Serendipity

A key to understanding TED

The Persian epic of the Hasht Bihisht (1302) is a source of many pleasures and insights - including the key to understanding a wondrous modern happening named TED. 

You see, the Hasht Bihisht contains a little jewel of storytelling known in English as The Three Princes of Serendip. 400 years after that literary gem was cut, the English man of letters Horace Walpole remarked that such princes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” 

Hence the word “serendipity.” It’s the magic ingredient in the richest learning experience. We learn best when we least expect to. That’s the essence of TED’s success.

How do I know this? Not because I figured it out. I know because I listened to the violin.

Twenty years before serendipity entered the English lexicon, Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri of Cremona, the greatest violinmaker of all time, put his final touches on the instrument that a world class musician named Robert McDuffie now owns. Actually he co-owns the violin with his investors.

McDuffie played this violin at the TEDx Peachtree conference last week in Atlanta. TEDx Peachtree is a child of TED. There are many such children around the world and TED is spawning more all the time.

McDuffie’s violin is many things: an exquisite musical instrument, a work of art, a cultural icon, the voice of God. Above all it’s a curio, like something imagined by Jorge Luis Borges that travels through time and many hands with an immutable message. 

Last week a pristine voice in the violin delivered the message to me. I heard a convincing explanation of how we learn the most important things in school, at work and in life. 

The explanation is simple. Miraculous flashes of insight come not from deep channels of knowledge, but the edges and bridges of our knowledge systems; not from diligence, but fortuity; not from rote, but the flutter of a butterfly’s wings that changes the world. 

As McDuffie shut tight his eyes, the violin sang with three centuries of authority: that we become more attentive, thoughtful, connected and effective by ceasing sometimes our search for clues, and instead opening our minds to the clues that are searching for us. That, my friends, is serendipity.

But what is TED? Basically a cool symposium where thinkers from different walks of life present ideas worth spreading. They do it quickly, without much structure really, and very little ego. More like a causerie than a lecture. TED is an exquisite opportunity to experience serendipity of the highest caliber.

With so much intellectual freedom and diversity at a TED conference I would expect things to collapse into mediocrity. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when there’s no leader present? 

That may happen at other gatherings, but not here. Instead TED swells into a series of soaring clarion calls to our collective genius. We listen to speakers, we commune with them and each other, we begin making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things we were not in quest of. We go home as changed persons.

At TEDx Peachtree I was dazzled moments after arriving by Brad Bent’s audacious flat screen monitor. It displays high-definition 3D motion imagery. No, I didn’t have to wear colored glasses. Gorgeous 3D motion was visible to my naked eyes from every angle.

As I ruminated on what a naturalistic 3D display will do for e-learning and video game design, I was suddenly confronted by a new extreme of augmented or hyper realism. This is the next wave of immersive learning design, beyond what we now know as simulation and gaming. 

Only a few weeks ago in this same venue (SCAD), Clint Hocking raised the bar of design excellence in a lecture about hyper realism. Okay, that was good, but here now was Patti Maes demonstrating a spontaneous transient imprinting of visual information on the physical world and copious strategies for interacting with the physical world through an unprecedented intelligent digital interface controlled by the individuals using it. Current paradigms of performance support began to seem like fossils from a primitive past.

Phew. Serendipitous learning can begin to feel like a waterfall that you’re about to go over. What the heck is going on here? When did I become a dinosaur? 

I was pulled from my anxiety by a young spark of genius named Josh Elder, one of those transformational figures who connects the archaic past with the scintillating future. Josh is dusting off the tools of comic book art to catalyze a new era of visual learning. He wants to invigorate academic instructional design with visual storytelling. 

Good for him, kids will benefit. I feel sure that adults will benefit even more because unlike most kids, adults are stuck in constricting paradigms. Visual storytelling already commands the summit of interactive design in video games. It’s only a matter of time before corporate learning reaches that summit too. It must, it shall.

Amy Lee Segami is another artist of transformation. Instead of beckoning inspiration from comic books of the mid 20th century, her visual muse is named Suminagashi, a Chinese art form that is 2,000 years old. She paints on water; a literal way of saying that she paints on life, just with different tools than Patti Maes.

Jill Bolton Taylor is a neuroscientist rather than an artist who briefly reached nirvana through illness. She reminded me of gurus who blinded themselves by staring into the sun to see God. You, me, we feel superior to people like that when we hear about them. How about when we talk to them? I learned more from Taylor’s short TED causerie than I did when I met Timothy Leary in San Francisco, though he taught some of the same ideas. 

There were other wondrous moments in the TEDx Peachtree conference. I have mentioned a few to make a point about how we learn, a point that is usually overlooked in our deterministic approach to instructional design and training evaluation. 

We want to figure everything out and define the outcomes even before the first teaching moment occurs. Fine, we do that, we have to do that because learning is a system and a process. Just don't forget that the best learners are always making discoveries on their own, by accidents and sagacity, of things you didn't already think of and they were not in quest of.

So I have a clarion call of my own. My friend, when you teach somebody, set them free.