The Brink of Chaos

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Matthew

Do you think that crime in the US worse than it was last year? Most Americans believe that crime is worse than it was last year, when the reality is that crime has been in steady decrease since 1994. [Gallup Poll].

Why do we think that crime is worse? Because we remember the crime on the news last night easily, but have a hard time remembering the news from a year ago. What we see is all there is. This is how Daniel Kahneman describes many cognitive biases in Thinking Fast and Slow. When we analyze situations, we only consider the relevant facts that come to memory. We don’t consider information we can’t remember or that doesn’t come to mind. What we see or what we remember, is all there is.

This is at the heart of our errors in analyzing the world around us. We want to think rationally about the situations that happen to us, but we can’t bring all of the right facts that we need to mind; so we make mistakes. When we are trying to answer very hard questions and recognize that we probably don’t have all of the data we need or can’t remember all the data we need, that is the time to remember the errors caused by WYSIATI thinking.

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Posted in Thoughts | 2 Comments

The Power of Responsibility

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Matthew

The book Influencer tells the story of Delancy Street Foundation, a halfway house for people who are just out of jail that operates in the San Francisco Area. They have one of best success rates in helping violent offenders find more productive lives.They have several key techniques but one of the most important is that everyone in the house is put in charge of someone else recovery. This means that if someone slips up, he is not only letting himself down but also the person responsible for his recovery. Moreover, rather than mulling over their own need for change, they have the opportunity to help someone else. There is a lot of transformative power in being responsible.

The best way to learn something is to try teaching it to someone else. We may think we fully understand the subject but trying to explain it to someone else requires a deeper understanding and actually proves that you do understand. This is the same thing that happens from being responsible for something. It changes our reference point.

In my post about Positive and Negative Goals, I mentioned how groups should gather around positive goals as they are energizing. When we are building groups of accountability, the best way to do this is to be responsible for someone else’s success. This helps all of us be proactive toward helping others.

Moreover, consider the effect of responsibility on parents. They suddenly start attending church or stop smoking or get a good job. They do this because they know that they are now providing a model and responsible for their children. Being responsible for something makes even difficult habits easier to kick. And the cycle continues, as children get older, it’s important for them to also be given responsibility both to build trust and because it changes the way we see our situation.

Of course, giving responsibility requires trust and trust requires a belief in both the competency and character of the other person. Many times we need development in both. Delaney House builds on this by first making people responsible for very small things, and as they become more accomplished, giving them responsibility for more. They’ve even seen that elderly people who are put in charge of a plant in their room live longer than those who are not responsible for anything. Ultimately, we all are more satisfied with life when we are responsible for something that is in our power to control.

Photo Credit: marcokalmann via Compfight

Posted in Leadership | 3 Comments

Why Information Work is “Expensive”

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Matthew

“I know a lawyer that charges $750/hr. At that price, I would only pay for the 3 minutes it took for him to give him the advice I needed and I would expect that he would already have the answer to the question I asked. If he had to look it up, that would be on his time.” - a friend

In the industrial era, time was an easy way to measure productivity. A person working on the assembly line produced some number of widgets in a certain amount of time. If we were to compare the most talented widget maker and the least talent widget maker, we would certainly find a difference but the distribution of all workers could be plotted ona bell curve. Everyone could make at least 1 and noone made more than 1,000,000.

But information work is not limited by physical constraints. The variance between one information worker and another can be several orders of magnitude, possibly even infinitely different. Within information work, a typical hour may yield zero useful results, and the next hour may invent the cure to cancer. How does one put on a scale the measure of value on an hourly basis?

Perhaps this is why so many companies use salaries instead. It accounts for the lumpiness of value provided by a typical information worker. One hour is incredible, the next is filled with the frustrating sound of rebooting their computer. Hourly wages don’t make much sense when we pay someone to think for a living, but it doesn’t stop us from using this measure of evaluation.

We hired a UX designer to help us out with our last project. It bothered me that we paid him by the hour but this is what he preferred – it was easier to account for his own time. He delivered way more value than we ever paid him, but when we got the invoice, others who reviewed it asked me why it took so long to do some particular part of work. Because that’s the nature of information work! It took him half an hour to come up with some ideas that we would never have come up with, but doing some of the more manual work to show the implementation took more time. It still was highly valuable and he delivered big.

At the same time, those who do this kind of work can delude themselves into thinking a few minutes of their time is worth the world. A friend had a business partner who was working on 4 different ventures at the same time, while my friend was really focusing only on the one between the two of them. When confronted with the lack of focus on this project, the business partner explained that his ideas and insights were not measurable by the hour. This is just lazy. It’s true that a specialized worker can provide valuable ideas but usually this only happens through dedicated focus.

Information workers are specialized. No one pays a talented architect $350/hr to break ground, but neither should one be astounded that he makes $350/hr doing architecture. Nevertheless, sometimes an architect must spend some of his time doing work that is below his ability so that he can also deliver the ideas that make him worth his rate. The key is to deliver good ideas and execute on them. This is what every information worker should strive for and it’s why salary works better than hourly pay.

So is $750/hr a ridiculous pay for a lawyer? Well, how much is it worth for the idea no one else could find that causes you to win the case?

Posted in Ambiguity, Marketing | Leave a comment

Work Theater

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Matthew

Meetings, the practical alternative to work

This quote was on my boss’ mug that he made sure to bring to every meeting he attended. These kinds of silent protests worked well when we all sat in the same conference room to have a meeting, but as we’ve become more global, we call into all conference calls from our desk. At one point in my career, I had 30 hours of meetings a week! Meetings are often work theater, but what looks like work is not really work.

There are many adages on this theme: Don’t confuse effort with results. He generated lots of smoke but no fire, or lots of heat but no light. When work consisted of making widgets, it was easy to measure both the effort and the results because they were correlated. Unfortunately, we’ve never really left this correlation behind and it leads to a lot of work theater.

Many offices are the stage for work theater — a place where we put on a show about working. It sure feels like work when we’re at the office even if we are talking about other things. Perhaps this leads to the rather simple reasoning about outsourcing information work. It’s cheaper, so we can have 4 people “working” for the cost of 1. But four people doing the wrong thing does not equal 1 person doing the right thing. Outsourcing only works when a company rethinks how to make sure the outsourced group is responsible for results. Not all “work” is created equal.

In the process of selling our software to many large organizations, I experience a lot of work theater. There is so much ambiguity for everyone at large companies that many isolate themselves into very limited boxes and only focus on one thing. Without a doubt, these people do lots of “work”, but it’s not the same as getting results. This is why small motivated companies that are able to work toward targeted results, will win everyday.

Related Reading:
Steven Blank: “The Difference between Motion and Action”
Fred Wilson: Action Oriented Entrepreneurs

Posted in Ambiguity, Leadership | Leave a comment

To Be, To Do, To Have : Three Kinds of Goals

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Matthew

When thinking through personal goals, there are three categories of goals that we might make:

To Be Goals – These are self-improvement. The involve developing skillz. Examples include learning a new language, getting more sleep, being more punctual. You might think of these as goals that answer how you want to be characterized.
To Do Goals - These are experiential. They involve desirable adventures. Examples include traveling to china, enjoying a meal at Alinea ($210 pp), or going to an olympic games. These are the things people typically put on their “bucket list”.
To Have Goals – These are typically material, but sometimes situational (e.g. have a success business). They involve possessing something we perceive as enjoyable. These are probably the most common type of goals people fantasize about but are likely to be the least satisfying when realized.

This list is in order from most difficult to least difficult to achieve as well as from most satisfying to least satisfying. In addition, “To Be” goals will often enable the “To Do” and “To Have” goals.

I like this framework for considering goals that are worthy of pursuit. I hope that it is helpful for you as well.

[Credit: I came across this framework originally in Tim Ferris' The 4-hour Workweek which I don't recommend, but there were a couple of useful ideas as there are in most books]

Photo Credit: Joe Penniston via Compfight

Posted in Attention | 3 Comments

Moving Back To The Rockies

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Matthew

Last Tuesday night, I fell asleep playing 3D tetris in my mind. It wasn’t a dream, though I wished it was. Instead I was mentally orienting all of our furniture to see how it could fit in our 17ft UHaul for our move back to Colorado.

It wasn’t that we were unprepared. The previous week my parents flew out to help us pack and we spent an intense week getting ready. We sold our second car, we packed all the closets, the drawers, the random things hanging out on our desks (where do we get all of that stuff?). We purged things that we really didn’t need — like my original laptop from 1998. I did try to boot it but it gave out one last long beep and then died. So the house was ready, but the question remained: would it all fit.

On Wednesday evening, we had over 19 people show up from Esperanza Viva, the Spanish-speaking church that we had been attending. They managed to get all of our belongings out of our apartment, but packing the truck was taking more time. Furniture and boxes lay strewn about the truck like a pack of dogs all clamoring to on board. But we resisted the temptation to just throw them in there and another engineer and I worked hard to try to fill ever cubic inch of space. There were not a few doubters that it would all fit, but just like leftovers going into Tupperware, it’s amazing how much can fit in a small space.

It turned out there was even more stuff that was still left in the house to pack, but after a little repacking as well as shedding some laundry baskets and that old Ficus that decorated our porch, we managed to get everything in the truck and were ready to go — almost.

My wife followed me over to get the tow dolly for our car and on the way, I took a turn just a little to tight for our truck and caught one of the rear tires on the median. There was a large sound but it wasn’t the first time I had caught the median before. Ann though, who was following behind, watched the tire explode with a huge white puff and envisioned all of our belongings going with it. Needless to say, this did not inspire confidence for driving not only the truck but also towing a car behind.

Fortunately, the truck made it to the UHaul but indeed we had a blow out. One of the employees stuck their finger in the tire just to show how bad it was. After waiting an hour for the tire repair man, we launched our 1200 mile journey right at rush hour traffic.

Now even though Tetris may have helped me pack the truck, Mario Cart proved less useful with a 27ft rig. It took 2 more days, but we have finally arrived back in Colorado. The furniture and boxes are in their kennel (storage) for now and the truck made it back to UHaul in one piece.

Thank you so much to all of you who helped us with our move. We couldn’t have done it without you. We will miss all of our friends and family in California and look forward to getting to hang out again with our friends and family here in Colorado.

If you want to see some pictures from the trip, you can check out my twitter feed (@brinkofchaos) located on the front page of this blog.

Posted in Storytelling | 2 Comments

Ambiguous Questions

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Matthew

Why did Paul send Tychicus to Ephesis?

This was one of the questions that we were supposed to answer before meting together in a small group (after reading Ephesians 6 in the Bible). The passage discusses Paul wanting to send Tychicus to give news of their work. When we got together as a small group though people seemed to be answering a completely different question:

Because Tychicus was Paul’s best friend

Because Paul trusted Tychicus.

I read the question as: “For what purpose did Paul send someone to the Ephesians”, but many others read the question as: “For what reason did Paul send Tychicus instead of himself”. Of course, the person asking the question had one answer in mind, but the answers vary greatly depending on how you read the question.

This happens all the time. We ask a question, and receive an answer that seems to be a complete non sequitur to what we asked. This is not an example of the other person providing a koan (e.g. ”What is Buddha?” Dongshan said, “Three pounds of flax.”) but rather stems from ambiguity in the question. The problem is that neither communicator even sees the ambiguity because for both it was perfectly clear in their mind. This is the root of miscommunication.

Next time you find yourself miscommunicating with someone, see if you can find the ambiguity and identify ways to eliminate it.

Posted in Ambiguity, Communication | Leave a comment

How We See The World

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Matthew

What do you see when you look at this picture?

Photo Credit: エンバルドマン via Compfight

Those from the West are typically drawn to focus on the Shark then search for other objects of significance. Those from the East still see the shark, but also pay attention to the overall context (like the school of fish on the right hand side, or the light rays coming from the sky). From the time we were very young, we were taught by our parents how to perceive the world.

In the excellent book, “The Geography Of Thought”, the author describes in broad strokes how the eastern mindset differs from the western mindset. For example, in East Asia it is more common to learn verbs before one learns nouns. Western thinkers learn nouns first (“Ball”, “Car”, “Balloon” – just listen to a mother and her young child). Eastern thinking is more aware of connections — they had a much easier time conceptualizing radio waves than the Western world. Western thought focuses on Platonic categories and objects. Even our language creates nouns from adjectives. In English, we describe the quality of white for a particular object we describe its “whiteness”. In Chinese would use a simile — as white as a snow leopard.

These are all broad generalities. They certainly don’t describe every person from either culture, but I lent the book to a Chinese friend and he said it helped him better understand working with some of his western colleagues. In meetings, people would talk about problems in the system and see the problem either with Part A or with Part B where he saw the problem as being in the connection between the parts.

All of us carry a framework through which we perceive and understand that world around us. It’s what we notice, it’s how we talk to ourselves about it, it’s how we make connections. Our framework helps us make sense of the world around us, but it can also cause us to miss important things. Because we live and reason through this framework, it is not possible for us to even fully understand it until we expose ourselves to others with a different framework. This is one of the reasons I love to both read and travel.

Posted in Ambiguity, Thoughts | 1 Comment

The Story Of Other People

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Matthew

Have you ever stopped to think how many people all over the world take a shower every morning? Or how many never take showers at all? Our world is filled with so many different people, each one has important thoughts, important things to do, important people to see. Our natural course is to assume that others experience life exactly the way we do. This is why I really loved this panel excerpted from How To Understand Israel in 60 Days by Sarah Glidden *:

Understanding the stories of others is something we wrestle with even from the time we are very young. Apparently one of the causes for the rebelliousness of a two-year old is that he suddenly realizes that others’ desires differ from his own. He ponders, “How different are they? Well, let’s find out!”. Much to the consternation of his parents, this exploring is an important first step to understanding how others perceive things differently than we do.

But this doesn’t seem to be a lesson we ever stop learning. We want to believe that everyone is like us because it makes it easier for us to model the world around us. And indeed, there are many people we run into that are a lot like us, but then there is a whole world of people whose lives we can hardly imagine.

* Note: I edited the dialog in the middle panel to make the panel stand on its own. The original read “Half of the passengers on this flight are bound for birthright, just like us”. The full book is about a number of American Jews traveling to Israel on a Birthright trip, which is a trip paid for by the Israeli government to show Jews from around the world what Israel is like. The author is very skeptical of the process, especially in trying to untangle the story behind the Palestinian and Israeli perspective which is what makes it an interesting read.]

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The Experience and The Memory

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Matthew

This afternoon, I started to swim to this island. It looked like a short swim away, I mean it seemed to only be sticking out of the sea by about one or two feet. After swimming for a while, I started to see people standing on the island who had kayaked there. Given their height, I realized that it was a lot further away than I thought. But I was already half way there, what to do…

I knew that I both wanted to get to the island to feel the immediate sense of accomplishment, but more, I wanted the memory of having made it out that far. It turns out the height of the island above the sea was closer to 4 or 5 feet. When I got there, I walked around the island which was mostly made of coral with bare feet (ouch), but again, I had swum all the way out there, I wanted to see the whole thing.

It was probably the highlight of my day, not because the experience itself was particularly enjoyable, but rather because the memory of it is very enjoyable. Daniel Kahneman described this difference between the enjoyment we get from experiencing something in the moment compared to the enjoyment we get from revisiting the memory of what we had done in his TED speech.* This difference is a helpful framework for thinking through life’s event

Consider all the memories you have of eating ice cream a couple of years ago. If you have any, they are probably not very clear. We eat ice cream because we enjoy it in the moment not the future memories we will have. But we don’t only chose experiences we enjoy now, but also chose to “make memories” that we will enjoy in the future.

My swimming was exactly this type of experience. Swallowing sea water that kept splashing me in the face coupled with the constant reminder of not being a great swimmer and then walking on rough coral was not about the enjoyment of the moment – but it is a great memory.

* One of his examples is a colonoscopy study that shows people are more likely to come back for another scope if they leave the scope in longer – though I think they now totally sedate you so maybe they just decided not remembering it at all is better. His TED speech is a worthwhile watch. The ice cream example came from a great book on cognitive biases called You Are Not So Smart from the author of a blog by the same name.

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