Hacking Grand Narratives

April 16, 2012 By

Grand narratives are probably the most frequently mentioned subject in reactions I get to Tempo, even though I carefully restricted myself to individual narratives in the book. Apparently the urge to apply narrative models to collectives is irresistible. Several readers have gone ahead and sort of hacked the narrative models I discuss in Tempo, and applied them to grand narratives. To be frank, I don’t completely understand most of these attempts. I know of applications to unconventional crisis response, the political process in Honduras, the history of Western art, and the history of debt/finance.

But as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I am treading carefully here.  I’ve learned something from each hacking attempt people have told me about (do share if you’ve tried this sort of thing), and I’ve made two experimental attempts myself: applying the model to 19th century American business/technology history and on a smaller scale, to software projects. I am starting a third experiment: applying narrative analysis to wannabe-Silicon-Valley tech hubs like Boulder and Las Vegas. But overall, I am not satisfied that my models (or anyone else’s) are good enough yet.

But let me try and lay out the problem here, and have you guys weigh in.

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How Do You Run Away from Home?

April 11, 2012 By

My Big History reading binge last year got me interested in the history of individualism as an idea.  I am not entirely sure why, but it seems to me that the right question to ask is the apparently whimsical one, “How do you run away from home?”

I don’t have good answers yet. So rather than waiting for answers to come to me in the shower, I decided to post my incomplete thoughts.

Let’s start with the concept of individualism.

The standard account of the idea appears to be an ahistorical one; an ism that modifies other isms like libertarianism, existentialism and anarchism.

Fukuyama argues, fairly persuasively, that the individual as a meaningful unit only emerged in the early second millennium AD in Europe, as a consequence of the rise of the Church and the resultant weakening of kinship-based social structures. This immediately suggests a follow-on question: is the slow, 600-700-year rise of individualism an expression of an innate drive, unleashed at some point in history, or is it an unnatural consequence of forces that weaken collectivism and make it increasingly difficult to sustain? Are we drifting apart or being torn apart?

Do we possess a fundamental “run away from home” drive, or are we torn away from home by larger, non-biological forces, despite a strong attachment drive?

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Trigger Narratives and the Nuclear Option

April 10, 2012 By

We use the phrase nuclear option rather casually as an everyday metaphor for highly consequential, irreversible and consciously triggered decisions. But chances are, you’ve never actually considered how the actual nuclear option is managed. The turning of this one little key — the picture is of an an actual nuclear trigger —  is easily the most analyzed decision in history. The design of the decision process around it is one of the greatest feats of narrative engineering every accomplished. That the trigger has  (knock on wood) not been pulled since World War II is an engineering accomplishment comparable to the Moon landing.

The nuclear option is the most extreme example of a special kind of decision narrative that I call a trigger narrative: one built around a major decision requires an explicit triggering action after all the preparation is done: things like proposing marriage, submitting a manuscript to an editor or issuing a press release. Not all major decisions are framed by trigger narratives, but for those that are, the nuclear trigger narrative has much to teach.

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Lawyer Mind, Judge Mind

March 29, 2012 By

Several recent discussions on a variety of unrelated topics with different people have gotten me thinking about two different attitudes towards dialectical processes. They are generalized versions of the professional attitudes  required of lawyers and judges, so I’ll refer to them as lawyer mind and judge mind. 

In the specialized context of the law, the dialectical process is structurally constrained and the required attitudes are  codified and legally mandated to a certain extent.  Lawyers must act as though they were operating from a lawyer-mindset, even if internally they are operating with a judge-mind. And vice-versa. Outside of the law, the distinction acquires more philosophical overtones.

I want to start with the law, but get to a broader philosophical, psychological and political distinction that applies to all of us in all contexts.

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The Tempo of Code

March 26, 2012 By

At ALM Chicago last month, I did a talk titled Breathing Data, Competing on Code. It was a lot of fun, and a big part was applying ideas from Tempo to software development. I did this once before at the SoCAL Lean/Kanban meetup, but this time, I took the ideas in a significantly different direction. It’s an hour-long talk, so you’ve been warned.  The talk was pretty well-received, so looks like I am gradually improving at this talking-head game.

There are also quite a few bits that are somewhat interactive, so you may lose the thread during those parts.

Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch?

March 22, 2012 By

There is a fascinating set of ideas that has been swirling around in the global zeitgeist for the past decade, around the quote that will keep Donald Rumsfeld in the history books long after his political career is forgotten. I am referring, of course, to the famous unknown-unknowns quote from 2002. Here it is:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Rumsfeld put his finger on a major itch that set off widespread scratching. This scratching, which is about the collective human condition in the face of fundamental uncertainties, shows no sign of slowing down a decade later. But the conversation has taken an interesting turn that I want to call out.

Out of all this scratching, four broad narratives have emerged that can be arranged on a 2×2 with analytic/synthetic on one axis and optimistic/pessimistic on the other.  Three are rehashes of older narratives. But the fourth — the Hydra narrative — is new. I have labeled it the Hydra narrative after Taleb’s metaphor in his explanation of anti-fragility: you cut one head off, two emerge in its place (his book on the subject is due out in October).

The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.

My own favorite starting point for thinking about these things, as some of you would have guessed, is James Scott’s idea of illegibility, which is poised diplomatically at the origin, equally amenable to being incorporated in any of the narratives. It is equally capable of informing either skepticism or faith in any of the narratives, and can be employed towards both analysis and synthesis.

I haven’t made up my mind about the question in the title of the post, but am on alert for new ideas relating to it, from Taleb and others.  So this is something of an early-warning post.

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The Fundamentals of Calendar Hacking

March 19, 2012 By

I am always amused by time-management amateurs who have found a system that works for them and a few of their friends, and start imagining that they’ve created a perfect system.  “Universal time management system” is the perpetual motion machine of the self-improvement industry.

The zeroth thing you need to know about personal time management is that in a certain theoretical sense, there are no universal  systems. Only calendar hacks. What’s more, you cannot pick some compendium of calendar hacks and easily sort out the ones that will work for you. You need to learn the art of calendar hacking.

That’s what this post is about: the fundamentals of calendar hacking. I’ll be straight with you: the ideas in this post are going to be somewhat tough to grasp if you haven’t already encountered them, but I’ll keep it non-technical and provide several hopefully illuminating examples along the way.

The key is diagrams like the one below.

 

Diagrams like this are known as empirical computational complexity phase transition diagrams in computer science. I’ll show you how to read and draw informal, non-technical versions in a minute, but the key idea behind them is that an impossibly hard scheduling problem is not impossibly hard everywhere and at all times.

The key to calendar hacking is separating out the hard and easy regimes and dealing with them differently. This is one of my favorite technical ideas, and my excuse for playing fast and loose with it, as I am about to, is that my heart is in the right place. I mentioned this idea in a footnote somewhere in Tempo, but I figured I ought to do a proper post on the idea.

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Reviewing Refactor Camp 2012

March 14, 2012 By

I’ve been procrastinating on this post for a couple of weeks, wondering what the heck to say about my first attempt at a serious Ribbonfarm event: Refactor Camp 2012, on March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo.

Throughout 2011, I did a whole lot of physical-world stuff, meeting people all over the country, sleeping on couches and in spare bedrooms, and organizing a handful of field trips (I think I met at least a hundred people, if not more). But Refactor Camp felt different somehow.

It started with a thought that came to me early in the day: holy crap, I’ve managed to fill a largish room for an entire day, and they’re expecting me to arrange for entertainment in non-written form. And some of these people have actually flown in especially for this. What the hell were they thinking?

The slightly surreal feeling continued through the day. Immediately after the event, as I noted in my follow-up email to the people who attended, I was feeling somewhat ambivalent about the whole thing.

Now, two weeks after, I am really glad I did it. I hope good things come of it.

As part of the follow-up, there is now a Facebook group called Bay Area Refactorings, which you are welcome to join if you live in the area/visit frequently/are planning to move there, and want to meet others in the area who resonate with ribbonfarmesque themes, join the group.

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Routine, but Cannot be Automated

March 9, 2012 By

The hardest kind of activity to get organized is stuff that is routine, but cannot be automated. This is stuff that has trivial meta-content, but non-trivial work content. Even GTD struggles in this department.

Trivial meta-content means it is not hard to plan or schedule this stuff, or figure out and create the necessary enabling pre-conditions. Non-trivial content means the actual work is hard and cannot be automated.

Blogging is an example for me, so I’ll use that. If I had to put it in my organization system, it would simply be write blog post as a weekly calendar reminder.  No biggie. But I cannot put the work itself on autopilot.

Small business book-keeping is another. It seems simple enough to just put your receipts in a shoebox, and update your books based on your invoices, credit card statements, receipts and bank balances every month. All you need is an Internet connection and your shoebox. But the work itself cannot be automated.

Why is this stuff hard to get organized? Is it fundamentally hard? What are the consequences if you don’t keep up?

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Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law

March 8, 2012 By

For the past several months, I’ve been immersed in nineteenth century history. Specifically, the history of interchangeability in technology between 1765, when the Système Gribeauval, the first modern technology doctrine based on the potential of interchangeable parts, was articulated, and 1919, when Frederick Taylor wrote The Principles of Scientific Management.

Here is the story represented as a Double Freytag diagram, which should be particularly useful for those of you who have read Tempo. For those of you who haven’t, think of the 1825 Hall Carbine peak as the “Aha!” moment when interchangeability was first figured out, and the 1919 peak as the conclusion of the technology part of the story, with the focus shifting to management innovation, thanks in part to Taylor.

The unsung and rather tragic hero of the story of interchangeability was John Harris Hall (1781 – 1841), inventor of the Hall carbine.  So I am naming my analog to Moore’s Law for the 19th century Hall’s Law in his honor.

The story of Hall’s Law is in a sense a prequel to the unfinished story of Moore’s Law. The two stories are almost eerily similar, even to believers in the “history repeats itself” maxim.

Why does the story matter? For me, it is enough that it is a fantastically interesting story. But if you must have a mercenary reason for reading this post, here it is: understanding it is your best guide to the Moore’s Law endgame.

So here is my telling of this tale. Settle in, it’s going to be another long one.

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