I'm a self-taught guy.  

You see, like most people, I learn by doing.

I learn when I’m doing something that has a tangible outcome.

Because that’s how I encounter real-world obstacles that make me think about the problem and act to find or develop solutions.

So far, there's not been many things I haven't been able to learn, although jazz guitar is still beyond me!

The last formal teaching I had was as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce in Bristol, UK. I loved the practical skills we learned in the workshops and foundries.

In my last month there I learned computer programming from Don Alcock’s book. He drew bugs where learners were likely to make mistakes, so I learned it was OK to create bugs, as long as you fixed them.

Forty years later, I’m improving my skills with Oxygen Builder and custom types in Wordpress by building sites to help share knowledge.

My doctorate (professional studies) is about the ways managers overcome barriers to improvement, my Master's was in Organisational Agility, and I am a qualified professional coach.

I have no qualifications in IT, yet designed and built TfL's contactless fares engine used 15 million times a day by passengers in London, wrote courses on web services and software development, and taught thousands of attendees for Learning Tree International.

What gives me more pleasure than self-learning is helping others to learn by doing.

When I do coaching, digital, and agile transformation activities right, I help managers solve their real-world problems, collaboratively. Reg Revans called this Action Learning.

It's always thrilling, because I have no answers, only a process of co-inquiry and facilitation.

Solutions emerge, unpredictably.

Emergence is the outcome that matters.