Author: Jonathan O'Shea, TAB Facilitator in Bristol
It strikes me that these days it’s quite difficult to come across something genuinely different. More and more the new things we watch, read or listen to are recommended for us and based on some exciting algorithm that purports to understand what we like.
In olden days, when I used to flick through the TV channels, (it’s all catch up TV in our household these days) I’d occasionally come across something really interesting that I’d never have found out about otherwise.
Going even further back, when there were only three channels (for my younger readers that was in a previous century when the most sophisticated bit of computing electronics was probably a pocket calculator – very exciting when they first appeared!) you would just watch what was on. Sometimes it was terrible, well a lot of the time actually, but sometimes you came upon programmes by accident that were really entertaining (Not the Nine O’Clock News) or insightful (Carl Sagan’s Cosmos) and these took your knowledge and thinking down a completely different, and rewarding, route.
So how can we get that same meeting with the genuinely unexpected, not recommended, these days?
One way I’ve discovered of doing this is through the power of Peer Boards. I run a business called The Alternative Board (TAB) and through this I run four Peer Boards every month and meet up with about twenty business owners and business leaders.
The primary function of the Peer Boards is to allow business owners and leaders to get a different perspective on issues, challenges and opportunities they might be facing in their businesses, but as a bonus extra you also get to discover something totally unexpected.
The things I’ve discovered in the last month, through my Peer Boards and TAB generally, have included Bobby Caldwell, The Squid Game, How to Price my Platypus and The Culture Code (start Googling and you can find out more about all of these). With the exception of The Squid Game which now appears to be omnipresent, I just wouldn’t have come across these without the random subject generator that is the wonderful people I get to work with on the Peer Boards.
My question to you is how do you find these new islands of learning? JRR Tolkein was quoted as saying that “Not all those who wander are lost” but in these days when information is sent to us, recommended, surely we all need to do some wandering so we discover something genuinely new.
Find your way to wander. For me it is through my Peer Boards. Whatever is yours, don’t let it just be the outcome of an algorithm. There’s a whole world out there to be discovered.