Suffering is optional

"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."
This famous quote from the Dalai Lama might sound slightly harsh, yet I think that what he is saying, in part, is if you set unattainable goals, such as having the perfect job, marriage, children, or education, you will suffer the disappointment of never perfectly attaining those goals. 

So, how do you make progress in your life if your unattainable goals can cause suffering?

One popular approach is to set less challenging goals: I want a new smartphone or car. These goals avoid the suffering of disappointment but don’t help you progress because there is nothing more to do once they are attained. As Neil Postman said, "You cannot get better at watching TV."

Set a practice, not a goal.

The first step is to change your mindset, to move away from achievement and finite endpoints, and to open yourself to the idea that progress and learning are infinite. This means that you will be focused on doing new things you are not good at and practicing them daily for 15 minutes. Once you have confidence in one element of whatever skill you are practicing, move on to something else that challenges you. There is no end point; practice is forever.

Many companies have an annual ritual of getting people to set goals at the start of the year. By doing this, they enter what could be a growth opportunity with instead a finite mindset. If your goals are not attained, then everything else you did that year is a failure.

This excellent video clip from basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpoperfectly illustrates the difference between a finite and infinite mindset. "Failures are steps to success."

This year, instead of setting a goal, set a practice. If the skill you want to practice is improving how you present ideas, give yourself 30 minutes each week to give a short presentation to one of your peers. Each person will be different, and that is the challenge. Real practice involves failure, which a goal-based mindset cannot understand.

There are no shortcuts, just practice and consistency. Try to find joy in that. There is no buzz every day, but over time, a quiet confidence that allows you to know that you are capable of most things you set your mind to. Most importantly, you make suffering optional.

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Where do ideas come from?

Ideas are different from thoughts. Thoughts are everywhere and are as common as grains of sand. They are fleeting and often out of context. An idea, on the other hand, is “what exists in the mind as a representation (as of something comprehended) or as a formulation (as of a plan).” - Merriam-Webster definition. 

Ideas go beyond thoughts because they are formulated in a way that allows them to become real.

Here are some inspirations for ideas to try, read, and think about. 

• In A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young, the author outlines his method for the production of ideas, underscoring that they don’t just arrive, but must be made.
  “As I said before, what I am now about to contend is that in the production of ideas the mind follows a method which is just as definite as the method by which, say, Fords are produced.”

• There are many ways to have ideas, Creators on Creating is a great book that outlines how many of the most creative people develop their ideas.

• One practical way of creating ideas is the 9-box method. Get a piece of paper, draw a three-by-three grid of boxes, Write your problem statement at the top of the page, and then fill each box with an idea that might solve the problem you are trying to tackle. This method allows for a breadth of thinking and comparison between ideas.

• One of the best apps I have found for gathering ideas is Readwise. It allows you to highlight quotes from Kindle or other online readers and organize those ideas to act as a springboard for your own ideas.

• Musician Brian Eno is famous for being an ideas person. He believes in a concept called Scenius, which means that ideas are not just generated by individuals but by groups of people all thinking independently and then coming together to make an idea.

• I will leave you with this thought about ideas from the excellent book Hare Brain Tortoise Mind.
  “One of the strongest forces that prevents the discovery of these new avenues may be the habit of thinking fast: of taking your first intuitive assessment of the situation for granted, and not bothering to stop and check.”

A question…
How do you come up with ideas? Please take a moment to share your thoughts on what works for you.

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Listening is the first step

“Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.” - Carl Rogers

This quote inspired me to create a design exercise with my team. How can you practice active listening? What is active listening?

For me, it’s the ability to let go of your thoughts and feelings and formulate questions about what you hear. In other words, to be actively curious. This means going from a passive state of absorbing knowledge to an active state of thinking about what you heard and formulating questions based on that new knowledge—a practice driven not by self-interest but by curiosity.

This unlocks a whole new world where you can move beyond your thoughts into someone else’s ideas.

The exercise I devised for my team was to watch three videos and, after each video, spend 5 minutes writing down the questions that arose for each of them from watching each video.

Here are the three videos I used.

Andy Goldsworthy on the work of art
Lewis Hamilton on teamwork
Brian Eno on culture and creativity

After 30 minutes of this exercise, we generated over 60 questions as a group. This started a wide range of conversations among the team. For me, this is a victory for listening and curiosity, two vital skills for creativity to thrive.

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Teaching critique

A critique session is often a moment to teach. But what does it mean to teach?

I found this quote recently, which resonated.

“It means that your students can look at the work and make similar decisions without you being there.” - Dr Samuel Holtzman

Not only do we need to offer criticism, but we need to provide tools to help people critique their own work.

To that end, I wrote this article, “Design proofreading.” It offers a tool to help you understand how I critique UX design work. I hope it proves helpful to you as you work through your next project. There are no magic solutions to making great designs, no secret methods other than spending time understanding the problem, trying out a variety of ideas to see what fits, and then critiquing those ideas.

Every critique teaches you something, and the trick is to be open, to listen, to let go of your preconceived ideas, and to be ready to move on to the next idea.

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Fear is the motivation-killer

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” - Frank Herbert, Dune.

In today’s culture, we are constantly afraid. What will be the next disaster for yourself or your community? Cybercrime, subway muggings, bridge collapses, wars, and global pandemics. 24-hour news coverage of all these fearful events is constant. Ẽven observing them from the edges, it would be reasonable to feel fear. I certainly do.

The problem is that this fear robs us of our agency. If you allow it to overwhelm your mind, you become passive, waiting for the next disaster rather than living your life. So, how do you fight this? How do you find the motivation? How do you face your fear and permit it to pass over and through you?

One approach is to change the rules of the game. Right now, there are more sources of news and information than ever before in human history. In previous eras, people didn't know what they should be afraid of because they didn't know about events on the other side of the city, let alone the globe. Now, you can access everything immediately through your magic rectangle, always within arm’s reach.

But what if you changed the rules of the game? What if you went from being a passive information sponge to diving deeper into the ideas that speak to you? Rather than feeling fear, you pick the type of information and make it work for you instead of against you, providing you with a source of courage and motivation.

Find your people
Have you ever felt deeply connected with an idea you have read, watched, or listened to? An author or artist that you could not stop thinking about? What if we thought of that person as part of your “team for life” — a group of people who would help inspire and motivate you for the rest of your life?

It's fine to have a small team to start, and your team might change over your lifetime as you discover new people and ideas and as you yourself change. You might say, but I’ve read that book and listened to that music a thousand times. How do I keep getting motivation from that one person? This is where the internet in that magic rectangle can instead come to the rescue. We live in a time when a large part of human creation is accessible (or at least a large part of human knowledge). If you like a particular person, chances are so do a lot of other people. Those other people might have written a book, conducted an interview, or made a movie about your inspirational person. Luckily for you, all of that stuff is now only one click away. Apple podcasts or YouTube are excellent starting points.

Everyone’s “team for life” is unique to them. So it’s easy to be self-motivated to find this information because these are ideas and people you have picked. The deeper you dive into the people who get you, the more you learn. Your “team for life” is always there for you, showing you new places to explore, books to read, and things to listen to. This is also an excellent antidote to information overload, a filter on the internet.

You could pick from some of the usual suspects: Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Steven Spielberg, or the Beatles. But the people you pick don’t have to be famous; they just have to get you. Appeal to your particular way of thinking, the thing that motivates you. For example, I like Shakespeare, Neil Postman, Adam Curtis, and Georges Simenon. Now, that’s just me, but when I watch a Shakespeare scene or listen to an interview with Neil Postman, it motivates me to keep exploring. That motivation turns into things like starting to write this article.

Pick your team for life
Take 10 minutes, sit down, and write a list of people that you really enjoy reading, listening to, or watching. Don't worry if it’s hard at first or if you pick the wrong people. Your team is going to change and evolve as you do, and that's a wonderful thing. Once you have two or three people jotted down, open up a podcast app or YouTube, visit your local library, and look for anything about that person: interviews, music, movies, books, articles, anything that allows you to explore their ideas further, and make a playlist. The next time you’re bored or lack motivation, just pick something off your "team for life" list and enjoy.

Introduce other people to your team and share their ideas with your work colleagues or with your friends. It might fall flat, or it might be the opportunity for someone to find a new member of their own “team for life.” Find your people on your “team for life,” and they will open endless doors of insight, discovery, and motivation. This will allow the fear to pass over and through you, and what will remain is the most motivated version of you.

Look outside yourself

Have a problem at work? Try a mindfulness app. Have a family conflict? Feeling sad? You guessed it, try a mindfulness app.

What if instead of using an app to look inward for solutions, we looked outward?

If you feel your attention is scattered, you can practice meditation, breathe, and build your focus skills.

You can also make a coffee date with a friend once a week and sit and listen. Resist the temptation to offer quick fixes or anecdotes from your past experiences; just listen. I would argue that this would build your focusing skills just as much as any mindfulness app might. Sitting and listening also provide a new perspective on your own issues.

Modern culture has gone from a collective sense that we are interconnected to an almost robotic individualism, which is leading to record levels of anxiety, loneliness, and worse. The BBC writes, “suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among Americans under the age of 35, according to the Centers for Disease Control, America's health protection agency.”

Meditation and mindfulness clearly have a place but even monks talk to each other, they share ideas, problems, and chores.

If you want to get fit, get a personal coach. If you want to improve your mental health, get a therapist; if you want to learn a language, take a course with a teacher and class full of fellow learners.

While you can improve all these things by yourself with a smartphone, doing them with other people helps not only with learning a new skill, it also helps with the more intangible social learning which neither a device nor your inner voice can provide alone.

I am not advocating for returning to offices five days a week or only getting fit at a gym, but there needs to be some counterbalance to the relentless message that everyone fixes themselves alone, which seems to erode our culture one person at a time.

Even my favorite stoic, famously inward-looking, wrote,
“But the greatest benefit is to be derived from conversation, because it creeps by degrees into the soul.” - Seneca

Investigating design

A software product designer is often given a problem like this:
“People cannot figure out how to share a document using our current software experience.”

It’s natural for that designer to want to talk to end consumers of the software and ask them what the issues are with the software experience. When they do, they often hear responses like, "It’s just not clear," or "I don't even know where the button is,” or "This is not how it works on Microsoft Word." These conversations might offer valuable insight, but they don't really help a designer understand the whole problem; the feedback is about specific parts of the problem but doesn’t form a complete picture of the experience.

But what if this was a mystery?
What if there was a crime, a murder! it happened in the middle of the day, and there were several witnesses, but none of them actually saw the dirty deed.

Interview the witnesses
You would interview the witnesses - just like in our software design problem when the designer talked to the users. But where would you be if you just stopped there without examining the crime scene or forensics?

The crime scene
At the murder scene, we’d investigate the details of the space. Too often, in software, we overlook those spaces where it all happens: the software screens, the buttons, menus, fields, and workflows. There is much to be learned from those old screens, like from a crime scene.

Forensics
Where did people click? Could they understand the labels? Was it clear that this item could be shared? What is all the functionality that's available? In other words, let’s establish the facts so we can see the whole problem.

Put the pieces together...
Once you’ve interviewed the witnesses, investigated the crime scene, and have all the facts in place, you can recreate the sequence of events that led to the crime (the user experience). You can see what is happening and why it's going wrong. You can take all those eyewitness statements (user interviews), put them in context, and make sense of them.

Once you can see what happened in a design, unlike a crime, you can change what will happen. As a designer, you can change the sequence of events and alter the facts to make the outcome something that engages your users and helps them get things done. In other words, you can create a design that is no longer a crime.

Reactive vs Proactive work

A recent official report on Fostering Innovation by the British Psychological Society, having surveyed all the relevant research, concludes that: ‘Individuals are more likely to innovate where they have sufficient autonomy and control over their work to be able to try out new and improved ways of doing things’ and where ‘team members participate in the setting of objectives’.

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind - Guy Claxton

Office workers now have more autonomy than ever, and it’s clear that people feel that autonomy is important to them—yet understanding how to use this newfound freedom is often challenging. Autonomy needs a new mindset.

To take advantage of your newfound freedom, you need to consider the balance of reactive versus proactive work that you do.

How do you know if you are doing reactive work?

Are you executing on work set out in the project plan and primarily responding to other people’s requests?

How do you know if you are doing proactive work?

Are you planning how you’ll approach your work?

Here’s an example of choosing one of these two ways to work in response to the same scenario. Your boss briefs you on a new project. You can:

A: Wait for your boss’s project plan and for someone else to schedule a kickoff meeting.

B: Make your own project plan, research the subject matter, and schedule meetings with end users of this project.

While plan B sounds like a lot more work, it has the benefit of being proactive, putting your needs out in the world, and communicating what you want to achieve with the project. Even if you don’t get everything you want, you might get more than you imagine. In addition, you will be much more motivated to do a task you set yourself rather than being told what to do.

Balance is essential. You don’t need to control everything, but you do want control over some aspects of what you do. Doing proactive work can help you achieve this balance.

No matter what your level in your organization is, proactive work can have an impact. If you are an intern, it’s a way to ensure you get a chance to do more exciting work. If you are mid-level in your career, it lets you set the tone for a project, and if you are a leader, it enables you to control your most precious asset, your time.

My books of 2023

Change is the one constant in life; it’s also the key theme in some of my favorite books from this year.

Maybe you are like spy George Smiley, looking forward to retirement before having your world turned upside down, or maybe you are like John Cleese, discovering the power of your subconscious mind and its ability to change how you think. The artist Wayne Thiebaud recalls his ability to change between being an acclaimed artist and a teacher. Peter Ackroyd details the amazing roller coaster ride of change that is British history.

Adapting and changing is a crucial ability in life, and W. Timothy Gallwey’s great book The Inner Game of Work helps you find ways to focus on the change you want.

I hope you find a book here to take into the new year that can help you focus on the change you want in 2024!

The Inner Game of Work
W. Timothy Gallwey 

The spy who came in from the cold
John Le Carre

Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide
John Cleese

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors
Peter Ackroyd

Wayne Thiebaud: Draftsman
Isabelle Dervaux

Give as few orders as possible

“82% of employees and 62% of HR directors believe that workers will need to hone their current skills or acquire new ones at least once a year in order to maintain competitive advantage in a global job market.”
- HBR What Your Future Employees Want Most

As a leader in an organization, your first priority is often to deliver results, complete projects, and meet deadlines. Doing the essential work of helping individuals and teams acquire new skills is often left to employees’ own self-motivated efforts or mandated training courses. 

I think there’s a better way to help people hone and gain skills. I recently read the book The Inner Game of Work by W. Timothy Gallwey, which focuses on a coaching approach. Gallwey’s coaching system involved not giving specific instructions to the people he worked with but instead suggesting specific things for them to focus on that could lead them to improve a skill. This coaching method is not about filling people with new information like a training course might; it is about helping them improve and optimize what they already have. 

In one example, Gallwey writes about his work with call center employees, who do a job that is often challenging and thankless. Instead of having them learn pre-determined scripts or evasion tactics, Gallwey asked the call center workers to focus on the tone of a caller’s voice. By learning to listen carefully to a caller’s tone of voice, the call center workers evolved a skill they already had; over time, they became better able to understand the emotional state of the person on the other end of the line, which allowed them to approach the conversation in the right frame of mind. Gallwey’s book is full of examples like this wherein coaching helped people better understand their jobs and increased their ability to handle most situations—all without giving them step-by-step instructions.

To put this coaching style of management in context, I made this diagram to show the spectrum of different team management styles. 

Order
Direct & results 
This is the most familiar management style: telling people what you need and when you need it, directing them about the results you need.  

Lead
Suggest & results 
This style requires a person to convince an entire company or group to follow a particular path without giving specific orders but rather through suggestions. This requires a very different set of skills. Communication and persuasion are the critical skills required.

Teach
Direct & learn
Teaching involves helping people learn something new; it requires structure, tools, and materials to help people learn a new skill. The goal of a teacher is to achieve understanding, not results. 

Coach
Suggest & learn 
Coaching is often the most misunderstood of all the categories. It is a subtle skill set. Coaching is about trying to get people to level up the skills they already have without micro-managing the process. 

Management styles are rarely delineated like this; worse, managers are often expected to use all of them. Yet, managers may find it hard to master all these different styles, and switching between them can confuse managers and teams. If you give orders and demand results one day and then offer open-ended suggestions the next, people often don’t know what to expect—or what is expected of them. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the hero receives some good advice: “‘Give as few orders as possible,’ his father had told him... ‘Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.’”

Following the “order” style of management can get results, but it often leads to teams feeling like they learned very little in the process of getting that desired result. When people on teams don't learn, they get bored, which makes getting quick results even harder. While “coaching” is often the least used management style, it may in fact, be the most effective at giving employers and employees what they each want: growth and new skills for employees and proactive, motivated employees for employers. Seems like a win-win.

Feeding my subconscious

Design is a process, not an outcome.

The process of exploring a problem will always lead to better results compared to creating the first thing that pops into your head.

I recently read John Cleese's book on creativity, and it reinforced this notion of design and creativity as a process of discovery.

In the book, Cleese notes that there are two parts to the process: first, the conscious effort you put into thinking about a problem, and second, the way your subconscious takes over as you daydream or sleep. It’s this subconscious time that makes sense of the tangle of issues with a problem and allows you to unwind your thinking and often to come up with a solution you could not think of when you were struggling consciously. Your subconscious mind is a mysterious place, and you are not entirely in control of it, which leads to these happy insights.

As I read this, I had a thought. If I am not in control of my subconscious mind, then what happens if instead of feeding my subconscious brain with fun, creative ideas, I provide it with, let’s say, reading hundreds of posts about negative things, a disaster here, a negative comment about my ideas there. What if I’m feeding these thoughts into my mind 2-3 hours a day in a constant visual and text stream? What will my subconscious make of that? Will it emerge with something positive or negative?

I am not in control of what my subconscious does. But I am in control of what I feed my subconscious. The diet I feed my mind is as important as the one I provide my body. I find that every day, I need to eat my mental greens to feed my mind with challenging and nourishing ideas and that maybe I should take a break from those Instagram Big Macs.

Are you directing or acting?

“Cut! Let’s try that one more time!” 

You’re on a movie set, and the director didn’t see exactly what they were looking for in a particular take. The lighting was off, the costumes looked wrong, or the expressions on the actors’ faces didn’t match the dialogue. Directors like David Fincher are famous for doing forty or fifty takes to get what they want. Everybody involved takes this process in their stride because they expect this to happen; they just set up and try again. This might seem like a super annoying—or incredibly inefficient—way to work. But this seemingly slow method can lead to great results for creative work. 

Doing multiple takes while everything is set up and everyone is in the right frame of mind is, in fact, very efficient and creative. 

Let's take another scenario. Let's say a designer spends some time creating a poster for a design team review. They present a couple of ideas, but something is not quite right. The structure is wrong, or the content does not quite work. What happens next? The people trying to decide if the design makes sense (the “directors”) cannot say, “Okay, let's try it again” in real time because the designer cannot just make another idea for the poster on the spot. It takes another 2-3 days to make a meaningful version, which, once again, might not be quite right. 

Suddenly, it’s our standard process for designing that looks pretty inefficient and emotionally bruising compared to the film process of repeatedly trying. 

To avoid this situation, a lone designer will often try to both act out the scene (create a design) and direct the scene (decide which of their ideas is the right one to show). But this is difficult. I know there have been a few actor/directors, but I would say that they are the exception, not the rule. 

In films, the audience never sees all the takes, just the final cut; in design, a client or internal stakeholders only need to see two or three versions of a design, but a design team’s internal process needs to be much more expansive to come up with those few strong ideas. 

If you are designing something, you are an actor. So, don’t edit yourself. Come into an internal team design review with a range of different concepts. This is where it’s helpful to think in concept models. What is a concept model? For example, cars, trains, and bicycles are different concept models of transport that can get you from A to B. They require very different elements to make them work. Cars require roads, insurance, driver’s licenses etc. Trains need stations, tickets, timetables etc. They each provide the same outcome of getting from A to B but go about it in very different ways. Their concept models are clearly different. 

One simple rule for crafting different concept models of an idea is to take your first idea and then make the complete opposite version. (Car vs. Train) Another method is to take your initial model and then take everything out of it apart from the essential elements (Car vs. Bicycle).

Finding the right concept model is the hard work of design. Once the concept model is transparent, creating the sketch or image of the design is usually pretty fast. Bring a variety of concept models to your “director”—now they can see a breadth of options, leading to better outcomes and a much richer conversation about the problem you are trying to solve.

If you are a design director, then you are like the film director; you cannot be involved with creating individual concept models/ideas. It’s not impossible of course, but you do have to flick a switch in your brain and let go of any attachment you have to an idea and look at it as if you were seeing it for the first time. This sounds logically possible, yet it’s often emotionally very difficult to do; the effort it takes to make something makes it hard to let go of, clouding your ability to understand the problem and see the right solution. 

I can hear the outcry from designers now: “Why can’t we do both?”

I would reply there is no harm in being an actor. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, and Angela Bassett … are all great actors; they have considerable influence over the creative process, but they don’t edit and direct the final movie. They play their part. A considerable part, and they seem very happy with that role. 

Design is the ability to make sense of things. It is often a collaborative activity, and even the “crazy ones” have their own creative collaborators. Brain Eno, famous for his creativity, has a term for this. He calls it scenius, his term which describes “the creative intelligence of a community.” In these collaborations, we all have a role. Sometimes those roles are interchangeable, but great ideas are often formed when people focus on a single role, allowing the design process to work and creating something beyond a single imagination.

Efficiency is overrated

It’s 7 am, and it’s a school day. That means getting our son to school on time. For the longest time, it has been a tricky task, that is until we wrote a checklist. Every morning, he has to do seven things to be ready for school. He checks them off the list, and we are out the door on time. A model of efficiency, checklists are great for activities in life that don’t need much consideration. The issue occurs when you start applying the checklist mentality to parts of your life that require real consideration. 

“When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.” - Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

Checklists, timers, stand-ups, speed reading, book summaries, and workflows are some of the efficiency tools that have come to dominate our lives. They are great tools for production and for getting things done. Yet, when we apply these same tools to the creative parts of our lives (arguably the more important parts of our lives), they are destructive and rob us of much of the value of these creative moments. 

What matters when you slow down is the experience and emotions you feel when you enter this state; it is quite different from the momentary fix of the dopamine you get from checking something off a list. 

In the next few posts, I will highlight several examples of how slowing down improves creativity and makes activities more enjoyable.
To get started, I’ll share an example from music and one from conversation.

Music: Slow, Slow, Quick 
Recently I noticed that while practicing his guitar my son was playing the same songs as usual, but very slowly. I asked him why he was doing that. It turns out that his guitar teacher had recommended this slow playing to improve his technique. Playing slowly leads to better form, so when he plays at full speed, the notes he produces sound clearer, more exact, more pure.

Conversation: Repeat after me
A while ago, I read a great book called Non-violent Communication by Marshal Rosenberg. It’s an essential book on asking for what you need and listening for what others need. One important exercise in the book helps reduce conflict in conversations. Practice accurately repeating back to your conversation partner precisely what they just told you. This sounds simple, but it is a deceptively challenging thing to do. It requires you to stop jumping ahead in a conversation to what you want to say and to slow down and really listen to the thoughts and feelings of the person sitting across from you.

In the sci-fi classic Dune, Duke Atredies gives his son Paul Atreides (the hero of the book) the following advice.

“Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for a quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurances of success. Take your time and be sure.” - Dune by Frank Herbert

This rings true. Slow down to ensure not only success but also enjoyment in the parts of your life that are most important to you.

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.

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.

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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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