The Brink of Chaos

Personal Lore

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Matthew

Several weeks ago, while eating lunch with some friends from work, a coworker I had never met walked into the restaurant. To tell me who he was, my friends told me a story: He’s the go-to guy when you need a design finished. Many years ago, there was a design that no one was able to get to get to work and we were desperate. We gave it to him on Friday, and it was ready to go on Monday.

That one weekend of work made him a modern-day dragon slayer – his own personal lore. He exemplified the classic heroic tale: the protagonist starts as being good but then through one act of bravery or wit or simply shear will he overcomes a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Once this happens, the story sticks with him for the rest of his life. We used to define heroes by the dragons they slew, now by the feats they’ve accomplished. Obtaining that reputation gains us credibility even when we make mistakes in the future.

We might be tempted to try to invent the situation or create our own story, but we can’t. These stores come like nicknames, not out of intent but as a product of preparation and opportunity. They come when we do what is most natural to us because it’s who we are. Heroes don’t decide to be heroic in the moment, they were heroic to begin with.

So instead we should think about how we want to be characterized and work toward what is important to us. We are all capable of the heroic. How we live will define our own personal lore.

Dragon Credit: balt-arts

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Relationships: The Moving Landmarks Of Life

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Matthew

During my stint in EDA software, I had a lot of dinners with sales guys and their friends. Inevitably dinner conversation turned to comparing Rolodexes* . What ever happened to Soh Insoh, one would say? He’s at Apple working with Frank. Frank left Azul? etc. Every industry is a small world.

Of course, sales guys aren’t the only ones who do this, we all do. Our past relationships provide a landmark for our lives. But it isn’t a static memory we have of a place, instead it’s a moving landmark that helps us understand where we fit. Our relationships weave our lives together with others and as we grow older, help us see where we belong.

Moreover, when we identify common relationships with people we know, it connects us together. Just as having lived in or worked at the same place with someone connects us, so does knowing the same people. In fact, if there is the possibility of knowing someone in common, that trumps having been to the same place. When we find out we worked at the same company as someone else in the past, usually our first question is, did you know …?

We often think that what we did and where we did it mark out our lives, but our relationships are more meaningful. The path of life doesn’t correspond to a picture of the planet with a timeline. Our relationships provide landmarks that allow us to start locating our place. As the years go on, we start tying all of them together as we describe our life. To properly understand our own path, we have to mark down who we knew – only then can we know where we truly are.

* I wonder how much longer that analogy will work — who has a Rolodex anymore? Reminds me of the story of the babysitter that came over and noticed a phone with a cord dangling from it and commented what a good idea it was to add a cord to the phone so that you’d always know where to find it.

[Photo Credit akarakoc]

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All Bleeding Stops Eventually

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Matthew

“Things which can’t go on forever, don’t” – Stein’s Law

Overdrive feels awesome. We push it and reap huge benefits quickly by pushing the system beyond its normal limits.

Unfortunately, the system can’t operate that way forever. If we use overdrive for too long, the system will break, often irreparably. In most systems though, the break-point is unknown and so we find ourselves thinking, just a bit longer and then we’ll recover.

Systems which are being overdriven surround us. Sometimes we see the warning signs of the impending destruction, but when we do it’s difficult to help others understand that the systems current ability is not sustainable. As a result, I started collecting some analogies about this effect so that others might understand.

The Classic – Saw Blade
A sharp saw cuts down trees easily. Overtime, the saw gets duller and duller requiring more and more work to cut down trees. Suppose we find ourselves needing to cut down 30 trees a day. We are able to finish that quickly and still have time at the end of the day to sharpen the saw for the next days work. But a rush order comes in, and we need to cut down 50 trees today. That’s fine, we meet our quota by skipping the sharpening time. The next day we may find ourselves needing to meet the same quota, it works out but it’s taking us longer. Eventually the saw is dull enough that we are now playing catch up. Taking off half a day at that point to resharpen the saw seems killer and yet not doing so only creates more and more problems over time, till eventually we are trying to use the saw like an axe.

The Sprint
Sprinting feels incredible – the breeze in our face, our limbs free. We’re fast! But if we keep trying to sprint, suddenly we can’t run any more as the oxygen in our blood crashes and we find ourselves just trying to catch our breath. We start to just walk, or even stand still waiting for our longs to calm down. We can’t sprint a 5k much less a marathon, but every once in a while, when we need to get somewhere quickly – sprinting is great.

Development Debt
When we need something today, debt feels amazing. We can have something today and we don’t even have to pay for it until tomorrow, and even then it’s a small amount. The problem is that the more debt we incur, the more the income of tomorrow goes to what we needed yesterday making it harder to make ends meet today. When we develop any kind of information product, we often are under the stress to get something done and get it out to market. Inevitably, during this time, we incur development debt — code that should be restructured, databases that should be reorganized, or processes that need to be improved. Can we just push forward and not do those things which “add no value”? Sure, but just like interest eventually there is so much friction in the system that getting anything done is impossible.

The Red Line
Accelerating in first gear up into the red-line on the tachometer exhilarates us. Unfortunately, it’s the red-zone for a reason. If you keep driving the car in that area, eventually it will break down, the problem is that we don’t know when. It might be after a few seconds or a few hours, but it will break. Organizations can feel like this — we can drive them into the red-zone for a period of time and it may work just fine for a while, but eventually it will break. Organizations, however, rarely have an obvious tachometer. So just because we can make it go faster, doesn’t mean we should.

Turn It Up To 11
Speakers are rated up to a particular wattage. We can keep turning up the volume past that value and things get louder and louder, but eventually the volume starts damaging the speakers – introducing increased amount of distortion. Eventually all you get is really loud noise and even when you turn it back down, the damage is done.

Organizational Counter Pressure
We can push our people to work harder and get more done. In an example that I’ve seen in almost every organization, management takes the budget recommendations and tells the organization that they only have 90% of what they asked for. Surprisingly, things still get done and management gets bigger bonuses. So the next time around the organization asks for 110% of what it needs knowing that cuts are coming, management asks for 80% and on and on we go, until management and those estimating the costs are now working at cross purposes to outsmart one another.

When trust is destroyed, friction increases and rather than getting more done efficiently, more time is spent just trying to manage the infighting within. Any complex system will form antibodies that work against the pressure leaving the resulting system and organization in far worse shape because trust decreases which takes a long time to recover from. It’s incredible that organizations can sprint, can red-line, can go to 11 – but as leaders we must not get addicted to the performance at that level. We should use it when it’s needed, but then offer time to recover. This is how you get a complex system to work well over the long haul and even create a virtuous cycle that allows the overdrive to take place more often.

What analogies have you used to describe this situation to others? Leave a comment on the blog.

Photo Credit: Nathan E Photography

Posted in Communication, Leadership | Leave a comment

Allergic To Humans

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Matthew

Sometime ago, I was in a meeting where one of the engineers asked the sales manager whether there was an update from a prospective customer. This question of curiosity was met with ferocious opposition as the sales manager launched into a tirade about how we’re not just going to go after any customer but we’re going to be more selective. Woah! What just happened there?

We’ve all experienced this kind of overreaction. One person asks a fairly innocuous question or makes a bland statement and another person goes ballistic, typically followed by a downward spiral of reduced discourse and higher volume. We’ve just experienced the relational equivalent to allergies.

If we breath in some foreign pollen that our body thinks is trying to kill us, it responds strongly — we’re under attack! Defend! Defend!! This is not a healthy response nor does it actually prevent death by pollen (sometimes it even causes it!). But allergies aren’t caused by a single dose of the ‘toxin’ but rather get stronger through repeated doses.

And this is what happens in any close relationship — families, spouses, work colleagues, partners, management teams, friends. Over time, patterns of communication are built up, so while a stranger hears an innocuous question, we hear a conversation we’ve had before and didn’t like where it ended up, so we respond as though the conversation were already at that end in hopes of stemming the tide. Defend! Defend!!!

Unfortunately, just like allergies, this just causes more pain rather than improving our situation. Moreover, just like allergies it can be difficult to stop. It’s pretty easy to see the allergic reactions of others. We ask an innocent question trying to understand, and the other person gets angry. What was that about? But it’s super hard to see our own silly reactions. Why? Because our allergic reaction seems like the obvious response. We emotionally replay the conversations of the past and so it seems like they are intentionally provoking us. It only makes sense that we respond this way to such an obvious attack.

But it isn’t and we shouldn’t.

So I’ve started thinking about what the best antihistamine to human allergies — how do we calm our own reactions and how can we help others? One question that seems to help is to see if the response makes sense if a total stranger asked the question or made the statement. As I later asked our sales manager, “Hey, if I asked this question, you wouldn’t have tried to lecture me about customer choice. You would have just told me the answer. What’s going on there?” I think we can ask ourselves this same question — would we respond the same to a stranger? If not, what’s going on there?

We can also stop the cycle. Human relational allergies are worse than environmental ones because with humans the ‘pollen’ has an allergic reaction too. We ask a question, the other party gets angry, so we get angry with them and overreact, causing them to double down. All of us have experienced this. None of us have walked away feeling good about the resulting exchange.

Uncontrolled allergies breakdown what could be extremely deep and valuable conversations. They cause us to fake relationships rather than have real ones because it’s the relationships that are the deepest and most meaningful that often have the most allergic responses.

[Photo Credit: Jon Díez Supat]

Posted in Communication | 1 Comment

The Asymmetry of Importance

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Matthew

In California, I started going to a barber near our office on a regular basis instead of finding some cheap place to get a haircut. So each time I went, it was with the same barber and not the usual stranger hacking at my head.

So, at each haircut, I remembered the barber and our conversation from my last visit. My memory was clear; his memory on the other hand was sketchy. For me, it was my only haircut for several months, for him, it was the 350th. Should I blame him for not really remembering me?

We encounter this asymmetry all the time. Whether it’s the high school teacher we meet at the grocery store that can’t remember our name, or the coffee barista who can’t remember our favorite drink that we order all the time. It’s easy to understand why our memory recalls a unique event as significant and others don’t, but this is not only a difference of memory, it’s a difference of importance.

We often assume that those we interact with in business have similar interests, similar values, or a similar perspective to our own – not the same, similar. Just like we assume others remember us as well as we remember them. We believe that our interaction with them is of equal importance to their interaction with us. Most of the time, nothing could be further from the truth.

We ran into this difference when we were trying a new pricing strategy with our customers. We came up with a strategy that we believed cleverly aligned value with cost. We thought that anyone who thought about it could easily justify the cost on this basis. The problem was that the people having to make this decision were inundated everyday with many things that they had to sort out (not just this one) and a limited amount of focus to resolve them. If we were their only problem, they could think through this clearly and see the ingenuity of our pricing structure. But we weren’t. So they would punt and tell us they wanted to buy way more than they needed just so they could avoid thinking through it now (or ever). Then they were shocked and dismayed by the price. Clever models are only clever if other people are willing to adopt them. We assumed their value on this deal was like ours because we had no idea all the other things on their plate.

All of us are overwhelmed everyday with ambiguity – but the important ambiguity that we make decisions on is different between all of us. We have a hard enough time finding clarity in our own lives, so the simpler we can make it on others, the better. Don’t be surprised by the asymmetry of importance between ourselves and everyone else.

[Picture Credit: Steve Rhodes]

Posted in Ambiguity | 1 Comment

Screen-protectors & Regret

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Matthew

Some years ago, I forked out birthday money for a 32GB iPod touch. It was time to join the horde and experience iOS myself. I purchased a screen protector and case to guard my new expensive possession. No one wants to use a scratched piece of technology.

After a few weeks, the screen protector has bubbles and scratches. I carry on using it, eventually putting a new protector on to replace the old, taking great care to make sure there are no bubbles. A few days later, it’s scratched again but I’m not going to go buy another one so I use it scratched. After a year, I tire of the scratches and take it off. How many scratches after another year? Zero.

Why in the world would we put something on my device that gives us the defect we’re trying to avoid? The gorilla glass does not scratch easily, but screen protectors scratch VERY easily. We do it because we want to avoid the regret of a scratched screen. Once we scratch the glass, it’s hard to replace. We can’t go back. So we live with the very condition we’re trying to avoid content in the knowledge that at least the condition could be changed. So to avoid the permanent disfigurement, we live with constant “temporary” disfigurement.

How else do we live a crippled life, refusing to use what we have for fear of losing it? How often do we make decisions that cause us more pain now, just so we won’t regret something in the future? How do reevaluate our past information (poor quality glass screens that scratch easily) with new ones unless we chose to take the leap and face the possibility of regret?

Face that possibility. Live life.

Photo Credit: Lukas Mathis

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Obviously Not Obvious

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Matthew

On my way back from the airport, I decided I need to get some gas and pulled up to a local gas station. I went through the usual paces: credit card, zip code, No, I do not want a car wash, nozzle, gas grade, pump. And nothing happened.

After putting the nozzle back, pushing the grade button a few times, trying to pump again, still nothing. Maybe I did something out-of-order.

So I put the nozzle back, canceled the transaction and then carefully repeated each step – still no gas. I thought, “Wow, this is the first time that I have ever discovered a broken pump that wasn’t already so labeled.” So I went inside and said, “It looks like pump 4 is broken?”. He responded, “Nope, you just need to lift the switch underneath the nozzle to turn on the pump”. So out I went and sure enough after lifting the nozzle, you have to lift the base that holds the nozzle. More embarrassing, there was a sticker right next to the nozzle showing the switch in the associated “Start” and “Stop” settings.

Now some of you are reading this and maybe thinking, well, obviously you need to lift that switch under the nozzle, and in retrospect it is “obvious”. But what is obvious? And why do things seem obvious only after we see the solution?

We can all think of brain teasers where we noodled for some time unable to come up with the solution. When someone tells us the solution, we groan, “Oh, it was so obvious!” Merriam-Webster says things are obvious when “easily discovered, seen, or understood”. No surprises there. And what could be more easily discovered, seen or understood than facts and methods we have already learned. Most of what we know we now consider obvious and what we don’t know, challenging.

Why then do we get frustrated with others we are teaching when they don’t see what is obviously so obvious. It is not them that has the problem but ourselves. For in this area, we find ourselves lacking the ability to shepherd others across the field of the unknown, and that realization frustrates us. Of course, when feeling frustrated we would rather it be someone else’s problem than our own. So when we feel frustrated with others struggling with what we consider obvious, remember the problem is not with them, but with us. For if it was really so obvious, they wouldn’t be having any trouble.

A good friend of mine reminds me periodically that there is no intuitive interface — there are only interfaces that are familiar and once familiar, it becomes intuitive. That gas pump is now familiar and won’t cause me problems, but had clearly caused others the same difficulty as the attendant immediately knew the solution to the “broken” pump. He could get frustrated and yell at having to point out this obvious thing every time someone asks, but he just points them in the right direction and everyone keeps moving forward. We should be like that when others need the same kind of instruction.

[Photo Credit: Mark J P]

Posted in Ambiguity, User Experience | 1 Comment

Stuck In A Hole

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Matthew

“This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out.”A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’ The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’ The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on

Then a friend walks by, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’ And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’” – Leo McGarry on The West Wing

All of us have made mistakes and failed in some way and learned how to get out and move on. We help others most when we’ve already found ourselves in the same struggle or failure and know the way out. When we’ve never experienced the problem or even when we count the cost, we are tempted to help from the sidelines with pat answers and cliché advice – easy, but not very effective.

So, how are we helping others in the holes we’ve been in before?

Posted in Leadership, Storytelling | Leave a comment

The Failure of Cliff Negotiations

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Matthew

At times, we are all involved in high stakes negotiations — there is a lot of money on the line and we don’t get more than a few shots. Many times the temptation is to go to war and strive to maximize our value since it might have a large impact on the bottom line, but too often this results in the failure of both the negotiation as well as the relationship delivering not just zero value, but a long term cost.

Consider this graph. As we apply more pressure in the negotiations we receive additional value (the other party receives less but that’s not pictured here). The three dots indicate three different strategies:

The green dot represents the philosophy of leaving some money on the table. Negotiate for as much as we can, once we are above zero value for ourselves but may not have maxed out the value, we decide to deliver more perceived value than we cost. This is win-win and in my experience, does the most for increasing overall value to a business.

The yellow dot represents our goal when we start feeling the heat of battle. The goal of “cliff negotiators” or win-lose negotiations (though rarely will someone be brave enough to admit that this is their philosophy) is to peak our own value and still get the deal done.

The red dot is where “cliff negotiators” often end up because the deal doesn’t get done. This actually represents a cost (negative value) because that relationship has often been scorched and there is no “try again”.

The problem with negotiating to maximize our own return is that we don’t know where the cliff is! This is represented by the red cloudy band. There is some probability that it lies in this range but we have no way to know where the breaking point actually is. Compounding this problem, we overestimate the amount of value that we think we bring to the table. We believe we are still in green territory until we find ourselves losing the deal entirely. Like a poker player losing a big hand, we go on tilt and are even more tempted to try this strategy with the next negotiation because we need to make up ground, only to find ourselves again falling short.

Even if we believe we are “green dot” negotiators, we must be on guard about our own misperceptions. It’s critical that we develop a keen sense of awareness and understanding about how the other party sees the deal. Most of the time figuring a way to get the deal done and closed is far better than pushing forward to extract as much value as we can. We should always remember this is unlikely to be our last negotiation with the other party and we want to set ourselves up for the next time.

Posted in Leadership | 2 Comments

Addicted to Urgency

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Matthew

The modern world rushes by us with a trillion distractions, each wanting to grab your focus and hold you occupied. Sometimes this is referred to as the tyranny of the urgent. It makes it sound like it holds us against our will and we just can’t help ourselves. But I think we like it. It keeps us from having to really consider the deeper questions of life but with the pleasant excuse of telling everyone it’s not that we don’t care, it’s just that we are too busy.

We are addicted to urgency. The little things that demand our attention right now and they provide immediate satisfaction. It feels like we did something. We responded to that email, we retweeted that insightful quip, we caught up on the news. The problem is in the river of urgent requests that we all find ourselves swimming in, when do we get out of the stream and reflect.

For many of us, the holidays and new year provide some time for reflection though at times it feels unpleasant. Like the chill after a swim without the sun to warm us up. We see all the things that we believe are important but that have been neglected. Maybe its how our body feels, maybe it’s relationships, or doing good for others. It’s not pleasant to reflect on those things and so sometimes we take the cheap path, throw down some goals and jump back into the river.

We need to find a way to get out of the river more often, experience the withdrawal from our drug of choice, and figure out where we are. When we find ourselves saying we were too busy for something or we didn’t make time for it, we should then ask ourselves why?

Lean into that hard question because that is where the important lies.

Photo Courtesy: Trey Ratcliff

Posted in Attention | 1 Comment