Reshan and I recently signed on as official advisors of a company. Part of our early contribution is to review some of the company’s instructional materials and provide feedback. Today, Reshan sent me an email invitation to access an Explain Everything file. When I clicked on it, and signed in, I saw a prompt that asked me to “rewind and then play” a recording.

When I pressed play, I heard Reshan’s voice and watched him present, manipulate, and annotate different elements on the screen. Then I pressed record and added my own thoughts. We’ll send the file back to the company’s leaders in a few days.

Working in Explain Everything is an entirely different kind of asynchronous work for me. I’m used to using email and Google Docs to collaborate over distance and time, and these modes are obviously text based. What I like about Explain Everything is hearing my collaborator’s voice and seeing his response to images in close to real time, even though we’re working asynchronously. My challenge now will be to become fluent enough in Explain Everything to be able to understand when I should reach for it instead of email or Google Docs.

Yesterday, I encountered three sentences worth saving. See if you can guess which one came from Verlyn Klinkenborg, which one came from a fortune cookie, and which one came from my father, “Jersey City” Jim.

At most schools in the US, students learn in community.

It’s worth thinking about the implications of that default.

What would you do differently, as a teacher or school leader, if you believed that students in your school learn because of your school’s community?

And what would you do differently if you believed that students learn in spite of that community?

Or from that community?

Mainly from that community?

Outside of that community?

Independent of that community?

In college, I spent my junior year in England. My schooling for that year was exclusively handled through a tutorial system.

Each week, I read a book and a bunch of critical articles about that book. Toward the end of the week, I wrote a paper and then rode my bike to my tutor’s flat. After settling in, often with a cup of tea, I would read my paper out loud and then my tutor would ask me pointed questions about my logic, my assertions, my research, my reading, my word choice, etc. I was part of communities — one in my own flat, one surrounding the college’s basketball team on which I played, and one at a local pub where people went to play trivia or argue about politics or philosophy — but I did not “do school” in community. It was an individual endeavor. I didn’t have to speak in front of other students, couldn’t hide behind them if I didn’t do the reading, and didn’t have the benefit of listening to them as they made sense of the material.

I point this out, along with the questions above, to help us to see that our inherited educational structures make assertions about how students learn best. Given that we probably can’t change some of these structures — i.e., we can’t suddenly shift our classes into tutorial models — we need to either teach with the momentum granted by structure or teach around the barriers erected by structure. And before we can do either, we have to work hard to see just what it is that our schools, and their learning goals, are built upon.

For me, a “Klinkenborg” is a wise instruction about the craft of writing. Or, as Verlyn Klinkenborg himself might prefer, a wise instruction about writing, or, actually, an instruction about writing. His book Several short sentences about writing is as compelling and captivating as everyone says it is. Here’s a favorite part, written in the same format as it appears in the book:

Concentration, attention, excitement, will be part of your working state.
Daily.
Flow, inspiration–the spontaneous emission of sentences–will not.
That distinction is worth keeping in mind.

Get to it, whatever it is.

Listen here.

In Make Yourself Clear, Reshan and I devoted a considerable amount of time to discussing what can go wrong when we offload to computers decisions that should be made by humans. And in today’s WITI, Colin Nagy serves up a prime example from the world of travel. Vaccinated travelers are desperate to return to their favorite destinations, and in some cases, prices are soaring and limits are being tested:

By letting the algorithm dictate with no human touch or no limitation on how high your rate can go in a market, the short-term economic gain can be offset by longer-term problems. While price gouging might feel good to companies that have been on life support for a year, there’s a danger that the consumer expectation will be so high when they are paying four to five times a normal rate, that it is nearly impossible to live up to that standard.

On top of this, we are in the middle of a major kick-start for many properties. From the look of my Linkedin feed and through informal conversations with general managers, there’s a hiring surge and a lot of latency with hospitality workers being plugged back in. Some staff, and years of institutional knowledge, are simply not going to return.

So there’s a potentially tough equation here: short-term thinking when it comes to goosing the rates at luxury properties, coupled with the lack of trained staff. It might feel good to fill the coffers, but if you can’t live up to the new price you’re charging, guests won’t come back.

As is typical in situations where people — or their machines — are behaving badly, there’s an opportunity that I’m hoping many organizations will consider. In our book, we encouraged, in situations like the one described above, “throwing a spanner . . . in order to welcome back into the fold human judgment.” Nagy puts it much more eloquently.

An owner of one of the world’s best luxury brands told me on background they are not trying to recoup all of their losses. Instead, they are trying to use this time to fine-tune, rethink, and reset their relationships with guests around the world while also nourishing a new guest base that they found during Covid. It is a refreshing bit of long-term thinking: doing the right thing for a brand, rather than just trying to catch up.

We’re entering an era where soul, values, and longer-term thinking will be prized by consumers, so brands should think twice before they gouge, as tempting as it may be.