Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Feedback sessions are a powerful tool for generating forward progress in any aspect of life. Even though I determined that iteration and feedback don’t work as a management tactic, I still think feedback sessions are important.

One simple benefit is that regular feedback sessions force you to take action. It almost doesn’t matter what form the session takes – it could be a daily status meeting, a one-on-one with your manager or mentor, or even a journal update that you write for yourself. You can keep yourself moving forward by regularly being evaluated on what you’ve done since your last session, and what needs to be done for the next one. I feel like I have drifted less since starting the five minute daily journal report suggested by Gerald Weinberg. There’s no implied consequence in failing to accomplish my daily goals, but getting into the habit of setting goals and recording whether I reached them has kept me more focused and disciplined.

Another benefit of regular feedback sessions is to confirm which direction is forward. One tactic I use in rapid prototyping situations where direction is unclear is to create a first draft just to have something to criticize. I don’t spend a lot of time on that first effort because I’m not trying to solve the problem with it. Its point is to elicit criticism, and by analyzing and understanding that criticism, I learn where I should be spending my design efforts and what the final goal is as of today. By getting early feedback, I don’t waste time polishing a solution that doesn’t fit the situation. Because I intentionally didn’t spend much time on that first attempt, I’m not personally invested in it, so I am open to exploring other options in response to the feedback I get. With regular feedback sessions, I can work with my teammates in shaping our work even as goals change.

To take a specific counter-example, I once worked at a company where a software team interviewed end-users about what they needed, drew up a specification and disappeared for six months to code to that specification. They came back with software that did exactly what was requested and found that circumstances had changed drastically over the six months since the specification was written, making their software useless. But because they had spent six months writing that software, they were emotionally invested in finding a use for it, so they spent another couple months trying to fit it into what the end-users were doing. If they had re-evaluated the specification every two weeks with the end-users, they could have evolved the software in response to the changing landscape and not wasted their time or the time of the end-users.

Feedback sessions also allow us to overcome our innate desire to keep doing what we have always done. We humans are subject to the consistency principle described by Cialdini, where once we say we’re doing something, we become more committed to doing it. We don’t want to find out that we made the wrong choice, so we either don’t evaluate the results, or interpret the evaluation results in order to support the choice we made. Feedback sessions allow us to verify that our choice is having the intended effect.

In an environment where feedback is valued, the review informs what will happen next. If everybody involved has agreed to take action in response to feedback, designing the evaluation process is in some sense more important than designing the work itself, because the evaluation process will determine how the work evolves. This is the idea behind test driven development, where the evaluation (test) is actually written before any work starts on the software itself. This is also why students always clamor to know the grading scheme at the beginning of the term – they plan their work by knowing how they will be evaluated. A good evaluation process creates a good end result.

Feedback sessions play a large part in why I currently function better as a team player. I do not yet have the self-discipline to re-evaluate myself with brutal honesty on a regular basis. I’m working on that with exercises like the daily Weinberg journal. I’ve also started setting up regular phone calls with trusted friends to talk about my life goals, and even though they are friends, I feel a responsibility to have made some progress towards those goals between calls. These feedback sessions are increasing my ability to move forward and execute, and I think that is a good thing.

P.S. I wrote this post on a bus on the way to Cornell. Yes, the bus has wi-fi. Luxury!

I had a teddy bear moment today. I was trying to debug something at work, got stuck, asked one of my coworkers to help me, explained the problem to him, and said “Oh, I see what’s going on” without them saying anything. I guess I should bring a teddy bear into work so that I can explain problems to it before bothering my coworkers.

This incident is a reminder of my last post about conversation, where I realized I “only figure stuff out by talking about it” with other people rather than pondering it alone. It seems very similar to the classic extrovert/introvert divide, in that extroverts recharge with other people and introverts need alone time, and they have a very difficult time dealing with each other, as the article Caring for Your Introvert explains. Like the personality types, the different thinking types have fundamentally clashing assumptions which makes for wacky hijinks.

To make the rest of this post coherent, I will refer to people who think by talking as “talkers” and to people who think by themselves as “ponderers”.

One of the ways in which the thinking types clash is in how they approach conversations. For instance, because I am a “talker”, I often throw out completely unformed thoughts just to see what happens. I see ideas in conversation as being malleable; they’re batted around, and new ideas are constructed in a cooperative effort. My post about patterns and truth indicates my disdain towards absolute Truth when compared to the joy of following ideas where they lead.

“Ponderers” hate this because they treat conversation as a way to exchange information about what one already thinks, not as an opportunity to refine one’s thoughts. This doesn’t mean they are closed-minded; they will take in new input, but they will process it later on their own. To say something in public without having supporting evidence is anathema to them.

You can see why conversations between the two thinking types might cause problems (exaggerated for effect and from the perspective of a “talker”):
Talker: “Hey, so what about Idea A?”
Ponderer: “I don’t think that’s a good idea because of Reasons X, Y and Z”
Talker: “Oh, good point. Well, what if we modify the idea and try idea B instead?”
Ponderer: “Wait, that doesn’t match what you said before.”
Talker: “Yeah, I’ve moved on and I’m trying something new”
Ponderer: “You’re being inconsistent! What do you really think?”
Talker: “Well, I thought idea A, but that doesn’t hold up, so maybe idea B.”
Ponderer: “How am I supposed to talk to you when you can’t make up your mind?”

The two sides have differing assumptions about the purpose of conversation. “Ponderers” see conversation as akin to siege warfare, where they bring their ideas and their supporting evidence to bear, and try to discredit the other’s ideas. When they finish the conversation, they examine the damage done by the other side, figure out how to rebuild their ideas, and prepare for the next battle. Meanwhile, “talkers” like me are bouncing ideas around during the conversation, changing as we go, but have difficulty developing new ideas on our own.

So we both get frustrated at the next conversation. They come back to the conversation re-armed with reformulated ideas with new supporting evidence, and wonder why I’m wasting their time when I haven’t changed my ideas since we last talked. Then during the conversation, I start evolving my ideas, which frustrates them even more because they can’t bring their artillery to bear on the rapidly moving target. I get frustrated because they stick to their fortifications and refuse to change their ideas based on what we’re talking about together.

I’m projecting how “ponderers” think, but I can definitely see why I would drive them nuts with my constantly shifting thoughts. And I certainly have felt my own frustration at not being able to get people to go with my flow during brainstorming conversations. Just being aware of the differences may help me identify more constructive ways to make this interaction work in the future.

It’s also helpful to remind myself that when I get stuck, it’s probably not productive for me to continue bashing my head into the metaphoric wall. The best way for me to identify a new approach is to talk it through with somebody else. As the teddy bear story shows, it doesn’t have to be somebody that understands it and may work better if it isn’t – by breaking the problem down to try to explain it, I may figure out a new way of seeing the problem that provides a possible solution.

Do these archetypes of thinking make sense? How do you think?

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone recently with various friends talking about what I’m thinking and where I’m going with my life and my career. After one recent phone call, I realized that I value such conversations because each conversation is an opportunity for me to evolve my understanding of the world.

When I’m talking to friends, I’m not just reciting the events of my life. I’m struggling to put them into context, figuring out the narrative that ties them together, making sense of the chain of events so that I can understand what happened. In other words, I’m constructing my self-story. By telling it to somebody else, I’m explaining it to myself, but at the same time, the feedback that I get may encourage me to modify my understanding. For instance, if I’m talking about an interaction I had with a coworker, and I explain what they did and why I thought they did it, my friends will offer alternative explanations that may better explain the events. And I modify and retcon my story to incorporate that new interpretation.

What’s really interesting is that some of these reconceptions can then change my behavior. By bringing a new understanding to the world, I react differently when presented with a similar situation. I may even seek out new ways of interacting as a result.

What I find fascinating about the process is that it goes against my preconceived notions about making sense of the world. Our culture perpetuates the myth that we are lone heroes, each on our own journey. Our icons are tortured geniuses working alone, from Einstein in the patent office to novelists and poets whose work is only read posthumously. The spiritual journey involves meditation and solo hikes to the tops of mountains to consult gurus.

And I bought into all of that. For a long time, I felt that the best way to figure out what I wanted to do was to sit alone in a room and think about it. And it turns out that doesn’t work for me at all. I can only figure stuff out by talking about it. I started writing this blog because I needed a place to get ideas out of my head and onto “paper” so I could take a look at them and see if they made sense. I learn so much more in an hour of conversation than I do in an hour of thinking.

I think part of why it’s taken me a long time to accept this idea is my background. I started off in physics, which perpetuates the lone theorist myth, with stories of individual brilliance ranging from Einstein to Feynman to Schrodinger. After physics, I moved into programming, which also emphasizes individualism. My boss believes that private offices are essential for programming because it requires such high levels of concentration. So the idea that I could learn by talking really took some time before I could finally accept it.

I should also mention that such conversations aren’t entirely selfish on my part. By using my friends to help me make sense of the world, I’m promoting our ability to make sense of each other. Because they’re helping me interpret the events of my life, they gain a better understanding of how I think about the world. And their interpretations help me better understand how they make sense of the world. Plus, i can contribute my viewpoint to help them make sense of events in their world. It’s a two-way process that builds community and trust, and also increases our ability to function in a world that doesn’t always behave in an expected fashion.

Gosh, I’m really on a crusade for the power of conversation recently. First in my post on the importance of talking in management, and now here with the applications to personal growth. I suppose it’s not surprising. I fancy myself a conversationalist and would love to find more excuses to practice the art of conversation. So feel free to contact me with ideas that you want me to think about or if you need another perspective or anything like that. And maybe at some point, I’ll get around to organizing a fabulous New York conversation salon.

P.S. Posting will be down this month, as I’ve got three end-of-term presentations coming up in the last week of April for my program. So I’ve got some work to do.

P.P.S. I decided to create a blog category of conversation to make it easier to find such posts in the future.

One of the things that many of my friends have been struggling with is that managers don’t really do anything. These friends are highly technical people, so when they think of doing something, they think of time spent in the lab, or coding on a computer, or building something. When they see a manager spending all of their time in meetings or talking to various people while they are struggling to get their tasks done, it can cause resentment.

And they continue to hold onto these prejudices even when they become managers themselves. One friend gets frustrated because he doesn’t feel he’s getting anything done at work because he spends all his time talking. Another looks back longingly on the days when they could just code and not worry about dealing with other people.

So what are managers doing? What is it with all the talking?

Sometimes thinking through ideas out loud is the only way the next step can be identified. Just by forcing their team members to articulate what’s going on, managers can often move people forward when they’re stuck in “blank page” syndrome or are procrastinating. My best manager (the coworker mentioned in that post actually) dropped by my desk once a week, in classic HP “management by walking around” fashion, to review what I’d done the past week, where I was stuck, and what I should get done the next week. It wasn’t any sort of formal meeting, but it helped me stay focused and gave me a chance to get unstuck.

Sometimes they’re talking so you don’t have to. One of the primary responsibilities of the manager of a technical team is to protect their team from the rest of the organization. Other departments at the organization may be after the team to produce documents, fill out surveys, participate in training seminars, etc. The manager is intercepting those requests and fighting them appropriately so the team doesn’t have to spend time thinking about that stuff. Even when the manager loses those battles, they can at least present the busywork on their terms, rather than let their team be interrupted every day by such requests.

Sometimes they are keeping things coordinated. The larger an organization is, the more effort is necessary to keep everybody moving in the same direction. Even when everybody thinks they understand which way is forward, they may have different ideas. The programmer needs to be dissuaded from spending several weeks re-designing the infrastructure to make it “just right” because there are customer features that need to be implemented. In this scenario, the manager is like a sheepdog, identifying wayward wanderers and bringing them back to travel with the rest of the group. Occasionally, the wanderers are correct in trying to lead the group in a new direction, and then it’s up to the manager to communicate that understanding to the rest of the group.

Sometimes they are figuring out the direction themselves. Determining the priorities and which way the team should be heading is part of being a manager and leader. But it can’t be done autocratically or the team will just ignore the direction because of unrealistic expectations and go their own way. And if the manager sets priorities without consultation with the customers, the team could work for months and produce something that can’t be sold. Maintaining these lines of communication between the team and management and customers requires yet more talking.

Sometimes they’re just keeping tabs on what’s going on. To keep a team motivated requires knowing what each team member is working towards, and what they are inspired by. Figuring that out involves understanding them as people so you can determine how you can frame the company goals in such a way as to match their personal goals. People can be motivated by money, by recognition, by power, etc., and choosing the wrong method can be disastrous (as one manager memorably remarked “Oh, right, Eric needs the carrot, not the stick!” after he attempted to strongarm me into doing something and I reacted violently in a contrary fashion).

Of all of these, I think the most important is the direction and coherence a good manager can provide. I believe in the amplification of coherent effort (Work Amplification by the Stimulated Effort via Rewards (WASER?)) – that a team is greater than the individual sum of its parts. But the opposite definitely happens – if one person is going in the wrong direction, it destroys the coherence of the team effort, reducing the total output of the team by far more than that one person’s contribution.

I like to think of the effect of a good manager as being a force multiplier. They may not “do” anything themselves, but they make everybody around them more productive. For instance, if they can take a team where the team members are each going their own way and the team is performing at the equivalent of half the total of the individual efforts, and transform it into a coherent team which performs at the equivalent of double the total individual efforts, they have added an enormous amount of value despite doing none of the work themselves.

So even though they are “just talking”, don’t underestimate the value of a good manager. And for those of my friends who are moving into management and frustrated by not “doing anything”, maybe this will help you frame the contributions you are making to your organization.

One of the skills I continue to work on is the art of conversation. This seems to be key to so many things I’m interested in, from management to communication to cognitive science. And it has the added benefit of being useful at parties!

So what makes for a good conversationalist?

One of the qualities I try to cultivate in myself is broad interests. I like to know a little bit about a lot of things. This gives me an advantage in conversations in that no matter where the conversation goes, I am interested, and can often contribute some thoughts or experiences. Over the course of the past few months, I can recall conversations about motorcycles, sports of all sorts, management, investment, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, geek culture, programming, games, music, etc. The conversation about motorcycles particularly sticks in my brain because a friend of a friend had a Ducati and three of us were gathered around it ooh-ing and aah-ing, and my friend was completely bored and left out of the conversation for 15 minutes. I felt bad for my friend, but didn’t know how to steer the conversation back towards territory where he would be more comfortable.

Because I have broad but shallow interests, I have the advantage that I rarely have turf to defend in a conversation. As I mentioned in my other post, the flow of conversation requires a collaborative effort where people are looking to construct new understanding, not defend their existing position. Adversarial relations turn conversations into arguments. So my lack of expertise may actually contribute to me having better conversations, as I have no positions to defend, and I’m generally open to new viewpoints. I’m even learning to get past my ego and stop trying to use conversations as an arena to show off how clever I am. Mostly.

Those who have a deep but narrow focus can be interesting to talk to for a while, as they are passionate about their subject. It’s fun to get them talking about their research, especially if I can relate it back to topics that I find interesting. Unfortunately, once the conversation leaves their topic of expertise, they don’t have anything to say. If I’m on my game, I can serve as an impedance matcher, translating things into concepts they find interesting, but that’s a skill that I’m still working on.

I’m still figuring all of this out, of course. I am nowhere near as successful at talking to people as I’d like to be – there are many people with whom I fail to have even perfunctory conversations. But every now and then, I have moments of progress; last week, I went to a holiday party where I knew nobody but the host and managed to have several interesting conversations with people about various topics. Interestingly, I do best in one-on-one conversations because it forces me to take the lead. Small group conversations of a few people work as well, where I can lay back a bit but still contribute. Once the group size exceeds about 6 people or so, though, I’ll fade into invisiblity because I’m not yet assertive enough to assume anybody should care what I have to say.

Conversation as an art form continues to fascinate me because it’s a realm in which I feel relatively comfortable. I’m reading a book on leadership now, and its advice is to “discover and cultivate that authentic self, the part of you that is most alive, the part that is most you.” I sometimes wonder if conversation is my element. A good conversation can energize me for days. Great conversations stay in my thoughts for years (often aided by me writing them up). I love taking ideas out and bouncing them around and collaborating in the process of synthesis. I thrive in the interstices between other people. I’m still not quite sure what that adds up to as far as a career path, but I’ll keep on playing with it.

P.S. Ironically, I should be out at a nextNY holiday party having conversations right now, but I was too socially exhausted to go. After finishing off my master’s project proposal last Tuesday, I was doing something social for six nights straight, with a few of those nights double booked. I ended up coming down with a cold, and decided to stay in for a couple nights to recover. Tomorrow night, the big push to Christmas starts, though

P.P.S. In the spirit of starting conversations, the book I’m reading claims that Emerson used to greet friends with “What’s become clear to you since we last met?” What a wonderful question. I need to adopt it in my life. And I ask it of anybody reading this post!

I was telling a friend about the Buffy singalong today and mentioned that one of the reasons it was so enjoyable was because everybody in the theater was a Buffy fanatic, or at least Buffy-fanatic-friendly. Because the show had sold out earlier in the week, only the fanatics had tickets. And that created a really positive vibe that fed on itself. I mentioned in the post that I think I enjoyed watching the warmup episode far more because I was surrounded by other people enjoying it.

This got me thinking this evening about other examples. I watched The Matrix on opening night in a sold-out theater, and it blew my mind. I watched the Blair Witch Project at a midnight showing on its opening night in limited release, and it was a far more compelling experience than when I saw it a month later in a multiplex. The Steve Reich concerts were spine-tingling. It happens when watching sports where the buzz is truly infectious – I even found myself momentarily rooting for the Yankees once this summer. Even a non-interactive experience like watching a movie or concert or a game is profoundly different with a sympathetic audience.

But why? If I enjoy something, why should it matter whether other people around me do as well? My theory of the evening is that it has to do with flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (which I’ve never read, so the following discussion may be inaccurate), where the general idea is that we’re happiest when we can reach a state of flow, where there is nothing impeding our progress in our task. Books like Peopleware emphasize the importance of giving people good tools to do their job, as that keeps them in the state of flow. A bad tool distracts people, keeps them from concentrating on their task, and breaks their attention out of the flow.

I think that a similar thing happens in groups of people. Books like The Society of Mind or Cognition in the Wild suggest that our minds act like groups of people, so perhaps groups of people may work like minds in this instance. When people are getting excited about something, that excitement feeds on itself, as if the whole group is getting into a state of flow (I’ve covered this in the context of conversations). But all it takes is one person to be negative to destroy the flow, and force the momentum to start over. The colloquial term is “party pooper”. It may seem as if they’re just one person, but by interfering with the network and multiplier effects of group enthusiasm, they can have a disproportionate negative effect.

To use pseudo-math for a second, if you have four people, and they’re all psyched about something, and they feed on each other’s excitement, the end result of excitement is probably exponential – it’s more like sixteen (four squared) units of excitement rather than four. If one person is negative, then you have either two or three units of excitement, depending on whether the negativity is a actively negative (a -1) or indifferent (a 0). Flipping the effect of one person doesn’t just reduce the excitement by one, it reduces it by thirteen! Obviously, the numbers are made up, but it illustrates the idea that I’m trying to get across.

I think this idea also applies in business. One bad apple in a company, especially in a startup, is a disaster. One of the priorities listed in Good to Great is to get the right people on the bus. Get the wrong people out of there. And I think one of the reasons that is so important is because of these multiplier effects. The wrong people don’t just drag down their own performance, they destroy everybody else’s productivity and enthusiasm. But when everybody is on the same page, and they’re excited and they’re psyched, amazing things can happen.

How do we get people into that state? Still working on that one. I’ve got a post on management somewhere in the pipeline that may discuss this. I’m pretty pleased with extracting all of this from the Buffy singalong, though.

P.S. Missed last night’s post because of class and homework. Oh well. The daily posting was more of a guideline. Maybe I’ll try to double post this weekend to “catch up”.

P.P.S. It’s only halfway through the month and I’ve already equalled my typical monthly output of posts. Goals help! Of course, I may be overwhelming my poor readers with verbiage, but they can always skip a post or three.

A few months ago, Wes made a comment about my post about good conversations where he linked the idea of flow with what I was looking for in conversation. I’ve been meaning to follow up on that comment for a long time, and tonight’s the night.

Conversation is a topic near and dear to my heart. Besides the post listed above, I have posts about the recipe for a good conversation, a late-night conversation with a friend, a surprisingly stimulating conversation at a party, thoughts on conversational alignment, and thoughts on the connections necessary for conversation. And those are only the posts I can remember off the top of my head. I would obviously love to understand better what leads to a good conversation. And looking back over those posts, I think perhaps the concept of flow is a good place to start.

The concept of flow at work has been described by many people such as the Peopleware guys. In particular, they emphasize how important it is for there to be no interruptions, nothing to break you out of the state of flow. Looking at those conversations, one was a late night conversation, and one was at a party where I didn’t know anybody so I didn’t feel compelled to circulate. Others were at people’s houses sitting around the living room, so there wasn’t the distractions of public places like restaurants or bars. In all cases, there was time for the conversation to develop, to take on a momentum of its own, to carry us all away with it.

Such momentum can seldom be achieved in other environments. There have been several promising proto-conversations I’ve had at work which were interrupted by a customer calling in; the moment was lost, people dispersed, and the conversation was over before it had really begun. I also find it very difficult to have good conversations at bars or parties; it’s generally too loud, so you have to shout to be heard, and people have to repeat comments several times, which destroys the flow of thoughts. Also, people circulate, wander off to get drinks, etc.

The other issue with bars and parties is something I touched on in the mysterious connections post, where I said “If I have to spend several sentences explaining each of my references, then the conversational momentum is disrupted and it’s hard to achieve that sense of flow in conversation”. It’s also linked to the idea of language alignment. If I don’t know people well, as is common at parties, then there are more opportunities for friction between realities to interrupt the flow of conversation. Combine that with the inhospitable (to conversations) physical environment, and it’s no wonder that I don’t enjoy either bars or parties.

Another aspect of good conversation flow is something I touched on in the recipe post, which is the idea that people need to work together for it to happen. We’ve all had conversations where things are starting to roll and gather momentum, and then everything comes to a screeching halt because some egotist in the room starts (figuratively) jumping up and down yelling “Look at me!” Good conversations require a sense of selflessness, of putting the needs of the conversation above one’s own needs. In the cases where ideas are getting kicked around, it means not getting emotionally invested in an idea, or outraged that somebody would challenge that idea. As soon as somebody decides that he won’t accept alternative viewpoints, the conversation becomes a battlefield, rather than a collaboratively constructed work. It reminds me of the book Getting to Yes, where negotiations are much more productive once they are viewed collaboratively rather than as zero-sum positional negotiations.

So what makes for a good conversation in my eyes? Good people, obviously, who trust each other, and have interesting ideas to exchange. A shared idea of the conversation as a collaborative inquiry, rather than an opportunity to enhance egos or flaunt closed-mindedness. An appropriate environment, with minimal distractions to disrupt the flow and momentum of the conversation. Oh, and the time necessary for conversational momentum to build.

I really like the concept of flow to tie all of these ideas together. Thanks Wes!

P.S. Now I just need to figure out how to set up these conditions for a good conversation here in New York. I might have to start throwing dinner parties or something. Yeesh. Or find a good cafe, I suppose. Hrm.

Amazon link

I read this book once long ago, but Joel insisted I re-read it after starting last week. So I took it home for the weekend and read it while taking breaks from unpacking. It’s a quick read, with short chapters. And it’s excellent.

What’s interesting to me is that I totally didn’t appreciate the book the first time I read it. It seemed like a bunch of obvious platitudes which didn’t really matter. Upon revisiting it, though, I realized that this book contained many lessons that I had had to learn by doing things differently and suffering through the consequences.

To take a couple obvious examples, it took me many years to figure out that the best way to seem interesting is to ask open ended questions about things other people are excited about. Everybody likes talking about stuff that excites them. Carnegie laid it out for me, but I didn’t really understand. Or how offering genuine specific praise is always appreciated – I used to feel weird about bothering folks just to tell them they did something well (e.g. Telling guest soloists with the chorus how well they sang). But then I realized I always get a thrill out of such recognition (like when somebody cites one of my blog posts), so now I try to demonstrate my appreciation when I can. Another good example is Carnegie’s admonition to avoid arguments, because if you lose, you lose, and if you win, you still lose because you haven’t convinced them, just browbeaten them into submission. As those who know me can attest, my affection for confrontation and argument got me into all sorts of trouble at work for a while before I realized that perhaps arguing wasn’t the best strategy.

So I’m glad Joel suggested I re-read this book. My friend Adam who I had dinner with last night said that a friend of his recommends reading a chapter a day, and trying to apply it to one’s life; when he reaches the end, he goes back to the beginning and starts over. I’m not sure I’ll go quite that far, but it does have a lot of good advice that I can learn from. And having confirmed some of his observations the hard way, I value the others more.

One observation about myself is that although I recognize how well these techniques work and have even adopted several of them myself, they still don’t come naturally to me. I use them because they work, not because they’re how I actually feel; I haven’t really internalized them. For example, I know that showing interest in others is the best way to sustain conversation. And I can do it. But I’m sometimes not actually interested in what they’re saying. Carnegie would claim that if I continue to use the techniques, the attitude will follow, just as the best way to be happy is to force oneself to smile. We’ll see. I may just be a cynical cold-hearted manipulative person by nature.

Speaking of which, next up on Joel’s re-reading list is Cialdini’s Psychology of Influence.

P.S. Completely unpacked, pictures up, trash taken out. Visited Whole Foods yesterday and stocked up on fresh produce, yay! Started answering tech support emails today, and also helped to debug the office VoIP system at the end of the day. Tomorrow night I’m going to go check out an architect duel in Tribeca, cuz that seems like a wacky New York thing to do.

A couple days ago, I was trying to explain to my friend Wilfred the ideas of Latour; in particular, the notion of an iterative reality constructed via consultation. As a scientist, he was somewhat distressed by this idea, given that he believes in a Platonic reality, where there is a “real” world that we are discovering through science. But then we wandered off into talking about how it applies to what we see of each other, because our “self” has no Platonic counterpart. There is no objective self that we can “discover”. The way I see myself is different than the way Wilfred sees me, and both are different than what some stranger on the street sees. Is there truly a “me” that stays constant through all of these interactions? I argue against the idea in this post.

But it gets even more interesting because my “self” that emerges in a social interaction is intricately bound up with what the other people involved bring to the interaction. I am a different person when I’m by myself, when I’m with different groups of friends, and when I’m with strangers. And that person evolves differently depending on those interactions. In some sense, my “self” is a collaborative process. Which really hurt my brain, so I decided to write a blog post on it.

Wilfred pointed out that the rise of celebrity, where people are famous for being famous (of which he pointed out Paris Hilton is the iconic example), provides another facet of this. Paris Hilton, the celebrity, is undoubtedly different than Paris Hilton, the person. Her celebrity persona has been constructed via an interaction between her, her agents, the media, and her audience. Wilfred also pointed out that this fracturing of identity was one of the bases for postmodernism and deconstructivism.

One of the other aspects that I find interesting about this idea of the collaborative self is that I think it relates to the idea of the conversational interface. We “reveal” (construct?) different aspects of ourselves depending on who’s asking (as a side note, I originally wrote reveal, and then realized that betrayed a Platonic belief that there was a “true” self that could be “revealed”, so I changed it to construct).

Jane Jacobs had an interesting take on this in her book The Death and Life of American Cities (which I still haven’t written up because I’m lame). She pointed out that one of the advantages of cities was that it allowed for a managed transition of identity between public and private, because there are multiple venues for interaction, from acknowledging a familiar stranger on the sidewalk or at the store, to grabbing a cup of coffee with an acquaintance, to saying hi in the lobby of a shared apartment building, to inviting people into your actual home. In smaller towns, without as many possibilities for public interaction, you have to graduate to the invitation into the home much more quickly, leading to a much more rapid breakdown of barriers. There are advantages to both methods; one could argue that small towns have the advantage of building up social capital in the Bowling Alone sense, whereas cities are more about the development of weak ties in the Granovetter sense.

As another side note, this is probably why the cities are where the disaffected congregate. As I wrote once, small towns are great for those that fit in; “However, such a community serves its misfits poorly. If somebody didn’t mesh with the community for whatever reason, they were doomed to a lifetime of ostracism”. There is no place to hide in a small town. So they leave for the city, where they can manage their identity, revealing only bits at a time, until they find a community within the city where they won’t be ostracized for being who they are (interestingly, I’ve fallen back into using “reveal” rather than “construct” for identity – some habits are hard to break).

Okay, this post has suffered a severe coherence breach (substitute a sci-fi-esque “containment breach” to make that phrase make more sense). I’ll have to worry at it a bit more and come back to it when I actually have a theme rather that just some random thoughts. Mostly I just wanted to title a post “Collaborative selves”, cuz it’s a cool phrase.

I mentioned in my comment on yesterday’s post that “the user interface is a negotiation between the designer and user”, an idea which was definitely inspired by reading Dourish, who makes a similar point in saying that “Computation is a medium”. An interface can also be seen as a conversation, as Suchman describes. So the real question is, what is your interface communicating to the user?

There are a variety of ways to approach this question. One way is to look at it purely from a user perspective, which is the approach Don Norman takes in focusing on affordances – what does the user perceive as ways to interact with this interface? The designer’s intent is lost, and the interface has to stand on its own. This only embraces the surface level of the interface, though, and I’d like to probe deeper.

I’m going to take a step back here to introduce Garfinkel’s concept of “accountability”, which I read about in Dourish. Accountability in this case has to do with an entity being able to account for its behavior, in that it is possible for others to discover its tendencies by observation. Dourish points out that the use of abstraction as a building block in computers has destroyed the accountability of software. He uses the example of networked file systems on an operating system. Because the operating system treats local folders and networked folders as equivalent, both conforming to the abstraction of a “file folder”, it doesn’t warn the user when they start copying a file to the networked folder, even though a network copy will take longer and is more prone to failure. If the user could look inside the folder and discover that it is implemented differently, then the user could make a more informed choice. As he writes, “The features that matter to me as a user are ones that have been hidden by the interface and by the abstraction that it supports.” (p.84) The interface is not accountable; it is not possible to discover through observation what is going on.

How does this apply to the idea of conversational interfaces? An interface which is accountable is open to a deeper exploration than one which is restricted to the top abstraction layer. The user can query it to find out details as needed, much like we query others when they make a conversational reference with which we are unfamiliar. An un-accountable interface, like the file folders, is restricted to the most shallow of interactions, because it can not reveal what is going on underneath. It’s the equivalent of a conversation with a monomaniac, who keeps on repeating the same thing over and over again, regardless of what you ask them. This inability to reframe what it says in response to our query is part of what makes technology alien to us. Humans will try all sorts of different ways to communicate, to get their point across. Technology often only knows one.

So a conversational interface must be accountable in that its internal behavior must be observable and discoverable by the user. Let’s extend the concept of a conversational interface by saying that it should be able to be experienced at multiple levels: a surface level where the user is just getting acquainted (equivalent to sharing nods with your new neighbors in the apartment building), a deeper level where the user starts to figure out some of the more expert details (acquaintances who you share a meal with occasionally), and even deeper levels where the user ascends to guru-hood with the system (equivalent to your closest friends). The user can “converse” with the interface at multiple levels, depending on their needs for the interface.

We can extend this concept further, by introducing the notion of charm. I really liked this quote by Kunstler in his book Home from Nowhere: “charm is the quality of inviting us to participate in another pattern, for instance, to glimpse the pattern of another personality through the veil of manners, customs, pretence.” A charming interface is one that not only can be experienced on multiple levels like the conversational interface, but actively invites the user to explore the deeper levels. Not all users will take the challenge, of course, but none should be so intimidated as to give up because it’s too hard.

I think really great interfaces possess this quality of charm, of invitation. Computer games are a good example of this. They start off with easy levels, building up one’s mastery of the controls until the controls themselves fade to “ready-to-hand” status. Then they continually challenge the user with goals that are just out of reach, inviting the user to explore the world and the interface more deeply. Computer games can be tremendously addictive due to this nature; there’s always one more challenge, one level deeper to go. But it provides a good model for what a charming interface would be.

I’ve wandered a bit afield from my original question: What is your interface communicating to the user? But I think the concepts of accountability, conversation and charm provide a framework for analyzing such communication. An accountable user interface answers the user’s questions as to whether the interface fits the user’s needs. A conversational interface is one that can be used at several different levels, depending on the comfort of the user with the interface. A charming interface invites the user to interact with it, to explore its capabilities, to ask it questions. Each of these lets us go beyond the surface level of affordances, and start to have real conversations with the designer via the medium of the interface.

I think this concept of conversational interfaces is interesting because it frames the question of interface design at multiple levels. How does the interface invite a novice user to try things out without fear of breaking anything? How does the interface indicate to the user what is going on underneath to help them make better choices? How does the interface encourage the user to find more expert methods within the interface? These are all good questions to ask when designing an interface.

I think I’m going to leave it at that for the evening. There’s definitely more to be explored here. Some loose ends I had jotted down from a previous attempt at this article include looking at the Internet and open source software as an example of how open and transparent interfaces lead to diversity and innovation, Jane Jacobs coining of the term “border vacuums” to illustrate how closed, opaque borders shut off diversity, and giving Don Norman more of a fair shake in looking at how affordances can invite interaction. Some neat stuff here. And it’s good that it’s letting me introduce concepts from the Dourish one at a time, because there’s a lot packed into that book and my review’s going to be long enough as it is.