(2021-08-31) Benn Learning Formats

Jason Benn is Experimenting with new learning formats. Inexplicably — and despite my total control of my schedule — I found myself having a lot of unproductive meetings.

Three of my learning clubs have now been reoriented from goalless recurring meetings (about as enjoyable as a fork in my eye, or Vegemite on my toast) to collaborations that build towards outcomes that I truly care about.

In the School for Social Design, Joe Edelman and I wrote up a roadmap for the next few months that puts all my design practice in service of achieving my next three community objectives.

Inspired by this, I redesigned the structure of my IFS with my therapist. Now, instead of a weekly meeting regardless of whether I've made progress, we collaboratively develop a self-improvement plan for a particular problem, stay up-to-date with weekly email check-ins, and meet only as I hit milestones or get stuck.

Lastly, inspired by Letters to a Young Technologist, Scenius Club (in which Andrew, Priya, Daniel, Jean and I study the patterns underlying famous collaborative groups of history) has planned a weekend together in SF in mid-November to hang out and write essays. We've redesigned our meetings in service of this destination: we'll record our questions and insights into shared Google Docs, and we'll end each meeting by writing Twitter threads.

• see Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress