Designing the inevitable sequence

You walk down the stairs of the subway station. Pay at the turnstiles, step onto the platform, and your train arrives. Once on the train, you remind yourself to switch at 59th Street for the uptown express. You pull in at 59th Street, and the uptown express is waiting, doors wide open. 

You made your connection. Next stop, home. 

A perfectly arranged set of moments makes for a satisfying experience. 
But what happens when things don’t line up quite so well?

Frustration, questions, anger?

To me, good design is often a matter of sequencing experiences to result in an inevitably great outcome. Arrangement not reinvention can lead to the most satisfying of experiences. 

Recently, I came across two thoughts that highlight this theme, and they come from radically different perspectives, fields, and time periods. 

First, I was listening to how John Williams describes composing the iconic Indiana Jones theme song. He said,

“A very simple little sequence of notes, but I spend more time on those little bits of musical grammar to get them just right, so they seem inevitable, they seem like they’ve always been there they’re so simple. And I don’t know how many permutations I will go through with a six-note motif like that — one note down, one note up — and spend a lot of time on these little simplicities, which are often the hardest things to capture.” 

And then, after youtube, I was reading  Plato, as you do ;-) and the following idea struck me as connected. In The Apology, Plato wrote,

“I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.”

Taking the time to arrange experiences an order, and with connections between experiences, that feel, as Williams says, “inevitable” can lead to lasting satisfaction, maybe even “success,” over time.

A better way to write comments

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
- Marshall McLuhan

You’ve just finished a design or a piece of writing that you’ve been working on for a while now. 

You welcome feedback from your team because it helps you improve the work. Yet, you also have an uneasy feeling that comments can often generate. How big is the change that someone is suggesting? How crucial is it? Will you understand it well enough and have enough time to make it?

Without a clear understanding of the amount of work suggested, all you see is a stream of comments, which range from notes about small details to concerns about large sections of the work. Each comment requires time to understand and interpret.

It can be overwhelming. 

So how can you avoid feeling overwhelmed?

I have written in the past about giving feedback and how you can “Contribute more than you comment.” Feedback comes in all shapes and sizes, and often that feedback should not come in the form of a comment at all. But if feedback needs to be in the form of a comment, then there’s something you can ask your commenters to do, which will help you avoid being overwhelmed and will also help your commenters to contemplate and clarify their feedback. 

Ask your commenters to make one small change that can make a big difference. Ask them to add a prefix to their comment. 

This prefix is using the words small, medium, or large.  

Small: for changes that are minor errors or updates. 

Medium: For issues that require a bit more thought or collaboration. 

Large: For fundamental issues with the idea. 

Ideally, the moment someone adds the prefix “Large” to a comment, they should realize that large comments are not comments; they are opportunities for the commenter to contribute an idea or set up a conversation to help improve the situation. 

Adding one of these three small words at the start of a comment provides some much-needed context and gives the receiver of the comment a sense of priority in their feedback. 

Try this with your work collaborators, and let me know how it goes. 

Of course, this kind of change takes time, so to begin with, try the exercise yourself. Read through the comments people have made on your work, and tag them small, medium, and large. Then, try it when you comment on other people’s work–how does it feel to explain your comments as small, medium, or large? 

Commenting tools are helpful for collaboration, but we must make sure we control our tools rather than them controlling us. 

Practice makes satisfaction

“Practicing invites a kind of intimacy, a moment of mindfulness that we can cut and paste into our daily routines. Once we appreciate that practice is not an endgame, our ego disappears, and we enter the experience with complete commitment.”

– Xenia Hanusiak 

“Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur”Psyche Ideas

Every week I practice a new soccer skill. My most recent skill is called around the world.
Check it out ;-)

Many people would see this as a habit. Habits as a topic have taken off in the last few years; everywhere you look, there’s a new book about making better habits for health, wealth, eating, and writing... The list is endless, and yet I would say working on soccer skills each week is not a habit but a practice—an intentional practice of skill-building. 

This distinction may seem subtle, but let me explain. Here’s a typical series of events that starts with an intentional practice and ends up with a habit. 

Step 1: Start with an intention. Let’s say you want to get fit. You begin to practice by going for a run. 

Step 2: You decide you will go for a run every other day. 
Step 3: You become used to it, and it becomes a habit of running. Now, no matter what, you are going to go for a run. 

I would say stop at step 1.

Once running becomes a habit, it can become less about intention; you can lose track of why you were doing it in the first place, much like a video gamer loses track of time so he can have one more boss battle or a wine drinker forgets precisely what that great taste was in their mouth from the first glass.

The habit of running is no longer a practice; practice is based on improvement, regular challenges, trying something you can't do, and not repeating something you can.

An example of intention-based practice turning to habit is artist Johnathan Harris’s project “One photo a day.” His initial intent was to be more present to capture the moment by taking a picture daily and posting it to his website. But over time, the intent was lost; the practice turned into a habit. He found he was taking pictures every day and wondering not about the feeling he was trying to capture but what subscribers to his website would think about the image. An almost compulsive need to take the kind of pictures that would get a reaction from the audience, he was habitual in making photos he knew could please an audience rather than challenging himself to create images that intentionally captured his thoughts. He was on autopilot. 

So if that’s not it, what is a practice?
Popular wisdom says that if you get into a habit of doing something, you will improve over time and gain mastery. Ten thousand hours of practice, and you can master any skill. Yet if this were true, all those who run for fun would be elite athletes after 15 years of running, and all the bloggers would be excellent writers. What’s missing from the conversation is that each of those magical 10,000 hours must be highly focused deliberate practice hours where you focus on improving a specific weakness or trying something beyond the repetition.

An example of intentional practice in my own life was teaching my son how to play football (soccer). In “Setting challenges, not goals”, I reflected on how we worked on intentional practice this way: “By making a target that was challenging, all his other skills were improving. He was improving overall even if he was only hitting the “top bins” targets once in every ten attempts. On the other attempts, he almost always found the rest of the goal. Creating this artificial constraint allowed a range of other skills to improve. The actual goal of the exercise became almost irrelevant, he would shoot 100, 120, and 150 shots every session. He could sense the improvement, so not hitting our artificially created targets was not a disappointment but a challenge.”

This intentional practice led to him getting much better at football. He could have just carried on kicking the ball into an open net or getting to take three shots in a 30-minute game on a team. Instead, he intentionally focused on hitting top bins (the upper 90s), which seemed challenging, but was very satisfying once attained. But it is still a challenge and always will be. He knows he will lose this ability if he stops intentionally practicing this skill. 

A practice is not a singular act; it requires help and challenges. While turning up is a good start, getting better at something is the thing that keeps you going. You often need other people to help you and challenge you to improve, to realize that practices are not about making progress in your life toward an end goal; as Adam Curtis, one of my favorite authors and filmmakers, said, “One of the most radical things you could do today is make something amazing and not tell anyone else about it.”

A practice is not about the endpoint; it’s about being in the moment and enjoying kicking a ball, writing a sentence, or even the act of making a mark on a blank piece of paper.

2023 the year of running

Happy new year! It's 2023, and inevitably thoughts turn to New Year’s resolutions. 

Getting fitter is often at the top of many people's lists. Start running! It's the easiest thing to do, and no equipment, memberships, or apps are required. But I think we can all agree, running is sweaty, makes your body ache, is dull, and it’s pretty hard to motivate yourself to go. Just don't do it! 

But what if there was another way to start running that didn’t leave you sweating profusely, gasping for breath, and feeling the next day as if you had been run over by a bus? Last year, I wrote “Running for everyone” based on my own experiences in 2022, about an approach to running that allows regular people to engage with running and even enjoy it without any of the downsides we usually think about. Oh, and by the way, you will be running faster after 2-3 months of following this approach. 

So maybe running isn't so bad. ;-) Try it and let me know what you think. 

Happy 2023! 

Just do it.

“What’s the hardest thing about writing? It isn’t having the idea or structuring your thoughts, or even having good prose. The hardest thing about writing is getting started.” - KP

When you sit down to do something, there’s often a conflict. Part of you is the person who is excited about the possibilities, and part of you is the person who wants to critique anything new.The critic often wins; before even putting pen to paper, the doubts begin. Before you know it, distraction kicks in. All the momentum you had is gone.

So what can you do about this? In Read, curate, and write, I found that to start an idea, you can first start with other people’s ideas. The act of reading or seeing and then curating other people’s work can help to overcome that first step of putting your own idea down on paper. Curation will become an essential skill in the future as news and ideas become homogenized by all-seeing algorithms; people who can collect thoughts in novel ways will be precious indeed.

My second approach is to use drawing as an entry point to organize your ideas. In Visual Thinking, I offer a simple method for using sketching to organize your thoughts and to generate that all-important first mark on the page.

That all-important mark lets you leave the chief critic in your head behind to start the work of bringing your idea to life!

Game Over

“There is a design practice called “gamification” which attempts to use the trappings of games (reward structures, points, etc.) to make people engage more with product offerings. Does it miss the point of games? It is often layered on top of systems that lack the rich interpretability of a good game. A reward structure alone does not a game make.” Theory of fun for game design by Raph Koster

The idea of gamifying work has been around for a while: If you do this, we will give you a bonus, stock options, a promotion, something just out of reach. In the end, everyone is dissatisfied. The employee never quite gets the reward they want, and the employer has to constantly increase the rewards. Otherwise, the employee will leave to start a new game with a new company to see if they can play it better the next time around. It’s a finite game.

In these two articles, I have tried to think instead about work systems that are infinite in nature. In Grow vs. Manage, I explore how to avoid the standard crisis management version of leadership by using a more sustainable approach in which people practice daily skills that lead to growth over time, preventing the typical all-or-nothing system.

In Leadership, I explore the idea that leadership is not about having all the answers, but instead, it’s about setting up a “rich interpretable space” that gives people the support and tools they need to lead from the bottom up. It can be hard to describe this type of leadership because it’s not about what you as an individual have to do but more about what you can create for others.

In the same way that playing a game with poorly defined rules can lead to frustration, working in environments that don’t encourage growth and only offer short-term rewards often lead to game over before you ever get to explore the rich possibilities of any job.

Below is a collection of books that talk about this idea of leadership and team cultures that allow for the creation of a rich interpretable space.

Dune by Frank Herbert
“Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him…once…long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”

Punished by Rewards  by Alfie Kohn
“American adults, including parents, are firm believers in rewards. Typically, it is assumed that rewards will increase children’s interest in an academic assignment or their commitment to altruistic behavior.“

Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull
“Asking this much of our people, even when they wanted to give it, was not acceptable.”

Ask Iwata by Hobonichi
“This is why I spent my first month as president interviewing everybody at the company. The discoveries were endless.”

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
“You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.”

Workplace

There is no going back to the way things were, and even if you could, would you want to? Ideas on how to make our new situation even better.

Have you ever been to Trader Joe’s? (You have to live in America, I think) The food and snacks, both frozen and fresh, are excellent. But the best thing about Trader Joe’s for me is the staff. No matter which store you go to, from Oakland to NYC, everyone who works there has a confident cheery can-do attitude and kindness that goes beyond the usual ‘have a nice day.’

I was intrigued by this, and I asked one of the store managers, ‘How do they hire such friendly people?’ His answer was revealing.

He told me that their hiring system was not unique. It was the culture of the place that was different. The culture would affect anyone who joined Trader Joe’s. That can do, always there to help attitude, he said, was infectious. The pay and benefits helped, and soon the opportunity to be unionized, but the main thing is the culture. If everyone around you is behaving helpfully, then you eventually adopt their way of thinking.

As we all figure out how to work before and after COVID, culture, it seems, is one of the hardest things to measure but has the most significant impact on how people feel about work. To that end, I wrote the following two articles on how to start building some of that hard-to-bottle work culture into your everyday work lives.

“Work culture” looks at ways to focus your time, create a more balanced work culture and find the suitable space and environments for the best work.

For many people, remote work is the new norm. “Thrive in your virtual workplace” looks at this new type of workplace as an ecosystem and provides a guide on how to make this new virtual workspace work for you and your teams.

There is no going back to the way things were, and even if you could, would you want to? In some cases, people have found new ways of working which let them balance their lives. I hope in these two articles you find some valuable ideas to make this unique situation better.

Teamwork

“Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.” - Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc

What does it mean to get the team right? What are the building blocks for working with people? 

Over the last few years, I have written several articles to explore these questions, realizing that to build stronger teams, it’s essential to consider these themes:

Ethics: How do you treat people ethically?
“Worker Cogs” considers how treating people with respect, thoughtfulness, and a baseline of ethics can build the foundation for your team. 

System: What is the system that your team can work in?
“Building an ecosystem, not a process” considers how one sports team uses an ecosystem built by and for the team.

Communication: How does your team communicate?
Once you work as a team, communication is essential. “Contribute more than you comment” covers the spectrum of ways to communicate and treat people's time and efforts with respect. 

Connection: How do you find the right people to work with? 
Finally, “The best team in the world” shows the power of expanding your viewpoint and finding the people who can tackle more challenging work, the work that makes you grow. 

I‘ll leave you with this great quote from Terry Orlick’s book Cooperative Games: “The important thing is for everyone to participate, to develop their skills, and to help each other get better at whatever they are doing.”

Contribute more than you comment

Now more than ever, there are many ways to collaborate online at work. Google docs, Asana, Figma, and Miro… each week, there seems to be a new service that promises to improve online collaboration.

Along with all this collaboration comes criticism in the form of written comments. Adding comments to critique work is the easiest thing in the world. Just click the comments button and type away; before you know it, you have left ten comments for your collaborator on how they could improve their work. 

Now stop for a moment. Let’s imagine you are not on a computer but in a room with the person who created this fragile new piece of work. Would you be so quick to launch into a list of ten things that are wrong or could be improved? 

Hmm, maybe you would start by praising some aspects of the work before launching into your critique. Perhaps you would add some context as to why you think something doesn’t work. You might even stand up at a whiteboard and draw or write something to move an idea forward or to clarify a critique. 

Neil Postman, a professor of media ecology, wrote that “language is an abstraction about experience, whereas pictures are concrete representations of experience.” If nothing else, this means that there must be more complex and nuanced methods of communication than a comment box. 

Yet, the comment box has become our medium for communication: the hammer to fix all your problems, from putting a nail in a wall to fixing your dishwasher. But in reality, the people on the receiving end of your multiple comments are still people with feelings and thoughts. Much like fixing your dishwasher with a hammer, you may get mixed results if you only communicate in a single medium.

This diagram illustrates the range of collaboration communications you could have. On one axis we have the complexity of the problem while the other axis looks at the quality or speed of response. This leaves us with four quadrants.

Conversation
A thoughtful response to a complex problem

Contribution
A thoughtful response to a simple problem

Checklist 
Quick response to a complex problem


Comments
Quick response to a simple problem

Conversation
A thoughtful response to a conceptual problem

When you have a complex, open-ended problem, what you need is high-quality collaboration that offers multiple avenues of possible investigation, which for most situations only a person-to-person conversation can offer. Your best bet here is to have an in-person, phone, or video conversation.

This is appropriate for something like:

• A planning meeting for a new project 

• Analysis of raw research 

• Creating a new idea or concept 

• Teaching a person a new skill

Yet, too often, organizations use this type of collaboration in inappropriate ways, and this makes this mode of collaboration lose its value. How often have you been in a meeting where you just sat there and listen to someone talk to you for 45 mins? 

In-person conversations are valuable pieces of time and mind space; potent and essential, but also to be treated with respect.

Contribute
A thoughtful response to a tactical problem

When you have a tactical problem that could be solved in multiple ways you need a thorough response. Show, don’t tell. In this case, it’s essential to show why you don’t think something works and what could be better. This could be by adding your version of a sentence, sending back a reordered meeting agenda, or creating a quick sketch of your version of a design, making what Postman calls a “concrete expression of experience,” 

This kind of considered response allows the other person to clearly understand your thinking and shows that you have put time and effort into a complex problem. In our increasingly asynchronous world, it removes the ambiguity that text alone can often have

Checklist
A quick response to a conceptual problem

When the problem is conceptual and complex but requires a quick response, it is often better to reply with a checklist of actions rather than a specific critique or idea. 

Checklists are powerful; consider this example of how a doctor’s simple procedure checklist for intensive care doctors saved lives. 

“The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven percent to zero… They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.”

A Life-Saving Checklist

How does this apply in design? For example, I often see people offering comments like “you need to think more about the way this interface element interacts with the rest of the webpage”. The “you need to think more” part of that sentence is highly ambiguous. What does that mean, do I sit and think at my desk, do I ask for help, do I start doing more research? Which one is it?

In this case, a checklist comment could look more like this:

“Not sure this interface element works, try: 

1. Defining the problem you are solving 

2. Defining the outcomes the user expects

3. Looking at how other companies solve this problem, and if they meet the user outcomes you have created. 

4. Creating 3-4 options of designs based on the problem, outcome, and learnings from researching other similar interfaces.” 

This checklist helps the person receiving the comment take actionable steps toward solving the problem.

Comment
A quick response to a tactical problem

Change the name of a button, reduce the number of agenda items in a meeting, or change the color of the poster; these are the kinds of comments best suited for the commenting systems we have today. Short to write, easy to understand, and actionable. 

They all start with an action (“change”, or “reduce”) with a specific adjustment attached. There is no ambiguity in the request.

In much the same way that we overuse in-person meetings, the value of comments is much reduced if this is the primary medium in which we collaborate with others. People start to ignore comments and important ideas get lost. 

Reducing the way we collaborate down to short messages or drawn-out meetings sells us short. So the next time you collaborate with someone, remotely or in person, on any type of project, think about these four modes of communication: conversation, contribution, checklist, and comment. It might change the way you make things together. 

Alternatively, you can carry on trying to fix that dishwasher with your hammer 😁

Running for everyone

I always associated running with being sweaty, out of breath, injuries, and expensive sneakers.

In the last eight months, I have started running; I now run about 60-80km a month. For context, I used to run 0km a month. By trying to understand the process of running, I discovered some fantastic methods and ideas about the process of running and dispelled my preconceptions.

First, I had to run slow to run fast: the Maffetone method has some interesting insights about using your heart rate to improve your slow running. I also found that I did not really know how to run: Tony Riddle is a coach that teaches you how to relearn what you knew intuitively as a kid. The book Born to Run helped me understand that those fancy sneakers were not the way to healthy feet and injury-free running. Finally, I learned to breathe better by only breathing through my nose with the aid of the book Breath.

All of this has helped me run further and faster than I could have imagined. It’s been a fascinating journey, and I hope this hyper-post gives you some motivation to try going for a run.

Why you are not a number

You have done three straight weeks of regular exercise, closed all your rings on your Apple Watch fitness app every day, and you feel great. Out of the blue, you hurt your ankle while walking down some stairs. It feels okay at first but then it starts to swell. 

Three days later, you are still putting ice packs on your ankle and the whole time, your Apple Watch is constantly reminding you to get up because you are “nearly there!”

Your streak is gone because you’re hurt. Yet the watch and most fitness apps have no sense of this. You are not a machine that can just be fixed in an hour by a technician; you are a human with a complex nervous system that needs time to recover. 

The more we look at the metrics of what we’re doing, the less we look at why we are doing it. The temptation is to do something you can quantify because numbers are easy to understand and give you a sense of progress. Yet, as in our little drama above, numbers are easily affected by circumstance. 

So what are we to do?

Leave numbers and metrics to what they are best at doing: measuring business activity, and operations that do run like machines. If one person gets sick, an entire company doesn’t shut down, it carries on because, like any machine, it can be fixed. 

On the other hand, Individuals and communities are not machines. They thrive on a sense of purpose. They need a structure, not a number. Creative frameworks are structures that allow us to make progress without measurement. The joy and the value come from the consistent challenge and curiosity that these structures enable.

Here is a collection of articles I have written about creative frameworks that focus on the process, not the outcome, the structure, not the number. 

Way Finder

The journey is to be enjoyed but before you can take it, you need to find out where you are right now, which is a journey in itself. 

Set challenges, not goals

Move from a fixed to a growth mindset, and the possibilities are endless. 

Practice Creativity

Think about your life and education. Were you ever taught how to be creative? 

Intent driven design

Focusing on a user’s intent allows you as a designer to look into the future and predict what the user will need and when.

Creative Frameworks

What is a creative framework?

At its simplest, it is a conceptual tool that allows you to test a concept.

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

- Bertrand Russell 

The Danish way

We needed a vacation but didn’t want to go to places we’d been before, so we looked up the cheapest airline tickets to places in Europe. It turned out that Copenhagen was top of the list.

That random selection began a journey that turned out to be one of the best vacations we have taken as a family and an introduction to a way of life that, while not perfect, strived for the right balance.

Sometimes it’s the small things in life, the small acts of kindness that make life worth living and affirm your connection to the culture around you.

Here are three examples to give you a sense of our experience in the city.

Baked good
There is a special policy for children in nearly every bakery we went into in Copenhagen. That policy was to give them a free baked good treat.

It was a little odd at first, but this simple act which could not have cost the bakery more than a few cents was a moment of delight for both our kid, and his parents—it was like being regularly accorded an empathetic understanding of what it means to be a parent with a child in a busy city. Kids get tired quickly and need more food, more often, than you could ever imagine. A free baked good helps all the people large and small in the city stay in balance.

Where did you get that shirt?
We were walking past the national football (soccer) stadium on our way to a park when we heard a voice call out “Nice shirt!” from behind us. We all turned around and saw a middle-aged man wearing a stadium uniform. He said that Mo Salah, the player’s name on the back of my son’s shirt, was one of his favorite players. Without missing a beat the man, whose name was Martin, asked if we would like to take a look at the Stadium!

I have been a football fan my whole life, and my son had caught the football bug from me a while ago. Before we could even reply to this invitation, he was already jumping up and down at the opportunity of looking around Copenhagen FC’s national stadium.

Just like that, Martin opened a large side door in the stadium wall off the sidewalk. We followed him down a corridor that emerged right onto the main pitch. He was preparing it for the first game of the season on the weekend. For the next thirty minutes, he engaged my son (in perfect English) in conversation about the club and the great games that had been played in this stadium and the players he loved to watch. Martin did not have to do this—he must have been pretty busy—but he could understand that this was a simple and very kind way of making someone’s day.

Learning the city
Copenhagen is full of beautiful parks. But there is one extraordinary one. It’s designed for both playing and learning.

On the streets of Copenhagen, there is a complex choreography of pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. To help younger members of the community to understand how that works, the city built a mini-city in the middle of one of its many parks.

Kids from four to twelve can come and borrow a bike or a pedal car for free, or walk around this miniature city. The road signs, traffic lights, and bike paths are all scaled down to kids’ size, so they can practice the skills they need to live in a busy city.

—

None of our experiences in Copenhagen by themselves are groundbreaking changes in city life. Still, in combination, they gave my family a sense of belonging to a city we were only visiting for a week. It showed a sense of balance, which was beautiful to experience.

For me, design as a practice is the ability to take ideas or concepts and rearrange them into new patterns and create something new and unexpected. Using this definition, you can see how Denmark is trying to redesign its culture.

Could they, and we, all do more? Eradicate poverty, racism, sexism and create a more equal and fair society? Of course, we could, and must. But it takes a lot of small steps in a run-up to build momentum before a giant leap. Without taking those smaller steps first, we will not leap very far as a culture.

——

Books of 2021

December 31st, 2021
6 min read

I like books that are hard to summarize. Hard to explain why they make sense. That challenge our use of language because the words we are reading don’t fit with our narrative of the world we live in.

2021 was a year of challenge, and 2022 will be a year in which we have to rewrite many of the narratives we have told ourselves over the years. Where we live, how we live, how we communicate with people, where we work, how we work, and for whom.

This year, reading each of the books below helped challenge me to think of a new narrative for the future.

Hoping you all have a great start to the new year and that these books can help guide you on a new path for what is turning out to be a whole new world.

- Kaushik

Monoculture by F.S. Michaels

A book that describes the ever-smaller circles that our culture is creating.

”Over time, the monoculture evolves into a nearly invisible foundation that structures and shapes our lives, giving us our sense of how the world works. It shapes our ideas about what’s normal and what we can expect from life.”

“Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.” —LEO TOLSTOY

A game of birds and wolves by Simon Parkin

A remarkable story of how one man and a group of very intelligent women saved England and Europe from defeat in the Second World War.

”This was not the hyperbole of propaganda. Of the 39,000 men who went to sea in U-boats during the Second World War, seventy percent were killed in action. By contrast, only six percent of those who fought in the British Army died in combat.”

“This was Roberts’ masterstroke. By repeatedly playing through recent action at sea and using a game to understand the situation from all angles, he would be in a strong position to see where the British commanders had misunderstood the U-boats’ behavior. The process would enable him to formulate the first universal set of defensive tactics for the navy to use against U-boats, encouraging escort ships to work together like team-mates, rather than individuals.”

Ask Iwata by Satoru Iwata

A fascinating book about the philosophy and management style of Nintendo’s late CEO.

“This is why I spent my first month as president interviewing everybody at the company. The discoveries were endless”

“So how do you know when a project is going well? When someone points to a gray area in the initial plan, then asks you “Hey, can I take care of this?” and follows through.”

"A good idea is something that solves multiple problems in a flash.” This is something that Shigeru Miyamoto taught me at Nintendo about making games.”

Dune by Frank Herbert

A focus on planet ecology and ancient cultures make Dune a unique read.

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

“Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him…once…long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”

Maigret at the Coroner’s by Georges Simenon

Maigret comes to America to find out about police methods and finds a whole lot more.

If you have never read a Maigret mystery then please do, they transport you to Paris between 1930 and 1970 and give you a tremendous feeling for the city, its people, and the culture. In this book, Maigret takes a break from Paris and is visiting America on an exchange program for police officers to learn from each other’s methods. What he discovers is a new world of both Victorian values and booze-soaked 60’s free living. He finds a new style of policing all about relationships, networks, and consumerism and I am not sure he likes any of it.

Lila by Robert M. Pirsig

This follow-up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a deeper dive into the metaphysics of quality while sailing down the Hudson River valley.

“Cultural relativists held that it is unscientific to interpret values in culture B by the values of culture A. It would be wrong for an Australian Bushman anthropologist to come to New York and find people backward and primitive because hardly anyone could throw a boomerang properly. It is equally wrong for a New York anthropologist to go to Australia and find a Bushman backward and primitive because he cannot read or write. Cultures are unique historical patterns that contain their own values

and cannot be judged in terms of the values of other cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by Boas's doctrines of scientific empiricism, virtually wiped out the credibility of the older Victorian evolutionists and gave anthropology a shape it has had ever since.”

You are not a number

“Since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”
- Joseph Weizenbaum

There’s a number for everything: the number of steps you take each day, your heart rate, your bank balance. Yet, so often, many of the things that we think are quantifiable are not. This collection of articles looks at a number of those important aspects of life and how amazingly, some of the essential things in your life can't be measured, like how much pain you're in, whether you can accurately taste something, or even how intelligent you are.

These all seem like things we should be able to measure. But in reality, we are often taking educated guesses or using outmoded or even biased ways to measure them.

To start, I would love for you to watch this video by Robert F Kennedy, where he defines what GDP means (gross domestic product). He talks about how this number plays a role in our lives, and how often it is quoted as indicating how well a country is doing, yet in fact, it doesn't measure any of the things that make a country worth living in.

GDP
RFK speech about the gross domestic product


Taste
As I browse my local wine store I often look for suggestions and clues to a good wine to buy. I ask the people in the store, but I also look for labels like the rating from Robert Parker of Wine Spectator magazine or if a bottle has won an award. But it turns out that taste is not something you can quantify in a number even though the rating reviewers give to wine often significantly influence how well that bottle sells.
This fascinating video from Vox shows that regular people and famous wine critics often don’t agree and don’t have a standard at all.
Expensive wine is for suckers


Pain
Back pain, shoulder pain--most people will feel these at some point in their lives, but how much pain will each of us feel? Though it seems like an essential measurement, it turns out there’s no way to measure pain. How do doctors know which patients to treat first or how severe an injury is if they can only rely on a subjective measure? These articles look more closely at pain and quantify this most elusive and vital part of human health.

“Right now, there's no clinically acceptable way to measure pain and other emotions other than to ask a person how they feel,” Tor Wager, lead study author and associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU-Boulder
Objectively measuring pain for the first time

Measuring pain how much does it hurt


Brain activity
An electrical impulse travels around your brain and activates different parts of your brain, and lets you perform amazing feats. That sounds about right. Still, it turns out that the fMRI—the technology to measure brain activity—has not been working all this time. This article shows that instead of measuring actual brain activity, the fMRI uses blood flow around the brain as a proxy, and it turns out that assuming that connection was not necessarily the best choice.

“This is likely because fMRIs don’t measure brain activity directly: They measure blood flow to regions of the brain, which is used as a proxy for brain activity because neurons in those regions are presumably more active. Blood flow levels change. “The correlation between one scan and a second is not even fair; it’s poor,” says lead author Ahmad Hariri, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Duke University.”

“The researchers reexamined 56 peer-reviewed, published papers that conducted 90 fMRI experiments, some by leaders in the field and also looked at the results of so-called “test/retest” fMRIs, where 65 subjects were asked to do the same tasks months apart. They found that of seven measures of brain function, none had consistent readings.”
Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong


Intelligence
In Steven J. Gould’s enlightening book The Mismeasure of Man, he looks at the long and sordid history of intelligence tests and in particular, the IQ test. Even its founder Alfred Binet disowned it, and the methods and the systems it uses are both deeply rooted in a racist and misogynistic view of the world. Yet to this day, people proudly quote their IQ score and talk about Mensa membership with great pride, while the entire IQ system is based on bad science and insufficient data.

“Not only did Binet decline to label IQ as inborn intelligence; he also refused to regard it as a general device for ranking all pupils according to mental worth. He devised his scale only for the limited purpose of his commission by the ministry of education: as a practical guide for identifying children whose poor performance indicated a need for special education—those who we would today call learning disabled or mildly retarded.”
In this article in The Independent, another set of research comes to the same conclusion.

“We already know that, from a scientific point of view, the notion of race is meaningless. Genetic differences do not map to traditional measurements of skin color, hair type, body proportions, and skull measurements. Now we have shown that IQ is meaningless too."
IQ tests are 'fundamentally flawed'

Numbers and measurement are valuable tools, but that’s all they are. Truth is far harder to come by and requires a much deeper inquiry. Yet, in our fast-paced world, we sometimes settle for numbers alone because they provide a quick and efficient--yet too often incomplete--answer to many of our essential questions.

Walk Don’t Run

If you don’t follow soccer/football, you might not have heard of Paul Scholes. But if you listen to what some of the most famous footballers in the world say about him in this article you’ll realize that he must have been a very special player:

“My toughest opponent? Scholes of Manchester,” said Zinedine Zidane, French World Cup Winner and 3-time world player of the year. “He is the complete midfielder. He’s almost untouchable in what he does. You rarely come across the complete player, but Scholes is as close to it as you can get.”

“In the last 15 to 20 years the best central midfielder that I have seen — the most complete — is Scholes,” said Xavi Hernandez, Barcelona midfield maestro, arguably the best midfielder in the world at the moment. “Scholes is a spectacular player who has everything. He can play the final pass, he can score, he is strong, he never gets knocked off the ball and he doesn’t give possession away.”

With such glowing reviews, you would think that Paul Scholes was the peak human athlete, but to look at him you would never guess. It turns out that what he has is very hard to measure. In the same article, scientists tried to use specific athletic metrics (speed, agility, strength, etc.) to find a correlation between athletic ability and skill. Turns out, they found none.

They next turned to measure specific soccer skills in a group of semi-pro soccer players, skills like dribbling speed, and volley and passing accuracy, etc. They then looked at how these players applied these skills in a complex match situation. Once again players with superior measured skills did not translate that advantage to the pitch in a match situation.

An even more famous example is Lionel Messi, arguably the best player in the world over the last decade; Messi is very hard to measure. He runs far less than his arch-rival Cristiano Ronaldo and is even criticized for walking around the pitch too much. Yet, season after season, Messi scores 30+ goals and creates multiple assists.

There are some great stats on how little Messi does in this 538 article.

Numbers do not tell the whole story and can miss the most important elements of the game. It turns out what makes both Scholes and Messi so great is an immeasurable thing called match awareness.

The legendary Man United manager Alex Ferguson explained Scholes’ abilities this way:

"He has an awareness of what’s happening around him on the edge of the box which is better than most players. As a kid, he always had a knack for arriving in the right area just at the right time, but he’s proving just as effective from outside the box because he’s using his experience in the right way. One of the greatest football brains Manchester United has ever had."

Turns out that he was better than other players at applying his knowledge; he was learning by doing in a growth mindset.

The closed mindset looks at problems like this and sees the stats; practice more drills, get faster, stronger, more agile. Yet all of this work only gets you part of the way.

For both of these amazing players being allowed the freedom of playfulness is an important factor in both of their lives. They apply playfulness to the game; they don’t follow the ball around the pitch, they make space for themselves and others. They play with space, breaking the rules. This is not to say that they don’t have to work hard and practice. Yet, it is the application of that skill that is the key factor, that growth mindset that allows them to be playful when all about them are anxious.

Pixar’s Ed Catmull explains this phenomenon another way: “Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.”

It is very difficult for numbers and stats to capture that unexpected use of craft that confounds the rigidly ordered world and creates what can best be described as art on the football pitch.

Next in this series, I’ll look at how some critical experiences in life which seem like they must be quantifiable—like pain, taste, and intelligence—in fact, elude measurement.

Build an ecosystem, not a process

We’re at a Premier League football match—the top division of soccer in England, with a global audience of 4 billion—and it’s the start of a new season.

The result of this first game is a surprise. Arsenal—a legendary Premier League team—is facing Brentford, a newly promoted team that has not played in the Premier League in more than 60 years. Brentford’s entire team probably cost less than one of Arsenal’s strikers, who cost about $80 million each.

So how did Brentford end up beating Arsenal 2-0 in this game? 

In a post-match interview, the Brentford manager Thomas Frank gave insight into his framework for building a team to perform competitively even without the best resources in the world. 

His growth model was :

Hard work  

Performance 

Togetherness

and finally, Attitude 

Listening to him, I realized this four-part growth model was an interconnected ecosystem to get players’ mindsets right for each game. 

Hard work is the baseline; when every member of the team works hard they build the performance of the team. As the performance improves, players feel they are making something special, which leads to togetherness. This togetherness builds an attitude of confidence but also humility knowing that if they don’t work hard (the start of the cycle) that performance and togetherness will suddenly evaporate. 

This model spurs players to continue to work hard and feed the growth cycle. 

Even beyond sport, the chance of having the best team in any industry is slim. To get great work you need a team with the right attitude, that mixture of confidence and humility. But as a leader, you can’t start there, because attitude is an experience gained over time, not a skill that can be learned. 

That’s why I think starting with hard work is important. But what do I mean by hard work? 

• Turn up for meetings on time 

• Make a plan for the week’s work 

• Prepare for work sessions

• Make good agendas for productive meetings

• Take good actionable notes when you have meetings and work sessions 

• Share progress at the end of the day/week so everyone knows what is happening 

None of the tasks above are “hard” to do but they are the first steps to building a healthy “hard-working” culture. You don’t need a team of superstars to do these tasks. But if you start doing these tasks consistently the performance of your team will improve over time and so the growth cycle will begin. 

Over time and as your team evolves, established members of the team will be there to help new teammates become part of the cycle. This consistency will give people on your team the confidence and humility to create great new products and services, and most importantly to keep growing.

After 8 out of 38 games of the premier league season, Brentford is 9th out of 20 teams. That in footballing terms is a minor miracle.

Write your own culture

3 min read

A while ago I read about the Richard Feynman learning technique.
Feynman was a Nobel-prize-winning physicist and a prolific, wonderful teacher. At the core of his technique is writing down your ideas to the point where you can explain them to other people.

If (or when!) we meet, it won’t take long until we get on to the topic of writing ideas and concepts down. In doing so, not only do you understand and structure your thinking and build confidence in yourself, but you unlock the opportunity for other people to learn from your thinking. In that wondrous moment, you have just created culture! And as we all know, culture eats process for lunch!

But, wait a minute. Writing is actually quite hard to do, especially if you want other people to read and understand what you are saying about complex ideas. What’s the hardest thing about writing? It isn’t having the idea or structuring your thoughts or even having good prose. The hardest thing about writing is getting started.

To that end, I wrote this short piece a little while ago. “Read, Curate, Write” is a guide/tool to help you overcome that barrier and get started. Steven King said, "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." The tricky bit is moving from reading to writing, and I hope this post will help you do that, and overcome that hardest of all problems - getting started.

Post: Read, Curate, Write

Becoming the god of war

“ To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here is where things grow” - Robert M Pirsig

I have always enjoyed playing video games, and one video game series I have played over the years is called “God of War.” It tells the story of a Spartan warrior who, in his hour of need, calls on the Greek god Ares to help him win a battle. For once, the god aids the hero of the story, Kratos, and grants him the power to defeat his enemies. But—it’s a Faustian pact because now Kratos is Ares’ war machine; he must do the war god’s bidding. At one point, on a murderous rampage at the request of Ares, Kratos destroys a village and accidentally kills his wife and child.

This is a turning point; Kratos now vows revenge. Eventually, across many games, Kratos does indeed get revenge and becomes the god of war by killing Ares.

In the latest installment of the game series, we find a new type of Kratos. He has escaped the Mediterranean and has made a new life for himself in the north, in Scandinavia, where he is trying to escape his god status. He starts a family and is laying low.

Unfortunately, his wife dies (not entirely clear how that happened). She was from the Norse race of giants and her last wish was that her ashes should be scattered on top of a high mountain in Asgard. The game is the usual action-adventure but also requires Kratos to manage his anger and be a father to his 11-year-old son Loki.

So far, so good. The game is enjoyable and as you progress you gain new abilities and become more and more powerful. Near the end of the game, I was feeling pretty good about my skills. At this point, the game takes a hard left turn.

Your final challenge is to defeat a series of characters called the Valkyrie.

At this point in the game, I was feeling pretty confident, having defeated multiple other gods, and so I stepped into the arena with the first of 8 Valkyrie opponents. About 3 seconds later, my character Kratos had been killed.

All the skills that I had learned so far in the game were of no use to me now. The game designers had stepped up the level of skill required by about one hundredfold. This seemed impossible. How could I defeat this enemy? It was all too fast and too brutal for me to manage. But sure enough, on the tenth try, I started to get the hang of it; after the 50th, I was almost winning. I lost track of the number of attempts I made at this, but eventually, I won, and the satisfaction was immense. I could have given up at any time as I had finished the main part of the game, but I was compelled to continue to see if I was able to complete this challenge.

Great, that was done; only 7 more Valkyries to go! And then something remarkable happened. The game requires you to travel around the Norse mythical world and find the other Valkyrie, and as you travel, you encounter all kinds of nasty enemies hell-bent on stopping you.

That was when I realized that I was the god of war.

When I had been attacked by these enemies earlier in the game, I had to concentrate on winning. Now, after defeating the Valkyrie, these enemies seemed easy to defeat. I was almost playing with how I would do it; the upgrade in my skills and confidence by defeating an almost impossible was profound. It also made the game far more enjoyable. It allowed me to feel like a god and wield the power in a way that was not forced but almost balletic.

I became the god of war by focusing on a growth mindset and taking on difficult challenges not for the results but for the overall improvement. The game had shown me the value of a challenge system that could enhance my growth.

You can look at challenges in two ways: the closed mindset will tell you to ignore them or to call them impossible, but the growth mindset will see them as a necessary part of growth. When you go to the gym and lift a heavyweight to increase your strength, you can see that lifting the weight is a challenge, but you also know that if you do it enough, you will be stronger and fitter.

For most challenges in life, it is not entirely clear what the end benefit may be to you if you try a challenge and then fail and try again. Some things are impossible, but quite a few things, especially the things you can practice, are not impossible and are just like that weight in the gym. You're not going to enjoy doing it the first few times, but after a while, you start to see that what was hard before is now easier. You start to feel all the other benefits that doing this challenge can give you.

Write 400 words a day and you will have your book within a year and be a better email writer to boot. Draw every day, and you will have your exhibition. Knit every day, and you will have your hat for winter and know how to make other clothes. Read every day, and you will have interesting things to think about and talk with friends about for the rest of your life.

Outcomes can be obscured by the mountain that is the challenge, but as you climb you start to feel the benefits of the effort; it sustains you, and after a while, it's the climb that matters and not the goal.

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Average cover band

If you have never heard of Robert Elms I would recommend you check out his radio show on BBC Radio London. He’s a music journalist and his show is all about the city of London and his love of music. For years it has been a favorite of mine.

Robert does a segment on the show called “cover to cover,” where he finds a song that has been covered by two different bands and then plays them back to back on the radio and then asks his audience to write and call in and tell him which one they think is best, and why.

The other week we were doing our own cover to cover at home and I was listening to a song that seemed really familiar but was somehow lacking soul. I asked my son Luca, resident music expert, “who’s this band doing Chuck Berry’s "Roll Over Beethoven"?” turns out, that pretty average band was The Beatles!

Very early Beatles. I could not believe it. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, bands in the world, and here they were doing a pretty average cover song. Between 1963 and 1965 the Beatles recorded over 20 covers. Some better than others but to my ear, most were all just okay, mainly because it was clear these were stories about other people’s lives.

Wikipedia entry

But, I started thinking about it, and I realized that perhaps--like in last week’s post--their goal was not to make a perfect version of another person's song but to focus on what they could learn by playing those songs, how could they develop their own style, figuring out what could they borrow and how could they make it their own. Beyond 1965 they recorded over 30 more covers.

The Beatles seem to have had a continual growth mindset, learning techniques and styles from the best music they could find. They learned by covering almost impossibly good musicians--mostly Black blues and rock n’ roll artists--and molded what they learned into their own unmistakable sound and stories.

Next week find out how I played a video game and felt like I had become the god of war!

Listen to Robert Elms on the BBC

See challenges, not goals in action: Watch Luca hit top bins!

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Set challenges, not goals

Summer 2018. The football World Cup has kicked off in Russia and this is the starting point for my son Luca’s football obsession. Up until now, he has shown no interest in the sport but for some reason, my enthusiasm and the nature of the international tournament catches his imagination.

Luca is 6 years old, and many of his friends have been playing for a while, so he wants to practice. I enjoy playing football so we start to practice together at the local park… Everyday!

Days turn into weeks, weeks into months. Months into years. There is a pandemic. Playing football together becomes one of the major ways we have fun. The practice becomes more serious. We try different skills and techniques. Learning to pass, to strike the ball, to volley the ball. One day, after Luca has mastered some of these skills, I decide to make things more challenging.

I find some painter's blue tape and we go to our local soccer pitch. I subdivide the goal in sections with the tape (picture below), the top left and right corners (top bins in the football world) being the most prized, and hardest to hit, targets.

Hitting such a small target from 20 or 30 feet away is much harder than it looks. It requires the player to focus, gauge the speed and power they apply to the ball, apply spin, and most of all improve their accuracy.

I wondered if this would just be too hard a target to hit for Luca.

Then something interesting happened. I noticed that even if Luca was not hitting this very specific space in the top corners of the goal, he was consistently hitting the goal with power and accuracy.

By making a target that was challenging, all his other skills were improving. He was improving overall even if he was only hitting the “top bins” targets once in every 10 attempts. On the other attempts, he was still almost always finding the rest of the goal. Creating this artificial constraint allowed a range of other skills to improve. The actual goal now of the exercise became almost irrelevant--Luca would shoot 100, 120, 150 shots every session. He could sense the improvement so not hitting our artificially created targets was not a disappointment but a challenge.

Carol S. Dweck's great book Mindset sums up this phenomenon well:

The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people's minds within fearing thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What's more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we're talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that's why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.”

While a fixed mindset would think it was a failure unless you hit the top corner target every-time, Luca’s growth mindset was able to see improvement in all areas. This mindset also leads to an ability to not give up when things get hard. Beyond any specific skills you might gain, this sticktoitiveness may be the most important area to practice.

This post is the first of three about the growth mindset. Next week I will be writing about how this kind of mindset led an average cover band to become one of the world’s most famous rock bands.

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ABOUT DESIGN + CULTURE

The Design + Culture series appraises and imagines the way we shape our world. It's a guide for anyone who wants to build tools and frameworks to help sustain their creativity and change our culture.

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