Working Smarter Glossary

Grappling with blazing-fast change requires a new vocabulary. Here are a few phrases from a CLO survival guide that you may find useful.

Beta: Not ready for final release. Still buggy. Life is perpetual beta.

Blink: Rapid cognition, or gut feeling. Making snap judgments, often valid, on the basis of a few data points. Popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in a book of the same name.

Blog: Great way to narrate your work to enable others to learn from your example.

Boiling the ocean: Trying to cure all problems at once, often with a single tool. Don’t even try.

Brain rules: Don’t design learning experiences that defy human nature. John Medina’s book lists 10 basic truths about how people learn.

Complexity: It’s a nonlinear, interconnected world, and you will never figure it out.

Course: Rigid unit of learning, generally expressed in hours or days and “led” by an instructor. Opposite: “Just enough.”

Doggie treats: Incentives, targets, measurements and other directional signals. These drive organizational behavior. Coined by Art Kleiner in Who Really Matters.

Entropy: Disorder. Closed systems decay over time. Margaret Wheatley has proposed that this is why scientific managers are so hung up on control.

Flow: Why you cannot step in the same river twice. Nothing is permanent; everything flows. Also, the euphoria that accompanies flowing in sync with your reality.

Free-range learner: Someone who learns as he or she chooses. Often discovery learning.

Frog boiling: Apocryphal science experiment. Drop a frog in a pot of boiling water; he jumps right out. Put a frog in a pan of cool water and slowly heat it on the stove; the frog never senses a big change in temperature and stays in the water until poached.

Grades: Random numbers used by academics to exert social control over students.

Hospicing: From Nancy White, “We are hospicing things we no longer need/should do. Sometimes that means turning them over to others to care for until they die.”