Tag Archives: patterns

Information abundance requires pattern recognition

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What a fantastic quote by Adam Grant,

“The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It’s how well you synthesize.

Information scarcity rewarded knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition.

It’s not enough to collect facts. The future belongs to those who connect dots.”

Pattern recognition and synthesis are the path to innovation, ingenuity, and invention. The collection of knowledge is not enough. Wisdom comes from recognizing how to make connections across different fields, how to make meaning out of relationships that not everyone sees.

Artificial Intelligence can give us the knowledge we seek. It can dumb down the ideas to our level of understanding, and even teach us with relevant examples when we are stuck. More information won’t be what we seek. Instead we will seek new connections, patterns, and relationships.

The desired experts of tomorrow are probably not the siloed experts we once sought. Instead they will be information generalists who understand how to take information from different fields, identify relationships others don’t see, and synthesize information such that they can tell a story others won’t know to tell.

How are we preparing the next generation of learners for this new future? How will schools need to change to help students prepare for the future in a world of abundant and easily accessible information? It certainly won’t be by feeding them content. Instead, the future of education lies in creating challenges where students need to synthesize information and recognize connections and patterns across different fields of study.

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Related: My ‘Transforming Our Learning Metaphors’ Ignite Presentation from almost a decade ago.

Traffic flow

We are staying in an AirBNB in downtown Toronto with my mom. It’s a small 3-bedroom apartment on the 6th floor, just above the Gardener Expressway. I needed earplugs to go to sleep last night. The flow of traffic is a little too uneven to be a constant background noise.

I remember a funny line from Robin Williams as Mork, playing an alien from another planet, on the sitcom Mork & Mindy. He comes in one day and asks Mindy, “Why do they call it ‘rush hour’ when nothing moves?”

Any city as big as Toronto has a buzz, and never sleeps. The highway below us has a constant, congested flow of traffic and as I write this at almost 5:30pm the traffic is crawling going both east and west. But even at 2am there will be a flow of traffic. I don’t think there is a time during the day when there would be no cars on the small strip of road outside this apartment’s window.

Sometimes when I’m on the road at 2am I wonder as I drive, “Where are all these other cars going?” And, “Where are they coming from?”

How are so many other people on the road right now? Is this a regular routine or an unusual anomaly in their travel patterns? Are they coming home from a long day? A fun night? Or are they just starting their day?

Tonight I’ll put my earplugs in and ignore the traffic flow, cars each heading to their own destinations… destinations I’ll never know.