Peanut butter and banana sandwiches

“Damn, I hate these peanut butter and banana sandwiches,” said the construction worker for the third time in three days.

His foreman asked, “Why don’t you ask your wife to make you some other kind of sandwich?”

The construction worker replied, “Because I’m not married. I make these sandwiches myself.”

Likewise, people used to accept the peanut butter and banana reality imposed on them by others. Now they’re making meaning by themselves. Part of this is due to an on-going cultural shift from push (”Do what I tell you”) to pull (”You figure it out.”)

From Push to Pull- Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources

A great article on push and pull by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. They wrote this late last year but I just found it this afternoon.

To exploit the opportunities created by uncertainty, pull models help people to come together and innovate in response to unanticipated events, drawing upon a growing array of highly specialized and distributed resources. Rather than seeking to constrain the resources available to people, pull models strive to continually expand the choices available while at the same time helping people to find the resources that are most relevant to them. Rather than seeking to dictate the actions that people must take, pull models seek to provide people on the periphery with the tools and resources (including connections to other people) required to take initiative and creatively address opportunities as they arise.

Push models treat people as passive consumers (even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line) whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers. Pull models treat people as networked creators (even when they are customers purchasing goods and services) who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem into an opportunity. Pull models are ultimately designed to accelerate capability building by participants, helping them to learn as well as innovate, by pursuing trajectories of learning that are tailored to their specific needs.

What blows my mind about this is that I was writing the same push and pull story this morning, thinking I was coming up with new and exciting stuff. I read and respect the two Johns, so probably I appropriated their ideas, forgot where they came from, and began pontificating, happy to find my thinking more profound than usual.

The bottom-line for learning is what Harold Jarche, Judy Brown, and I have been trying to capture in our unworkshops.

Pull platforms represent continuous learning environments where participants come together and learn from each other as they tackle a series of unanticipated “action points” – situations requiring very specific choices or decisions. By providing highly flexible environments where participants can access the contributions of others, pull platforms facilitate learning from others as well and encourage participants to focus on areas where they can be truly distinctive. As a result, participants are able to build capabilities much more quickly by working with others to bootstrap their own capabilities.

Furthermore,

Pull models will also reshape learning dynamics. Rather than accessing and absorbing codified information on a pre-determined schedule, we will find ourselves accessing and joining relevant communities, often distributed across geographies, and participating in creation within these communities through apprenticeship models. We will spend less time at the outset “learning-about” and at an earlier stage we will begin the process of “learning-to-be” through participating in communities of practice.