# AUA Session Text Good morning. Introductions to session and ourselves. ==We’re here because we think that there is real value in the approach we’re advocating, for both individuals and the sector, and that it connects to some of our core values around empowerment, authenticity and leadership.== ==It’s important to note that we are not experts in this field- we’re just a bit further down the road, and we might have some tips and tricks to help you implement something similar.== The Learning Outcomes are on the screen. Regarding a disability statement, we believe that the content of this presentation is applicable to all, with possibly some minor adjustments. Anyone who has any questions about their implementation can speak to us afterwards. Many people who are neurodivergent find Second Brains particularly useful to them. This is the Nintendo quit screen message up until the Nintendo Wii. And it still resonates with me today. We save our calendar invitations and RSVPs... We save our to-dos... ==But do we save our thoughts, our ponderings, and the things we’ve learnt from others?== Who here has already forgotten something they learnt at this conference, and it’s not written down anywhere? Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files. A report from the International Data Corporation found that 26 percent of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems. Incredibly, only 56 percent of the time are they able to find the information required to do their jobs. COMMONPLACE BOOKS Yet some people do save their ideas, thoughts and ponderings. Particularly in the renaissance and 19th century, commonplace books existed to capture the knowledge, quotes, aphorisms, proverbs, etc that resonated with their authors. They were different from notebooks, and different still from the reflections that you’d find in journals. This approach was formally taught to Oxford University students, with John Locke, Francis Bacon, John Milton learning to use them. Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Henry David Thereau were taught to use them at Harvard, and their books still exist. Virginia Wolf kept one too. Even modern artists like Taylor Swift keeps notes of ideas that pop into their head before they disappear, and things that have caught their attention. Why haven’t we adopted something like this yet? BRINGING IT BACK TO HE Yet some professions are better at retaining knowledge than others: In IT there are code libraries In Law there are case files In Art there are portfolios In Marketing there are swipe files But what about in higher education more broadly? ==In Drucker’s words, we’re all knowledge workers, so why isn’t there a systematic way for knowledge to be retained and shared, so that we can get better insights? So we can be more creative? And we can be better leaders?== AND THE PROBLEM IS BIGGER THAN EVER BEFORE “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”- Herbert Simon In the 1980s the academic subject Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) was created due to this wealth of information. It was born out of an MBA course at UCLA and is a systemic attempt to create, gather, distribute and use knowledge. OTHER PROBLEMS WITH OUR BRAINS ==And on top of this our first brains are really not very clever. The information we do retain is based on biases, and this perpetuates errors.== We can apply all our cognitive biases, and in particular -Recency bias. We tend to favour the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones. -Confirmation bias. We search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports our prior beliefs and values. -Availability heuristic. We rely on immediate examples or easily retrievable information to make judgments or decisions - Even things like a status quo bias- we like to keep things as they are, and not change. We look at information that supports this view. - A negativity bias, we like to focus on the negative. - We could use a system or systems to help us overcome these biases. Working in HE we could do with overcoming some of these things given the scope of the challenges the sector faces. --- The thing was, we’d tried all this before. We kinda knew all this and we’d failed- we’d both been paid members of Evernote for years, and just kept getting it wrong because we didn’t have a system in place. There had to be a better way. And Neil is going to take us through his way now. --- (Neils Slides) --- So on the right there is a visual representation of my second brain. I’ve 1695 notes, as of this week, with almost 4000 links between the notes. You might look at this and feel intimidated or confused, I look at it and feel empowered because that’s over 2000 of my ideas and thoughts, interconnected, in a simple, trusted system that focuses on retrievability, that helps me remember, helps me think and therefore enhances my creativity. There’s not that much more fundamental than that. The Programme I use – Obsidian- facilitates connecting notes together Programme also allows add-ins that can do amazing things, including asking your second brain questions through ChatGPT This app makes ‘capture’ of all of my second brain content really easy. Anything I highlight across my kindle, web browsing, PDFs etc all goes into this app, and all the highlights are automatically sent to my Second Brain. I can then do the ‘progressive summarising’ thing that Neil mentioned to create those nuggets of wisdom, which then I can connect to other notes to be more creative, to see things from different perspectives. Spaced repetition is an effective learning technique used with flashcards where new information and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, and older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently. So I have a second brain for all the same reasons as Neil, but I also choose to publish ASPECTS of my second brain. Clearly I don’t publish confidential information. My aim is to write with an audience in mind, keeping me honest, but also being vulnerable and authentic. It’s a leadership tool, as well as a knowledge dissemination tool. Here’s really where I felt that this approach aligned with my leadership values and that broader purpose of being an authentic leader in a complicated, confusing world. This is about “Working with the garage door open” and it is “anti-marketing” in that it’s putting the individual and all my foibles and errors first, so I can learn, and so others know I’m incomplete. I’m a part of the ‘learning in public’ movement which means that basically the best way to get better at something is to receive feedback on that thing all the time. Imagine if you could read your bosses mind, or your predecessor's mind. On bosses mind: Not curated content on Twitter or a Blog, but thoughts running through their head. Commenting on events. On predecessor’s mind: what would that mean for productivity. Not just their handover notes and emails, but their thoughts and ideas, and that business continuity. What if you knew what they thought they’d got wrong in their role, and why. Everyone having a learning mindset- led through the CEO saying that it’s OK to be wrong and it’s ok to experiment. If our knowledge capture is deficient as a sector, how do we expect to weather the “VUCA” context we’re in? Are we really bringing all our resources to bear on the problems we face? If we’re working hard on things that we don’t appropriately capture and retain, isn’t all that effort wasted? Should there be an expectation that UK HE Leaders not just have to demonstrate thought leadership, but have to show their workings out?