Articulate with ease (AWE)

Cover image credit: Lubos Houska on Pixabay

Since 2006, I paid less attention to the continuity of research on a topic because each ghostwriting assignment had a hard stop on time and content.

The writer in me enjoys time-bound assignments because I can avoid procrastination and scope creep; however, the researcher in me feels shortchanged. I always want to ask more questions, consider more alternatives, evaluate more countermeasures, and revisit or even challenge my take on the articles I write. I can definitely write another ghost piece that challenges my previous ghost piece, but those pieces will seem to have come from two different folks with opposing viewpoints.

Where’s the fun in that? Isn’t it better to read contradicting pieces by the same author?

I enjoy fostering diverse and even contradicting mental models, but I can’t approach my previous clients and request them to allow me to write a rebuttal to my previously published ghost piece. It isn’t mine after submission, right?

Interestingly, some clients are down for another ghost piece that refutes the previously made claims; however, they aren’t sure if that will tarnish their thought leadership position. That’s a fair point, considering that perception is everything when one is trying to establish domain authority.

I’m not trying to establish any sort of authority or thought leadership, so I’ve nothing at stake apart from my curiosity itch.

The researcher in me had not been satiated yet. So, it was time to give her some space to express this continuity of research and to focus on topics that matter to her. In April 2018, I created Articulate With Ease to focus on evidence-based conservation and small business consulting.

Why Articulate With Ease?

This tiny endeavor isn’t to serve folks who want to improve their communication skills, which is what I get asked often. And it isn’t surprising because a huge chunk of my career involves Academic, Technical, and Marketing communication. It’s what I literally call my ATM skill because it brings the cash.

But here’s what inspired me to call this effort Articulate With Ease.

In February 2018, my family was celebrating my brother’s birthday at Agonda beach, which is less than 20 kilometers from my house. It was also my favorite place in Goa before tourists started to flock there.

While I was observing the crabs and waves, I noticed a few black kites (Milvus migrans) chasing a white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster). After a few minutes, most of the black kites stopped chasing this sea eagle; however, one kite just wouldn’t give up. The chase ended only after the sea eagle released the morsel that it had in its talons.

The ease with which the two birds danced around was mesmerizing. It was a food chase for them but a spark of inspiration for the observer. Students of anatomy (human or vet med) immediately connect articulation with movement and grasp my message.

Their effortless flow and contribution to life inspired me to call my tiny endeavor Articulate With Ease, and I was pleasantly surprised to notice that the name contracts to form AWE. It totally captured the essence of my emotion that day and the service offer that I was designing for my potential clients.

However, a life-altering experience drew me toward geriatric stroke care and cloud-native resiliency instead. It also led me to reconsider my approach with AWE. Is there an alternative route to achieve the same goal?

What’s the best route to fuel curiosity?

A curious person is always observing, questioning the existing mental models, evaluating blinding beliefs, and trying to make sense of the very nature of the learning process. I see it as thinking about thinking or observing the flow of your own thoughts as they move.

If you’re familiar with the works of David Bohm, Alan Watts, Allan Anderson, and Jiddu Krishnamurti, you’re most definitely catching my drift. Perhaps the dichotomy of life is engaging you from quite a different lens. If you know, you know.

Let’s circle back to the search for an alternative route that can continue to fuel my curiosity.

I started to explore the buzz around Cloud Native and Autonomous Operations after reading a few use cases in wildlife conservation. As I delved deeper, I began to develop an interest in observability (o11y) and chaos engineering. The more I read, the more dots started to connect.

I began to ponder about the foundational elements of software reliability and cloud-native resiliency. Tools draw much attention, but few are considering the skills, learning path, and worldview that lead to the choice of the right tool for the job.

Learning and lasting change require an interplay of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor (CAP) functions.

Much is written about the cognitive domain, so I’m ignoring that here. Instead, I’m focusing on the affective domain. The psychomotor domain recaptured my imagination after mum had a stroke in May 2019, but let’s park that discussion for another day.

Back to the affective domain, which involves our emotions, beliefs, and values.

Without activating and investing in this domain, lasting change is incredibly hard to realize. Learning and performing are as much about refining behavior, as they are about refining knowledge and skills. I’m choosing to focus on behavior, not attitude because the latter is necessary but insufficient for lasting change.

The willingness and ability to challenge one’s beliefs in the face of contradicting evidence is no small feat.

But lasting change or internalization requires exactly that. It requires us to question our established mental models and to accommodate novel approaches, which is why activating the affective domain is a prerequisite to any change effort.

It’s also why my focus is on David Krathwohl’s Taxonomy of Affective Domain. Similarly, engagement is a 5-step journey from Inform to Empower as described in this 2016 article by Melody Barnes and Paul Schmitz Stanford Social Innovation Review.

• Receive: Starting to be aware of an intervention
• Respond: Starting to participate in the intervention
• Value: Starting to see the worth of the intervention
• Organize: Starting to change due to the intervention
• Characterize: Exhibiting the change with consistency

By prioritizing the affective domain, I can evaluate my learning journey and level of engagement while I am making sense of the skills, path, and worldview that lead to the choice of the right tool for the job.

This is a B9 Token, which is an effortless contribution by me that inspires you enough to donate nine dollars, in cash or kind, to an organization in your neighborhood that is serving a cause that matters the most to you. If you took action as a result of this post, thank you for celebrating the ubiquitous presence of the one you love the most!