This summer, Reshan and I have been developing a theory that can be concisely summarized as “everything is teaching.” With that on my mind, I answered some questions from Thrive Global about my podcast, Inquiry to Insight. The full interview can be found here. But I’m copying below the part where I focused on the ways that, I believe, successful podcasting is just like intentional teaching.

Podcasting is Teaching Excerpt

As I’ve said, any success I have as a podcaster comes from my training as a teacher at a school that takes the training of teachers very seriously — it’s almost like a teaching lab. And, in my own writing and research, I’ve thought a lot about how teaching practices apply to fields outside of education. In fact, at the close of Make Yourself Clear, my last book, co-authored with Dr. Reshan Richards, we wrote a chapter called “Think Like a Teacher.” That invitation holds true for podcasting, as well. Successful podcasts do what successful teaching does, with one caveat. I’m not talking about the kind of teaching that most of us grew up experiencing, wherein a “sage” (teacher) offers lessons on a “stage” (the front of a classroom). I’m talking about teaching that puts the student at the center of the action.

So here goes…

1. First, successful podcasters, like successful teachers, practice active listening — they don’t listen until they get to speak or enlighten, they listen with the intention of helping the speaker (student) to articulate their understanding and enlightenment. Their job, as listeners, is to show the speaker that they are fully hearing them or to ask questions in order to promote successful discovery and communication.
2. Second, successful podcasters, like successful teachers, practice preassessment, helping them to understand where their interviewee (student) is situated at the start of the conversation. Preassessment yields information that preps the ground for a successful interaction.
3. Third, successful podcasters, like successful teachers, use formative assessment. They’re not listening to their interviewees with the intention of judging them or forcing them into a box. Instead, they are listening in order to adjust their own plans, their own questions, their own posture, their own view of the interviewee (student).
4. They may have an idea about where they want the interview to end up (which is the fourth teaching move, called understanding by design), but they are willing to follow the needs of the interviewee.
5. Fifth, successful podcasters, like successful teachers, attempt to create an experience for their interviewee that is meaningful, relevant, and personalized. If you’ve ever been in a classroom where those elements were not present, then you understand why they are so important. Your interviewees will engage and share to the extent that the conversation is in service of transformation for all involved rather than a mere transaction. If it feels meaningful to them, and it’s obviously meaningful to you, then together you will make something that could only be created in that particular circumstance — like a great class.

All of these practices — active listening, preassessment, formative assessment, understanding by design, and meaning making — make for a successful classroom or podcast. Podcasting is teaching.

At Refreshing Wednesday, the mission isn’t R&D. It’s more like N&D (that’s “Noticing & Documentation”). Here’s a masterclass.

H/T to Craig Mod.

I’ve been dipping in and out of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It is challenging me in some important ways.

Here’s a typical insight. It comes from this interview with Burkeman but is repeated almost verbatim in the book.

I’m perpetually fighting an email backlog, but I’m more at peace about the inevitability of that than I once was. I try to allot a certain amount of time to going through email, and then at the end of that time, I say, Okay, I labored for an appropriate amount and then move on, instead of holding on to the thought that I might finally get to inbox zero.

Acknowledging both one’s efforts and one’s limits is good for one’s relationship with email, sure. I’d argue that it’s also good for one’s relationship with all work (and probably one’s soul). Squeeze, then release. Focus, then unfocus. Work, then relax. Attend to, then forget, blur, widen, walk the margin. At least for a little while.

This line of thinking-doing reminds me of a quotation from Emerson, illustrated nicely by Austin Kleon.

My father and my uncle served in Vietnam. When they came home and in the years that followed, they never would have received a message like the one below. Honestly, I’m not sure what they would have done with it if it did arrive. It was a different time.

What I love about this particular outreach is that it encourages talking, meaning making, and connection. It acknowledges lived experience. It suggests that distress is “normal.” Last, it offers additional resources. It’s a different time, and leadership responds accordingly.

Reading an old WITI, I came across a beautiful idea: dazzle camouflage. Typically, when we think of camouflage, we think of designs that enable people or machines to blend into an environment, so as to avoid being seen. Dazzle camouflage was developed when being seen was inevitable. Its intended effect was not to hide the object but to confuse the observer of that object.

Here’s an explanation of the origin of the practice.

How to camouflage ships at sea was one of the big questions of World War I. From the early stages of the war, artists, naturalists and inventors showered the offices of the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy with largely impractical suggestions on making ships invisible: Cover them in mirrors, disguise them as giant whales, drape them in canvas to make them look like clouds. Eminent inventor Thomas Edison’s scheme of making a ship appear like an island – with trees, even – was actually put into practice. The S.S. Ockenfels, however, only made it as far as New York Harbor before everyone realized what a bad and impractical idea it was when part of the disguise, a canvas covering, blew away. Though protective coloring and covers worked on land, the sea was a vastly different environment. Ships moved through changing light and visibility, they were subject to extreme weather, they belched black smoke and bled rust. Any sort of camouflage would have to work in variable and challenging conditions.

[Norman] Wilkinson’s innovation, what would be called “dazzle,” was that rather than using camouflage to hide the vessel, he used it to hide the vessel’s intention. Later he’d say that he’d realized that, “Since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer – in other words, to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as the course on which she was heading.”

Later in the article, Professor Roy Behrens explains the concept’s efficacy. Apparently, when aiming a torpedo at a submarine, even a small miscalculation could ruin the attempt and save the submarine. Dazzling or confusing the torpedo launcher would be just the cover that a submarine needed. So the idea of dazzle camo was not only beautiful, but also practical.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Something to keep in mind when designing products, services, or experiences for others:

Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory . . . starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase.

Source: cdixon. H/T FS Brain Food.

I love the way precision gives way to excessive generality in this description of the Barcelona days of Lionel Messi.

There’s the touch, the ball treated gently. The vision, seeing the pass no one else can. Playing the pass everyone else can, but doing it so well it can’t be stopped. The way he doesn’t so much kick the ball as watch it dash alongside him like a faithful, enthusiastic puppy. Everything really.

It’s as if the writer, trying to wrestle Messi into mere specificity, finally gives up. Messi’s greatness, they assert, was Blakean: eternity seen in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower. I should add that the pacing of the passage is lovely, too, as the form follows the function, as the great player is both described and embodied.

Source: The Guardian.

One of my goals this (school) year is to find a few new teachers. Part of this goal, I’m already realizing, is to acknowledge the teachers in my life. They are everywhere.

And unexpected. I took my dog Moxie on her first post-vacation walk this morning. We chose our usual route around Anderson Park. Apparently I was planning for us to spend our usual amount of time on this usual walk. Even though I didn’t have anywhere to be, I noticed a frustrated feeling rising in me when Moxie put on the breaks . . . after our first three steps.

She sat and sniffed and sniffed some more and I was pulling and she was pulling and the walk was going terribly for both of us. But then I started following her nose with my eyes and my brain started following my eyes and her nose with questions. What was she sniffing? Did different nose crinkles mean different things? What made her tail wag? As usual, curiosity was the right salve for what ailed me, and in turn, for the ways I ailed the world.

Moxie wanted to re-smell everything, every square foot of park. She wanted to explore new plantings (that I would have missed) and plop her whole body onto her favorite patches of thick grass (that I hadn’t noticed). She wanted to chase slices of light and shadow (that I would have missed). She wanted to say hello to old dog friends (that I would have hustled past). She wanted to put the squirrels and the birds (that I would have missed) on notice. “I’m back,” she wanted to proclaim — slowly and with relish.

I wanted to get home. Wanted to clean out my overflowing inbox. Weed the garden beds. Clean the garage. Tie up some boxes for recycling. Pay some bills. File a box of papers near my desk. Replenish the refrigerator.

All these tasks were necessary and practical, sure. But all these tasks were leading me back to the old me. They would have me locked into my old habits in no time. Did I really need to check my inbox ten times before lunch? Were there any bills I could renegotiate or even eliminate by cancelling certain services? Would I receive and collect less paper if I digitized some transactions? Did I need the same — or as much — food in the refrigerator? After a substantial break, I want to re-choose my habits. I want to be intentional as I restart the school year. I want, both literally and figuratively, to unsubscribe from a lot of the old channels and inputs and only resubscribe to what adds value and joy. Moxie, one of my new (or rather, newly acknowledged) teachers, helped me to slow down enough to see all these angles.

A few others, too…

Good teachers are existential breaking system. They say, “let’s try it this new way.”

To be committed to learning is to be committed to seeing the world in a different way, to diverge from the usual in service or search of positive change.

Frustration is a strong signal that a teacher has arrived.

After a break, sniff around a bit before you get started again.

You think you’re the one walking the dog, and the dog’s okay with that. It helps her to teach you what you need to learn.

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.