draw aloud March 24th 1984 I was a young Marine Corps helicopter pilot stationed in poang Korea it's winter it's cold it's snowing it's moonless I had flown on March 23rd I experienced what it was like to get lost in the mountains we barely made it back so on March 24th when my crew came to me and said hey we know you're not scheduled to fly tonight but would you mind riding in the jump seat I said sure I geared up climbed into the helicopter and watched as 29 other Marines pack themselves in with their rifles
straight full of combat gear and then I realized every cell in my body said get out 30 minutes later I was sitting in the Ops tent silent the mission was quiet we couldn't hear anything and then all of a sudden a cackle came over the radios it was dash2 they were radioing back back we had just seen a giant Fireball on the ridge line ahead of us we can't contact dash one for years I tried to figure out what was going on how did my brain predict at that precise moment that I should get up
walk out of that aircraft with only a premonition that it was going to hit the ridge line that was the beginning of my research the Journey of a Thousand Miles begins with a single step in my case it took three decades so I had a question could I see inside the human mind could I grab that prior knowledge could I understand what those Pilots were thinking before they got on that ship so I joined a research program here in adult learning and I have a philosopher friend Charlie and he's also a plumber he said art
keep it simple so with the help of the research department and the adult learning folks I created a protocol and I asked three questions how's the world work how do you store that information in memory how do you monitor your own learning and I give you three crayons and I say the only rules are you can only draw triangles squares and circles and I get diagrams back like this from fifth graders to people in their 60s from The West Wing of the White House to people that run major corporations as we go through these diagrams
and I've collected thousands of them then I thought huh there's a conceptual space hidden between the conscious thinking and our neural makeup somewhere in there is hidden how we actually think so these diagrams and after three questions by the way this is a uh it's easy to take adults and say hey here's three crayons let's draw no judgment so after collecting thousands of those it led to this diagram you see right here the draw loud compass and all I did was figure out that you know in reality we navigate through Human Experience using six separate
facets of cognition we are not computational thinkers we are combinatorial thinkers and it's a significant difference we are human pattern matching machines and we consume through early life all kinds of patterns and categories that tell us how to navigate change in the real world so let me take you through your brain I'm going to time slice how you think and how I think so the first thing we do really is frame the universe we're in the perceptual space that we navigate through the second thing we do is build a cluster of stakeholders that occupy the
world we live in companies customers collaborators competitors community at large and then we make connections across those stakeholders symbolically through motion and through object after we make those connections early in life we start developing relationships with those connections using roles rules and reciprocity then we start to create measures inputs processes and outputs are our social network world is great for this because tools like Facebook and Twitter they allow us very easily to stay connected and we decide how much energy to invest in one relationship versus another and then finally the last thing we do is
create comparisons of the previous facets that we've just built and on a daily basis you ask your is asking you six questions about the symbols motion and objects that you encounter in the world what is the quality of that information what is the quantity of that information what is the configuration the composition can I substitute that information for something else can I subtract it completely and we do this over and over and over and you don't even realize it it's subconscious and if you notice as I built a compass there is not a single triangle
in that Compass there's not a single square and yet in the history of cognition in the evolution of our thinking over 40,000 years we're still drawing triangle squares and circles so let me take you inside a real life experience this is a DI using draw aloud as Captain solenberger hit the geese as he took out took off from LaGuardia and both engines were blown out he went through the same process when I deconstructed what was the Miracle on the Hudson frame cluster connect relate measure compare he spent out of a three-minute flight as an expert
pilot the last two minutes doing nothing but comparing in the cockpit information quality quantity configuration composition substitution and subtraction so let me take you back to 1984 this is the last picture I took of JJ aqu quisto and Dave Higgins that was my crew that's who I flew with inside that cockpit there is a little seat called the jump seat they took off that night with another crew and as they moved through that space frame cluster connect relate measure compare the reason I knew that helicopter was going to crash was because I had grown up
the son of an army helicopter pilot he had flown extensively in Vietnam and Korea those stories got inside my brain he told me art when you go to Korea be careful flying in the Korean mountains in the winter at night is deadly especially if you're using night vision goggles there's no moon and it's snowing and that's what happened La that night crew number one lost their way in the darkness the PVS 5 night vision goggles failed them they couldn't see the ridge line ahead of them we could have predicted that ahead of time if we
had listened to the prior knowledge of those that had flown before us tragic loss of life now we o draw loud to those 29 Marines that sacrifice their lives I'm just the messenger so here's my idea I want you go to the drugstore I want you to buy some crayons sneak into the mail room steal some white paper the next time you get your team together just say hey guys hold on we're going to do a couple diagrams and give them the rules only triangle squares and circles a few minutes and answer the question that's
illuminative thinking draw loud change your world thank [Applause] you
