Learning By Doing: Christmas Goose

In the spirit of learning and development kicked off by Joe's post on Lifelong Learning and Learning Journals, here's a post on cooking, journaling, and learning by doing. This is the story of my first Christmas Goose as an eater and chronicler only; my wife was the chef - all references to she in this article refer to the chef. This is my "learning journal" of goose cooking, if you will, inspired by Joe's post as well as my own journal entry that I kept about the entire Christmas day experience with my family and friends.

Most of this post explores the cooking process and what we learned. The last section discusses the tools and technologies used to capture/journal this experience.

Background

Goose is not a traditional Christmas meal in my family. It's usually ham, turkey, or pork loin for our Christmas main course. A few years ago, for some unknown reason, I became fixated on eating goose for Christmas. Seems like it's a tradition in England. And I speak English and probably have some English ancestors. So I think it's instinctual on some level...

At random points during 2010-2012, when someone would talk about the holidays, I would say, "wouldn't it be great to eat goose?" Or if my mother-in-law asked what I'd like for dinner while visiting in June, I'd say, "how about goose? And if not tonight, how about for Christmas?"

Christmas 2012 was when it finally happened. 

My wonderful wife found one in the freezer section of our local market in mid December. This is the actual goose as it rested comfortably in her cart, a picture of which arrived accompanied by the text message, May your Christmas wishes all come true!

Yes!

How To Cook A Goose

The only problem, according to my wife, was that she had no idea how to cook a goose. And to make it an experience to remember, it just happened that she decided to do all new dishes. She can't remember why.

Goose, stuffing, and sweet potato casserole were all new to my wife's repertoire. Not a problem.  Because she is a great cook, a fast learner, and because we have Internet access - the ultimate meta knowledge base! 

The first stop was the Schiltz Foods website (purveyors of our fine frozen goose). She looked at lots of the recipes there…10 or more. Along the way she sees something about how great goose fat can be for later use, and how it needs to be removed and rendered during the goose cooking process. More on that later.

This is the matriarch's recipe that she actually chose. She said it seemed easy enough. Having picked a recipe, it was time for some background research.

First, it was off to the Google to search for instructions on how to do render goose fat. Several sites say that it is great for cooking, and even to  spread on toast. So we figured we would keep it. But how? This site was one reference for her. While the goose is cooking you use a bulb baster to extract fat from the roasting pan. Cook it over very low heat to liquify it, strain out the bits, pour it into clean jars to cool. Put it in the fridge and use it later for cooking. There will be lots of it. 3 jars for us. Here's what the process looks like (fat in the foreground, the sauce pictured to the right, and if you look closely the bulb baster is sticking out of the roasting pan):

And what about sauce? This recipe for cherry wine sauce came from the BBC Good Food site. The sauce has a half bottle of wine in it. Yum.

Stuffing and Sweet potatoes were next. An apple, sausage, and cranberry stuffing recipe came from AllRecipes.com. This is a great website…the value added there comes from the comments written by the other members, plus the pictures and guidance you get beyond just the recipe, from real people who have actually made the dish.

The sweet potato casserole recipe came from our sister-in-law, arriving by email as a text document. We actually ate that for Thanksgiving, so she at least had an idea of what "done" looked like.

There were actual vegetables consumed…brought by our dinner guests.

Finished Product

In case you are curious, here's what done looked like for the goose, stuffing, and sweet potato casserole (foreground).

Everything was fantastic. The goose, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and everything brought by our guests. That's not to say that there aren't improvement opportunities. And everything gets better with practice. 

Lessons Learned

-The Internet is a fantastic resource, particularly if you can trust your information sources. We can't say enough good things about AllRecipes.com.
-There is more than one way to cook a goose. When you have no idea what you are doing, we highly recommend checking multiple sources (that you trust or have been recommended by those you trust) to get a better sense of what to do.

-There's more to cooking than following a recipe. But practicing on goose is hard, and expensive. And we had never even tasted goose, so the cook it to xyz temperature or until it's done advice wasn't very helpful to us...

-Adjacent experience with things like turkey and chicken roasting were helpful in goose preparation. But goose was qualitatively different.

-Carving a goose is nothing like carving a turkey. The breasts are very shallow.

-A 10lbs goose will feed 4-5 people well. Maybe 6. At $5.50/lb, 2 geese is an expensive meal to feed a large group.

-Add more water to the roasting pan continuously during the goose cooking process to fight breast dryness. 

-Should have titled bird down to let it drain fat out. At the end of cooking a lot of stuff poured out.

-Cooking to 185 degrees (Fahrenheit) as specified by our recipe seemed to make the breasts dry. Lots of recipes had said 175 and maybe that would be better.

-Sweet potatoes did not brown on top as experienced during Thanksgiving. Perhaps it was something to do with how we prepared the topping. Or the humidity of our oven. Or the type of butter we used (salted? unsalted? hmm). Or the way I chopped the pecans. Consultations ongoing with sister-in-law.

-Cooking all new things certainly makes it spontaneous, but also adds strategic risk to the outcome of the meal. There was frantic moment where she turned on the broiler to brown the top of the sweet potatoes, all the while needing to finish cooking other things, carve the goose, etc. It all turned out ok.

From a learning and development standpoint, this is all very interesting to me. I expounded on the parallels to my work life while enjoying leftovers with my family. They rolled their eyes when I talked about how this reminded me of cases at work where I had to learn to do a complex task, or be involved with teaching a colleague or helping a colleague with knowledge transfer from one person or group to another. It is far from straightforward, just like making a goose for the first time. Unfortunately, the eye rolling started when I said the phrase knowledge transfer...

We are not certain that our suggestions will make our next experience better, but based on the opinions of an experienced cook they should. During the cooking process itself, it would have been nice to have a family member or friend standing by who had cooked goose to make it for us or at least be there to answer questions as they came up. Having sister-in-law on hand for sweet potato consultation would have been a plus.

All in all, the we learned something and had a great meal in the process. If we do it again, we'll apply that knowledge to the process. We will have the actual experience and our photo-annotated journal entry.

By the way, here's the gift that will keep on giving all year. Goose fat in the fridge.

How I Journal

I keep a journal. It's far from a regular thing but it's fun. I've journaled my kids' births, long drives to Cleveland, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, cross country mud runs, and events from work. There's no magic involved in keeping a journal, which is what allows me to look back and write blog posts like this, among other things. Having easy to use tools greatly facilitates the process of capturing what's going on and using it later. This isn't the place to explore the value of journaling; suffice it to say that it's more and more valuable to me and here's how I do it.

• A smartphone with a good camera. I use the iPhone 4S. I can take pictures of random things. All of the pictures in this post were taking with a 4S. Depending on when you read this, a 4S could be woefully out of date.
• The Apple iCloud Photostream. Pictures from my family's iPhones are available across our devices via the Photostream. For example, the picture of the frozen goose was taken by my wife, and available to me via the Photostream on my phone, tablet, and MacBook. If you are not an Apple person, you can probably find equivalents in the PC/Android ecosystem.
• Evernote. Journal entries live in Evernote's cloud-based service. Their website has the tagline: capture anything, access anywhere, find things fast. I use it more and more. Evernote accepts email messages to post as notes. You can use a Mac, PC, iPhone, Android client to do it. There are iPhone and Android apps that allow for fast single or multiple picture note uploads, voice note uploads, etc.
• Evernote Mac and iPhone clients. I do a lot of serious editing on the Mac client program or even the plain web interface on whatever PC or Mac I happen to be using. I can easily copy/paste pictures, do more advanced editing etc. But many times I can jot quick notes using the iPhone app and do almost everything I can do with the full client.
• SnagIt (for PC and Mac). It's the best screen capture tool, and I use it on both PC and Mac. In my journaling, I can use it to grab a snippet of a web page, or clip of an image from my photostream. All of the images in this post are partial clips of full images, taken with SnagIt.

To summarize, an iPhone, Apple's iCloud Photostream, Evernote service, Evernote clients, and SnagIt. Oh, and desire to keep a journal. I highly recommend it. It really is amazing to back and read entries that are a year or two old, and they are greatly enriched by pictures taken in the moment.

Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks for your time.

Lifelong learning and learning journals

I love to learn. I love to recognize the gaps in my knowledge and then methodically fill in the gaps. I love to learn and understand new concepts; to learn new words, or new terms that help me fill in the blanks. I love to understand how things work. I mean the mechanics behind obvious processes. How does one actually run a Starbucks or make a leather belt? I love it all really, and that is a good thing since I must learn new things to survive and thrive in Information Technology.

It is a competitive world, and to compete we must learn new skills. We must become better in 2013 than we were in 2012. I consider it an imperative. We must learn, or the world will pass us by. The problem is that learning, especially learning focused on acquiring specific skills, is daunting and often too hard to accomplish without a detailed plan, support and tools.

I have a tool for this. I use a learning journal. I’ve done so for 20 years.  My learning journal is a simple notebook. I buy a new one each year. In my mind’s eye it is like the notebook kept by Indian Jones’ father from the Last Crusade. Full of archaic knowledge and fantastically drawn pictures. In reality, it is a humbling list of things I don’t know. Here are a few entries from last week.

• What does the work NADIR mean? How would I use it in a sentence. How many definitions are there?
• What is the exact definition of the Paleo diet? How is it different from the low-carb diet?
• How does an EDI ASM work? Does it require a return transaction? What business processes do it support?
• Why do I keep losing admin rights on my PC?
• What communication technique is best used to deliver employee feedback?
• Is it possible to write code that allows a user to make limited mass changes to a table in MANMAN?
• Why is it that technical skill development is not part of our yearly development goals?
• I must learn to use Adobe Lightroom’s book feature. Make a sample book. 
• I must learn to use a flash diffuser properly.
• What is Tweetbot and how is it different than Tweetdeck?

There are 15 more items on the list. Some are complex while some are simple. The magic of my process comes next. I use my notes to systematically plan and execute what I need to learn. Take the word NADIR for example. I allocated time yesterday to look up the word and then recorded its definitions in my learning journal.

1. Astronomy . the point on the celestial sphere directly beneath a given position or observer and diametrically opposite the zenith.
2. Astrology . the point of a horoscope opposite the midheaven: the cusp of the fourth house.
3. the lowest point; point of greatest adversity or despair.

I took some time to learn the astronomy definition. I had to use a visual tool and mnemonic because I could not visualize the concept. I skipped a deep understanding of the astrology term, to focus on the third definition. And with that I had what I was looking for. A new word and an understanding of its use. How did I not know this?
Of course, being who I am, I needed to learn how the word is used by others, so I used Google’s Ngram Viewer to search the corpus. The results show the word entered use between 1744 and 1759 and then went on to see limited use through today. It picked up use in 1742 because of the publication of The history of Nadir Shah: Formerly called the Thamas Kuli Khan, the Present Emperor of Persia. I added the book to my to read list and moved on. Of course, all of this went into my journal.

I have a regular process that focuses my attention on learning follow-up. It do it each Friday. I allocate an hour to review my journal and identify short and long-term learning goals. The short list goes on an index card for action at my next opportunity, the long-term items become small projects, like my four-month long effort (so far) to learn Spanish. This process works for me. I manage to learn a huge number of new things by design each year.

I recently started experimenting with moving my journal online using a internal wiki called Traction TeamPage. Access is limited to my team. I’m sharing what I don’t know and asking for help acquiring new knowledge. My goal is to look for new ways to learn via online social interaction and collaboration. The concept is simple. Out your own ignorance, ask for help, and publish what you learn. It is a work-in-progress and one of my many team development goals for 2013. I’ll post more on this as the year goes by.

One story  – My first foray into self-disclosed ignorance resulted in my team either answering my questions outright, pointing me towards help files they had created in Traction TeamPage, or, they pitched in to help me learn. I learned Tweetbot through a discovery session with an employee who had mastered the software on his own. It was a wonderful experience, as learning should be. The most interesting aspect of my move toward socially interactive learning is that I had never incorporated others into my learning process. I would have leaned Tweetbot on my own without the benefit and insight of an experienced and enthusiastic user. It's like a learning power up. I went on to spend a hour with Tweetbot on my own, and now I can confidently say that I have it mastered. That is what lifelong learning is all about… ignorance, leaning and mastery.

I don't get the Pomodoro Technique

There. I've said it. I don't get the Pomodoro Technique. Does that mean I am uncool or not part of the "in crowd". I so love being part of the "in crowd". The basic principle of the Pomodoro Technique is based on time management using 25-minutes segments. Wikipedia says..

There are five basic steps to implementing the technique:

• decide on the task to be done
• set the pomodoro (timer) to 25 minutes
• work on the task until the timer rings; record with an x
• take a short break (3-5 minutes)
• every four "pomodoros" take a longer break (15–30 minutes)

I remember back in the 80s when this fad hit originally the business world. I went to a day-long seminar taught by a famous productivity guru. I remember thinking that the idea seemed too simple to be useful. I was stunned to have somebody suggest it to me as a means for managing my daily mess just the other day. The simplistic nature of the technique did not work for me in the pre-computer days of yore, the technique would die in a hail of gunfire under my current unending load of email, meetings, and project management assignments.  My life is to complex for a simple solution, even though I use simple solutions to solve my productivity problems today. I'm still an 4x6 index card man at heart. 

I am a firm believer in one aspect of the Pomodoro Technique. I work to eliminate all distractions from my workplace so that I can focus on what I am doing. I allow no email, no open door, no internet, and no IM. I just work and then move on to the next task. If something is distracting me, I turn it off. This is the main reason why I use two computers (well, three actually). My main computer is for work. I do not use it for email, web surfing, or anything distracting. If I open email, I use it for reference only. Computer two is my work laptop. It is communication central. I communicate with others via email, IM and video conferencing when not working on a task. I can shut the lid on the laptop and thereby shut out the world, which allows me to focus on real work. Computer three is my trusty Mac Book Pro. I use it for creative endeavors, private communications, and blogging. I rarely open it at work unless I am working a photography or graphic arts project. 

True story - while taking a break at work today to write this post, I was interrupted to take photos of three people for a rebadging project. I really should have closed my door. 

As for 25 minutes segments… That's not for me either. I figure out what is urgent/important during my daily planning session. When the first item is complete, I reassess my list of next actions, and then move on to the next task. One task may take 5 minutes,  while the next takes two hours. Fitting my workload into 25-minutes chunks is just as impossible now as it was back in the 80s. I will add one thing here though. I use a timer set for every two hours to remind me to get up and take a walk. I try to take three 15-minute walks a day, not counting lunch. It really helps my tired old legs and clears my head for the next round of work. 

Revisiting Collaboration

Before November 2012, I can recall only two books that I have read more than once:

• The Goal, by the late, great Eli Goldratt
• Getting Things Done, by David Allen

Now I can add Morten Hansen's Collaboration to the list.

It is hard to say why I decided to read it again. I picked it up in 2009 when it was published, and referenced it in the talks we gave on Observable Work. I had been looking at its distinctive red book jacket on my bookshelf for years, and I figured it was time for a closer look.

Distinctive, right? This is a relatively short, but dense, book. I purchased it before I owned a Kindle; if I owned an electronic version of this book I would have been tempted to highlight the whole thing. It's that good.

Some perspective is in order. "Collaboration" means a lot of things to a lot of people. A December 2012 search of books on Amazon.com with the keyword collaboration returns over 13,000 hits (try it yourself). Hansen takes pains to stress that his book is not about creating effective teams. His collaboration is about effective cross-unit, cross-location work in large companies. According to Hansen, the business case for collaboration is built around three main drivers:

• Better innovation (cross pollination of ideas, etc)
• Increased sales (leverage customer relationships, cross selling, etc)
• Improved operations ("best practice" sharing, operational excellence)

It's also important to know when to collaborate, and when the costs outweigh the benefits. It is clearly not valuable in and of itself, and he has the data to back up his conclusions.

His barriers to collaboration are familiar to all of us who work in large organizations:

• Not invented here
• Search
• Hoarding
• Transfer

Nothing illustrates the hoarding barrier better than the classic Dilbert cartoon where Wally claims, "I'm hoarding my knowledge in case I need it". Indeed.

There is a fascinating quote when talking about the Transfer barrier, and the huge but poorly understood place of tacit knowledge in organizations. Fernand Point, quoted from his book Ma Gastronomie:

"What is a béarnaise sauce? An egg yolk, some shallots, some tarragon. But believe me, it takes years of practice for the results to be perfect." (p61)

Which is why "best" practices are so hard to transfer. Context matters. Local conditions matter. All of the unwritten and unsaid and unmeasured things in the best practice matter at least as much as the flowcharts and checklists and procedures.

Overcoming the barriers has nothing to do with better software, even if that's what many would have you believe. In fact, Hansen mentions software only in passing, and usually to illustrate a case detailing an unused "repository" where knowledge went to die.

I read and re-read his exploration of unification, T-shaped managers, and nimble networks as tools to enhance collaboration and overcome the barriers. This is practical, actionable advice and you don't need the latest version of an overhyped, underused social collaboration technology to implement them.

Even if you are not a leader, I believe that there are things that you can do NOW to enhance collaboration in your organization:

• Read the book. Give copies to your manager and your colleagues. Recommend it as a learning/development opportunity and maybe your company will pay for a few copies. It can't hurt to ask.
• Work more openly to reduce the search barrier. Publish to as wide an audience as possible, link to information sources, etc. Encourage others to do so.
• Ask someone outside of your formal hierarchy for help. Look outside of your little world for solutions to problems and show that even if it's not invented here it can work. Publicize that solution, show where you found it, and thank those who contributed.

If your manager or someone else tells you that you ought not be publicizing your problems and asking for help outside of your formal hierarchy, tell them that Brian is just so, so disappointed in that viewpoint.

Happy collaborating, everyone. Thanks for your time.