The Cactus and the Weasel

February 20, 2014 By

The phrase, strong views, weakly held, has crossed my radar multiple times in the last few months.  I didn’t think much about it when I first heard it, beyond noting that it seemed to be almost a tautological piece of good advice. Thinking some more though, I realized two things: the phrase neatly characterizes the first member of my favorite pair of archetypes, the the hedgehog and the fox, and that I am actually much better described by the inverse statement, which describes foxes: weak views, strongly held. 

If this seems counterintuitive or paradoxical to you, chances are it is because your understanding of the archetypes actually maps to more commonplace degenerate versions, which I call the weasel and cactus respectively.

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True foxes and hedgehogs are complex and relatively rare individuals, not everyday dilettantes or curmudgeons. A quick look at the examples in Isaiah Berlin’s study of the archetypes is enough to establish that: his hedgehogs include Plato and Nietzsche, and his foxes include Shakespeare and Goethe. So neither foxes, nor hedgehogs, nor conflicted and torn mashups thereof such as Tolstoy, conform to simple archetypes.

The difference is that while foxes and hedgehogs are both capable of changing their minds in meaningful ways, weasels and cacti are not. They represent different forms of degeneracy, where a rich way of thinking collapses into an impoverished way of thinking. 

I seem to have been dancing around these ideas for about a year now, over the course of three fox/hedgehog talks I did last year, and even a positioning for my consulting practice based on it, but I was missing the clue of the strong views, weakly held phrase.

It took a while to think through, but what I have here is a rough and informal, but relatively complete account of the fox-hedgehog philosophy, that covers most of the things that have been bugging me over the past year. So here goes.

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From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay

February 12, 2014 By

Kartik is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home turf at akkartik.name.

The past hundred years have transformed how we imagine ourselves. Freud catalyzed a greater emphasis on the unconscious. Kahneman and Tversky inspired a lot of research into how our subconscious biases affect day-to-day decision-making. Between those tectonic shifts, our understanding of our selves has been radically overhauled.

Gone is the Cartesian, centralized mind mystically separated from the physical world. In its place we’re left with a schizophrenic brain inextricably bound to the body and, at bottom, nothing but atoms. We’re still struggling to work out the implications of this new perception for different areas of human endeavor. Building effective institutions is one of them.

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Running Lean, Running Fat

February 10, 2014 By

The term lean has become way too overloaded with complex management ideologies and procedural scaffolding. This is one reason I have come to dislike it. Leanness is a variable in a process optimization model, not an ideology. Cutting the fat is not an unqualified good idea and can actually be dangerous. Lean as ideology often turns into anorexia.

But the core idea is a useful one. In any work process, leanness is simply the amount of work in various stages of completion between input and output. Stuff near the input is raw material inventory, stuff near the middle is parts inventory, and stuff near the output is completed inventory. The sum is Work-In-Progress (WIP), loosely speaking.

I suspect lean became an ideology because of the obesity of 1970s industrial processes in America. Now we’ve come to the other end of the pendulum swing. Anorexia is widespread.

How do you manage leanness without ideology?

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An Information Age Glossary

February 7, 2014 By

We live in an information-rich environment, but our minds are still wired for an environment of information scarcity. It still hasn’t really hit us that in the last 20 years, we’ve experienced a transformation that is as dramatic for our brains as climbing out of the water and learning to breathe air was for our ancient fishy ancestors. 

For the past year or so, I seem to have been unconsciously retooling my thinking and writing to operate in an information-rich environment. A big part of such cognitive ret0oling is  learning to favor particular terms (or unusual redefinitions of existing terms), and deprecating older terms and meanings that assume information scarcity. 

I figure it is time to get more conscious and deliberate about the retooling, so I am sharing the current state of my glossary. Proposals for new terms, or refinements of definitions welcome. I’ll edit this post for a while, and if people find it useful, we can try to figure out a more permanent home for it.

Very little of this is original to me by the way. I’ve credited people where I can, but a lot of this is the outcome of conversations with people I am not at liberty to cite publicly. So you can credit me for any substance here, and blame these invisible collaborators for any bullshit.

Related: I’ve wanted a CMS dedicated to creating shared glossaries for a long time, and even took a half-hearted stab at building one with a friend. I’d enthusiastically support any such effort.

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Technical Debt of the West

January 28, 2014 By

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt. This is the finale of his residency.

Here’s a recipe for discovering new ideas:

  1. Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking.
  2. Predict, on the basis of #1, where you’re likely to have blind spots.
  3. Start groping around in those areas.

If you can do this with the very deepest frames — those that constrain not just your own thinking, but your entire civilization’s — you can potentially unearth a treasure trove of insight. You may not find anything 100% original (ideas that literally no one else has ever seen), but whatever you find is almost guaranteed to be underappreciated.

In his lecture series The Tao of Philosophy, Alan Watts sets out to do just this for Western civilization. He wants to examine the very substrate of our thinking, in order to understand and correct for our biases.

So what is the substrate of Western thought?

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Discovery-Heavy Projects

January 27, 2014 By

I don’t like processing huge fire-hoses of complex, poorly structured and somewhat arbitrary information, but I am good enough at it, mainly because I’ve had a lot of practice. I call these discovery-heavy projects. They require three cognitive skills:

  1. Triage Skill: Simple information, such as a shoe-box of family photographs, can usually be categorized rapidly within a simple taxonomic system. Complex information, such as a pile of paper documents that are part of a legal discovery process, tends to require much more thought to codify into usable form for processing. You have to triage the simple and complex, and resist the temptation to find a pigeonhole for everything. Some critical stuff will stay sui generis. 
  2. High-touch processing: Poorly structured implies low automation potential. This means you will need to examine every bit of information that comes in via the firehose.
  3. Data slumming: Arbitrariness of information means you cannot infer it from other information you’ve already processed. For example, the GDP of Great Britain in 1973 is something you just have to look up.

These behaviors can be very exhausting to those who are not naturally skilled at them, or energized by them. So what can you do?

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The Poor Usability Tell

January 21, 2014 By

Work can be a delight when your tools and your environment are crafted in ways that enable you to focus on the task at hand. However, most people I suspect have only limited experience with this sort of situation; it’s rather common to see everyday tasks performed with sub-optimal tools. Software engineers are in a privileged position, parallel perhaps to blacksmiths of the past, in that the same skills used for their work may be deployed toward tool improvement. Correspondingly, they pride themselves on possessing and creating excellent tools. Unfortunately, most other roles in a given business are ill-equipped and poorly positioned to effect a similarly-scaled tool-chain improvement effort. Instead, they are reduced to requesting assistance from other departments or outside vendors, a relationship which Kevin Simler highlighted last year in a spectacular post entitled UX and the Civilizing Process. You should read the entire piece, but the salient portion for our purposes is the following paragraph:

You might think that enterprise software would be more demanding, UX-wise, since it costs more and people are using it for higher-stakes work — but then you’d be forgetting about the perversity of enterprise sales, specifically the disconnect between users and purchasers. A consumer who gets frustrated with a free iPhone app will switch to a competitor without batting an eyelash, but that just can’t happen in the enterprise world. As a rule of thumb, the less patient your users, the better-behaved your app needs to be.

Any given software project will be improved by increased usability. Nevertheless, we’ve all witnessed moments where “more cowbell” doesn’t seem to effect the desired improvements. An unalloyed good in its tautological form (better is better), it is in the specifics that we see usability as a concept fetishized.

This isn’t an accident; in fact, there can be an inverse relationship between the best user experience at the level of an individual or a small group, versus the best user experience for an organization or a network of organizations.

In poker, a tell is some sort of behavior which gives hints about the card’s in a player’s hand. Poor usability is a tell which may indicate that an organization’s and a user’s needs are in conflict, and that the organization’s needs trump.

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Resident Bloggers for 2014: Sam, Jordan, Kartik, Keith

January 15, 2014 By

Another fun bit of housekeeping. I’d like to welcome Sam Bhagwat, Jordan Peacock, Kartik Agaram and Keith Adams, our resident bloggers for 2014.

I’ve known them all for a couple of years now (though I’ve only met Jordan online), and I can safely say that the sophistication of my understanding of our emerging digital civilization has been greatly enhanced by my ongoing conversations with these guys. If I’ve said anything smart in the last couple of years about the world being created by computing technologies, a lot of the credit goes to them.

This blog already has a computing subtext (the “refactoring” in the tagline is a reference to a computing concept), and my own work this year is going to be dominated by projects related to software and computing, so part of my reason for inviting these guys on board this year is a selfish one. I hope they can keep my own thinking at the bleeding edge. Nothing like immersion to get you thinking like a native in a new culture.

I suspect all of you will also enjoy learning from these guys. The more our world gets eaten by software, the more the world views of software professionals matter in shaping the future. On the flip side, non-software people have to keep evolving their appreciation of computing, or risk being left behind on the wrong side of history.

To kick things off, I asked the new residents to introduce themselves with a short riff on the idea of refactoring, as I did last year.

So let me yield the floor to them.

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Refactor Camp 2014: Computing and Culture

January 15, 2014 By

It’s Refactor Camp time again.  As with the last two years, the event will again be held in the Bay Area during the first weekend in March.

This year, that’s the weekend of March 1-2. Click here to register.

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The venue this year will be the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. For those unfamiliar with the area, this is in the Bay Area, about an hour south of San Francisco. I am hoping to see more out-of-town attendees this year. In the last couple of years, we’ve had between 4-5 out-of-towners, and they definitely helped get us out of the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

The theme of the event this year will be Computing and Culture, and the format will be a pure barcamp style. More details at the Refactor Camp website.

As before, the event is organized on a non-profit basis, and limited to about 45-50 attendees. The registration is $95 and covers both days, including lunch.

If this is beyond your means, but you really want to attend, email me, and I’ll make a few limited discounted spots available.

So looking forward to another stimulating weekend with both returning attendees and new faces. About 22 spots are already taken via early invites, so if you want one of the remaining spots go register!

When Finishing is Easier than Starting

January 13, 2014 By

When you are young, beginning new projects is easy and finishing them is hard. As you grow older, beginnings get harder, but finishing gets easier. At least, that has been my experience. I think it is true of anyone of at least average intelligence, creativity and emotional resilience. The reason is simple.

When you are young, the possibilities ahead of you, and the time available to explore them, seem nearly infinite. When you try to start something, the energizing creative phase, (which comes with internal brain-chemistry rewards on a fast feedback-loop), gives way to exhausting detail-oriented work, maintenance work, and unsatisfying overhead work. You need to get through these to bank distant external rewards (money and such) that only come with completion. It is then that you are most vulnerable to the allure of exciting new beginnings. So you abandon things halfway. You bank the internal rewards of beginning, but not the external rewards of finishing.

But with age, this changes.

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