Systems Management School

Results of the Use of Pomodoro Practice During The Course

I began to keep records of the completed Pomodoros only from the second chapter. Starting with the sixth, I changed the accounting format and began to write them to the ledger file for later analysis.

Initially, I used Pomodoro exclusively as a ritual to enter the role - headphones, music, timer start, and the process went. The fact that Pomodoro can be used for planning I guessed but did not use because I did not resort to planning. The fact that the completed Pomodoros can be used for analysis has not occurred to me.

I deliberately decided not to automate the Pomodoro timer binding to projects - recording a completed Pomodoro for me is a ritual to exit the role. Before that, it turned out too often that I continued to do work despite the nicknamed signal.

Unfortunately, the lack of a clear boundary between work and leisure (all the work I do right can be attributed to a hobby) does not allow me to take advantage of Pomodoro's practice fully. When I switch between chats while discussing work and personal issues, reading articles, mail, and from time to time making something on work, the work advances. Although the timer is not started, on some days, I recorded zero completed Pomodoros. Sometimes it means I didn't do anything. Sometimes not.

The average number of Pomodoros per day is three pieces (statistics for a month and a half). The duration of one Pomodoro is fixed - 35 minutes. Of the 140 Pomodoros included in the statistics, 60 are course completion. It does not mean that most of my time was spent on the course; this is just an activity that I could separate from everything else. Only 24 Pomodoros were invested in working projects for comparison; actually, much more time was spent.

Current plans are to continue as is. The calendar has a daily task, "at least one Pomodoro," which I perform almost daily. The stage of setting the habit of using the instrument is still underway.

Can Thinking Be Taught?

How is unreflected, unconscious art or craft passed on? A student looks at dozens, hundreds, thousands of masterworks, learns to understand the slang of professionals as one learns a native language (without handbooks or dictionaries, just "from talking"), constantly watches real masters work, and tries to copy it—just like the proverb "monkey see, monkey do". Then three out of ten students get some proper rails in their heads for the train of their professional thoughts, and they begin to think fast and make few mistakes. And in seven out of ten, they don't, and they make a lot of errors. Teaching art or a craft is not "imparting conceptual knowledge".

We need nine out of ten to be able to learn (it is conceivable that there will be one incapable person out of ten, but not seven out of ten). This means that we have to take for teaching such counterintuitive knowledge that cannot come quickly to the students themselves, make a minimal compact and comprehensible definition of it (conceptual! So that it can be expressed in words!), and then somehow pass it on to students so that it's built into their heads. The question is: Does this happen in areas that have traditionally been considered "art" and which it was thought could not be taught rationally? Yes, it happens, all over the place! This is the way of Western civilization: to turn "art" (including the art of thinking) once modeled and rationalized into a rapidly conceptualized person-to-person mastery in the course of structured learning.

When you find the right concepts and the right thought operations with them, and the right exercises to speed up "automatization" of thinking, to get fluency in thinking—then students after training will not even realize what they had difficulty doing before training. They will be unable to remember what rails their thinking was on before the training, and so they will marvel at the behavior of untrained beginners, including their own behavior in the period before mastering this or that practice. Ask a child why he was very bad at multiplication just a year ago-he will not be able to explain why. Now multiplication is quite natural for him, and it does not require the mental powers as it did a year ago.

The Learning from Professors Problem

Anatoly Levenchuk (Анатолий Левенчук), at the third meeting of the Education for Educated Study Group, spoke about the learning from professors’ problem-honored scientists, people who have been teaching the subject for a very long time and deeply understand it. It seems to the professor that everything he says is evident and primitive. He sincerely does not comprehend why the students do not understand him.

I came across such a situation at university: when you listen to a teacher but do not fully understand what he is saying. The reason is apparent. The teacher expects the student to master specific disciplines at a certain level and builds his explanations on the concepts of these disciplines. If, for some reason, the necessary discipline has not been mastered, then no explanation is possible. In the case of applied disciplines, this undertraining can be easily identified, and the student sent for further education. But in the case of transdisciplines, it is more challenging to identify failures (although, perhaps, no one tried).

A similar situation is possible in universities and at all levels of education: in the family, in kindergarten, at school. An educator, parent, or teacher may no longer remember what problems he faced in childhood. Therefore, when a child is taught the essential practices of the intelligence stack, for example, composure, the teacher cannot find the right words. It seems obvious to him, but not to the child.

As one of the solutions to this problem, it is proposed to involve graduates in teaching. This opportunity is beneficial for the graduate: he can repeat the material, look at it from the other side, identify and close the spots of misunderstanding. It is also fruitful for the student. He communicates with a person who recently dealt with the subject and remembers all the pitfalls.

I hope that the Systems Management School will develop activities to attract course graduates to teaching. It can include checking homework, discussing incomprehensible points in texts, and applying course materials to life. I also hope someday to take part in such activities as a teacher. And the maximum coverage of the intellect stack with courses will help me and other students identify and correct problem areas in education, starting from childhood.

Transition to the Application of Thinking

Reading a handbook isn't enough—it's like reading a bicycle manual; it doesn't help much. Solving problems is not enough—it's like riding a bicycle only in a straight line, on a specially equipped track. It will take a long time to train yourself in problem-solving, in applying systems thinking to your work projects (riding a bicycle off-road in the mountains)—and only then will the blossoming complexity begin to recede and lend itself to a brain trained in systems thinking.

The basic ideas of the systems approach are few, and each of these ideas is fairly quickly understood. If we express the systems approach in one phrase, it's something like, "to meet external roles requirements, we need to understand the functioning and possible design of the supra system and then formulate functional and interface requirements for the System-of-Interest. Implementing these requirements involves developing the architecture and then physically fabricating and debugging the System-of-Interest design. To do this, the System-of-Interest life cycle practices must be implemented by organizing a team competent in these practices and equipping that team with all the technologies needed for these practices. And all of this must be done recursively across multiple levels of the system's breakdown, i.e., for all subsystems of the System-of-Interest".

The problem is not even that these sentences consist entirely of terms whose meanings need to be known. All of these meanings/concepts/ideas are deeply related to each other and are rarely used singly. So what is required is a certain fluency in their simultaneous and combined use, roughly in the same sense as fluency in playing the piano or typing on the keyboard, fluency in speaking a foreign language. Every key on the piano or keyboard is understandably pressed. There are not many of them in all, the only problem is to press the different keys in time, quickly, and in the way that you need to get the music. It takes a few days of practice to master a computer keyboard, but it takes several years to master piano keys. In mastering systems thinking, as in mastering the piano, there are no simple ways except countless repetitions, by doing numerous exercises to use these ideas, by gaining experience in applying them to life. This, alas, takes time. That's why it's advisable to learn how to think from childhood.

Applicability of Thinking by Writing

Often our thoughts are pretty abstract, and in the presence of many options for solving problems, they can be completely irrational. An extensive series of calculations or reasoning needs a lot of energy for remembering information and building logical chains. However, with the advent of a new solution to the problem, we forget the details of the previously invented one.
Thinking by writing allows you to visualize information, sort it out and organize your thoughts. Among other things, in some cases, thinking by writing helps to work with cognitive distortions.

For this method, I have identified several options for applicability.

1. The first is work. With the help of thinking by writing, you can decompose a problematic task into parts and think through all possible ways to solve it. Also, you can evaluate the disadvantages and advantages of each method. In addition, interaction with other project participants is greatly simplified (if you work in a team), resulting in the entire team's efficiency increasing.

2. Second is street epistemology. I'm not entirely sure that I'm applying thinking by writing in its standard way here. However, in some dialogues, you need to understand several beliefs, so notes can help you not to lose your train of thought. Because sometimes, there are more profound beliefs on which the opponent's vision of the world is based. Moreover, keeping records allows you to find errors in reasoning that you may not have noticed before.

3. Next is emotions. It is something like street epistemology in dialogue with oneself. It is much easier to identify deep irrational beliefs without forgetting surface ones if you write your arguments on paper.

I'm sure there are many more uses for thinking by writing that I haven't been able to identify yet.

Can Thinking Be Taught?

How is unreflected, unconscious art or craft passed on? A student looks at dozens, hundreds, thousands of masterworks. He learns to understand the slang of professionals as one learns a native language (without handbooks or dictionaries, just "from talking"), constantly watches the real masters work, and tries to copy it—just like the proverb "monkey see, monkey do". Then three out of ten students get some proper rails in their heads for the train of their professional thoughts, and they begin to think fast and make few mistakes. And in seven out of ten, they don't, and they make a lot of mistakes. Teaching art or a craft is not "imparting conceptual knowledge".

We need nine out of ten to be able to learn (it is conceivable that there will be one incapable person out of ten, but not seven out of ten). This means that we have to take for teaching such counterintuitive knowledge that cannot come quickly to the students themselves, make a minimal compact and comprehensible definition of it (conceptual! So that it can be expressed in words!), and then somehow pass it on to students so that it's built into their heads. The question is: Does this happen in areas that have traditionally been considered "art" and which it was thought could not be taught rationally? Yes, it happens, all over the place! This is the way of Western civilization: to turn "art" (including the art of thinking) once modeled and rationalized into a rapidly conceptualized person-to-person mastery in the course of structured learning.

When you find the right concepts and the right thought operations with them, and the right exercises to speed up "automatization" of thinking, to get fluency in thinking—then students after training will not even realize what they had difficulty doing before training. They will be unable to remember what rails their thinking was on before the training, and so they will marvel at the behavior of untrained beginners, including their own behavior in the period before mastering this or that practice. Ask a child why he was very bad at multiplication just a year ago-he will not be able to explain why. Now multiplication is quite natural for him, and it does not require the mental powers as it did a year ago.

You Need to Go into the Fog

A person with the mastery of infinite development is always on the frontier of knowledge. Ahead of the unknown, fog, and a variety of informational noise. From this noise, you need to form a goal and implement it. It's scary. The hypothesis may not be true, and the project will fail. Therefore, in addition to state-of-the-art (SoTA) skills, you need to use transdisciplinary skills to achieve the goal and work in an uncertain and constantly changing world.

So first, you need to see the next goal. Our restless state should motivate us to action. Do not go back to the known and warm. You need to look ahead, extract clues from the noise, examine new and valuable information.

And when you find the goal, it is necessary to implement it using the SoTA practices of entrepreneurship, engineering, and management. You need to figure out what to do and how to do it, also choose the best-known practices that give us a competitive edge. We act faster, spend fewer resources, or do not meet competitors if we find a unique or new niche.

At the same time, we remain sensitive to changes. We strategize cyclically. We study the situation because changes can come suddenly. Remember that success is not guaranteed, and you can lose a lot or even everything. And our strategy is to minimize failure and maximize the fruits of success.

And what will be the size of the goals we set? What project do we want and can implement? It depends on our personality caliber. It is necessary to set a rather tricky but achievable bar. And at each turn of the cycle, increasing the complexity. It will pump the intelligence and skill, and the caliber of personality will increase. Following him, we will be able to implement more significant projects.

The caliber of personality depends on several factors considered in the T-person model. The basis is a well-pumped stack of applied skills and fundamental knowledge in some areas - the vertical line of the model. It is also necessary to gain mastery in expansive transdisciplines - to understand the activities of other people in the project, be able to communicate with them, the skills of organization and innovation. And personal skills, such as composure, role-playing, thinking skills, are used everywhere. These general skills and knowledge are shown by the horizontal bar of the model.

So let's go into the fog! It is not easy, and you have to study a lot and think a lot. Use the problem-solving way of thinking according to SoTA disciplines' rules to achieve results that will bring true satisfaction in life.

The Domain Specializations of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking says nothing about the content of thinking, only about its form—the use of systems thinking concepts in thinking. Systems thinking controls attention, and the objects of attention themselves can be from completely different domains. Systems thinking in this respect is transdisciplinary: it does not touch the concepts of applied disciplines. If cooking is an applied discipline, soup can be a system. If the applied discipline is quantum computing, the system may be a quantum computer. But systems thinking will drive attention to the objects of other disciplines: pointing out the important things you should not miss during thinking.

The transdisciplines developed on the basis of systems thinking (systems engineering, systems management, etc.) do everything so that one does not have to think much but can simply apply in the project already known technical, managerial, creative solutions. There is no need to invent the idea that requirements have to be documented. This has already been discussed many times, you just need to leverage this solution: if you have an engineering project, the requirements need to be documented. If you don't, it's going to be wrong; you know that in advance. You have to save your thinking and document the requirements right away, not wait for the effects of undocumented requirements to show up in the project. But which exact requirements to document? This requires thinking; systems thinking and systems engineering will not tell you.