Scripting Life
Jun 23rd
Have you ever considered how the various roles in your life mimic a screenplay?
A friend of mine is teaching me his method for Designing a Balanced Life. This week, we discussed the roles that each of us play in our lives and how they interact. Previously, I’ve considered my various roles, but I found his method more effective: instead of only naming the role, he introduced the analogy of planning your week as a way of scripting life among the various characters that represent your roles.
In this context, your roles transcend a simple name; instead you flush out each of these roles as characters in the script of your life. Just like you get to know characters on a sitcom or in your favorite novel, so the roles in your life have their own unique aspirations and personalities. When your roles are working in concert, your life is a well written drama: They work in concert when the director directs.
I find that planning your days or weeks as though you were directing your drama compelling, and I thought you might benefit from it as well. Let me know what you think.
When Your Brain Fails – Nodding Off
Jun 16th
Yesterday late in the afternoon, I was providing a demo of our product in a warm conference room. The person I was showing it to started nodding off. Now this wasn’t a case where there were a lot of people, there were only three of us and he was asking us questions in between his long “blinks”. I might have been offended, except it reminded me of one of my own more embarrasing moments.
Several years ago, I took a day trip that required me to leave very early in the morning. I showed up for a morning meeting which went fine. We ate lunch together and then just three of us were talking about strategy. These were not people I knew very well and I was trying to participate to the best of my abilities, but I hadn’t had any coffee and was very tired. All three of us contributed to the conversation, but I could not stay awake. I would close my eyes while listening then before saying something, think whether or not the statement I was about to make made any sense. I could tell that the other two knew I was falling asleep as when I opened my eyes they were smirking, but then I continued to think, okay, now I’ll stay awake, only to close my eyes again.
The problem is that when you get that tired you do not think: “I should stand up and move around”, or “I should take a break and go find a cup of coffee”. Instead your brain thinks things like: “It won’t hurt to close my eyes a little bit”, “I’m just listening with my eyes closed”.
We play games with our head not wanting to just admit that we’re tired, and instead we try to figure out how to play it cool. The problem is that when our brains are very tired we don’t think rationally but we can’t recognize that we aren’t. So I leave this as a personal lesson learned, if you start taking extended blinks, bite the bullet, stand up and go splash yourself with some water, or just take a break for a moment and go for a walk — better this than pretending no one is noticing that you’re sleeping.
Being Great Even Though You’re Not Perfect
Jun 8th
About nine years ago, I went on a trip to Latvia with a group of more than 50 people from eight different countries including Russia, Sweden, US, Holland, and Latvia. The age ranges in the group were from 16-60 and contained people from all walks of life. The purpose of the trip was to provide food and clothing to impoverished Russian people who had stayed behind after Russia pulled out of the Baltic States. When Russia was in power in the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), they discriminated against the natives. After Russia left, the natives returned the “favor” to those Russians who stayed behind, making it difficult for them to obtain jobs.
The leader of our group was gifted with extraordinary vision and charisma. He established audacious goals and got everyone excited to work toward accomplishing them. This strength, however, was offset by a sizable lack of skill in administration. You might think this would have caused problems, but instead it created a team dynamic rarely encountered.
On our team, were some incredible administrators (one of which was his wife). The administrators’ strength was revealed when they took on his audacious goals and helped him organize the team to pull it off. This dynamic rippled through the team; other members stepped up to lead activities they were good at and the rest of the members contributed to help them succeed by utilizing their own set of gifts. In spite of the incredible diversity in the group’s demographics, the team succeeded. More than that, everyone exercised their own passions and strengths depending all the while depending on others doing the same. This enabled some whose gifts may not have been readily apparent, to shine. There is no greater feeling than being a part of a team that is truly synergistic.
This dynamic is only enabled when the leader is willing to set the tone. If our leader had limited his vision to what he knew he could personally administrate, we would have lost out, not only on his strength, but also the strengths of the administrators and the resulting ripple effect that brought out the strengths in the rest of the team. If everyone in a team can focus on the strengths they bring to the effort rather than feeling the need to shore up their weaknesses, incredible things can happen; however, this depends on the leader not requiring perfection in everyone, including themselves, and instead making way for each to express their own ability.
Are you willing to do that?
Amplifying Noise
Jun 2nd
Yesterday, Ann and I were watching a Mexican dancing television show at a restaurant. Something about it struck me very funny and I laughed out loud. At the same time, I looked over to see a waiter and a waitress pretending to dance like they were on the show. After my laugh, they looked over at me and assumed I was laughing at them. I smiled at them and they smiled back and it was the end. There was no opportunity to clarify.
Too often we find ourselves interpreting the actions of others out of context. I have met people for the first time and decided that for whatever reason, they didn’t like me; however, after being with them a few more times, we became good friends.
Its easy for us to emphasize subtle messages in new relationships that are fake. We amplify these messages to a level of importance they shouldn’t have, and it can have a profound affect on how the relationship develops. I believe this stems from three things. First, we are constantly searching for cause and effect. Second, we see what we want to see. Third, we seek confirmation rather than negation of our conclusions.
Nicholas Taleb, author of the Black Swan, writes: “People are explanation machines.” We create completely logical explanations for the phenomena we see. We maintain this explanation until we are presented with evidence that contradicts it. Then, we create a new story for the phenomena remaining just as confident in our new answer as we were in our incorrect answer. The reality is that we don’t have enough information to come to any form of certainty in our conclusions, but we do anyway.
Every person has a view of the world that they use to interpret new data. In this way, new relationships can resemble Rorschach tests. People will interpret messages or actions differently. Some will treat an action as irrelevant, others will decide the person is being rude, someone else that they are being gracious — all based on our own expectations. Living in a country where the culture is different from your own only compounds this effect; however, as relationships grow, we learn what signals are important because we have more knowledge of the other person.
Finally, we search to confirm our conclusions. Once we have an idea in our minds, we go about collecting evidence to corroborate our original opinion rather than looking for indications that we might be wrong. In fact, we can even ignore the data that doesn’t fit with our idea and add importance to the data that does. This causes us to amplify our misconceptions.
This process happens not only with new friendships but also with all new relationships, including those with new customers. We pick up what we think are signals for good or bad and amplify what is probably just noise, giving it a level of importance that it shouldn’t have. This can lead us to make bad judgements both about the other person and about the relationship in general that can be difficult to change.
If, instead, we withhold our judgments, we don’t give more credibility to a message that is simply noise. If we find some subtle communication troubling we should search out all the possible reasons for it, giving as much deference to the other, rather than going with our initial instinct. This not only helps us recognize how little we truly know, but also starts to build a better context to interpret new information. It also keeps us from looking for confirming evidence because we admit that we simply don’t know. It is only in this way that we keep ourselves from being trapped by our own preconceptions and making mistakes that we may later regret.
How Good Are You?
May 26th
I’m fascinated by the various ways that we incorrectly perceive the world around us. For instance, I recently read about a cognitive fallacy that I like because I have experienced it’s truth: People who are beginners in a field tend to overestimate their ability in that field because they don’t have enough knowledge to know just how little they actually know.
Personally, I would love to be able to create better illustrations using a vector art tool. Seems simple enough, until you realize that seeing computer art is way easier than constructing computer art. Ignorance is bliss, but in the case of this fallacy it can quickly cause people to get in over their heads. When I saw this chart, I thought it was a wonderful and hilarious illustration of this exact concept (from the DataViz blog):
It’s important to remember that as we assess our abilities or our knowledge that we don’t know how much we don’t know. Especially at the beginning, we are not the best judges of how good we are. Experience makes a huge difference.
The Difficulty of Imagining Other’s Perspective
May 18th
In spite of an overwhelming group of people communicating their personal perspective on the internet, it still remains nearly impossible for us to understand how others see the world. We experience our lives in vivid 3D with a depth of emotion and experience that makes our perspective seem obvious. Meanwhile, we experience other’s perspective with the emotional depth of a government fact sheet.
As a result, the act of empathy is very difficult, and yet incredibly important. If we seek to communicate, help, and live with others in harmony, we must seek to understand how they experience life. This is important not only in our relationships, but also in how we create value for our customers. Companies should design products in a way that comprehends their user’s perspective, and yet sometimes the customer approaches your product in a way you never expected.
Recently, I came across two blog entries, written by experts in designing user interfaces, relating their frustrating experiences:
- Receipt Woes – Discusses the poor wording when the credit card machine prints two identical receipts but still has the text as though it was a carbon copy (i.e. Top copy – restaurant, bottom copy- customer). However, since the receipt was printed twice, they are identical put next to each other, so which one is the top copy?
- Turbotax Fail – Discusses how repeat Turbotax customers want to use their information from the previous year’s return – but the first dialog box that shows up makes it impossible to do this as the first step (even though it seems as though you could).
In both cases, my first reaction was to question: Why are they complaining about those things? They both seem trivial and non-confusing to me. This is because my perspective always seems obvious to me. What’s more, before hearing of this confusion, it would have been difficult for me to even imagine that this caused people consternation.
Yet, here are two experts chastising the companies for their poor product design. So how does one challenge their own “obvious” perspective? The only way to do so is to ask questions whose answer seems obvious, but may illustrate the differing perspective of others. For example, the Turbotax designer could ask several repeat customers, “What is the first think you want to do after installing Turbotax”? When someone surprises them by saying “import last years return” instead of “start a new tax return for this year”, they learn something that they could not have discovered any other way. The result is that this makes their product more usable by everyone.
The challenge in designing products is not only imagining what others might do and empathizing with them, but also asking questions that challenge what you are capable of imagining. These questions may seem obvious, but in the answers, you are able to learn more about how others see the world than in any other way. This is true both in product design as well as in relationships. We must challenge how we see the world in order to better serve those around us.
There Is No Signatum Without Signum
May 11th
There is no signatum without signum” – Quote from a reading that Ann was translating to Spanish
Most of you probably read that quote with emphatic agreement, if not, then you’re probably wondering what signum and signatum are, much as we were when Ann asked me what this meant.
After doing a bit of searching, we came to understand this quote as “There are no entities of a category if the category is not named”. Here is a more concrete example: Gouda, Cheddar, and Swiss are all types of cheese. Without the word cheese, or a description there of, the group doesn’t exist. Gouda isn’t cheese, it’s just Gouda.
Categories are concepts that help us organize the world. They help us better understand the world around us by grouping common elements and making general observations about them. Many insights about the world around us stem from the creation of new categories.
This is the basis of personality tests. They create named categories with specific observations about that group. These observations, which would not otherwise exist, can improve your own ability to reflect on how people differ.
Categories can also help us see marketing opportunities better. Here is one example I recently encountered: A marketing student told a VP from Clorox that people his age weren’t interested in preventative cleaning. Instead, they cleaned when it became a problem. Upon hearing this, the VP suggested that the students were not their target market. The student disagreed, and responded by creating two new categories. Some people view things as durable; stuff that will be here for a long time and should be maintained. Slogans like “Clean it so it looks brand new” fit well with this type of person. The other category of people is one who sees things as temporary. If something gets damaged, you throw it away and get a new one. This is the consumable culture. They still might want to clean, they view cleaning as different. By re-framing the categories, he makes it easy to see how Clorox might market to this new category in a different way. Once you have defined the category, you can make enlightening observations about each of those groups that before didn’t have a way to make generalizations.
Categorization matters and this story reminded me of the quote which I find fascinating. Little did I know that the esoteric knowledge would start creating a framework to understand other concepts. I suppose that in this sense, the quote is the signum that I needed to understand the signatum of categories. 
Serendipity, Making Friends and Marketing Adages
May 4th
“I know I’m wasting half of my marketing budget, I just don’t know which half” – Old Marketing Adage
Over the last several years, we moved to several different locations throughout the world. While we obviously enjoy the adventure of travel, one of the challenges we face is meeting new friends. In each locale, the people that live there already have satisfying relationships with others, as a result, they aren’t looking for new friends — it’s not that they actively reject new friends, but they don’t work to find them. As a result, the onus for making new connections falls on us, not only to seek out opportunities to meet people but also to initiate strengthening the relationship.
Today I was thinking that there is a lot of similarity between the marketing adage above and building relationships. I know that half of the time I spend finding friends won’t result in a friendship, but I don’t know which half. Serendipity is involved — being in the right place at the right time with the right person. It’s emotional labor facing rejection, and it can feel like it isn’t worth the effort, but then suddenly, when you least expect it, you stumble upon a group of people that you can really related to.
Investing even without knowing whether it will pay off is a strategy that applies to many things, including all of the relationships you currently have. Normally, no single time together makes or breaks a relationship, but the sum of all of the things done together does have a big impact.
So if you’re just trying to find people that you like, keep looking even when it doesn’t seem to be having much effect. If you’re well established, look for how you can invest in your existing relationships. We may not know what half of the effort is most important, but in the end, the payoff is always worth it.
Can you have too much choice? [The Paradox of Choice Reconsidered]
Apr 27th
You walk into your local burger joint and the menu says: “The Ultimate Customizable Burger – $5″, and that’s it. Since it’s the only thing on the menu, you ask for “The Burger” and the person behind the counter responds:
“What kind of meat would you like? We can make it with beef, bison, lamb, chicken, tofu, pork, tempeh, seitan, jackfruit, or plain.”
“Well, what do you think is best?”, you ask in a daze.
“They’re all good. What kind of meat do you prefer?”
This is only the beginning of the ultimately customizable burger requiring you to choose your selection of 50 toppings (which are all given to verbally from the clerk who amazingly has them all memorized), what type of bread you prefer (8 types), what country you want your lettuce from (out of 4). Imagine the answer at each stage to the question, “What do you recommend”?, is always answered with, “It’s your choice, anything you want!”
Feeling overwhelmed yet?
Is having the ability to customize a bad thing? Not necessarily, but forcing your customer to make decisions about how to customize something that is not important to them is a bad thing, but many software packages neglect this principle. People want choice when it’s important, but otherwise, they would rather someone make reasonable default choices for them.
A debate rages between the book Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz (Excellent summary talk he gave at TED) and those that favor the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Even though recently it’s been difficult for behavioral economists to reproduce Schwartz’s studies, I think his main point is very well taken: The sum of all the choices we are required to make actually makes us less satisfied with them.
The Long Tail is all about the value of choice. When something matters, like “I really love Mexican lettuce”, then you’re more likely to be delighted at the ultimate burger joints ability to provide this to you. We absolutely love to customize and develop niche tastes that are all our own. But if I’m a lettuce connoisseur (is there such a thing?), not a mustard connoisseur, I really just want someone to pick a reasonable choice for the mustard.
So I reconcile these two views as follows:
- To the consumer: Satisfice, set high standards, buy the things that meet them and enjoy them rather than worrying about whether there is something better
- To the business: Make your product mass customizable, index comparitively so customers can quickly find what they need, and provide good defaults so that you enable satisficing
[My earlier blog summarizing the concepts in the Paradox of Choice]
Crazy Tech Apps
Apr 21st
All of us have encountered an insane application of technology at some point in our lives causing us to have the “what were they thinking” moment. The amazing thing is that they were thinking, and their thoughts were that this application of technology was perfectly normal. In fact, they usually were thinking it was the best thing ever.
Here are a couple recent example’s I’ve come across:
- 18 Button Mouse
Seriously. Apple thinks more than one button is too many, but the designers of OpenOffice believe that 18 buttons is really the right number. - Palm 650 Hard Reset
Seriously, follow the link and imagine someone (and their friend) reseting this phone with a stylus in their mouth. There is “making something difficult”, and then there is turning it into a sport.
These are obviously extreme, but exemplify that once you start down a line of thinking, without someone to questioning you, your further assumptions all make complete sense, but lead to complete nonsense. This is a problem with buying too much into your own vision, you quickly loose focus on the real purpose — creating something that helps your customer achieve THEIR goals.
The only way to know their goals is to talk to them, not to decide for them. As Steven Blank says, “Inside the building, there are only opinions. All the facts lie outside of the company”. This sentiment is something that we should all apply, not only to our product development, but also to the teams that we lead.
[P.S. If you come across other examples of odd technology applications, please send me the link]