Good Enough = Continuous Learning and Iterative Design Thinking
Before my current line of work, I evaluated unemployed people from both a psychological and a physical perspective.
It was a “confidential session” where I had to get to grips with what are the person's competencies.
Add on any psychological or physical disabilities to evaluate if the person needed aid in the current field of work or perhaps more education.
In some instances, the person in question was assessed as not suited for the line of work due to psychological or physical disabilities.
Or a combination of both.
All in all, I stacked up more than 8000 hours within the field so that you, the reader, know where I am coming from.
During that time, working in the labor politics field, one thing became very clear.
Work titles come and go.
As do the work requirements that new titles form.
And people need to change with it, so they do not risk unemployment in the short and long term.
But it is hard for some people to adjust since they have a set belief system and mental model of the world, they live in.
More and more are expected of a person within a job title and the need to adjust is imperative more now than ever.
But how do you go about starting to learn something new every day?
Importance of the right influencers (Your Environment)
For me, it might not be that hard since my mother taught me to always ask the question “Why” things are the way they are.
In that way, she made me a curious little child. That in turn progressed into learning coding websites in HTML and CSS simply from looking at the source code on webpages and reading online about it.
And from then on learning more and more about the things that interest me like photography and videography, not to mention psychology.
I’ve had the privilege to work together with psychologists during my previous job, assessing people and doing requirement analysis of their work environment.
That has been immensely useful in understanding humans in everyday life.
Another, very important person in my life was my first manager at the Swedish Public Employment Service.
He once told me that he always asked himself a question when he came home from work. Namely “What have you learned today?”.
I took that to heart and literally did the same from then on.
Now, I do not ask myself that question since I learn more than one thing every day.
But from that, I learned how to always get something out of every interaction in my life.
There is always something new I can learn from the world in every situation. May it be how to be a better person in difficult times of conflict at work or in private relationships.
Or on the morning commute to work read about AI and how that is being used today to get a feel for how it fits into my life now or in the future.
What does it all mean?
But how does all this fit into being a Business Requirement Analyst?
Well, understanding my surroundings gives me an edge come the analytic part of my work.
And it makes me challenge my life every single day. For me, it is now my mental model.
My insights
But the most challenging thing is the relentless breaking down of my mental models every single day.
And every morning telling myself that:
“I know nothing, and I have no solutions to anything!”
That way I can question everything I do and at the same time ditch the pressure of always delivering a perfect solution.
Which we all know does not exist in the world.
That in turn becomes a habit for me and a part of my everyday mental model.
In time it has become a way of life for me, just as Netflix and TV are for others.
My Netflix is YouTube education about AI, Photography, and Videography.
Every day I learn something new on top of my ordinary job as a Business Analyst.
In the same way, I studied to become a designer through online education when it suited me to do the lessons and not a university teacher’s schedule.
I would argue that in today’s world, you need to think about what you will start studying so that you do not go for things like law or economics that we have started to see an end to.
In the three years it takes for you to become a bachelor of something, that line of work might be gone altogether.
We can see that in the US, where IBM’s AI “Watson” is a paralegal in some law firms stopping newly educated layers from entering the labor market.
Watson has also become a diagnosing doctor in Boston (US).
Security robots are patrolling the parking lots in LA. And AI is designing the best 3D-printed metal construction in many fields of manufacturing.
What I am trying to say is that you cannot simply stop learning new things today since the world changes around you.
And if your brain is going to keep being elastic to function properly you need to use it and add on new pathways like learning new things every single day.
That, in turn, makes you more prone to be open-minded in more situations and adapt more readily.
How?
Start simple with an interest/hobby or a new field of work.
But most importantly, and I can’t emphasize this enough.
Do it WITHOUT any pressure on YOURSELF.
Learn something new for a minute every day during the first week and ease into it.
And then extend it.
Some days you learn for hours and other days for just a few minutes.
But make it a habit for yourself.
More importantly.
If you’re a parent, then your children will see you learn new things every day and pick up the habit (hopefully).
Kids do what you do and not what you say.
That will give them an edge in their life.
Learning did not stop when you finished school.
Life is an education, and you should probably treat it that way.
The need to tap into the logical pathways and make that a habit instead of being a slave to the peripheral route/emotional decision system is more important today, more than ever since everything changes much quicker.
Start NOW
So, pick up your smartphone, tablet, laptop, or book and start being a consumer of forming your edge in tomorrow’s world by Challenging YOUR Status Quo!
More resources
“Rocket Surgery Made Easy” by Steve Krug
“Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug
“100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About Humans” by Susan Weinschenk
“100 More Things Every Designer Needs To Know About Humans” by Susan Weinschenk
“The Design Of Everyday Things” by Don Norman
“User Story Mapping” by Alan Cooper and Jeff Patton
“The Master and His Emissary” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist