Learn Smarter: The Feynman Technique, Don’t Know Notebook & Problem Testing

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0:32We're experimenting with this new format of Borrowed Brilliance, where every week either Helen or I have found something that we think is intriguing, it's interesting, but then really focus on trying to turn what we've learned into something that feels really useful for us at work. The reason we really like Richard Feynman, he was just very curious the way that he approached learning, the way that he asked questions. He has this whole spirit around the more questions, the better. And actually, the more we just close things off, that's not very good for our learnings. The Feynman technique. It's all about teaching what you are learning as though you are teaching it to a child.

1:10Number two is the idea of having a don't know notebook. And it would just keep a whole running list of things that you didn't know. You know, there's that work cliche of don't bring me problems, bring me solutions. solutions actually if problems in organizations are seen as something to share and to discuss you get to very different outcomes and actually you're much more likely to solve the problems hi i'm sarah and i'm helen and this is the squiggly careers podcast every week we borrow some brilliance and turn that curiosity into actions that we hope will help all of us to navigate and succeed in our squiggly careers and this is a slightly different format for squiggly careers for everybody who listens every week you'll be very used to us turning up with strengths or how to get a pay rise or what do microaggressions mean to pick a range of different topics and we've got to 500 episodes and we felt it was really important that we kept being useful so what we don't want to do is repeat things that we've already done and keep saying the same thing because I wouldn't listen to that podcast let alone everybody else so we're experimenting with this new format of borrowed brilliance where every week either Helen or I have found something that we think is intriguing it's interesting it could be anything it can be books data points a post we've read on LinkedIn anything that we're like oh there's something there's something brilliant to borrow from there and then what we're going to do in the podcast is share that with you but then really focus as always on trying to turn what we've learned into something that feels really useful for us at work so how would you use what you've learned in a way that feels relevant regardless of what role you're in or what stage you're in in your squiggly career so Helen very kindly volunteered to go first um so Helen who what or where are we borrowing brilliance from this week we have a who we have a who this week and my who is Richard Feynman um I shall hold up one of his books um it's actually this book is actually written by peter holland so it's not by richard fineman so if you're new to richard fineman a kind of a bit of introduction to him and his work he's definitely outside our normal world because he is a physicist um a nobel prize winning physicist who worked thought we'd start strong yeah we've gone this is like the deep cut he was known for his work on quantum electrodynamics um and amongst other things was involved in like the atomic bomb it's quite interesting actually just reading about some of the times and insights that he had actually on developing that um it's interesting interesting perspective i say that because i have read a few of his different materials and i picked up one of the books that's been written about his work which was called the pleasure of finding things out because the reason we really like richard fineman is because he was known not just for his physics But also he was just very curious the way that he approached learning, the way that he asked questions.

4:08There's just a lot to learn from how he learnt, which is what we're going to focus on today. But I was on a flight recently and I thought, oh, you know what? I'll pick up another Richard Feynman book, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Expecting it. Yes, I was really influenced by the title. Really influenced by the title. and then I realised it was essentially a compilation of eight talks or presentations that he had done on science but like deep deep science. What I do recommend is learning from how Richard Feynman learnt and there are three particular things that I have pulled out that I wanted to talk to Sarah about to get her take on how she might put these into actions that I have learnt from Richard Feynman.

4:54okay so the first one is called the Feynman technique and it is a way to learn so that it lasts that's probably my kind of summary of it and it's all about teaching what you are learning as though you are teaching it to a child so wherever you're learning about you know science or simplification or I don't know design thinking whatever the thing is that you want to learn about The idea is if you learn that thing and then imagining you are teaching it to a child, so you're having to explain what you are learning in a really clear way. You've got to make it really simple language. It's often harder to use simple language than it is the complicated language and no jargon.

5:41So you can't fall back on, you know, the acronyms that we might use at work. It has to be really, really simple and really, really sticky. and this this process of imagining you're teaching what you have learned to a child forces your brain to do a few things so the first is you because you're working so hard to keep it simple you also start to notice where you might have some gaps because like oh I can't I can't quite explain that thing so it's a really good way of getting to gaps in your knowledge it also means that you're having to sort of mentally organize your thoughts because you're probably doing a bit of sequencing so if you do this then this happens and that's the outcome and that sequencing is it's really useful for our brain to retain information and just the articulation of it means that it makes more sense to you so if you imagine i could just read a book or listen to a podcast and that information has gone in or i could then think about teaching it to a child and my brain just has to work a lot harder in order to do that and it's in that process that what you learn starts to last so what do you what do you think about this approach well the first thing it made me think of is obviously we recently did our squiggly skills times ai sprint and one of the things i think ai often does well is like act as if you know that's a useful prompt um and one of the prompts that i've been using recently when teaching my own child so a real life example is saying to an AI um this is a this is a concept or an idea explain it to me as if I'm an eight year old because I have got an eight year old and sometimes he will be struggling to understand something and I am struggling to explain it to him too because I think well probably I don't necessarily understand this or I've not learned this for a while so last week he was learning about the obscura camera and these are like really what is that like the early earliest ever cameras i mean this is literally i ended up you know you'll end up learning through osmosis through however old your kid is so yeah the first ever cameras um and they were like massive and like also obviously he's never even really seen cameras because obviously you just use phones so even like you could see him like really and i could see he was really struggling to get his head around he had to like read something to understand like what was being written about the camera but he didn't even understand what the camera was so obviously I was showing him some pictures and and then I was also like why am I trying to explain this why am I not just asking AI to do it for me I'm a tiny bit lazy I was quite tired you know at the end of the day also I don't think I could do a good explanation even to you now of what this obscure camera is and like the way it works and how it could sort of be half outside and then project images inside so that people could like trace over them and stuff so looking at some pictures definitely helped me but I was actually thinking there's you there's an action here about like you teaching to other people but there's also an action about if you're not sure on something you're if you're if you're kind of stuck on like a concept or you're trying to understand what this means obviously you could ask ai to help you and or you or you could practice on ai and say how would you make this simpler and get some get some ideas for language that you might take away or words that you might use or examples to bring things to life often that really helps kids um oh you know it's a bit like dot dot dot that's you know if you can make a comparison to something that people really understand like um the people I often think who are quite good at doing this is when you go to some exercise classes you know sometimes people will say like one of my teachers the other week said imagine you've got a marshmallow in your belly button and you've got to like you've got to crush it that's how much she wanted you to like pull your stomach in but it was really like everyone knows what a malteser is you know roughly what the size of a malteser is and you could and it sort of makes everyone laugh which was like but i thought it was quite a good thing you know was it a malteser or a marshmallow because i feel like they're gonna like have slightly different reactions to your tummy i've got like a melted chocolate she was like i mean yeah you're right when you think about i mean if you go too far it doesn't work but the idea of like you've got to crush it is like quite it was like oh yeah i've got a really light squeeze and that's what she wanted everyone to do um and i thought oh that's a good example of explaining something that's quite hard to get your head around in a way where it's like that would make sense if you like crush something that you know kind of works really well so I think this is the smart thing the only thing I would say you know with your suggestion of AI I think that it is an add-on but not an alternative to because I think the point of this is that you you're doing the thinking right so you're taking the learning in and you're doing the thinking how would i explain this what would the steps be and so if you just go oh i've read this book on i don't know moral ambition hard work for me yeah and i'm gonna i can you summarize it to make it more simple that is not what i think this technique is about the the fireman technique is learning in a way so it lasts by sort of organizing and reducing your knowledge yourself but i think you can get you know your if you are then going to share it with people like your mortezer marshmallow thing you probably could help you with some sort of memorable ways of visualizing it that but i don't think it replaces you doing the kind of the mental work for yourself it also reminds me of the hell and how to's so one of the things that you put in squiggly careers in action each week our newsletter and they're always really popular is where you do a kind of hell and how to but for you to do that and i'm not i'm not saying you're like teaching it to kids but essentially you have had to understand the concept you've got to explain it in a clear simple way because we sort of always try to do that I'm assuming when you do that you must sometimes think oh I've got a bit of a gap there or I don't know I don't know that thing or I can't explain that in quite the same way so you know to your point about adding in I feel like you've added this in really well with your with your hell and how to's well and actually that point around you know the gaps and spotting the things you don't know this links to idea number two from Richard Feynman that I really like and it is the idea of having a don't know notebook so lots of us might I don't know you might read a book and you might write down oh that's an interesting statement or that's you know you highlight a quote so we're sort of collecting lots of bits of knowledge along the way and you organize those however you like to organize them but his point was it is equally as useful to collect what you don't know so if I'm listening to Sarah and Sarah says a statement And I think, you know, I haven't maybe I haven't read that article or Sarah just mentioned that thing.

12:16And I don't I don't know. It's almost like I think this is noticing what you don't know rather than ignoring it and placing as much value on having a list of things that you don't know as having, you know, a book of things that you do. And what he would do is he would like be in lectures or listen to his colleagues or whatever. And he would just keep a whole running list of things that he didn't know. and then he would go back to his list and he would then work through them so it then became like a to learn list so it went from like his don't know notebook to a to learn list and he would just put some time aside and he had this practice of constantly turning unknowns into knowns and I was thinking about a way that I have done this is um I have a list of don't know words that I'm not going to say though because I'm sometimes really embarrassed that I don't know But I guess this is the point.

13:09Having a don't know notebook is actually a bit exposing because you're like, oh, here's a... So all these words, I have all these words that I'll read in the newspaper and I think, oh, I don't know what that word is. And then I will go and I write the word down and I write down a definition of it. So it becomes like, I don't know, it's like my own personal dictionary of stuff I didn't know. But over time, and sometimes I'll come back to it and I'll think, oh, could you find a way to use that word? Because I like language and I quite like noticing what I don't know with words but that was like my small way of doing it but I think I could probably do it more in the context of work in conversations so I used this last week so I did know this already so actually don't know notebook is one of the expert insights we included in learn like a lobster so in our new book which if you have been listening to podcasts for the last few weeks has been relatively unmissable I'm guessing if this is your first time listening you might be like they've written a book about lobsters and learning um go online you'll find it very very quickly um So we were both familiar with this idea.

14:07And I was in my first strategy away day with a new board where I'm a non-executive last week. So I knew there was going to be a lot that I didn't know. I didn't even know most of the people, let alone, you know, let alone the content. And it's in an industry that I don't know. So I was like, well, I'm not going to know the industry. I don't know the people. And we're going to be making quite a lot of decisions or I'm going to need to ask some questions around lots of things that probably just will be because I just don't know um and I was also quite mindful of like when the right time to do that is so what actually really helped me was writing down the things that I didn't know I could then decide when the right time was to move from unknown to known because sometimes it was just over coffee you know we'd be in a coffee break um and people come and chat and I would just say oh someone it was always like an acronym or jargon that as often was quite a good time to be like oh you know that I don't know recruitment like what does this mean and they'd be like oh yeah I sort of forget that we don't you know we don't explain that it's an index or whatever so I would sometimes do that sometimes I would just say it in the moment and it gave me the little push to be like you don't know you don't know you don't know what they're talking about here so for you to be able to be useful and to ask a good question or to make a useful contribution you have got to ask this question Sarah and it's it's that's okay um knowing that probably 70 80 percent of the people in that room would already know the answer and so I just I found that quite it's funny when I've done it and actually when I've recommended it to people in workshops you'd think it would be daunting but it actually ends up being reassuring you know what you don't know because I think it stops all of the things that you don't know just like pinging around in your head and just feeling like it's like really overwhelming it's probably a really long list and I think you create some clarity and make what you don't know much more concrete when I have done this in workshops I've done this quite a lot in workshops in the last two months everybody always picks AI at the moment I'm like right give me something you don't know that much about and everyone's like AI and then I just get people to frame their don't know notebooks as questions like what are the questions that you've got on AI I don't understand the difference between generative AI and agentic AI whatever it might be um I I don't know how to build my own chat GPT and everyone keeps talking about it whatever it might be and actually once people get started the long list of questions people start picking other people's questions they're like oh yeah that's a real I'm gonna add that to my don't know notebook and actually it becomes a really nice way of everybody feeling confident I think about getting started with that don't know to know and I think I've almost taken this mindset this year when I've been thinking about things I don't know to be like well well what are you going to do about that that that that knowledge is not just going to magically appear you've got to take some action so I really like this one I think the question to teams as well like what don't we know is a really good place to start and and I also was thinking about when you've got someone in your team who's either like new to the business or the project or the team that you're in saying to them like over the next week just keep a bit of a notebook of what you don't know and we'll catch up at the end of the week and I'll try and you know help you fill some gaps I think that makes it much safer for somebody at the end of the week to be like I don't know what these five acronyms mean and much more positive rather than you know when people often start a new role it's where like a gremlin about being found out will often grow because they're thinking oh I'm supposed to know this by now I'm supposed to come with all this expertise and it's like this is just hard isn't it when you're new but you could make it really safe for somebody to have a lot of like don't knows in that first week and then be the person that helps maybe fill fill the gaps I'd feel a lot um I think I feel a lot safer asking questions and admitting my gaps if someone had done that for me I love that quote that you found do you want to say that oh yeah I really like this quote and so again this is one of one of um Richard Feynman's from one of the books and presentations that he'd done um I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

18:15And I think, yeah, he has this whole spirit around, like Sarah said, turn your don't knows into questions. This whole spirit around the more questions, the better. And actually, the more we just close things off, that's not very good for our learning. So, yeah, it's why we're so attracted to his spirit, I think, of learning. So the last one I think is potentially the most random or the most playful one. It's called problem testing. so he says that you know lots of people will carry around problems with them like we don't know how to i don't know update the website or we don't know how to solve this issue that we've got with this system i was thinking something really different different when you said that go on i was like when i was thinking like oh i don't know how to cook

19:02i was like last week last week i tried for the first time to make a poached egg yeah oh my that's quite ambitious a poached egg well that's what my partner told me when he found me in the kitchen he was like what are you doing and i was like oh my gosh i really want to delve into this to have a bit of a healthier lunch and he was like why have you started with a poached egg i was like yeah i like them i like the taste and he was like no and yeah don't mean he didn't i was like one of my problems is i can't make a poached egg my eight-year-old can make scrambled eggs i can't poached eggs are ambitious though but i was like oh maybe i need to maybe i need to change my problem okay But there's work ones too, but that's, I think, all problems, right?

19:41Yeah, you are right. I'm not undermining that as a problem. So from I don't know how to cook, and that's a problem, for making simple nutritious lunches for myself, to I don't know how to update the website. More of an everyday work-related one. We all carry a range of problems around with us. It was because I had a day where I had two bowls of porridge and two bananas in one day, and I was like, I've got to be able to cook more food than this. so you went from like quite white food to more white food i think you know like the eating the rainbow the eggs are quite yellow bananas are yellow are they not the inside of them right we're not this is not a podcast on nutrition but i would love to have that conversation you know when people think oh like when we were like busy they're like oh how do you make everything work i'm like well sarah just needs bananas i mean there's a lot of good stuff going on there's a lot of good b vitamins slow releasing energy but we'll we'll move on we'll move on from now so how do i test this problem tell me okay all right so you have all your problems which could be a range of things so lots of people have lists of problems that's not really the the thing that he's sort of unlocking here what he says is you have like one list of problems and then you have a list of solutions but they don't have to be connected to your problems so just when you like see things you're like oh that's a really cool way of i don't know opening a bottle let's say you're like oh that's a cool packaging innovation they've really solved like so that there's not enough there's not as much waste or okay uh for example i am currently um growing herbs at home it's very opposite to you with but i've got like this new propagator thing that's got a light so they can grow for like 24 hours so it speeds it all up so you're like oh that's quite a cool solution to have like you know so your plants grow quicker and look after them so you basically just start collecting solutions to stuff things that you're like oh that's quite smart well unconnected to problems so you just go that's a good solution that's yes so you basically this week you could be like what are four things that are problematic and then you could be like what are four kind of interesting solutions that i've seen everything from i don't know subscription models to packaging it doesn't matter but then what you do is you look at them sort of together as a group and you say oh how could there be some connections between these things so how could the fact that I don't know you don't know how to cook be linked to a subscription model I've seen and I'd be like oh well why don't you get a subscription-based food thing or you're like I already do that but that's it helps you connect some dots and think differently about a problem well i suppose the solutions are borrowed brilliance right if you think about it in a in a different way when you it's kind of collecting it's kind of being really curious and collecting things that are smart or that do something different or solve a problem that is just really useful or that make your life easier and maybe sometimes we are too worried about the kind of straight lineness between i've got a problem here's my solution and actually i have read um this feels more relevant than the poached egg story which i will come back to um i did read some research around you know there's that like slightly work cliche of don't bring me problems bring me solutions yeah and i don't know why i said that voice but i feel like that's the that's the vibe um it's also the end of a day at bunday so we've lost we've lost focus for the day um And what the research found was that actually that narrows people's thinking.

23:22Yeah. And it stops people exploring possibilities and being curious because they feel like they can't even have like a discussion. So if I was coming to you with like a problem, it was almost like, oh, I can't talk to you about the problem because Helen would have expected me to have come up with an answer. But maybe there isn't one more answer. Or maybe I don't know what the answer is yet. and they were saying actually if problems in organizations are seen as something to explore and to share and to discuss you get to very you get to very different outcomes and actually much you're much more likely to solve the problems ironically by not kind of going down this route and i feel like what's quite nice about this is you're going well not every problem has a really linear solution there are problems and we need to know what they are let's say for our company we might be like right what are amazing ifs top five problems to solve and then along the way we want to make sure we're borrowing brilliance collecting good stuff collecting clever solutions and then at some point I guess you probably would want to try and pause and just be like well what what have we noticed from all of the good stuff and does any of it connect does it does any of it help us kind of solve that problem in a new way because I suppose I can see independently both of the things easy to see the problems easy to collect the smart thinking i think i think we're both quite good at that anyway good at that in our company but i probably would still need a moment when i'm like when are we bringing those things together right so that's probably a team that'd be a great thing to talk about that's where i got to on this and i was thinking oh this is like your i mean he was just he just did this himself he would just have his notebook and he would write his problems down on one page and then some random solutions on another and spend time doing them but I think this is actually a more helpful process to do in a group and I think you would give people let's say we were going to chat on Friday maybe on Monday you say over the next couple of days I just want you to look out for really interesting solutions interesting ideas of how people are approaching things differently everything from you know advertising product anything just bring them and then you get together on Friday and you say okay so let's talk what are our top three team problems right now and everyone just kind of gets a couple of minutes to share something like an interesting solution that they've seen and you're just playing with the problem and i think it works better with either repeated problems you know problem that's not going away or a weighty problem um a problem that's really getting in the way um not like not a small problem that could be solved tomorrow because i think i probably don't need to play with that for ages that's not that's not this it's the knotty messy ones that need a bit of creative thought i think this is what this is good for well if you can fix it fast it doesn't feel it's not worth it yeah like you're like well sometimes you just need to sort sort something and I think that's okay too yeah I think your word playing is a really good one I'm like you're playing with the problem you're exploring you're being curious it's probably problems where the answer isn't obvious it isn't easy or maybe you've tried solving the problem and it didn't work yeah that's also interesting because you're like well we maybe you tried the obvious answer um or what we would have typically done or what you've seen other people do but it's not got us to where we need to get to so we need to you know like this is this going to open up your thinking you're going to be thinking differently so let me just summarize then the three ideas that we got from richard fireman's work and then we've got a bit of an ai prompt which i'm not going to read all of it because i think it'd be really boring but what we'll do is we're slightly updating we're slightly updating the pod sheet just to make it easier for you to put these into action so i'll put the ai prompt into the pod sheet so you can cut and placed and kind of get that that insight and i'll also in the pod sheet put a link to a really good article from shane parish um who has written a bit about richard fireman as well so just in summary the three actions to try out first of all the thought the fireman technique which is about teaching something you're learning as if it was to a child and the second is the don't know notebook and the third is sort of playing around with problem problem testing sarah which is your favorite of the three i think so the don't know notebook i already used it's probably my current favorite uh but the one that i would want to try out and experiment with would be the playing with a problem i'm going to use your phrase i like playing and i was thinking we could do that together a little bit i like the don't know notebook as well i thought i might do it do it even a bit more um so the ai prompt then um the prompt i mean it's relatively short but you can cut and paste it from um from the pod sheet but it's i am a insert your job title in a insert the context with which you work in so for example i am a project manager in a large bank I want to tweak my week to bring in some rich Feynman style learning write down five questions I could start my day with and then it will generate like questions so as an example if I had to explain today's key project update in one sentence what would I say so it gives you a bit of a prompt that won't take you very long to respond to that you know if you're weak it would just put you slightly more in that Richard Feynman kind of creative curious super learning style um I did read one of those questions and thought um crikey if I'd have to do that today there's one that says um what's one thing on my agenda today that I couldn't easily explain to a new joiner and I was thinking what's one thing I could explain based on what I have done today you know you were like if I was trying to explain my day and what we've done and why today to somebody who was like brand new to say careers and amazing if and squiggly and all those kind of things.

28:39I was like, that would actually, but I was like, that's a really good insight for myself in terms of going, okay, sometimes you probably do need to kind of stop and figure out in a really simple, straightforward way, what am I doing and why am I doing it? Because sometimes I think you sort of lose sight of that because you're just so used to what you do. And I would love to end with one more quote from him that I like, which is that being wrong isn't a bad thing like they teach you in school. it's an opportunity to learn something so even if you give these ideas a go and it goes wrong that is not that's not a bad outcome because you can still learn you can still learn by doing it so a bit of a different format for this week and we would love to know what you think because the plan is to keep recording our tuesday episodes in this way some borrowed brilliance and hopefully turn that into some useful ideas for action that you can use at work still with our kind of work lens i think that's the bit we're good at so you can email us uh it's helen and sarah at squigglycareers.com or you can connect with us on linkedin and kind of message us there but we would really like to know what you think the only way we can do more of what's good for you and improve and do our even better ifs is if you tell us so please do but i think that is everything for this week we hope you have found it useful we hope you like the new format we've got some really good borrowed brilliance to come in the next few weeks we kind of already know where we're going with a few different ones we're going to try out lots of different things it won't all be people there'll be books there'll be objects object one um there'll be data and all sorts um so hopefully you'll have some fun with us learning and listening along the way that's everything for this week thank you so much for listening and bye for now bye everyone