Humans naturally think about their own behaviors in terms of peak and trough performance levels, rather than means or medians. Without any performance tracking, we know our limits in a variety of domains. Each time we attempt a performance episode in any skilled domain, these limits change, yielding a learning curve. It has a characteristic tempo, depending on the episodic performance quality, as well as a tempo across episodes, that is correlated with quality. I prefer this model of a learning curve that I made up to the usual smooth, S-shaped one with a plateau at the end. I’ll explain why in a bit. This picture is related to what I called the Freytag Staircase in the book, but is not quite the same.
The August Reading List Freeze
August 12, 2011 By
August is always a bitch of a month for me, to the point that I agree with David Plotz of Slate that we should get rid of it entirely. It seems to be my de facto annual planning month, though I have no reason anymore to be on an annual planning cycle. In August, I always seem to have far too many things in early stages of development, and too few leaving at the other end. I am currently in the early stages of several rather ambitious blog posts, a couple of new consulting projects and a couple of new personal projects. This year, thanks to my summer travels (I am back in Las Vegas now), I also have piles of unprocessed raw material from stuff I researched on the road, to write about.
So that’s a long, whiny excuse for rather sparse output over the last several weeks. I think I’ve hit my August trough though, so I can only build up momentum from here. But in the meantime, I assume many of you are on vacation, or planning to go on vacation, so I thought I’d share my current reading list, if any of you want to read along. Some of this will show up on the blog, some will not. My reading list piles up so fast that I’ve decided to be brutal. This list is it for the rest of the year. I will not be adding more books to the queue until I am done with these.
- Titan by Ron Chernow: Multiple people have recommended this Rockefeller biography to me.
- Tycoons by Charles Morris: Seems like a good overview of the Robber Barons
- The First Tycoon by T. J. Stiles: A biography of Vanderbilt, probably the founding father of the Robber Baron era.
- The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama: Don’t let the vague neocon associations dissuade you. There’s a reason this guy is so famous. If he writes a history of political order, you need to read it.
- World 3.0 by Pankaj Ghemawat: As meaty as Friedman’s The World is Flat is not. I suspect it’s going to become the definitive textbook introduction to globalization for those who actually care about getting the details and numbers right. The title is unfortunately rather uninspired, but the contents are solid gold.
- Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin: Haven’t yet started it, but seems like a really intriguing premise: applying the lessons of the NFL to figuring out how capitalism should be fixed to avoid the kinds of messes we seem to keep getting into.
- Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson: I rarely read fiction these days, but everybody keeps telling me to read Stephenson, so I finally caved, especially since it seemed to go well with the rest of this list. This is the first volume of the Baroque Cycle. If I have time, I may attempt to finish all three volumes this year.
- Debt: the first 5000 Years by David Graeber: I like ambitious reframings of everything from a new perspective, and this certainly qualifies. An attempt to rethink all of civilization and society as a manifestation of debt. If you want to sample before you decide, Julio Rodriguez at Wild Intent has attempted a valiant assault on this Mt. Everest scale book (ambition, not raw size).
Yes. There’s a definite theme here. No, the theme won’t take over the blog. I may even decide not to pursue it at all.
Mostly I am trying to flesh out the thinking around this year’s summer blockbuster hit, A Brief History of the Corporation to figure out just how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Though I hate to admit it, that piece did share some rather unpleasant characteristics with Michael Bay’s movies, so I am trying to think through some Oscar-season type follow ups.
Here’s to all of us seeing this beast of a month through. I’ll be in Hawaii over Labor Day weekend, so there is that to look forward to.
A Proposed Grand Narrative for the History of Debt
August 10, 2011 By
Despite my deliberate focus on individual-level narratives, the urge to apply the narrative structures discussed in Tempo to groups is irresistible to some people. This is interesting, because I personally have been wary of going there. I am not quite satisfied with how the models bootstrap up to group and grand narratives. But I am sort of happy that people are testing the ideas out in domains for which they weren’t really designed. If it works out, I’ll hopefully be able to build out the theory further.
Stefan King liked the Double Freytag as a way to structure the story of Western art. Critt Jarvis seems to believe it can help make sense of the ongoing political story of Honduras. And now Julio Rodriguez is making a bold attempt to tease out the narrative structure in David Graeber’s book, Debt: the first 5000 years.
Check it out: Towards a Grand Narrative of Civilization.
The title is ambitious, but I think justified. I’ve read an extract from the book, and Graeber makes a convincing case that the story of debt is the story of civilization. So I think Julio is justified in going hunting for the main narrative arc within the book.
On Being an Illegible Person
July 31, 2011 By
I’ve been drifting slowly through California for the past three weeks at about 100 miles/week, and several times I’ve been asked an apparently simple question that has become nearly impossible for me to answer: “What are you here for?”
Unlike regular travelers, I am not here for anything. I am just here, like area residents. The only difference is that I’ll drift on out of the Bay Area in a week. The true answer is “I am nomadic for the time being. I just move through places, the way you stay put in places. I am doing things that constant movement enables, just like you do things that staying put enables.” That is of course too bizarre an answer to use in everyday conversation.
My temporary nomadic state is just one aspect of a broader fog of illegibility that is starting to descend on my social identity. And I am not alone. I seem to run into more illegible people every year. And we are not just illegible to the IRS and to regular people whose social identities can be accurately summarized on business cards. We are also illegible to each other. Unlike nomads from previous ages, who wandered in groups within which individuals at least enjoyed mutual legibility, we seem to wander through life as largely solitary creatures. Our scripts and situations are mostly incomprehensible to others.
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Chet Richards’ Review of Tempo on Fabius Maximus
July 24, 2011 By
Chet Richards, author of Certain to Win and a close associate of John Boyd just posted a thought-provoking review of Tempo on the Fabius Maximus blog. I get a stamp of approval, overall:
[Tempo] is a synthesis, what Boyd called a “snowmobile,” that combines concepts from across a variety of disciplines to produce a cornucopia of new ideas, insights and speculations. You may be confused, challenged, outraged, and puzzled (some of the language can be academic), but you’ll rarely be bored because every chapter, often every page, has something you can add to the parts bin for building your own snowmobiles.
Overall, Chet comes to the conclusion that Tempo resonates with the Boydian spirit of decision-making. I don’t entirely get out of jail free though:
Perhaps his unfamiliarity with the original briefings, however, led him to make one characterization that is incorrect, although widely believed:
The central idea in OODA is a generalization of Butterfly-Bee: to simply operate at a higher tempo than your opponent. (118)
Guilty as charged. I didn’t spend enough time exploring how OODA gets beyond merely “faster tempo” to “inside the adversary’s tempo.” That’s something I hope to explore in a more nuanced way in a future edition. Over the last 6-8 months, I think I’ve come to understand the subtleties a lot better, and the challenge is to now spend more time thinking through clear definitions and examples.
There are several other great suggestions that I am filing away for future use, and things I need to clarify better. I definitely had to leave out more material than I could include in the book, so it is great to have encouragement for follow-on work from a leading steward of the Boydian tradition of decision-making.
Tempo and OODA: The Backstory
July 22, 2011 By
John Boyd’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) often comes up when I discuss Tempo with people from the more esoteric decision-making traditions. Very few people in the decision sciences are even aware of OODA, despite Boyd’s significant technical contributions to fighter combat tactics and energy-maneuverability theory, which preceded his more conceptual, almost metaphysical OODA work. This is because, despite the very technical look of the classic OODA diagram, there is an element of mysticism surrounding OODA.
So I thought I’d tell the back-story of how OODA informed Tempo, and is continuing to inform the ongoing conversation that I hope will feed into a more ambitious second edition.
But first a heads-up: I’ll be participating in a panel discussion about OODA and its relevance to the business/startup world next Wednesday, July 27th, 11:55 – 1:00. It’s a free call-in webinar, but space is limited. If you’re interested, register here. The event is hosted by Sean Murphy, one of my early supporters in getting the Tempo project off the ground, a few years ago.
Now for the backstory. There’s two parts to it: the nature of the “Boydian community” itself, and how the ideas ended up informing Tempo.
Houseboats, Containers, Guns and Garbage: the 2011 Ribbonfarm Field Trip
July 21, 2011 By
The first annual ribbonfarm field trip to Sausalito and Muir Woods Rodeo Beach is now done. As of July 17th, I can safely report that at least a dozen or so real people read the blog. It’s not all hyper-intelligent bots planted on the Internet by aliens just to mess with me. We started the day-long field trip on the Sausalito docks, where houseboat owner, long-time reader, sponsor and tour host Sam Penrose talked about the ideas in the book How Buildings Learn, and how they applied to what we were about to see.
Here’s a summary of the book, a Video series based on it and the Sausalito portion of the series (episode 2, starts at 9:20). Sam also flagged ribbonfarm-esque themes for the tour, such as the idea of legibility and outsider/outlaw lifestyles.
So what did we see as we trooped around behind Sam and his wife Sue? A bunch of really fascinating houseboats that totally disturb your idea of what “normal” life is or should be (how about living in a home that’s built on a converted World War II landing craft? Or one that’s clearly the product of a seriously tripping 60s imagination?) What did we hear? A bunch of associated narratives, micro and grand.
Diamonds versus Gold
July 14, 2011 By
I divide my writing into two kinds: gold versus diamonds. Sometimes I knowingly palm cubic zirconia or pyrite onto you guys, but mostly I make an honest attempt to produce diamonds or gold. On the blog, I mainly attempt to hawk rough diamonds and gold ore. Tempo was more of an attempt at creating a necklace: polished, artistically cut diamonds set in purified gold.
I find the gold/diamond distinction useful in most types of creative information work.
What do I mean here? Both are very precious materials. Both are materials that are already precious in their natural state, as rough diamonds or gold ore. Refinement only adds limited amounts of additional value. Both are mostly useless, but do have some uses: gold in conducting electricity, diamonds for polishing other materials. But there the similarities end.
Storytelling for Problem-Solving
July 13, 2011 By
Yesterday, I spoke about Tempo at the SoCAL Kanban/Lean Software Meetup, hosted by Pascal Pinck. It was an interesting mixed audience of about 40 odd — designers, startup types, big company types and a sprinkling of entertainment industry people and others. Since this was Los Angeles, I decided to focus on the storytelling ideas in the book.
Here are the slides and video; both have the voice track. Should be self-explanatory whether or not you’ve read the book.
View more presentations from vgururao.
Venkatesh Rao on storytelling and complexity from Pascal Pinck on Vimeo.
The End of the Parade
July 7, 2011 By
A foundational concept in twentieth century sociology is the cohort, a group of people starting something (such as life, employment or college) at the same time. Our view of the human world is based on the idea of cohort-based groups marching (theoretically) in lock-step through life. From grades in school to leagues of increasing skill-levels in sports to career paths within corporations, our world is full of groups navigating the world to the sound of the same drumbeat. If all the world is a stage, the larger drama is a parade of cohorts marching, dancing or straggling along drunkenly, but rarely breaking ranks.
Something very interesting is going on with cohorts today. The parade is ending.
Cohorts used to last as coherent social units all the way from high school to retirement. Now they fall apart within a few years of college. Different patterns of organization take over very quickly. To understand what’s going on, it’s useful to think in terms of the metaphor of racing and what happens to different start-time cohorts. Last year, I ran a series of five 5k races, and observed some very entertaining sorting effects, which I captured at the time in this sketch of my anecdotal observations (and unkind judgments):
Something very similar to this is happening in the human drama. If you’ll forgive some hyperbole, the global drumbeat is faltering. Cogs and mavericks alike are struggling. Cogs are wandering around wondering what to do with themselves. Mavericks are so used to defining their identities in terms of breaking ranks and following the beat of a different drum, that they too are struggling with a world that is not framed by a parade. Increasingly, there is nothing to rebel against.
