When my dad died a couple of years ago, our family had its first encounter with the hospice movement. Now my wife (Luann) and my daughter (Robin) are both doing hospice volunteer work. Last month, during one of the ongoing training classes for the volunteers, Luann told me about a powerful exercise that’s been stuck in my mind ever since. The goal of the exercise is to help volunteers understand what it is like to be the people they’ll be helping.
Here’s the setup. The trainer hands out packets of index cards and asks each trainee to write, on each of their cards, something he or she loves and would be devastated to lose. It’s easy to imagine what you’d write: the names of family members (spouse, parents, children, siblings, pets), activities (walking, playing music, traveling), experiences (reading, listening to music, enjoying gourmet dinners, watching sunsets).
Now the trainer walks around the room and randomly takes cards from people. One person loses two of them, another loses all of them, the person who lost two loses two more.
The effect is dramatic. Trainees clutch their cards and struggle not to let them go. When they release the cards they are visibly upset; some break down and cry.
This not only poignant. It also speaks volumes about effective explanation. For a long time my mantra has been: Show, don’t tell. If I show you a concrete example, that’s better than if I just tell you about an abstract principle. But that still leaves you on the outside looking in. If I can instead get you to experience for yourself what I am trying to explain, you will understand in a deep way and you will never forget.
With a few exceptions this space has been quiet for three months. Likewise my Interviews with Innovators show. I’ve always disliked posts about absences from blogging so I avoided writing one until now. But some people have asked, so here’s the answer. After 10 years of continuous output in the blogosophere, and 5 in the audiosphere, I needed to stop and think hard about what I’ve been doing in these venues, and why, and how I might use them better.
Along with throttling the output, I’ve cut way back on my input of text, audio, and video. In particular, after years of listening to many other voices during my hours of outdoor activity, I’ve sidelined the MP3 player, silenced those voices, and tuned into my own.
The upshot? I still don’t know how I’ll reboot the blog and the podcast, although I’m sure I will want to. Meanwhile I’m focusing on three things: refining the elmcity service, explaining the project’s underlying ideas and principles in a series of why-to pieces at radar.oreilly.com, and documenting how it all works in a series of how-to articles at answers.oreilly.com.
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
I’m writing these on parallel tracks, for different but overlapping audiences. You don’t have to be a programmer to read the Why series. It’s my effort to distill, from what I’ve learned and thought and done over the years, a set of general principles that can help everyone navigate — and innovate — in a connected world. I hope that educators in particular will take notice. There’s growing consensus that we ought to be teaching what is variously called computational thinking, or systems thinking, or digital literacy, or 21st-century skills. But we’ve yet to codify a set of guiding principles. I want to help get that done.
You do have to be a programmer to read the How series — and more specifically one who is curious about the Azure cloud, the .NET framework, the C# language, and Visual Studio. It’s all fairly new to me: Azure’s only a year old, and I never did much with prior incarnations of the framework, language, and tools. So I bring a beginner’s mind, and I don’t pretend to be a guru. But I am a good learner, I like to document what I learn, and when I do it connects me with people who help me learn better. I did this once before, at BYTE, when I began to develop the nascent web of people, documents, and services using Perl and CGI. Now I’m learning how to develop the current version. There is, of course, More Than One Way To Do It. I work for Microsoft and I’m focusing on the Microsoft suite of technologies. But you’ll see me use them in an eclectic way, from a perspective deeply rooted in openness and diversity. I sincerely want to help build a bridge between two vibrant software cultures that don’t know enough about one another.
Where these two tracks will lead I don’t know, but I’m enjoying the ride. I hope you will too.
