lots of other messages that we’re bombarded with all the time puts pressure on us. I think one of these daunting narratives is the idea that you need to find your one true passion. And the problem with that narrative isn’t that it’s wrong, but that it quickly hides the truth of how you do find that passion because it’s so singular. Find your passion. Like it’s one thing that’s already there and if you don’t know it you and other people can question you — like who are you?
I think it’s a million false starts where you have an impulse to do something and instead of worrying if it’s the passion you could approach it as something you’re interested in doing and then go do it. If it’s a big thing, go do a smaller version of it and do it for a while. Then get bored and accept the fact that you’re going to do that a thousand times and after those thousand times there’ll be a pattern emerging.
The thing is you only see those patterns after a while and it’s not enough to think about doing things. Having though about it is not the same as having tried a thousand things and failed.
And, to be clear, it’s not even about failure. It’s so much harder to actually stick around and fail instead of abandoning your ideas, because that’s what we do most of the time. And that’s fine that you abandoned something or even failed at it. Just keep doing you. Not like a headless chicken of course. So every once in a while just step back and reflect on what you’ve done and ask yourself:
- What are the patterns here?
- What where the times I abandoned them?
- Why did I abandon them?
- What was it about?
I feel like that’s all about creating feedback loops.
Yes, there’s feedback in everything. How it feels when you’re doing it. How excited you are about it. How you feel when you wake up. How not excited you are some days. How people respond to it. Are they using it? Are they doing something with it? There are lots of ideas where people are excited when you tell them about it but then when you ask them to do something with it they have no interest. That’s implicit feedback, but it still counts.
So how can you be more experimental in your approach to projects and life in general?
I think it comes down to having an awareness of the ecosystem around you and seeing those invisible forces that are against us, those dominating media narratives that raise the stakes too high. Most people aren’t aware of that and then you start blaming yourself. “I’m not an entrepreneur” or “I’m not creative”. You start finding all of these faults with yourself and internalize it rather than just say that no, it’s a fucked up world that’s telling me I’m supposed to be a certain way. Making that visible is important.
We hear all of these stories about the Ubers and the AirBnBs and the people that stood up and faced against adversity are now succeeding. That again raises the stakes for what is a legitimate project. What if you just want to cook meals for some old folks? We’re not thinking of that as a valid creative startup idea because it’s not going to make you a million bucks probably. But if there’s something in there that interests you — why not explore that for a while? And also be okay with doing that.
So, I’m an avid notetaker. I take notes of everything and lots of them. And someone mentioned a while ago that I’m very visual, which I do not see myself as when it comes to my notes.
There’s this misconception that visual means absence of words. That’s not the case at all. Visual means that you use the space rather than a linear string of text. That’s all. It can be all words, but when you position them relative to each other on a blank page all that negative space in between has meaning now. And that makes it visual because there’s a context.
How do you get people to get over that perception of not being visual? I imagine people come to you and say “I can’t draw”.
I’ll show you. Turn to a new page.
Draw a square.
One motion.
Avoid anything that sticks out or have any open gaps.
Four more.
Now do a triangle.
Again, one motion and no gaps.
One more.
And do three different sizes of circles.
There. You can draw. That’s all you need.
When people tell me they can’t draw I ask them “How many times in your life have you told yourself that? How many times have other people told you that? And who is it that’s trying to convince who?”. Most of the time it’s 98% yourself. There might have been other people, and damn those people, that initially told you that you couldn’t draw. But you’ve spent your whole life reinforcing that narrative and letting it take part of your identity. You can keep doing that your entire life, you’re entirely free to live for the rest of your life convincing yourself and being convinced that you can’t draw. It’s just a choice. You can also just stop right now and never tell yourself that again.
That’s really interesting — what we see as the truth and how it becomes a truth.
It is. And you can start exploring that by asking yourself “What stories am I telling myself about myself and about who I am? Which of these stories could I easily change?”. Because most of the stories we tell ourselves are completely ungrounded in any kind of reality. They’re just stories. And you can easily find other stories that would fit just as well on the other side of the fence. But you just need to ask that — what stories am I listening to?
Why did you ask me to slow down and make it no gaps or have anything sticking out?
Your brain wastes a lot of mental power interpreting symbols instead of instantly recognizing them. Just by slowing down a little bit when you draw these things it will feed into your mind immediately without having that extra cycle of interpretation. The same thing happens when you write. If you just write with block letters with no gaps and no overhangs the text will immediately be visible and readable. Which is all it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be perfect or pretty. It just needs to instantly be legible. And then you can begin working with the page as an API for you mind basically.
That’s a powerful thought — let’s end it at that. Thank you so much Mathias for sharing your thoughts. How do people get in contact with you?
It was lovely to chat. To read more about what I do you can go to my website Think Clearly. There you can also learn more about my Visual Thinking Bootcamp and sign up. I’m also available on Twitter and write here on Medium.
I’m researching culture building in startups for my MA in Digital Media Management at Hyper Island. For more info: http://bit.ly/building-startup-culture
