Category: improvement

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About Learning Better Life improvement unintended consequences

Unintended Consequences BL019

I’ve mentioned unintended consequences. This is not as complicated as it may sound, so I’ll illustrate with a few examples.

In the first case, the result is obvious once you think it through, but it depends on framing the problem properly.
Suppose the roads in your town are very busy. So the town looks at the current traffic volume, projects some future growth, and adds a lane to the major roads to increase capacity. 
Because it’s faster to get around, people decide to take more trips. So the traffic volume immediately exceeds the growth projection, and the roads get just as busy as before.
Often we make decisions based on “all other things being equal”. But all other things are rarely equal. Because this system has intelligent agents (people) who make decisions based on the changing characteristics of the system (road capacity as reflected by travel time), any assumptions about a constant traffic load are simply incorrect. Systems can react in this way without intelligent agents, through simple physical, chemical, or operational processes.
What isn’t obvious is that it’s travel time, not road capacity, that drives the behaviour. People don’t care how big the roads are. They only care whether it’s worth the time it takes to get somewhere compared to other options such as public transit.
In general this is called a feedback loop, where a change in one factor leads to a change in another factor in a way that either magnifies or diminishes the first change. More about this later.
The second case is more personal. I had the privilege of fulfilling a lifelong dream to trek in Nepal. The weather was fine and the mountains stupendous. But I felt like I had to pee. Really bad. Nearly all the time. It was uncomfortable, embarrassing, and inconvenient in an area with few toilets. I’m not super shy but getting just a bit of privacy is preferable when going outdoors. Are you getting the picture?
This had happened to me before. I had gone on an awesome bus tour of Buddhist sites in Sri Lanka, and had essentially the same problem. It did happen on occasion at home, but not as bad as on trips. So I assumed perhaps I was getting older and it was my plumbing; or I was not getting enough of the right kinds of fluids; or maybe I had some kind of infection. I had discussed it at some point with a doctor and probably had run a course of antibiotics and tried a couple of other things, but because it wasn’t ahem, pressing, when I was at home, it didn’t get a lot of attention.
So on both trips I just did the best I could, suffered my plight and embarrassment, and still mostly enjoyed myself.
Where does the unintended consequence come in? It was many years later that an internet search revealed that vitamin supplements such as vitamin C, or drinking juice that is acidic such as orange juice, can cause an urge to urinate. Guess what I was doing to stay healthy under demanding conditions or in hot weather? Lots of fluids including juice, and vitamin C supplements.
Since that revelation I am able to observe a direct and immediate correlation between the two. Needless to say, vitamin C supplements are saved for when I’m at home, and my juice consumption is down (also reduces my sugar intake, but that’s a different story).
Generalizing, it’s often the case that many of our problems may be aggravated by their own cures, or by the attempted cures of other problems: a plug for the structured approach to improvement presented earlier.
References
Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World by John D. Sterman
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About Learning Better Life improvement

Improvement Cycle 6 – An Alternate Approach BL018

I’ve described a rigorous method for improvement, fairly well-known as plan-do-check-act, with my own embellishments. As described it takes a scientific approach in the face of many unknown factors, to narrow down cause and effect relationships.

Sometimes a different approach can be taken to improvement. In the sleep example, I could say, there are a lot of factors that are well-established by solid research to be beneficial to better sleep, for most people. Unless I have specific doubts, I don’t need to prove that a specific method is effective.
I could measure my baseline, select several aspects to change simultaneously, keep track of them as I go, and measure the results. If I get positive results, then I’m happy. Nothing wrong with this method in terms of getting results. I don’t care which factors in particular worked, and as long as I keep all of the changes in place, then I should be able to maintain the new improved state.
The limitations are that I don’t know which of the factors helped the most, which could be discontinued, and I can’t make statements about just one of the factors. I really need to say “I changed a bunch of things, and I don’t know what worked in particular, but it’s improved so I’m happy.“
This method doesn’t apply if I throw into the mix unproven methods. If I do that, I can end up with a false positive: a belief that the unproven method had a positive effect when in fact is was some or all of the proven methods. This can also happen if I don’t track my baseline or my behaviour across the proven factors, and just add one unproven method. I see positive results and I think it was the unproven method. But it was actually something that changed in one or more other factors, but I wasn’t keeping track.
This is what’s referred to as anecdotal evidence: it’s a valid personal observation that hasn’t been conducted with any rigour or controls. In one sense there isn’t harm for some situations, as long as the benefits are achieved and there aren’t any unintended consequences. But a person can’t be justified in stating that the unproven method is now supported, even for themselves, because they haven’t really approached it in any kind of structured way.
Similar effects occur in organizations when several initiatives are undertaken in parallel. Everyone takes credit for any benefits achieved, but in fact some initiatives may have been very helpful and others quite unhelpful, or positive results may be from external factors unrelated to the initiatives. In politics, taking credit for results achieved in the presence of global economic conditions over which no single body has much control, or policies which happened to be in place rather than intentionally designed for a situation, is everyday behaviour.
About Learning
What is the shape/path of progress in learning? In school you might have experienced a fairly steady progression through each grade, a relatively straight line from knowing little to knowing enough to do the assignment, pass the test, get a passing grade. There might have been some bumps: a missed assignment, a failed test, a poor or failing grade, a change of courses.
Learning a sport, at least at the beginning, is a similar process. You observe, try, practice, and improve your skills in spurts and plateaus.
Advanced study and research at a mastery level, and exploration of complex problems and situations, often proceeds differently. Major setbacks, long plateaus, backsliding, abandoning a line of inquiry or action completely, starting from the beginning, making major changes in methods, dealing with injury, insult, or rejection, and straight-up failures and crashes, are part of the possible territory.
Recognizing that the path will often not be easy or straightforward, that you can feel lost or like a failure for long periods, will help you be persistent in the face of difficulties: you’ll expect them as being normal, rather than something to be feared.
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About Learning Better Life improvement

Improvement Cycle – Review Step 5 BL017

Without getting into the details of data analysis and statistics, I have introduced just a few things that you might watch out for as you interpret the data collected after performing the selected actions for a significant period of time – at a minimum, 6 to 10 data points.

At this time it’s appropriate to do a review and make any adjustments. Based on your measurement system you will repeat this review periodically until you have achieved the benefits you set out to achieve, or have decided to abandon the initiative.
  • What has changed since you set up the improvement process?
  • Is there anything that is obviously not working or is causing problems?
  • What is obviously working or beneficial?
  • Does the data analysis support what seems to be obvious?
  • Are there any clear trends emerging compared to the baseline?
  • Is there anything about the measurement system that needs to be adjusted?
  • Do you need to collect information for a longer period of time to establish a new baseline before making further adjustments?
  • What do you need to try to make sure that the effects you are observing are a result of the cause you believe is at work?
  • What are some alternate explanations for what you are observing?
  • Have you performed several improvement cycles and reached the end of your exploration such that it’s time to end this initiative and shift your focus to something different?
Exercise
1. Answer the above questions for your improvement initiative.
2. What questions would you add to the review?
About Learning
Learning can be unpopular with those around you. As you dig deeper and get into the habit of asking questions, you might:
a) quite simply know more about the world than you used to
b) start to question and understand the underlying reasons why things work or don’t, how they came to be the way they are
c) be able to define problems in new ways and find alternative solutions
d) begin to develop a better sense of the different possibilities about how events might unfold
e) develop a new sense of the probabilities of those possibilities
f) identify positive and negative, intended and unintended, consequences, in a broader and deeper way
g) start shifting your priorities and choices about how you spend your time, effort, money
These shifts in habits and beliefs may reduce your compatibility with, and appreciation for, people in your social and professional circles. This is a natural process of learning and maturation, and some relationships may need to be transformed or let go.
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About Learning Better Life improvement sleep

Improvement Cycle 4 – Pitfalls of Analysis BL016

Every step of the improvement cycle has its own pitfalls, but perhaps the most blatant and preventable errors occur in the collection and analysis of results to determine the effects of actions taken.


It’s in this step that certain specialized skills are necessary, and unfortunately, far from universal. Even among the highly trained, logical and statistical mistakes are occasionally made.

So what can you do? First, know what you don’t know. I’ll mention here and in future posts to some of the areas that you need to be aware of. 

Second, develop those skills. To improve in any area means that you need to develop your improvement skills in addition to the core functional skills. An athlete who wants to improve performance learns how to train. A writer learns how to edit. An actor learns how to rehearse. These are all process skills – how to get better – not just hitting the ball, writing a paragraph, or acting a scene.

Third, get a second opinion (or third, or… .) In high stakes situations, organizations use “red” teams, a group of reviewers who is given permission to be critical about the thinking and actions of the team being reviewed.

What are a few of the pitfalls?
  • inconsistent collection of data
  • excluding or dismissing some data points that don’t seem to fit
  • interpreting data to confirm what is already expected or believed
  • reaching conclusions before sufficient data has been collected 
  • presenting results that aren’t statistically significant – there is a certain degree of variation that is expected (“noise” in the system) that can’t be said to mean anything
  • delays in effects – any action that has a delay in its effect can be difficult to follow
  • confusing correlation with causation – events may align in time, but may not have any cause and effect relationship – to propose a causation, a plausible mechanism for that cause to produce that effect needs to be put forward
  • ignoring multiple interconnected variables – to rigorously demonstrate an effect, we want to keep all other things constant as we change one factor. In practice this is extremely difficult, even in a laboratory setting, and it makes us susceptible to seeing what we want to see.
In the sleep example, how do the multiple variables come into play? I chose to focus on temperature as an action, out of a long list of possible factors. How could I keep all of the other factors constant? 
Short answer: I couldn’t. If I collect data for a long enough period of time, there might be a case to say that natural variation in the other factors that are not consciously being changed are less likely to be contributing to any trend I observe, than the specifically tracked temperature.
Let’s consider the short list of factors from the last post. I do have control over my screen time, and can attempt to keep some consistency over it. I could track sleep medication, how much and when. I can perhaps get away with assuming that sleep apnea is relatively constant. I can track my alcohol and exercise. Even the temperature itself is subject to the ambient outside temperature with the window open, whether I used the oven or fireplace in the evening, etc. 

But some of these weren’t in my measurement system! Am I now going to start tracking a lot more factors? In any case it gets interesting because my tracking of other factors may result in changes to my behaviours in those areas. 

I might see that my alcohol use fluctuates, and because I want to make the effect of temperature change more clear, I reduce my variation in alcohol use, whether consciously or more incidentally. This in itself could have a larger impact on sleep than the temperature change I chose as my conscious action. 
Almost every improvement initiative has these sorts of effects – focusing on an area for improvement; the selection of actions, the measurement of data; the process of analysis and interpretation; the communication and integration of results; learning about the domain and about the improvement process. All of these can affect the system, even for this personal example.
When I see positive results, that’s great! But I might think it was because I changed the temperature, when actually it was changing my pattern of alcohol use. This type of conflation of actions and results is common in every area of life and business.
Exercise
1. What don’t you know about your improvement area?
2. What formal learning have you had about improvement?
3. Who could you consult as a red team?
4. How might your data collection and interpretation be affected by the pitfalls mentioned above?
5. How might your system be changing unintentionally as you go along?
About Learning
We need to understand what is at the edge of knowledge and what is well-integrated. We don’t need to blindly accept the mainstream, but if we choose to question or reject it, we need to invest more into learning and understanding deeply before following another path. (And here lies the failure of education systems to teach the basic techniques for evaluating knowledge and for identifying the interaction between fact and belief.) It’s for some reason common for some people to reject equally what’s well-established and what is more provisional.
There are many frontiers in our understanding of how things work. And sometimes things change. But by itself this fact doesn’t provide a basis for rejecting current knowledge. Changing one piece requires that change to make sense in the context of everything else we know. It’s our responsibility to dig deeper into how things are interconnected as part of the questioning process.
Where we have detailed, reliable, and proven knowledge that can be used to design new processes, materials, drugs, treatments, products, etc. then it’s an extremely bold claim to reject one small piece of this interconnected knowledge system. Such extraordinary claims require a careful approach of study, experiment, demonstrations, and repetition to be considered valid.
An example is the rejection of vaccines. To say one doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of vaccines to prevent life-threatening illnesses is similar to saying that antibiotics don’t work. I can only assume that people would not refuse antibiotics when they show up very sick at the hospital. Yet both have well-understood, and hidden, mechanisms. Both have short- and long-term trade-offs. Neither area is at the edge of understanding medicine.
Psychoactive drugs are a different story. The mechanisms, consistency of effects, side-effects, and other aspects of many of these drugs is not well-known. This is a leading edge of medical treatment and a healthy skepticism with regard to their use seems well-justified.
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About Learning action Better Life improvement measurement sleep

Improvement Cycle 3 – Taking Action BL015

The third stage in the improvement cycle is taking action. The nature of the actions will of course depend on the improvement area. The following is true of any type of improvement, but more would have to be added for larger or more complex initiatives. 

In selecting improvement actions, here are some criteria that can be applied to prioritize:
  • having the highest proven probability of achieving the desired result
  • proportionate to the nature and degree of the problem
  • well-understood benefits, costs, trade-offs, possible side effects within the detailed understanding of the situation developed in the previous step
  • clearly defined — SMART (specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic, time-bound)
  • that everyone understands, accepts, can commit to, and follow through on
  • may have been tried before
  • independent, or dependence well-known — can be done sequentially or in meaningful groups — if we make multiple changes we’ll never know what made the difference
One of the alternatives that should be included in any analysis is the option of doing nothing. Very often, a great deal of cost and effort is expended doing something, when in fact the best use of resources is stopping this particular train, and shifting to another one. Or postponing. Or doing things in sequence rather than simultaneously. These are all considerations of program management and project management, so I will just mention them in passing.
Before implementing you’ll have to consider how you have to update your measurement system for this action. At minimum you will have to add some tracking of whether the action is performed for each relevant time period. If you have to change your measurement system, take time to collect a new baseline for the changed measures. 
Now (finally!) we’re ready to start: perform the action, track when and what we do, and measure performance. [For a more complex situation, a reminder that all of this is wrapped in project management, process improvement, and change management.]
Note the difference between the approach we’ve taken and simply jumping in and trying something based on current knowledge. We’re now armed with structure, knowledge, understanding, and buy-in to take actions, measure results, and learn from our actions.

Example
Let’s apply these to the sleep example. Reminder that I’m not a sleep therapist.

Suppose my research has come up with some possible factors that could affect my sleep (I have gathered a list of over 40 ideas and I’ve chosen a few that are easy to work with):
  • temperature
  • screen time (blue light)
  • sleep medication
  • sleep apnea
  • alcohol
  • exercise
And now I’ll apply the criteria
  • having the highest proven probability of achieving the desired result — this is very hard to judge without better definition of the specific situation. Depending on the severity of the underlying issues and the nature of the sleep problem, any of these could be sufficient to make the difference I have in mind.

    For this example I’m going to consider them as equally probable at the outset.

  • proportionate to the nature and degree of the problem — I defined the problem as being not too severe, so I’ll be willing to try personal interventions before pursuing medical relief.

    I’ll rule out sleep apnea and sleep medication as early actions.

  • well-understood benefits, costs, trade-offs, possible side effects within the detailed understanding of the situation developed in the previous step — adjusting things that affect the temperature, changing my screen time and using a blue light filter, reducing or changing the time of alcohol consumption, and getting more exercise, are all easily understood with just a bit of thinking through. They could have effects on other people, and could take time.

    For this example I’ll suppose I have a consistent morning exercise program so I feel that I’m getting the known benefit of exercise for sleep, and not doing it in the evening when it could be a stimulant. I’m now left with three factors.

  • that everyone understands, accepts, can commit to, and follow through on — for a non-severe personal example, this may be the critical decision factor for early actions: what am I willing to do, what do I feel like doing, what do I believe will make a difference, etc. Nothing wrong with that. When the risks are higher, this criterion can lead us astray, choosing what’s easy instead of what’s necessary, and that’s the reason it’s placed after the previous criteria.

    In this case I’m going to choose what I can follow through on, something that’s easy to try: temperature. I’m not dismissing the other factors, just choosing one to try first. My research has shown that it’s a valid and reasonable thing to try.

  • clearly defined — SMART (specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic, time-bound) — this criterion and the previous one are a back-and-forth process: what I can commit to depends on what is defined

    How will I define the action? I think it’s okay in this case to actually do a few different things that affect the temperature because I’m really just interested in whether adjusting temperature will work for me, so that if I’m having trouble sleeping I’ll know that I should look at this factor. If I wanted to be more precise, I could change one temperature factor at a time, but that seems like overkill for this example.

    I’ve already set the time frame at 2 months. My package of actions will be, without getting into the exact details: turning down the heat one degree; keeping a window open at night; switching to a lighter blanket; lighter night clothing; preventing my bedroom from getting hot during the day by using a window shade

  • may have been tried before — people will often say “I’ve tried that” but very rarely would they have made a change in a structured way, and so they may not actually know whether that action was implemented consistently, long enough, or what other factors may have been at play

    Maybe I have the observation that I sleep well in winter when it’s a bit cooler. But it’s also darker, and I have heavier blankets, and my activity levels are different, and…

    So it’s hard to know which one of those things actually made a difference.

  • independent, or dependence well-known — can be done sequentially or in meaningful groups — if we make multiple changes we’ll never know what made the difference.

    I think that I can make the changes to temperature independently of other factors. They shouldn’t change anything else in my long factors list. If changes to temperature were going to affect a sleep partner negatively, for example, the impact of any conflict would mean that the temperature factor wouldn’t be independent.

    I do want to know at the end of my trial whether the change in temperature actually made a difference. If the case were true that there were several changes that I could make as a package, and I was willing to make and continue all of them, then if they worked, I would be “stuck” with continuing all of them, not knowing whether some of them could be eliminated with no effect. I could try experimenting then, of course, or I can just do it now and build up a set of factors that I am confident works consistently and by itself, for me. I’m not going to achieve scientific rigour, but I’ll at least not be flying by the seat of the pants.

The measures I will add to my measurement system are:
  • thermostat heat setting
  • window state — closed, ajar, open wide
  • blankets used
  • clothing worn
  • day shade state — closed, partially or part of the time, open
  • the temperature at bedtime as reported in the same weather app at the same time each night
  • an open-ended notes measure to capture any other impressions, factors or changes that might affect the data. We’ll talk about where we have to be careful in interpretation later.
And I can stick to my idea of capturing daily and reviewing weekly.

This may all feel like overkill for the example I’ve given, but a) if I had more serious sleep problems that were affecting my work, relationships, mental health, etc. or b) I was considering a more complex situation, the same method could be used and its structure and usefulness would be more obvious and necessary.

I personally do sometimes use a scaled down version of this approach for fairly basic issues, and I have had success using essentially what I’ve described to address more significant personal health/lifestyle issues. There are also scaled up versions used for larger organizations and issues. Since our Better Life scope is very broad, you’ll have to decide what the right scale of approach is.
I recommend that you get professional assistance, whether it’s medical, psychological, or other, for anything that is having serious disruptive effects, to complement/supplement personal efforts, to provide access to additional knowledge and resources, to rule out serious problems, and to prevent serious mistakes or errors of judgment. 
Exercise
For your own improvement area:
1. Gather a list of possible actions based on your research in the previous step
2. Review the criteria and make sure you understand them.
3. Are there any criteria you would add to the list? Why?
4. Apply the criteria above to evaluate the actions and to select one action to implement
5. Update your measurement system
6. Implement and track the action and performance using your measurement system
About Learning
Powerful thinking and learning depends on being able to direct and focus attention. Our ability to multi-task is generally poor for tasks that require a lot of brain power. There is an efficiency and effectiveness cost to switching between different activities. Emotional and intellectual work requires getting deep into the feelings and the ideas, and each time we’re distracted we can lose momentum and possibly progress.
It shouldn’t be news that most of our modern activities and entertainment encourage distraction and multi-tasking, where we are drawn into multiple unrelated streams of thought and feeling. We listen to music while we do other things. Social media is based on small bites. Exercise is increasingly packaged into short and changing routines. Television, film, video games, and online entertainment all foster cognitive passivity and rapid switching. Advertising and marketing are pervasive, trying to influence our thoughts and feelings in ways that we are not aware of.
All of this might be fine. And. But. One of my themes is having multiple tools in the toolkit. Can we choose how we are thinking and feeling and responding? If we have practice and skill with different modes, we can actively choose an appropriate way of being for different situations.
So how can we practice less common modes. Mindfulness is a trendy word for doing one thing at a time and being fully aware of what you’re doing. Some of my thoughts for developing attention skills if pursued actively (not as a spectator) for a significant chunk of time without distraction and in near-silence: 
  • Reading longer articles and books
  • Lectures or documentaries
  • Structured creative or non-fiction writing
  • Playing music or creating art
  • Formal study
  • Playing a sport, yoga, martial arts
  • Strategy games
  • Meditation, prayer, contemplation, reflection
  • Nature-based activity: bird-watching, star-gazing

What could you do to build attention?

Categories
About Learning Better Life improvement sleep

Improvement Cycle 2 – Understanding the Situation BL014

One of the components of the improvement cycle is understanding the current situation. There’s a balance between being sufficiently informed and getting stuck in research and interpretation. For the current example I’ll suggest it’s important to explore a few areas:

  • importance of area of improvement (sleep better) — this would have been considered earlier in the process of setting purpose but it’s worth revisiting at this stage
  • personal and interaction history
  • understanding the system
Importance of Area of Improvement
If it hasn’t already been done, it’s worth being clear about the importance of the area of improvement. Structured improvement takes effort so the potential benefits need to be aligned with the time required.
I would suggest that sleep is one of the most powerful levers we have to make positive changes in our lives. A search of the titles of academic papers shows that sleep quality and duration may be associated with learning, memory, inflammation, decision-making, emotion management, mood disorders, attention, obesity, physical appearance, mortality, etc.
Personal and Interaction History
Taking a look at the history of the issue, and the interactions the people have had with their surroundings, whether they be people, or places, or organizations such as schools and workplaces, will provide important information about what might have caused the situation to arise, and what keeps it going. 
It can also point to what’s been tried to make change and how and why those efforts have succeeded or failed.
If I’ve always slept poorly in a broad range of circumstances, and I’ve tried various adjustments to my everyday habits, it’s probably less likely that an easy fix is going to make a big difference, and starting with a more serious professional consultation might be in order. If I’ve had some great sleeps and some bad sleeps and I haven’t really tried experimenting, then it may still be very difficult to find out why, but some experimentation with simple habits may be fruitful.
By revisiting my past experience I might spot some patterns worth looking into. For example I might realize my sleep could be affected by caffeine, or conflict, or specific anxieties, or the temperature. 
Understanding the System
It’s tempting when choosing actions to try what’s easy or familiar. But those actions may not be the most powerful. We need to understand what could make the most difference, and assuming we have the resources to do it, try that first.

If an area is important and difficult enough that we’ve decided to take a formal approach to improving, then it probably has some complexity. 
Complexity means that there are various elements that interact in ways that result in behaviour that is difficult to predict. There may be delays between the changes and effects. Small changes may increase or decrease or fluctuate unexpectedly. Elements that seem to be distant from the change may be affected. Changes may seem to have an effect and then that effect, or even the change itself, may fade away.
In the sleep example, just as there are many possible consequences to changing sleep quality and duration, there are many physiological systems in the body that are adjusting to internal and external factors such as hormones or blood sugar; activity levels; noise; light; food; emotional stress; alcohol, drugs, medication; circadian rhythms; oxygen. Many of these can interact with each other and depend on timing, and actions taken on one can have unexpected consequences.

Sleep can be a virtuous cycle — good sleep can lead to good decisions that can lead to more more good sleep — or the reverse may be true.

There are a lot of choices about what changes to make. To make adjustments without a good understanding that there are many factors can result in frustration or depending on the improvement area, harm. At the same time, there may be some quick fixes that can be tried with low effort and risk.

I won’t get into the details of sleep, or into systems at this point, but the point to take away is that deep understanding or consultation with experts may be required to choose the right actions.
Exercise
For your own improvement area, explore the three steps mentioned above. This make take quite a bit of time and effort, and might include other people, depending on the topic.
  • importance of area of improvement — why is this area of improvement? what are the desired benefits and goals? what is the cost or benefit of doing nothing? what is your level of commitment to taking action and achieving results?
  • personal and interaction history — how has this situation come to be? what actions have been taken informally or informally and what was the result? how have other people, groups, physical locations, and other external circumstances affected this situation?
  • understanding the system — what are the reactions to actions? is there anything that encourages or discourages changes or the desired results? if action is taken, would it make sense that there would be delays before the final effects are seen? how simple or complex is the situation? are there many different parts? are the parts and their interactions well-known by anyone? by you? 
About Learning
There could be advantages to a learning journey that is self-designed or choose-your-own-adventure style, vs this method which is quite linear and presented to you. We all connect things a little differently and the sequence and modes of learning may not be ideal for you — this isn’t due to ignorance on my part, just a desire to produce a lot of content quickly and at minimal cost and then continually improve it. By presenting material in small chunks and providing a lot of exercises and application I hope this enables digestion and integration. 
References
Here are a few articles whose abstracts I scanned. Google Scholar is a simple tool to use as a starting point for research.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2689703/
https://spectrum.diabetesjournals.org/content/diaspect/29/1/5.full.pdf
http://sleepandcognitionlab.org/website/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Stimulating-the-sleeping-brain-Current-approaches-to-modulating-memory-related-sleep-physiology.pdf
http://publish.uwo.ca/~svanhedg/Publications/2018_COBS.pdf
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-017-0297-0
http://www.cogneuro-lab.org/UserFiles/Publication/SleeplessNight,RestlessMind-EffectsofSleepDeprivationonMindWandering.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Claudia_Aguirre5/publication/307550826_Sleep_deprivation_a_mind-body_approach/links/5b50efaa0f7e9b240ff08e4d/Sleep-deprivation-a-mind-body-approach.pdf
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/127096/14/Clark_Landolt_Sleep%20Med%20Rev%20(2016).pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cara_Palmer/publication/290648938_Sleep_and_Emotion_Regulation_An_Organizing_Integrative_Review/links/59fb54b5a6fdcca1f291474c/Sleep-and-Emotion-Regulation-An-Organizing-Integrative-Review.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eugene_Aidman/publication/328583846_Effects_of_sleep_deprivation_on_executive_functioning_cognitive_abilities_metacognitive_confidence_and_decision_making/links/5be00a234585150b2b9f5ac3/Effects-of-sleep-deprivation-on-executive-functioning-cognitive-abilities-metacognitive-confidence-and-decision-making.pdf
https://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/4/1/e000392?cpetoc=&utm_term=usage-042019&utm_content=consumer&utm_campaign=bmjosem&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=trendmd
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=74581
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Effects-of-sleep-deprivation-on-procedural-errors.-Stepan-Fenn/fe64934983dd2ecf30bf7167c136e2420eae246e?p2df
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5826812/
https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/39/4/833/2454001
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4666828/

Diversion
“I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other, and I think all these matters are full of doubt and the rational man will not be too sure that he’s right. I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt.” Bertrand Russell, philosopher
Categories
About Learning Better Life improvement sleep

Improvement Cycle 1 BL013

It’s time to return to your improvement area and think about how to tackle the process of improvement. Sometimes people jump into action, making changes and quickly adopting or dismissing them based on short-term results. That may work for some situations. Many situations require more attention, not just to the actions and results but to the process and system. We started that by setting and collection measurements about the baseline performance.
Improvement involves:
  • deciding on and planning an improvement process
  • determining the current situation (understanding the system and setting a baseline)
  • making changes (taking action)
  • seeing what the effects are (collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the results), and
  • adjusting the process and the actions
When large processes are being modified, there is a whole discipline of process improvement, and the effort may require specific project management effort to manage all of the tasks and resources in a structured way.
 
For sustained benefits, a layer of organizational change management is usually wrapped around the effort to make sure sufficient consultation, education, and process change are performed for the changes to be embedded in the structures of the organization and the habits of the people.
While each of these areas are fun and important and I’ll be coming back to them, I’ll assume that your improvement area is more modest, and continue with my sleep example as we delve into the first couple of points
Example
Suppose I’ve decided that I’ve somewhat vaguely decided that I want to sleep better because I’m feeling tired during the day. In a previous post I asked you to set some metrics and start measuring, which was a little bit premature but important to start the ball rolling. 
I’ve decided to measure my lights out time, the number of hours until I wake up, the deepness of my sleep on a scale of 1 to 5 as recorded soon after I wake up, and how energetic I feel at 3 p.m. each day on a scale of 1 to 5. 
That seems fairly straightforward, easy to do, and at the very least, not useless. We can assume that whatever we choose at the beginning will need to be adjusted, sometimes a lot.
I’ve chosen a few metrics, not too many; I’ve framed them in a positive way, how energetic, not how tired; I’ve made them specific, at specific times; I’ve made them quantitative, numeric. Deepness is subjective, but a device or a partner could complement the perception. Energy is subjective, but a colleague or partner could supplement the perception. For the current example, let’s stick with the basic self-reported perceptions.
From a planning standpoint let’s set a goal: I want to have a meaningful improvement at the end of 1 month. Well, that’s pretty vague. How about, I want to feel an improvement of 3 points in my deepness and energy scales averaged over a seven day period? 
Knowing nothing, that could be reasonable. But presumably I’ve chosen this area of improvement because I’ve tried a few things, and progress has not come easily, so I’ll want to choose achievable goals. If I can make some changes and see some successes, I will be motivated to keep going. If I set big goals and miss them by a lot, I could just give up the whole effort.
Averaging is important. Many measurements fluctuate a lot, and to understand the trend requires some kind of smoothing of the values. There are other types of smoothing, but let’s keep it simple.
The other aspect is the time scale. For simple systems, one month could be a long time. The human body and mind is not a simple system. It makes sense to give myself a bit more time to make a meaningful improvement. I might have to try a few things and let them soak before I feel confident that there’s a difference and what’s causing it. So my revised goal is: I want to feel an improvement of 1 point in my deepness and energy scales averaged over a seven day period, by the end of 2 months. 
What else do we need to put into our plan? We’re going to measure and write the values into a table or spreadsheet. We need to be able to calculate an average of the each of the measures for the first seven days, for the final seven days, and perhaps a few times in between, so it’s starting to feel like a spreadsheet could be handy. 
Being able to generate graphs is also useful. For this personal example, there is no need for technology, yet. A pen, paper, ruler, and manual arithmetic are sufficient. This is a great example of where learning a tool will give you great power in any domain of your life. If you don’t have familiarity with spreadsheet software, I would highly recommend learning at least the basics — free software and online tutorials abound.
The last thing we need to do as part of our improvement process for this simple example is to set a review schedule. When will we update our averages and see if we’re making any progress? In my example I could say I’ll take a look at my results weekly at a specific time, Sunday evening, and at that time I’ll:
  • update the averages
  • review the table and graphs
  • consider any obstacles that I’m encountering in making the changes
  • consider whether I need to make a major change to the improvement system as a whole — but I don’t want to tamper too early or often otherwise I lose the value of the measurement system every time I change it
Okay, I think that’s enough for this post! We’ve set up our measurement system and started capturing our baseline. Next we’ll look at understanding the situation and making changes.
Exercise
For your improvement area, go through the same process I did for my sleep example:
1. Set a goal — specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic, and time-bound
2. Review your metrics and adjust them if required.
3. Determine what you need to set up as a system and schedule.
4. Look into learning spreadsheet software if you aren’t familiar.
About Learning
As we explore learning, improvement, and thinking, it will serve us to remember that we are shaped by our own educations, in my case a Western tradition with the precepts of Greece, Rome, and the Judeo-Christian faiths at its foundation. 
It is difficult to even become aware of what we take for granted, what is embedded as invisible, unquestioned, and often unquestionable assumptions about knowledge and conduct. 
As a starting point, we can become aware that there are other long-standing and well-developed traditions that have often been overtly or more subtly dismissed, with different approaches and emphases, and as we explore deeper we can actively seek out and explore what those traditions can bring to complement and deepen our understanding.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC
 
Categories
About Learning Better Life improvement standards

Setting Standards 1 BL007

We’ve touched on:

  • why to improve
  • what to improve
  • what better might mean
  • setting a baseline for measurement
For any of these topics, when deciding what our goals should be and for how to improve, we could just go with what we know, and do our best based on what we’ve heard. If I want to improve how fast I can run a 5 kilometre race, I could think to myself, “I’ve heard better gear could help” and go buy lighter clothes and better shoes. I could try adjusting my diet and hydration and training program based on what I think might work. Through trial and error I could figure some things out to make improvements.
I think most people find that these techniques do work for most types of improvement, and then performance reaches a plateau. Sometimes performance may even decrease. The unintended consequences of my attempts to get faster could lead to injury, poorer health, too much time spent training taking away from other activities, or other results.
So in most cases when we are serious about improving performance, we want to go beyond what we already know to tap into what the others know. I could ask my buddy, who is about a good runner as I am, for tips. That might help, but I think you’d agree that finding out what the experts know, and some kind of course or coaching, would be a reasonable next step, and ultimately we could figure out what’s the best performance that anyone has achieved and how they achieved it. Study of world-class athletes and coaches could be used to develop new goals for performance and strategies for improvement. 
This doesn’t apply as much for the running example, but you could also study what knowledge was collected, what approaches have been attempted or been successful in the historical past. Sometimes wisdom or techniques have been set aside or forgotten and there is much that can be applied.
A third approach is to use imagination, modeling, simulation, visualization, storytelling and other techniques to project into what the best possible performance and methods could be. In business these may take the form of what Jim Collins and Jerry Porras called big hairy audacious goals, but it’s not just about goals, it could be about systems, methods, processes, cultures, etc.
These three types of sources — self, others, best possible — can be used for any type of inquiry:
  • what could goals be?
  • what does better mean in this discipline?
  • what are the methods that could be used?
  • what are the possible risks and unintended consequences?
  • what types of knowledge should I explore to understand this field?
Exercise
1. What knowledge and resources do you already possess about your goals, performance, and methods in your area of improvement?
2. Who are the leaders and experts, examples of best performance and improvement, past and present, for your area? What can you learn from what others have done?
3. What is the best possible performance, improvement, methods, that could be imagined? What hasn’t been done yet but might be possible?
About Learning
The role of perfection. Blogs are ephemeral and permanent; standalone and integrated. I’m a perfectionist and as I write I’m continually getting new ideas, associations, and improvements. Each post represents my best thinking within a constrained time period at a snapshot in time. At the same time web pages are captured by people and search engines and bots and probably intelligence agencies just for fun, so they don’t disappear completely. 
 
Is any post perfect? Far from it. I have to aim for “helpful”, “not wrong” and “good enough” and hopefully “not embarrassing in retrospect”. When I review a previous post I always see room for improvement. I’m trying to build up a whole journey so everything will link and connect to something else, and in the context of recent thinking and posts, and continually emerging plans for future explorations and posts, it’s hard not to continually make changes.
References
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James Collins and Jerry Porras
Categories
About Learning Better Life improvement measurement

Defining Your Starting Point BL006

It’s said that if you don’t know where you’re going you won’t know when you get there. It’s also true for improvement that if you don’t know where you started, you won’t know how much progress you’re making.
Measurement is also a way of focusing your attention, and intention, regularly on what you’re improving, why you’re improving, what you’re measuring, and how things are going. Supporting your improvement with measurement helps you take a more structured and disciplined approach, and helps work with other people on improvement and in demonstrating and communicating results.
One type of data is “hard” objective data, measurable with instruments, easily comparable and agreed upon by different people.
What and how you measure doesn’t have to be “hard”. “Soft” measures can be any kind of impression, observation, feeling, strength of belief. These may not be agreed upon by different people, and so they have to be used differently, but they are still importantly and useful. 
Consistency is important for all measures — the same people, under similar conditions, using the same methods, similar times of day, etc.
For example, if I want to improve customer relationships, a valid measure could be customer feedback. Often surveys ask whether you would recommend the service to another person, but it would be equally valid and perhaps more useful to ask at various times during the service delivery whether you felt valued and respected.
It’s important to measure for some time before making any changes, to get a solid baseline. Just selecting some things to measure and starting to measure them is a change which could have a positive impact, and you might actually start seeing some improvements without having “done” anything.
There is a lot more to be said about measurement, and it varies depending on the area to be improved, but let’s get started with measuring your baseline.
For your improvement area, review your criteria for judging whether it’s better than it was. For each criterion, consider how you will measure, and set up a simple system to measure this daily or weekly (depending on the measure and your time frame). For example, if I want to improve my sleep, I might start by noting my lights-out time, estimated sleep duration, and how rested I feel in the morning. 
 
Get going with measurement, and try to do it at the same time of the day/week. Do keep track of any ideas you have about how to improve the measurement system, and also about how to improve your performance. I am suggesting not making any changes until you set a baseline of at least 6 measurements. 
 
If you do make a change, make sure you keep track of what you’re changing and why. A goal here is not only to improve, but to learn about improvement and learning.
 
About Learning
You could just read all these posts in a few minutes each. I suggest that 90% of the value is in the exercises. It’s only when ideas are applied and adopted are they contributing to a better life. Think about it and do what will give you the results you want and need.
 
References
N/A
 
Categories
About Learning Better Life ethics improvement sleep

What Needs Improving? BL003

You took some time to revisit why you want to improve something. And then looked at what you want to improve. 
If you wrote something down for both of these questions, that’s awesome! 
Whatever you wrote isn’t final, doesn’t need to be complete or perfect. As long as it covers off the items that are relevant to you right now, that will be good enough for now. And good enough really is good enough. You can revisit and revise at any time.
What Needs Improving
You could have listed just about anything under what you wanted to improve. You could have listed results or skills or feelings or … (I’ll use … often to keep things open-ended. You can imagine it sits at the end of many lists. I don’t have the time or feel the need to research every sentence, so you could always have your own additions.) 
Here are a few thoughts about items of different types that I might put some focus on, but everything is fair game.
  • sleep better
  • have a more loving romantic relationship
  • physical health and fitness in general or to perform a specific activity
  • improving effectiveness within a group or organization
  • ability to make good career and financial decisions about your future
  • be prepared for unexpected adverse effects
  • reduce your ecological footprint
  • foster inclusiveness, belonging, and contribution of everyone
I will choose examples and case studies that I know something about and/or am familiar with relevant resources. I believe many of the topics will have universal or at least very broad applicability. But of course you can go in whatever direction you need to go.
There are a couple of directions we could go from here. We could get into approaches and techniques about how to improve in the areas you’ve chosen. But I think we’ll come back to that, and first take some time to visit What Does Better Mean? and soon What Do You Care About?
Example
Let’s first think of a sample about thinking about what’s better than something else.
We can think about a spectrum from badness to goodness. First, it’s open-ended. It’s hard to think of something that is perfectly bad or perfectly good, where nothing could be better or worse. 
Then within the spectrum we place anything only in comparison to something else. By imagining alternatives we can say that something is better or worse than something else, based on some conscious or unconscious criteria. 
For me, a shorter, deeper sleep is better than a longer, shallower sleep. 
Let’s look at that statement. Why is it better? I could say it’s because I feel better when I wake up, but it’s helpful to be more precise: I feel more alert, more rested, am more physically coordinated, am less irritable and easier to get along with, and so on.
So if you agree that: 
  • being more alert, more rested, more physically coordinated, less irritable, and more easy to get along with are 
    • a) valid criteria about how to measure whether sleep is good, and 
    • b) a majority of the most important factors to consider 
  • and you also agree that a shorter deeper sleep produces more of those results for you personally compared with a longer shallower sleep, the majority of the time
then you can probably agree with the original statement.
We could ask more questions about the statement, such as:
  • Is it always true? That a longer, shallower sleep is never better
  • What do you mean by deeper or shallower? Can it be measured scientifically in a way that aligns with perception?
  • Is what you feel by deeper and shallower the same as what I feel? Does it matter?
But for our purposes I think we can leave those aside. What I want to focus on is that there are some criteria that we can identify and define, that we use those criteria to make a comparison between two or more alternatives, and we use that comparison to make a judgment about what is better.
This may not be a familiar way of thinking for many people. It is detailed and precise, structured and logical, and designed to clarify and make visible thinking in a way that can be examined, assessed, and very importantly, shared. 
If you aren’t familiar with this type of reasoning (Note 1) and are willing to give it a try, then let’s keep going. I won’t be going to the extent of being philosophically rigorous, but I will encourage more of those features: detail, precision, structure, logic. This isn’t the only type of thinking, but I think it has to be one tool in the toolkit. There is also room for creativity, feelings, perceptions, and subjectivity, but it is called out as such.
Exercise
Think about one of the improvement areas from your list and explore the following questions. Be as detailed and precise as you can be.
1. You said you want to improve in this area. What does being better or worse look like in this field? What are the alternative behaviours or results that you are comparing?
2. What are the criteria that you use to judge?
3. Would different people in different situations agree on those criteria for their own situations?
4. Make a table or list to compare your alternatives using the criteria you identified.
5. If you explained your situation and criteria and how you judged your alternatives, would others understand or agree how you judged your alternatives for yourself?
About Learning
I mentioned doing improvement work a couple of times a week. This was just a guideline. You will have to choose what works for you. The key is to have some time set aside, to schedule it in, to make it a routine, and to do it often enough that you have momentum. You want to choose a frequency that’s achievable so that you will feel successful. On the other hand if you miss one or more scheduled self-study sessions, that’s absolutely okay: don’t beat yourself up, remember this is something you can do for yourself, review where you are in the process and carry on!
 
Notes
1. If you don’t have experience with formal reasoning, a philosophy course is a great way to get introduced to it. I’ve been watching the lecture videos from a course on the philosophy of death and the afterlife, taught by a professor, Shelly Kagan, at Yale University. It sounds morbid but I think most people would find the topic interesting. He’s a good lecturer, and while it doesn’t give the practice of having to generate arguments in the form of essays, watching the videos can only help improve your reasoning and understanding. Here’s the URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA18FAF1AD9047B0