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.

Becoming the god of war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Average cover band

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia entry

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

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

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

Listen to Robert Elms on the BBC

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

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Set challenges, not goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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

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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.  

Progress not perfection

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.” ― Chuck Close

I look at the huge pile of washing up in the sink. In my head I’m thinking, this would take forever to do and it wouldn't be more fun to watch that new Netflix series right now? But instead of giving up on the washing up, I make a bargain with myself. I’ll devote the next ten minutes to this task and get as much done as I can and then go back to the things I really want to do. So I do. I focus and spend the next 10 minutes doing the pile of washing in front of me. Surprisingly, I get it all done.

Anxiety about doing something is often caused by our need to complete something. If instead you focus on the process and try not for completion but for progress, you gain control over the situation. Instead of perfect completion, you are making progress.

For example, if every day you did the washing up in the sink and got 90% of it done, in 10 mins a day you would have clean cups and dishes and a mostly empty sink. Or, you can avoid it completely because you’re daunted by completing the task, resulting in a larger pile of dirty dishes and not having anything to eat on.

“You may say, “I must do something this afternoon,” but actually there is no “this afternoon.” We do things one after the other. That is all.”
- Shunryū Suzuki

Dirty dishes are one thing, but most things in life are never 100% complete. There is always more to do and letting go of the anxiety of completion and embracing the idea of progress will open the door to completing more of the projects you care about but feel are too large to take on. Using what I call a design mindset can help.

My way to solve my washing up predicament shows two key attributes of a design mindset.

First, there’s iteration:
Focus on the process. Each iteration of the design/activity gets you closer. Everything is a work in progress.

Next, there are constraints:
Constraints allow you to impose some order on an activity. In creating limitations, you help creativity get started in ways that productively solve the problem of the constraint. And, as we all know getting started is often the hardest part of completing anything. Time can be a constraint, as can limiting the number of tools you use to make a project or the number of words you can use to describe your project’s value. Each constraint creates a natural challenge—don't go overboard and set too many constraints, but one or two can boost your creativity.

The next time you have to complete a task instead of worrying about how long it will take, turn the question around: I am going to give this task the next 10, 20, 30 mins of my life, and let see how much I can get done. Using this method gives you control of the time and the task. Instead of setting goals for yourself, set yourself challenges, and surprise yourself with how much progress you can make in just 10 minutes. Repeat this every day and you will be amazed at how much progress you can make.

Design is murder

Inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Jules Maigret, I’ve come to see that design and detective work (the fictional and possibly even the non-fictional kind) share some illuminating common elements: piecing together clues from many small pieces of information; putting these pieces back together in different configurations, and finally finding the solution that fits - either by solving the mystery or creating a design that works. 

Fictional, and even real, detection uses a particularly powerful conceptual framework:

Means, Motive, and Opportunity. 

Restated as a series of questions, this framework can be applied with remarkable effectiveness to design problems: 
 

Means: How can a person gain access to, and understand how to use, your product and service? 

Motive: Why would a person use your product or service?

Opportunity: When can a person use your product or service? How does it fit into their lives?


Of course, there are two big differences. First, a mystery usually has only one right answer—a single killer or bank robber—yet design can offer many great (or terrible) solutions to the same problem. A second difference is that in detection each time the problem is similar (e.g. who committed the crime). Yet, in the design process, the designer has to define both the problem and the solution. Without the former, the latter makes no sense. 

Like the detective, the designer has tactics they can use to define and solve the problem. As I’ve written before ("The “problem first” design process"), the process for defining a problem is very similar to designing a solution; once the problem has been clarified you can then move into design solution mode. 

Following the detective’s framework, you can use a number of tactical design tools to solve a design mystery.

Means: How can a person gain access and understand how to use, your product and service? 

In Form, Function, and Feel, I look at how prototyping allows you to examine the different ways in which end users will perceive and use your product or service. 

“It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise, your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.” - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Motive: Why would a person use your product or service?

In Design First, I articulate a different approach to research which uses design tools to uncover the key questions that need to be answered to make a successful product or service. 

"You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear." - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Opportunity: When can a person use your product or service? How does it fit into their lives? 

In Intent driven design I propose an approach to predicting your users' intent and actions which allows you to anticipate and delight users with intuitive designs based on their needs. 

“See the value of imagination,” said Holmes. “It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified.”  - Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes novel

Detection and design share many similarities. When you begin, there are many questions and many assumptions are made. Yet, only by testing out your ideas can you hope to find a solution. In both cases, understanding human nature plays a vital role in coming to a solution; can you understand what motivates someone to commit a crime, or to use a service?

If the “means/motive/opportunity” framework is crucial in fictional (and even real) detection, in design it can crack the case of both defining the problem and developing solutions. 

Way Finder

Everyone needs a plan. A plan is like a map, but with important differences. It is not something that is static; it changes with time. Unlike maps of the physical world that, barring major upheaval, change only slightly over time, your plan for your life, your company, your community has to adapt to constant change. 

There are two really important parts of a plan: where you start and where you end. Knowing where you will end is hard so the best you can do is create a hypothesis of where you want to go and then aim in that direction. 

Having said that, it is impossible to create your hypothesis unless you know where you are right now. What's your situation? Where are you on the map? No point setting out to climb Mount Everest if you don't know which country you are in right now. 

So how do you find out what your situation is? At this point, I could give you some quick tactics. But the real answer is for you to figure out your own tools for understanding your situation. Imagine if you are visiting a city you do not know. I could give you a map, but if you don’t know how to read it then it’s of limited use. I could give you a tour guide, but after your visit, none of the places or how you got to them would stick in your mind for next time. What can you do?

Explore; small sections to start, make your own map, with your landmarks and places that you know. Build out further and further. This takes time! Which is free by the way, it just means you have to decide to use it to build your knowledge. 

Now, there are some shortcuts. You could ask other people for help in your network. Initially, this feels like asking for advice, but over time as your own map grows you will be able to start giving advice and then it is more of a collaboration. You can also share your map with others so they can benefit from your experience. This might lead to you exploring and extending your map. 

At this point you might ask, but what about the goal?! What about the endpoint you were talking about at the start of this piece?

I would answer by saying that the goal is always undefined and that by creating your own map, you have achieved your goal. Not only have you done that but if you have shared this knowledge with your network you have brought tremendous value to many more people. 

This excerpt from the poem “Ithaka” by C.P. Cavafy gets to the heart of this post’s ideas. 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. 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

- C.P. Cavafy

(for the full poem: Ithaka)

Read, Curate, Write

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot"
- Stephen King

Every day you are flooded with information, articles, books, social media, blog posts, lots and lots of information. It can be overwhelming because none of it speaks to your voice inside; it is just a lot of noise. You might have favorite authors and retreat to them when faced with all this noise but how do you find your voice? How do you get your ideas out into the world? It can seem impossible. 

Writing is hard, and writing in your own voice is even harder. It makes you vulnerable, it makes you look inside and talk about what you really feel and believe. Most of all, it puts new ideas and visions out into a world that might not be ready to receive them. 

Stephen King is right, reading lots and writing lots is the key to unlocking your own voice and ideas, but writing can be especially hard as an immediate next step after you read. One step toward a solution can be found in a curatorial approach.

Reading Stephen King's quote made me think about the process of writing and how reliant it is on both reading and curating your thoughts while reading. This may seem like merely collecting or organizing but it can be an important step between thinking about an idea and actually writing something of value for yourself. Curation bridges the gap between reading and writing and creates a path toward a writing habit. 

Try it: Collect 5 articles on an idea you find interesting. Now find another 10 articles. Next, select from these 15 articles the 5 most important ones that start to form a narrative arc for the story you want to tell. Each of the five articles will help tell a different part of the story. Begin with the article that gives the best overview of the current situation of the subject you are interested in. Then find the articles that best outline the problem or opportunity with the subject. Finally, pick the articles you feel talk about a solution to the problem you posed. Through this process, the act of curation tells a story and makes an argument. 

The next step might be to write a sentence or paragraph about the collection of articles, providing some context for your selections and order. Finally, write more specifically about the ideas in the articles. Through this process, you start to find your own voice. 

Reading, curating, and eventually writing. Over time the reading and curating will not be what you publish. Rather, you'll publish your writing on the ideas this process has sparked within you. 

The art of this literary curation, of gathering your reading into one place, is a starting point to help you find your own voice as a writer. In a sea of information and opinion, it will help you find yourself every day. 

Experience First

The world of innovation is awash with acronyms and tech terms: AI, AR, VR, CV, Bots, Mix Reality. It seems that every few months a new piece of pure technology is being born.   

Yet, two people who have created significant innovation in the last fifteen years explicitly say that you address a person’s or group’s problem first, and then find the tech to support the solution. You don’t start with AI, AR, VR, or Bots and look for a problem they can solve.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology” - Steve Jobs

“There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product-focused, you can be technology focused, you can be a business model focused... But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.” - Jeff Bezos 

What this means is that we have to look beyond the newest technology born in a lab as well as beyond what people themselves are currently asking for. To quote Wayne Gretzky, we need to move to where the hockey puck will be. 

How do you do that? You have to look for fundamental needs: communication, transportation, living spaces, health. What are the unmet needs in these areas and what will they be in the next 10 years?

Airbnb and Uber each met a fundamental need. It was not the technology that led their innovation, rather it was the need and the experience. You can, of course, make things faster with better technology, but neither of these culture-changing companies created any new fundamental technologies; they used sometimes decades-old technologies in new ways.

When you start with a new technology you are limited by its context and its lack of history. It is something looking for a home; there are many cases of technologies that should never find one. 

If you want to innovate, stop reading tech blogs and start looking around at people's most basic needs and make those better. Those needs represent big markets that can change the culture of our society. By creating real people-centered innovation, you have the possibility of creating products and services that people will eventually be unable to imagine the world without.  

Intent driven design

People don’t want a drill. They want a hole.

People are often only given solutions that solve a portion of their original intent.

So what is the intent?
The intent is being resolved or determined to do something. Doing this thing on which one is intent can be broken down into a series of smaller interconnected tasks constrained by a number of requirements (time, location, money, for example) which are only important in that they get you to your desired something. 

By listening carefully you can hear people's intentions, rather than just the tasks they mention. 
To design for an intention, you must be able to sequence the tasks in the right order and make sure each task is possible within a particular set of requirements. 

If you can understand intent you can map tasks over time and predict your users’ future!

Let's take an example: cooking an omelet. This seems simple but it is actually deceptively complex to create a solution that fulfills the whole intent. The answer could be to look online or in a cookbook and to follow the instructions, which can often be a hit or miss approach. Instead, let's break this down from an intent-driven design approach. 

By listening and observing experienced cooks (or users) you can see three major things you need to do in sequence to make the perfect omelet. 

Have the right cooking equipment. 
Have the right ingredients.
Know the right cooking techniques. 

Hence, an intent-driven solution would first make sure that you had the right equipment, and if you didn't would offer you alternatives you might already have, or would help you find a place nearby to get the right equipment. 

It would then check if you had the right ingredients to make the omelet. Once again, if you did not, it would suggest the places in your local area that have the ingredients you need. 

The final step would be to provide you with videos or clear instructions on the correct cooking technique to help you make the best omelet possible with the equipment and ingredients you have. 

Putting intent into practice
Very few, if any, services today offer this kind of complete intent-based solution. Making eggs is simple, but still, there's a gap between the tasks and the intent. Imagine something more complex -- like buying a house!

The actual tasks when buying a house include :
Get financial advice, mortgage advice, mortgage loan, credit checks, real estate lawyer services, real estate broker, house finding services, building surveyor reports, school district data, house closing services, tax document action, notary services, and on and on and on……

You can see what I mean; you want a home but to fulfill that intent you “need’ all these services, people, and kinds of information-- in the right sequence--to be successful. 

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.

This is what Airbnb and Uber have done to some success and Apple does extremely well in its retail stores. They understand the intent of their users (e.g. for Uber, to get to a specific location in a set amount of time) and make services and products that cater to each of the tasks that the user requires in sequence to fulfill their actual intent. 

To use this method you should start by identifying the basic parameters for breaking down all the elements that will lead a person to be able to fulfill their intention. You can do this by asking the following questions:
1. How much time does the user have to complete their intent?
2. Do they have to be in a specific location?
3. How much money will they need/do they have to complete their intent?

Next, you should try to define three main categories of tasks that need to be accomplished for the person to fulfill their intent.

The final thing to do is to sequence the tasks and apply the time, location, and money parameters to create a design brief which, if met, will fully satisfy the person’s intent.

It sounds like magic but in fact, it is just learning to listen in a very different way, and thinking more expansively about a design problem.