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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Earlier today, my friends were putting their house back together after the party last night, and called me up to ask me where I had put something while cleaning up yesterday afternoon. I told them, hung up, and then thought about what had just happened. It felt almost like something out of a religious myth, where people had made a plea to the heavens for information, and their request had been granted.
I’m reminded of a similar incident last summer when Jofish and I called up our friend Bats from the Home Depot aisle to get his advice on which products we should be buying for our home improvement project. Thirty years ago, we would have been reliant on the salesperson in the store; instead, we were able to consult the most knowledgeable person we know on the subject of construction. It seemed unremarkable at the time, but in retrospect, it shows how technology has made us much more powerful. Anything known by anybody we know can be shared with us at the push of a button. Our intelligence has become multiplied and distributed across dozens if not hundreds of people.
Stories like this make me feel like we are starting to achieve the aspirations espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog when they said “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it”. While none of us are omniscient, the oracles of Google and Wikipedia certainly grant us knowledge. I can pull out my cell phone and within seconds get the answer to almost any question, no matter how trivial (at the party last night, there was a dispute over who sang “Don’t you want me?”, quickly revealed by Google to be Human League). Think about how fantastic it would look to somebody even fifty years ago for me to consult a pocket-sized device and be able to read off so much information.
On a more personal level, we have more tools than ever to know what our friends are doing. I can see what my friends are thinking on blogs and LiveJournal. I can get real-time status updates from Facebook or Twitter. I can even see what they’re doing by looking at their pictures on Flickr. For instance, pictures from last night’s party are already popping up on Facebook, and they were up on Flickr this morning, so only one day later you can see images from an event at which you weren’t present. While it may not be omniscience, it can certainly feel god-like at times.
There are downsides to having this much access to information. It’s easy to become sucked into the flood of information and never do anything with the information gained. One can easily spend all day following the exploits of people around the world (I have a particular weakness for following Chicago sports). We have created this surfeit of information following the American mottos of “More is better” and “Too much is never enough”, but it’s unclear we know what to do with this information access. If we are becoming like gods, we need to learn how to become good at it, and figure out how to turn our partial omniscience (oxymoronic?) into action.
Perhaps omniscience is not a state to which we should aspire. It’s hard to resist the temptation to gather more information in the hopes that the next piece of information will determine what we should do next. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to know everything, but instead to quickly discern the most critical piece of information and figure out how to learn that. When Jofish and I were looking for home improvement advice, we could have spent days doing research. Instead, we called Bats, and used his expertise to sort through the different possibilities quickly.
We still haven’t learned how to live with these increased powers granted to us by technology. Our cultural and societal values are still trying to catch up, as is demonstrated by the various debates over privacy with regard to Facebook and MySpace. Another example of our struggles to deal with the implications of technology is the debates over stem-cell research and the questions raised by genetic engineering. How would we behave if we had the powers of gods? How should gods behave? We may have to answer these questions over the next few decades, especially if those who believe in nanotech or the Singularity turn out to be prescient.
I’ve mostly been able to ignore the subprime mortgage mess. I don’t work in finance (although several of my classmates at Columbia are walking on eggshells), and my investments are mostly long term so the volatility in the markets doesn’t really concern me. But then I read the following paragraph in The Economist:
The boldest suggestion has come from Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a guarantor and supervisor. The crisis is so grave, she argues, that most borrowers who are facing resets but still paying their dues should be given the chance by servicers to switch into fixed-rate loans at the starter rate for the full 30 years.
I’ve since seen other articles indicating that the government is seriously considering plans to freeze these loans at the introductory rate for at least five years. And I’m furious.
When I bought my condo, I looked into adjustable-rate mortgages. They started off at a lower interest rate than a fixed rate, but then would be released to the market rate after the introductory period. I did my research (i.e. I asked my parents) and determined that interest rates were as low as they’d been for decades, so the market rate would almost certainly be higher after the introductory period. With that in mind, I went with the fixed-rate mortgage, despite the initially higher interest rate.
And now I’m being penalized for being fiscally prudent. If they freeze the loans at the introductory rates, then people who made bad decisions are being rewarded by getting to keep their low interest rates, while people like me who made good decisions are penalized with higher interest rates than we otherwise would have had. That doesn’t feel right.
At the same time, I understand the social issues at play here. Having to foreclose on people’s homes doesn’t help anybody - the bank is left with an asset it can’t sell to cover the loan because the housing market has been weakened, and the people lose their home. The government is intervening because the economy is being damaged by the housing market decline. I get all that. But I still can’t get over my initial angry reaction.
Where does social responsibility end and personal responsibility begin? I believe that we should have a social safety net, but I also believe there has to be consequences to actions or the same mistakes will continue to be made. I don’t understand the people who said they didn’t understand what they were getting into and they were misled by evil mean brokers who said they could afford these big loans. Regardless of what they were told, they were the ones signing a contract, and they were the ones responsible for fulfilling the terms of that contract. If they got suckered by a seller in a flea market, we would have no sympathy for them, but because it’s their house, they expect to be bailed out.
There’s been an infantilization of society where people expect that they can make stupid decisions and somebody else will have to deal with the consequences. This has been happening because it removes responsibility from people, and also because institutions benefit by exerting more control over people’s lives (the MIT Freshmen on Campus decision comes to mind). But being an adult and a citizen means taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. It means admitting mistakes and trying to fix those mistakes.
I wonder what can be done to instill that attitude in our citizens moving forward, and how to remove the temptation from institutions to increase their control. That would be the socially responsible initiative, encouraging people to learn from their mistakes rather than seeking to shield them from the consequences of those mistakes.
Subtitled “How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”, this is a book applying the ideas of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to running a business. Maslow’s hierarchy states that people have different needs, but they can’t even think about certain needs until more basic ones are considered. We have to have food and shelter and safety before we ever start thinking about friends and family. We have to have friends and family before we worry about fulfillment, etc.
Conley applied these ideas in running his hotel management company, Joie de Vivre. He says that everybody involved in a business, from employees and customers to investors, have a hierarchical set of needs. For employees, the baseline need is for good benefits, a fair salary and to be treated well. But that’s not enough to get employees to be loyal participants in the business. Once those basic needs are satisfied, they have social needs - they need recognition from their peers and from their management. If all of their basic and social needs are met, then they look for meaning in their job, where it’s not just a job, but a calling, sharing the company’s mission.
He goes through similar pyramids for customers and investors, and observes that only by reaching the top levels of each pyramid do you get fanatic employees, fanatically loyal customers (Apple), and fanatically loyal investors. And getting those fanatics is a great place for a business to be.
These ideas make a lot of sense to me. As I mentioned at Thanksgiving, I’m fortunate that I’m in a position where I can worry about that top level of the employee pyramid, where I’m looking for meaning in my work. It also helps explain why I’ve been dissatisfied at other jobs in the past, despite getting paid well and having autonomy - I either didn’t feel I was getting the recognition I deserved within the company, or I didn’t share in the company’s mission.
While there aren’t any radically new ideas here, this book presents a good framework to think about the issues associated with running a company. It’s not the answer, but I like the viewpoint it presents, and it’s one I’ve referred to several times since I started reading this book.
When I first went to work for Applied Strategies, I didn’t really understand what they did. Applied Strategies (at that time) specialized in doing demand forecasting using decision analysis, which meant that we constructed mathematical models to estimate the size of a market for a drug or a vaccine. Our analysts used complicated decision trees, taking into account the probability of getting to clinical trials, succeeding in each phase of clinical trial, getting FDA approval, what other competitors were entering the same space, how much it would cost to build a factory and scale up production, etc.
At the end of all of these calculations, a number was delivered as to the size of the market. And I was horrified to think that this number was a deliverable. There were an absurd number of assumptions made in the calculation of that number, and changing any of those assumptions would alter the number significantly. So I couldn’t figure out what the value of that number was.
I eventually figured out (or had it explained to me) that the real deliverable wasn’t the number; it was the model. By constructing this model that had all of these assumptions and possible inputs, our customers could then see for themselves how altering certain assumptions would affect the result. The model also helped our customers do a sensitivity analysis and figure out which inputs had the greatest effect on the final result, which determined the inputs for which they needed better data. In other words, the deliverable wasn’t even the model - it was using the model to help the customer determine the relevant factors in their analysis, changing how they viewed the world.
In class this evening, we were discussing various frameworks for strategy analysis, from Michael Porter’s Five Forces Analysis, to a standard SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), to a PEST framework (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological). One of my classmates at the break was commenting that he wasn’t sure that he saw the value in such analyses, because things change so fast these days that the result of the analysis is stale as soon as you’re done.
His comment reminded me of my Applied Strategies experience, and I observed that the point of the analysis was not in the specific results, but in the change in view that results from doing the analysis. For instance, us technologists find it very easy to get sucked into the everyday grind of specific deliverables. But if we do a five forces analysis, even if the results of that analysis are immediately obsolete, it starts to get us thinking about the big picture of the overall industry and where it’s heading. Doing such an analysis changes how we see the world, and that is the important result.
I am also reminded of scenario planning, as described by Peter Schwartz in The Art of the Long View and at a Long Now talk. The point of doing a scenario analysis isn’t to predict the future - it is to prepare oneself for the future. By examining the larger trends that can shape the future and how one’s organization would react to those trends, scenario planning allows the organization to identify key pointers that indicate which way trends are heading and therefore be able to take proactive rather than reactive action.
This idea that the results of a process are a change in view rather than a tangible result resonates with me. Many organizations claim that people are their most important asset, but few organizations follow through in realizing that changing the viewpoints of their people is among the most effective investments they can make. If everybody in the organization is thinking strategically (shades of Semler), then the organization will have achieved greater results than they ever could have by investing in technology or tangible assets.
Several people have asked me why I’m pursuing this degree in technology management, when it appears to them that I have all the skills for management already. This viewpoint change is a significant component. I know how to think like a scientist, an engineer, a technologist, and an end-user. I even have some inkling of how to think like a manager. But this program is giving me the tools to think like an executive, and to put issues into the terms they will understand.
As an aspiring generalist, I believe in the power of bringing multiple perspectives to an issue, of having many mental models in my toolkit. I want to be able to communicate effectively with every level of the organization, from the peons doing the front line work, all the way up to the executive board who are concerned with ROI and shareholder value. I want to be able to re-frame issues and ideas in such a way that they make sense to anybody I talk to (part of the point of this blog is for me to practice explaining ideas within the constraints of a few paragraphs). I’m still not quite sure what precise career path this is preparing me for, but I’m investing in the most valuable resource I have, my mind, and I look forward to the eventual returns on that investment.
Paul Graham makes the provocative claim that “It may not matter all that much where you go to college.” He’s been evaluating startup founders as part of his Y Combinator program for a few years now, and “what we’ve found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it’s negligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to school.” While I agree with his premise that it’s important to evaluate people on their merits, not on where they went to school, I disagree with his conclusion that the college choice does not matter.
Going to a school like MIT drives one to achieve more than one would otherwise. Graham acknowledges that “The other students are the biggest advantage of going to an elite college; you learn more from them than the professors. But you should be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you make a conscious effort to find smart friends.” But I think he underestimates the difficulty of finding those “smart friends” at a typical university as compared to the elite.
In high school, I was never particularly challenged despite being in all of the gifted classes in a very good public school with other privileged intelligent kids. Most of my classmates went on to the University of Illinois, which is a great school, but I would have been able to continue coasting there, getting high grades without really trying. Maybe there would have been a few people there who could challenge me, but finding those few people out of the tens of thousands of students would have been extremely difficult.
Going to MIT raised the bar for me. At MIT, I had to work much harder than I had ever worked before just to keep up. My freshman year, I had a physics classmate who regularly doubled my test scores (he’d get a 96 when I got a 48). Other friends were able to maintain their straight A average with ease while I was struggling to learn study habits that I had never previously needed. I learned humility at MIT in a way that never would have happened at someplace like Illinois.
And such humility continues to be reinforced. While I might be considered successful by many people based on my income and my achievements, I’m below average for my friends. On one mailing list of my friends who are managers, the introductions made me realize I was among the oldest and least accomplished of the participants, as everybody else was a CxO or VP or Director. I haven’t been featured in a New York Times article, as many of my friends have. I don’t have a patent to my name. I am not the world expert at anything. Just this past weekend, it was amazing to hear about all of the great things that people I know have been doing. Because my friends from MIT set a high standard, I am driven to achieve more than I would settle for otherwise.
Graham’s point may be that entrepreneurs need to be sufficiently self-motivated as to not need the competition of others to drive themselves past their limits. I agree with him that one can get an education of similar value at other universities, as the actual course material is the same. Perhaps a proto-entrepreneur would take full advantage of such opportunities without being forced to by the competition of other students. But I know I would not have - that may just demonstrate my laziness, but I often don’t see a reason to work harder than I have to in a given situation.
I also agree that it’s possible that the people that get into elite universities and do well at those universities are the rules-followers, and that to be a good entrepreneur means being a rule-breaker. I would contend, though, that if one can’t figure out how to master the college grading system, one is going to have a significant challenge figuring out how to master the ever-shifting economy of the real world. Learning the rules of a system and how to win under those rules is a skill that is only dismissed by those that can’t figure out how to beat that system.
As I said at the beginning, I agree with Graham’s premise that we should judge people on their own merits, not on where they went to college. But I strongly disagree with his conclusion that college therefore doesn’t matter, as I believe that my merits are much stronger than they would otherwise have been because I went to MIT. I have achieved more and gone further because I struggled through MIT than I ever would have if I had coasted through another school. And I still believe I have a long way to go, because my MIT-educated set of friends makes me believe that I shouldn’t settle for where I am now.
P.S. Having said all that, the admissions process to get into an elite university is truly ridiculous at this point - they may just be flipping coins in the back as there are far more qualified applicants than there are spaces in the incoming class. But I still believe that the education you get is worth it if you can get in because of the caliber of the other students.
P.P.S. Speaking of university, I went to the first class of the term this evening, and this is shaping up to be our hardest term yet. Man, this class is going to be rough. But it’s going to be really good for me if the prof follows through on what his intended goals are.
I liked the career advice from Scott Adams last week (also seen at Seppo’s blog), where he points out:
…if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.
The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.
I think that Adams’s point is that no matter how narrow a field you define for yourself, you’re not going to be the best in the world at it. However, once you start combining fields, the possibilities go up exponentially so intersections of two or three fields are less populated and competitive.
Adams is also right about not having to reach the top of a field to reap the benefits. Most fields have a learning curve of diminishing returns, where you can learn 80-90% of the field in a few years, but have to spend the rest of your life to get the last 10-20%. Even worse, other people in the field are simultaneously mastering the field, so you have to work continuously to match the rising level of mastery. However, if you settle for the competence of 80% rather than mastery, you can leave the field after a few years and learn something else.
One important benefit of competence in a field is the ability to speak the language or the jargon. Being able to communicate with the masters of the field means you can benefit from their expertise without having to attain it yourself. You can engage their interest and convince them to apply their skills to the problem by framing it in terms they understand. This skill is particularly important when dealing with a discipline that tends to be dismissive of outsiders, like, say, software developers.
Adams’s post reminds me of Grant McCracken’s post where he points out the importance of hiring people who have more than one deep interest:
Once someone has mastered one additional identity (or deep interest) it is easier to master new identities in the same way (and perhaps for the same reason) that knowing one additional language makes it master more languages. The candidate has learned to learn.
By learning how to learn, people can reach the point of competence in a field ever faster, increasing the number of possible ways to combine their competencies and create a niche for themselves. They can speak the languages of the experts, making them a “boundary spanner” across different areas of the organization. They can find the innovation happening at the constructive interference between fields.
I’m biased, of course, in that I call myself a generalist. I have to take the Adams strategy of combining fields, because grad school in physics proved that I don’t have the necessary focus to succeed in a single field. I’ve covered this terrain before (see the comments on my post about passion), but it’s always going to be a continuing theme in my life until I find a niche where I achieve “success”.
I’m still working out what fields I want to combine. Given my previous careers in physics and software development, and my current foray into management, leading a team to develop scientific software might suit me nicely. I’m also interested in the possibility of leading an interdisciplinary team - I really enjoyed working at Signature with the mix of biologists and physicists and engineers and software developers. The post by Adams is a good reminder that I’m not necessarily drifting - I’m just building up competence in the several fields I need to create my niche.
This book is based on the idea that complex organized behavior can emerge out of simple atomic behavior. In physics, simple atoms interact with each other and generate complex behavior like temperature. Such models were never thought to be applicable to humans because people are too complicated and have free will. Buchanan collects work being done by “social physicists” to show that macroscopic human behavior, with hundreds of people interacting, can be modeled by “social atoms” following simple behaviors.
One aspect which made it difficult to construct such models of human behavior is that people learn. Atoms may blindly have the same response every time when presented with a certain situation, but if a response doesn’t work, people will try a different one. We can now use computers to model people’s learning behavior, and see the dynamic equilibrium that results.
For instance, he cites a paper by Brian Arthur discussing the “bar problem”. Arthur liked to go to the El Farol bar near the Santa Fe Institute on Thursday evenings when the Irish musician Gerry Carty played there. But about half the time that he went, the bar was too crowded for him to enjoy the music. So he started guessing when other people wouldn’t be going to try to plan his visits. He realized that others must be doing the same thing.
Being an economist, he decided to model the behavior of attendees. Some attendees would guess that if it were crowded the week before, it wouldn’t be crowded the next week. Others would feel that it would stay crowded. In either case, though, if a strategy weren’t working, people would abandon it and try a different strategy. And when he plotted the results of what bar attendance would look like, it fluctuated wildly around the maximum bar capacity. Why? If somebody hit on a strategy that works for letting them attend when the bar was uncrowded, other people would eventually try that strategy, which would make the bar crowded on those nights, making that winning strategy now a poor strategy. There is no stable equilibrium with “atoms” that learn. Unsurprisingly, the same model approximates the behavior of the stock market, another domain where any successful strategy is immediately copied to the point of no longer being useful.
Another “social atom” model that I really liked was one of a world where there are atoms of four colors: red, blue, green and yellow. When those atoms interact, they can adopt one of four strategies: cooperate with everybody, cooperate with nobody, cooperate with atoms of the same color, cooperate with atoms of different colors. The colors provide no evolutionary advantage whatsoever - they are just an easily identifiable way to tell atoms apart. What happens in a population of randomly colored atoms each starting with a randomly chosen strategy?
Surprisingly, atoms that only cooperate with their own color soon grow to dominate the population. The atoms self-segregate into neighborhoods of like color, and atoms that cooperate with all colors are taken advantage of by all sides before being squeezed out. Axelrod and Hammond call it The Evolution of Ethnocentric Behavior. The atoms in the model have very simple behaviors, and yet generate a result that looks suspiciously like racism. Coincidence?
One last model that I liked took a look at wealth distribution. It started with a population of atoms that each had the same amount of money. The atoms had to preserve a certain amount of money (equivalent to rent and food), and were allowed to invest the rest. Like all investments, the investment was risky, with a chance of losing the money invested, but provided significant returns if successful.
The population ended up with the distribution of wealth we see in the world where a small minority controlled the vast majority of the wealth. The model did not include skill in picking investments or any sort of ability by the wealthy to protect their investments by lobbying, so those weren’t factors. Buchanan explains it as being a result of the power of compound interest, or as the paper authors Bouchaud and Mezard called it, wealth condensation. An atom gets lucky and is successful in their first few investments. Now they can risk a much greater proportion of their wealth in investment because their basic needs are satisfied. Because they risk more money, they gain even more when they are successful, and in a large enough population, somebody gets lucky enough times to end up with all the wealth.
I highly recommend this book. It’s a quick read, but it’s thought provoking. These simple models fascinate me with their ability to generate results that look like people in the aggregate. The models don’t “prove” anything, but it’s instructive to realize that such results as racism or wealth inequality may have nothing to do with people being “evil” or “greedy” - they may simply be a byproduct of people learning successful adaptations within the system. And if such models can be used to predict the behavior of people in the aggregate, is social physics the beginning of Asimov’s psychohistory?
My social network would be considered poor by traditional standards, where more connections are better. Yet my network is powerful because I know connectors. I only know a few people in nextNY, but I know Charlie O’Donnell who knows everybody else. I’ve met a few people through likemind, but I’m friends with Noah Brier, one of the people who started it.
My network is structured differently than the connectors, who have direct links to hundreds of people. But I’m only one link away from the people in their networks. Last year, I called this quality being a social butterfly, but after finding the social network analysis page mentioned in that post, I like the term “boundary spanner”.
Thinking about my network got me thinking about the networks that each of the different networkers would have. The rolodex networker will have a broad but shallow network with very weak links. The connector will also have a network with many direct links but because of their personality, those links will be stronger. I have fewer direct links, but those links are entrances into other networks (I should note that I was not motivated by expanding my network, but by meeting new and interesting people, who tend to know other interesting people).
One of the limitations on the structure of personal networks is that social networks require maintenance or they fade away. We get together with our friends, we attend networking events, we drop people emails or postcards to let them know we’re thinking of them, etc. And that network maintenance takes time and effort.
How people choose to spend their “social maintenance budget” determines what kind of network they will have. Some will spend a few minutes with many people, shaking hands at happy hours and the like, creating a large network with weak links. Others will spend more time with fewer people, creating a smaller network with stronger links. Then there are the more typical mixed networks: strong ties with family and a few friends, weaker ties with coworkers, weak ties with folks at the gym or the bar, etc.
You can increase the size of your “social maintenance budget”, but that requires sacrificing something else in life. You only have so many hours in the day and so much energy. The agenda networkers who are seeking funding might be out every night looking for investors, but at the cost of time with friends and family.
Alas, networking is not an even playing field. Some people are naturally charismatic and memorable e.g. the connectors. They can get far more out of their “social maintenance budget” because they require less time with people to maintain a strong connection. Those of who us with wallflower personalities have to work harder to maintain a similar number of connections, so we have fewer connections. Different people, different types of networks.
So think about where you’re spending your time and social energy:
If you don’t have the network that you’d like, assess your personality type and choose the type of networking most appropriate. Because I’m not an extroverted connector, I have to concentrate on fewer connections so I need to make those connections count. If I’m going to spend my “social maintenance budget” on expanding my network, I need to find those connectors to get the greatest return.
P.S. Boy, that last sentence sounds really Machiavellian. In reality, I’m more likely to meet connectors because two introverts rarely start conversations with each other. And once I’m in a conversation, I can build connections with the people that reach out. But my larger point remains - in a world of limited time and energy, I have to make choices, so these posts are my way of thinking through the implications of those choices.
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!
When I worked at Signature BioScience, there were ten other software developers, all of whom wrote better and more sophisticated code than I did. Yet I survived through multiple layoffs as Signature spiralled into bankruptcy, and I was the only developer re-hired by MDS Sciex when they picked up the pieces from Signature’s carnage. Seem peculiar?
It was actually an easy choice for Sciex. At the time Signature went under, I had written the vast majority of the code actually being used by the company. The difference was that the other developers went to the biologists, asked them what software they needed, put together a specification based on what they were told, and coded to that specification. Yet somehow, even though they delivered code that did exactly what was requested, it never did what what the biologists wanted.
My skill as a software developer was not in my programming skills, but in my ability to identify and fix the underlying problem. When a biologist asked me for software that did A, I’d talk to them, realize that they were actually trying to solve problem B, and give them software that solved problem B by doing C. When I worked as a consultant, one of my clients said in admiring bewilderment, “You never give me what I ask for, but it always does what I need!” Similarly, the biologists at Signature eventually said “Eric just reads our minds!” when asked why they used my software over the software delivered by other developers.
I was thinking about this recently because identifying and solving the underlying problem seems to be a general concern of management. To take a concrete example, if sales aren’t meeting expectations, what’s really going on?
Is it that
As a manager facing this situation, it’s important not to dive into fixing the problem without first determining which of these possibilities apply, because you could end up like those developers at Signature, doing a lot of work with nothing to show for it. It’s also important to not to get too attached to a single solution (like making your people work harder), because that’s the “everything looks like a nail” situation.
As an aside, I think this is the idea behind the theory of constraints in manufacturing, as described by Eliyahu Goldratt in his books The Goal and Critical Chain, but I haven’t read those yet.
This idea of first identifying the real problem also applies in the softer side of management. When somebody isn’t doing a task assigned to them, what’s going on?
It would be easy to assume any of these and take action, but picking the wrong one could exacerbate the problem.
As an aspiring manager, I believe it’s impossible to distinguish between these various possibilities without actually talking to the employee in question. All the project management software in the world won’t help you figure out what’s really happening - such software can only provide an idealized abstraction of the situation. Five minutes of conversation can often identify the obstructing issue, and make it clear what the appropriate response is. I also believe that such conversation shows interest in the employee and makes it clear to them they are valued, but that’s a personal bias.
The difficulty of identifying the underlying problem is why the characteristics of reflection and thoughtfulness are so important in a manager. It’s too easy to jump on the first solution presented and spend resources without having any impact on the problem. You can tell the companies that do this - they unquestioningly adopt the meme-of-the-year from Re-engineering to Six Sigma to Total Quality Management to Agile Programming, hoping that this time it will solve their problems.
So when faced with a problem, don’t assume you know what’s going on and immediately start yelling out orders in an attempt to exude authority. Take the time to talk to everybody associated with the problem, figure out what they think is going on, get agreement on the problem and possible solutions, and go from there.
