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.

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.

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.

---

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.

Design + Culture Sign up

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!

---

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.

Design + Culture Sign up

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.

---

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.

Design + Culture Sign up

Thrive in your virtual workplace

I’ve always been a big advocate and early adopter of online collaborative tools such as google docs, Figma, and Mural. Yet, I have often found that co-workers are less excited about them. I wondered if perhaps it was hard for them to learn a new app or adapt to a new way of working.

After all these months of COVID lockdown, in which these tools are now mandatory, I have realized that the reluctance to use a new tool was not caused by the effort of learning something new, but was actually caused by the structural issue of not understanding the rules of a new system.

Perhaps I can use school as a metaphor to explain this problem. A school has a building and rooms within that building. But, it also has other, less visible, systems that make that structure work for educating kids. A school has teachers to guide learning. It has a curriculum to plan out learning for all kids. It has a gym for kids to exercise. It has a playground for kids to play in and it has a canteen for kids to eat. It also has a set of rules which both adults and children understand and therefore (ideally) makes the school a place for learning.

I realized that online collaborative tools like Figma, Slack and google docs are like a school building with only the barest suggestion of rooms, and a complete lack of the other elements that structure and connect people to an institution.

Before COVID people were reluctant to embrace new online collaborative tools because they did not know how the system worked because many parts of it were missing. Now that there is no choice, everyone needs to create those missing parts for themselves.

While there are many tools to provide the basics for online work, the true ecosystem of work is often invisible—we only notice it when it is taken away. While virtual work seems like something close to work, something is missing. That missing something, that vital ecosystem, is made of two parts: structure and connection.

Structure
Online collaborative services are often blank canvases by design. People will use them in so many ways that it is left to the end-user to organize their new virtual space. Think about the first time you used google drive or dropbox or any note-taking application; they were empty or had not-quite-right templates. The problem is that there are no rules for how to structure new virtual spaces for your needs, unlike real-world spaces which come with the desks, rooms, doors, corridors, and elevators in which work is done and conversations are had.

At a high level it is important to structure virtual spaces in three ways:
1. Sandbox: This is a space where people can experience and try out new ideas, e.g. a slack channel just for talking about new ideas, or a google doc to try out a new piece of writing a safe space. In the real world, these are often the water-cooler spaces where people can talk informally.

2. Workspaces: These are spaces where people do more formal work and put ideas that are more fully formed. In the virtual world, this may mean a google slide deck or a figma design file that is the core working document for your project. In the real world, the equivalent is your desk at work, where you have all the information at your fingertips and where you can gather and develop work and make progress.

3. Sharing: The final space is the presentation space, the place to put updated or final work files. This makes it clear where the latest official place is to get a project update or make a presentation. The real-world equivalent is a conference room or shared workspace where presentations are made and critiqued.

It’s important to have all three of these spaces to allow collaboration to happen in a virtual space. Most often overlooked are the sandbox spaces, because in the real world people do not think of these as official spaces. Yet these are the spaces that serve as the vital glue to connect informal ideas and information.


Connection
While we now have multiple synchronous and asynchronous ways to communicate with people, much of human interaction and communication is nonverbal and based on contextual cues. Hence, video calls and text-based messages fall short when it comes to conveying the range of genuine human interactions. Three ideas to improve this situation are:

1. Virtual coffee breaks Schedule times in the day with an open zoom room where people can pop in and see who’s around and talk about work or not. Just knowing that there is an informal place to meet online at a set time and place can help reduce the feeling of loneliness that can ensue from hours in front of a screen.

2. One-on-one: These kinds of conversations are more important than ever, and need to be scheduled, rather than relying on the serendipity that might happen when people are in an office together. Both managers and employees need to come to those conversations with an agenda in mind and to allow time to work on issues or skills.

3. Group space: Offsites in the real world were often used to help teams get away from every day and talk about work from a different perspective of a new space or location. The virtual world also offers such possibilities but they require more planning coordination. The Democratic National Convention’s roll-call this year was a great example of how a group space can show the diversity and space that people inhabit (link). Far from being sterile, it allowed people to show their personality and unique abilities and while that required more planning (or more technical coordination) than a group conversation, it showed a way of making the virtual more human for groups of people.

Working remotely through a global pandemic could never be easy, and people have shown amazing flexibility and resilience in adapting to this new virtual-only world. Yet there is a difference between surviving the situation and thriving in a situation. Structuring virtual spaces from the void and building in habits and routines of connection can make these spaces feel real and authentic.

---

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.

Design + Culture Sign up

2020 Books adaptation

It’s been quite a year. The unthinkable has become everyday life, and yet life goes on. With all this alone time an important theme for me has been the idea that your mindset needs to be more adaptable than ever before.

There are five books that I read this year that took me on a journey of understanding how to become more adaptable. The first two books, The Tyranny of Metrics and The Mismeasure of Man, question the basis for much of what modern life is based on—the numbers that run the world and how often those numbers don’t really represent people but rather the system that is trying to control them. If you think you can measure the economy then think again. Think you can quantify people by something as simple as an IQ score? Once again, history and science do not bear this out. After being told for so long that these measures are accurate and important, it is time to adjust to a new (or newly clear) reality.

“But what is most easily measured is rarely what is most important, indeed sometimes not important at all. That is the first source of metric dysfunction.” - The Tyranny of Metrics

“The spreadsheet is a tool, but it is also a worldview... those who use them tend to lose sight of the crucial fact that the imaginary businesses that they can create on their computers are just that—imaginary. You can’t really duplicate a business inside a computer, just aspects of a business. And since numbers are the strength of spreadsheets, the aspects that get emphasized are the ones easily embodied in numbers. Intangible factors aren’t so easily quantified.” - The Tyranny of Metrics

“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...” — The Mismeasure of Man

The third book, The War of Art, is a short but powerful reminder that oftentimes resistance to change does not come from the external world but from your internal world. Self-criticism and regret stop you from adapting to new ideas and it is this resistance that needs to be overcome every day by showing up, sitting down, and doing the work.

“There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.” - The War of Art

My fourth book, Doughnut Economics, starts to move past numbers and self critique and does something new, it presents a new system for the world based on a simple diagram of, well, a donut to explain how to adapt to this new world view.

“We have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive; what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow…” - Doughnut Economics

Finally, Mindset is one of the most useful books I have read in a long time. It has been out for more than 20 years and shows that beyond statistics and effort and ideas the real change starts with your mindset. If you can be open to adapting to new ways of learning almost anything is possible if you put in the practice. Practice does not make perfect but it does make progress.

“In short, people who believe in fixed traits feel an urgency to succeed, and when they do, they may feel more than pride. They may feel a sense of superiority, since success means that their fixed traits are better than other people's… However, lurking behind that self-esteem of the fixed mindset is simple question: If you're somebody when you're successful, what are you when you're unsuccessful?”It’s been quite a year. The unthinkable has become everyday life, and yet life goes on. With all this alone time an important theme for me has been the idea that your mindset needs to be more adaptable than ever before." - Mindset


The Books
The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Goul

The Tyranny of Metrics, by Jerry Z. Muller

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

Mindset, by Carol S. Dweck

---

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.

Design + Culture Sign up

Being Lucky

You make your own luck. Have you ever been given that advice—while in the same breath it’s applied to some titan of industry who came from nothing to rule the business world?

Let’s take a look at that idea.

“If Bezos and his team had waited a few weeks longer to raise those extra funds, people today would lump Amazon in with other dot-com-era failures like Webvan, Kozmo, and Pets.com — big-spending companies with unworkable business models that collapsed under their own weight.”
(Vox: The little-known deal that saved Amazon from the dot-com crash)

Amazon raised a large amount of money a few weeks before the 2000 meltdown. Just through blind luck. If they had tried that just a couple of weeks later, there’d be no Amazon. No prime, no two-day delivery, can you imagine?

In the provocatively named article “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” it turns out that luck rather than talent and design play a much larger role in people's fortune than anyone would like to believe.

“That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20 percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn’t what happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. ‘The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,’ say the researchers… So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? ‘Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,’ say Pluchino and co.”

Luck plays a clear role in my own life. My parents decided to leave Kenya when I was a kid because the health system was terrible. An incident where my brother almost lost his life in a botched hospital treatment was the last straw. It was luck that they happened to have British passports (as citizens of Kenya, a former British colony).
Without that piece of luck, I would not be where I am today. I have worked hard, no doubt, but without that lucky break, my life would be very different.

It seems to me that lucky people should be a little more humble about their privilege. While you may have taken advantage of your luck, the seed of your success was often pure chance according to researcher Alessandro Pluchino.

In the current climate of racial injustice and COVID, this may be the first time that many people are thinking about this issue and realizing that instead of their talent being the reason why they are where they are, it is in fact their luck. Being born in the right country, at the right time, to the right parents.

Maybe lucky people like me should think about giving back more than money. How about giving away some of your luck as well?

If you think you are lucky enough to be in this position, how about:
Connect with 10 people you know and share your connections to give them some luck.
Write some testimonials on LinkedIn or reference letters for people who are looking for work right now.
Give a talk (on zoom) at a college about your experience and the things you did that helped you succeed.

Luck is being in the right place at the right time. Being lucky you gain experience that is impossible to gain in any other way. Hard work is valuable and having a growth mindset is a huge asset, but even with that, there are certain things out of your control that you can not change and that only luck can account for. So share that experience and let people who have not had that luck benefit from your good fortune.



Article Links
MIT Technology Review
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it's just chance.

Vox
The little-known deal that saved Amazon from the dot-com crash

Practice Creativity

Watch the practice creativity video
I know many people who read this newsletter are engaged in work that involves being creative. It is an integral part of my work and life--coming up with new ideas and ways of solving all sorts of problems and creating new opportunities.

Think about your life and education. Were you ever taught how to be creative? Did you attend a workshop, take a course, formally learn how to practice this skill? Or did you just pick it up yourself?

For something so important to many, this central skill is often left to each of us to figure out how to develop on our own.

Making things has been central to my practice of creativity-- sketching out a new idea in a notebook, making a schedule for a new project, taking a picture while out on a family walk, each of these creative activities helps provide continuous inertia to stay in a creative mindset. I realized early on that even if my job title was "designer", which you would assume was an inherently creative job, the everyday practice of creativity was often missing in the process of making new products inside the structure of an organization.

Writing, drawing, filming, photography. It does not matter what it is, the simple act of making something helps fuel my creativity. Every time I make something, it feels like I am filling up my creativity tank, practicing the skill of thinking independently from the world and imagining something new.

Recently, I took this practice and turned it into a project over a month. Every day I took 5 seconds of video of something that struck me as unique on that day. At the end of the month, I edited all the clips together and added a soundtrack (supplied by my budding 8-year-old guitar player Luca).

The simple act of making each day was a reminder that creativity is a practice and a focus on moving your awareness to a different place for a period of time, a place you want to be.

Check out the video and think about your own creative practice. What projects can you do each day to help you find your voice and shift your focus on the things that matter most to you?

Sustainable creativity

Sustainable creativity is a workshop I have given several times over the last three months to a wide range of groups and organizations. The idea is to show people a system to generate ideas and in doing so allow them to sustain their creativity for the rest of their lives. Well, that’s part of the workshop. The other part happens after I stop talking, when the participants use the space that has been created to share the inventive ways they sustain their creativity. People have shared everything from setting up a standing monthly meeting with a group of like-minded people to writing jokes for a stand-up comedy class. The workshop enables people to get into the right mindset to talk about their ideas. 

It sounds simple—talking about ideas—but let me illustrate the issue with a metaphor. 

Let’s say that instead of talking about ideas, you like playing tennis. 

You ask your neighbor who also likes playing tennis to a game. You both like the idea of a game but realize you don’t live near a tennis court, so you both decide to just start playing tennis in the street, with all the cars and pedestrians and with no court makings.How do you think that game is going to turn out? 

Distracted, chaotic, not fun at all. 

This is frequently what it’s like when you try to talk about ideas with someone without making space for it. You can have the conversation, but too often everyday life gets in the way. And, with no guidelines and constraints (like a tennis court) to guide the conversation, you get distracted, neither of you is clear on where the conversation is going, and no one knows when it might end. 

With this workshop I am making a space for ideas, a metaphorical tennis court to be used to discuss ideas and creativity onto which I can invite people to play. 

I made this video version of a portion of this workshop to share one part of the tennis court. Perhaps if you watch it with a friend or colleague it can give you a productive space to play, think, and talk about the ideas which you find fascinating. Without ideas it is hard to change culture and if culture does not change we only repeat our mistakes. Please take a moment to watch the video and step onto the court of ideas. 

If your organization—or one you know of—could use some help creating a new space for talking about ideas, let me know, and we’ll find a time to book a workshop and set up the court.