All posts by anomalogue

Freedom

Ideas

We feel most free when we exercise our best judgment.

When our judgment is displaced by formal processes, we feel unfree.

If it is shown that this unfreedom is ultimately beneficial, sometimes we find the sacrifice of freedom valuable.

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When sacrifice of freedom is demanded without justification, or the justifications given offend our best judgment — we are forced into unfreedom rather than persuaded to voluntary sacrifice — this is experienced as tyranny.

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It doesn’t matter who does it, any power that forces unfreedom upon us is tyrannical.

This is why the enemy is not “big government” but any concentration of power that allows one group to impose its will on another.

This is why we should be as wary of corporatism — the tyranny of the corporate executive — as we are of bolshevism or fascism.

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We’ve got to get over our vulgar fixation on prejudices of soil, skin color, genitalia, sexual preference and religious affiliation.

Many other forms of prejudice exist as well, and our prejudices in respect to what constitutes prejudice permits prejudices of temperament and philosophical orientation to run rampant.

 

“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics

“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.
Nothing else was red.

There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

Down this path they were coming.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak —
mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.
In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk
devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,
tight and heavy, out of the failing folds,
no longer conscious of the delicate lyre
which had grown into his left arm, like a slip
of roses grafted onto an olive tree.
His senses felt as though they were split in two:
his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,
stop, come back, then rushing off again
would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, —
but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
back to the footsteps of those other two
who were to follow him, up the long path home.
But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,
or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.
He said to himself, they had to be behind him;
said it aloud and heard it fade away.
They had to be behind him, but their steps
were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages,
a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars –:
So greatly was she loved.

But now she walked beside the graceful god,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around –,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 

Pain of innovation

Brand, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas

The primary obstacle to innovation of every kind is the pain of philosophy, which begins as angst before blooming into perplexity.

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We don’t hate new ideas because they’re new.

We don’t even hate new ideas because they displace beloved old ideas.

We hate new ideas because they require the creation of conceptual vacuum before we can understand them.

A conceptual vacuum is not like empty space. It is empty of articulated order, which means it overflows with everything-at-once. It is chaos.

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The depth of an idea means: “how much forgetting does it require in order to be understood?”

More depth = more forgetting = more pain.

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Real innovation is the product of deep thought. That is, it involves forgetting the conventional wisdom of some realm of activity, re-conceiving it, and thinking out the consequences. This alone generates new ideas capable of inspiring people.

But most people have no taste for thinking, much less thinking in depth. They see thinking and doing — and especially creative doing — as opposed. To this sensibility, disciplined thought and research — anything that seems to question or negate can only encumber the creative process, which is understood to be purely positive. So the method is brainstorm the maximum number of ideas possible — very deliberately excluding thought.

What comes from this process is usually large heaps of uninspiring cleverness, which gets translated into forgettable products, services and marketing.

Doing something really different requires a hell of a lot more than ingenuity. It requires the courage to take the preliminary step of “thinking different”, and then the faith to relentlessly execute upon the new thinking. We reject what comes before and after, and pay attention only to the easy middle part.

  • Before: Philosophy
  • Middle: Ideation
  • After: Operationalization

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The very deepest ideas draw us into the underworld of mind. To grasp them we must cross the river of forgetfulness, and then grope through limbo, without boundary stones, maps, compasses or stars to guide us. If we look back, all is lost. We are trapped in the old life, rooted to the institutional view, pillars of respectability.

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When we rethink how we think, we gain freedom of movement, first in mind, then in body.

Born againandagainandagain

Ideas

When a person has no idea of the role he plays in the construction of the world he inhabits, and he has no awareness of the deep changeability of  significance of the world, he is a naive realist.

If a person suddenly experiences a shift in the significance of the world, without recognizing the permanent possibility of yet more shifts, he will interpret this event as a lifting of the veil of illusion and the revelation of the true world, and he will become a naive realist for a second time.

Some people never get bored with lifting and shredding veils. Realism does not have a monopoly on naivety.

Practical philosophical reductionism

Anthropology, Design

Less than a month ago I observed I’d collected three anti-method books in my library: After Method, Beyond Method, Against Method, and noted the absence of Before Method, Within Method, For Method.

I forgot that I also own For and Against Method, which is half argument for method, and Truth and Method, which argues against the existence of any universally valid hermeneutic technique.

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I did not set out to collect books on method. I own these books because the concept of good method is one of the most effective (because it is the least questioned/questionable) vehicles for enforcing practical philosophical reductionism.

We fail to recognize how aggressive this is, partly because we tend to harbor a monistic orientation to “best”. We are seeking the best way, and if someone has already found it, we should set aside our own semi-articulate objections, preferences and intuitions and resist the temptation to “reinvent the wheel.”

This aligns with a general moral preference for self-effacement. We are eager to show that we can put our own preferences aside in the interest of a better outcome. This is admirable — if you’ve actually established the superiority of the less preferred method. But all too often we adopt a “pain, therefore gain” attitude that does nobody a bit of good.

Then, of course, many people don’t want to think philosophically. They just want to figure out what they’re doing, so they can get down to the doing. Thought is an unpleasant necessity that precedes making and executing plans. For such minds, method eliminates a lot of crap they didn’t want to do anyway. Re-considering method introduces unwelcome extra work of a kind they’d prefer not to deal with. It’s like making them slaughter the cow that will become their tasty cheeseburger. They’d rather just slap it on the grill, already.

Then finally there’s the “involvement anxiety” toward  participatory understanding that’s endemic to human sciences. We badly want to know without our own selves figuring into the equation. Even people who pride themselves on accounting for context when studying human subjectivity often want to subtract the themselves out of the context they do create — and must create — through their practice. A practitioner’s preference of method is taken to be a subjective impurity to be removed in the attempt to understand the others’ subjectivity more objectively.

It reminds me of a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground, the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.

 

Specere

Etymology

Special – ORIGIN Middle English: shortening of Old French especial ‘especial’ or Latin specialis, from species ‘appearance’; literally ‘appearance, form, beauty,’ from specere ‘to look.’

Respect – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin respectus, from the verb respicere ‘look back at, regard,’ from re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’

Inspect – ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Latin inspect– ‘looked into, examined,’ from the verb inspicere (from in- ‘in’ + specere ‘look at’), or from its frequentative, inspectare.

Circumspect – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin circumspectus, from circumspicere ‘look around,’ from circum ‘around, about’ + specere ‘look.’

Suspect – ORIGIN Middle English (originally as an adjective): from Latin suspectus ‘mistrusted,’ past participle of suspicere, from sub- ‘from below’ + specere ‘to look.’

Despise – ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French despire, from Latin despicere, from de– ‘down’ + specere ‘look at.’

Continue reading Specere →

How to learn

Ideas

Unexpected events can be painful — but they are also instructive.

Following the trauma and disorientation of unexpected events, we go into learning mode. We study the unexpected event, explaining how it happened, cataloging its characteristics, identifying the early signs that the unexpected was about to happen.

Now we know how to expect the unexpected. We stay alert and vigilant and ready to respond.

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Innovation is a kind of unexpected event, and learning from innovation follows a similar pattern.

We usually find innovations a little implausible or unrealistic at first. Being new and unprecedented they don’t yet belong to reality as we’ve known it. (Think about everyone’s favorite example of radical innovation — how much ridicule was heaped upon it by precisely those who now celebrate its success.)

The innovations we admire most are the “disruptive” ones — the deep innovations that disorient and reorient our perceptions of what is realistic.

These deep innovations are the most instructive ones. Though at first glance disruptive innovations seem to burst into the world whole in flashes of intuition, closer scrutiny reveals that they generally owe their success to readily-discernible principles that had eluded us in the past — probably because we’d become engrained in the established ways of doing things.

These principles can be distilled into best practices and leveraged to create fresh new innovations.

And because these new innovations are founded on proven, well-established principles, we can justify them to sensible people who reject the squishy and subjective mythology of intuition and insight, and who demand a more objective, systematic and responsible approach to innovation.

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From the liner notes of the first Coolies album, which consisted entirely of Paul Simon covers:

Q: “Don’t the Coolies perform any original songs?”

A: “We do! Just ask Paul Simon — he wrote most of them.

 

 

An ideology of objectified ideologists

Ideas

Voegelin, from Autobiographical Reflections:

“…I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian — not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bete noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably I have never answered criticisms of this kind; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry but they cannot be partners in a discussion.”

The practical danger of this type of statement (though it is undeniably true in some cases) is that it provides a ready-made attitude by which a conservative soul can automatically reject a whole swath of -isms (like Postmodernism) as suspected ideology simply for being associated (however loosely) with known ideologies, or to even dismiss a new and apparently non-nonsensical or irrational philosophical position that requires effort to understand.

This sort of out-of-hand exteriorized dismissal (as an object to observe and explain rather than  a fellow-I to hear out and learn from), is one of the most useful ideologist’s devices. And it prevents him from being a partner in a discussion because he’s too busy observing and inquiring into your true motives to hear what you’re trying to tell him.

 

Chain of differentiations

Brand, Design

Differentiated brands are rooted in differentiated offerings.

Differentiated offerings are rooted in differentiated strategies.

Differentiated strategies are rooted in differentiated operations.

Differentiated operations are rooted in differentiated organizational structures.

Differentiated organizational structures are rooted in differentiated roles.

Differentiated roles are rooted in differentiated personalities.

(By “differentiated personality”, I mean having a personality that doesn’t easily fit into a standard professional role definition.)

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Undifferentiated brands have things  easier.

They have an easier time explaining themselves because they conform to expectations customers have already learned from their competitors. They have an easier time explaining their offerings because the offerings differ from others by well-established attributes. (“Ours is cheaper.” or faster, or lighter, or easier to use, or whatever.) They don’t have to put too much work into strategy, nor do they have to take risks with untried approaches to solving new problem. Instead they can assemble their strategy from readily-available and well-proven best practices. The same is true for their operations and hiring. They’ll find ready-made employees with ready-made knowledge of how to do things, who can just plug right into place and do their thing with no training required, and no adjustment to idiosyncrasies. Plug the role into the hole, and flip the switch and out comes industry-standard deliverables.

For all these reasons, and more, few companies choose to differentiate. Entire industries lack real differentiated brands. And it all works out fine, until it stops working.

Norms of is and norms of ought

Ideas

Norms are ambiguous: they are observed as “is” and imposed/complied with as an “ought”.

In other words, they are treated as a hybrid of natural and moral fact, and it might be this that gives norms their power to shame us into conformity — into affecting the appearance that we are what we ought to be.

Fable of the Olive Gloss Army Jeep

Fables, myths & parables, Ideas

When my Uncle Steve was in the Army he managed a warehouse. He was responsible for ordering and shipping supplies and managing inventory.

I say he “managed a warehouse”, but actually he managed two warehouses, an official one that belonged to the official Army supply network and a second unofficial gray-market warehouse that was part of a second network supplied by mistakes made by the official supply network’s. And because the official supply network did little but make mistakes, this second supply network was quite robust.

Due to the enormous number of procedures imposed on the network to guarantee maximum reliability and efficiency, the network was impossibly complicated, unreliable and inefficient. And that was the easy part. The processes involved in correcting a fuck-up was ten times more complicated, error-prone and slower than the process of generating a fresh fuck-up.

So, according to Uncle Steve, whenever he was forced to do things the Right Way the official warehouse system would invariably take aeons to complete his order and send him none of what he needed. Instead of attempting to correct the error, he would simply accept the incorrect order, put it into his second warehouse. He’d then use his second supply network to get what he needed a hundred times more reliably in one-hundredth the time.

At some point Uncle Steve started to collect mis-procured Jeep parts, a la “One Piece at a Time”. Soon, he’d assembled an entire vehicle. However, Uncle Steve made one strategic mistake that I feel sure he never regretted: he painted his new Army Jeep high-gloss olive. This extravagant touch attracted the attention of a general who immediately confiscated it for his own use.

The moral of this fable: The Right Way and the Effective Way of getting shit done is not necessarily the same. But even success is won despite the Right Way, once a success is won, the proponents of the Right Way will confiscate the success.

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Note, proponents of the Right Way confiscate successes as triumphs of the Right Way without the slightest curiosity about how the accomplishment was accomplished.

However, if shit goes wrong the proponents of the Right Way immediately look for deviations from Standard Procedure to explain why things went wrong.

Thus, due to the overwhelming power of selective curiosity, successes are always credited to the Right Way, and failures are always blamed on deviation from the Right Way — when if fact the only role the Right Way really plays in any success being as negligent, ineffectual and otherwise nonexistent as possible.

Continue reading Fable of the Olive Gloss Army Jeep →

The Worst Mammal in the World

Ideas

Click image for hi-res printable image.

Listen to the The Worst Mammal Overture. For maximum stupidity crank the volume.

I drew this picture somewhere around 1989. The Overture was recorded in 2003 as a sonic transcription of the visual image.

Who

Ideas

What?, How?, Why? — these seem a natural triad of questions. Intuitively, the question Who? feels like a hybrid — an answer derived from the answers to these more fundamental questions.

I wonder what kind of metaphysical prejudice underlies this “naturalness”?

I’m trying on this on for awhile: Who?, How?, What? as primary, with and Why? as the derivative hybrid…

(No, we will not be having any quatrads on this blog, so don’t even try it.)

Hyperbole

Ideas

Some reasonable comparisons appear hyperbolic because of a hyperbolic understanding of one of the terms of the comparison.

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Such accusations preserve the hyperbolic understanding of the term — and help prevent the understanding from being revisited.

Confabulation of method

Design

It’s interesting to see how confabulation of method can result in excessive exaltation of algorithmic methods, often in the name of “being scientific” (a notion which has been exploded by such thinkers as Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour and John Law) and also in the opposite direction: dismissal of method in favor of excessive exaltation of intuition.

Both types of confabulation obscure the true path to success. For those who subscribe to these confabulations and try to put them into faithful practice will find the path to success mysteriously obstructed.

Experience research, strategy, design

Design, Ideas

Experience research helps an organization learn about other people so it can respond to their needs, perceptions and personalities more thoughtfully. The hope is that the research will turn up some new tidbit or constellation of tidbits (sometimes dead simple, sometimes complex) that so far everyone else has overlooked.

These insights, as we usually call them, enable the organization who commissioned the research to gain first-mover status is addressing and satisfying unmet needs, or in finding better ways to satisfy needs.

Experience research also helps us form clearer images of the types of people will use a design. These images — usually in the form of personas — serve a number of purposes. They both inspire and guide team members’ intuition during ideation and design. They are also a valuable critical tool, useful for reality checking design approaches at the macro- and micro-level, and for assessing the probable effectiveness of candidate concepts and designs in order to narrow the possibilities to the most promising (hopefully prior to testing).

The primary use of experience research is to inform experience strategy and experience design to help organizations provide better customer experiences. Better how? Better, as defined by the customer. Why? Because if the customer thinks the experience is better, the customer will 1) in the near-term behave in a way that profits the organization (support the business strategy), and 2) the organization will earn the loyalty of the customer (build brand equity).

This view of experience research and experience strategy and design is, to the best of my knowledge, the predominant one.

This vision of experience research/strategy/design is inadequate. Something elusive but essential is omitted.

 

Confabulated norms

Design

Jonathan Haidt’s excellent and very accessible Happiness Hypothesis describes a fascinating phenomenon called confabulation which, to put it simply means that we often do not really understand the processes that drive our own behaviors, but despite this fact we unhesitatingly and innocently invent fictional explanations.

The concept of confabulation is not new. Nietzsche, for instance, observed it and ridiculed it from a hundred angles. Haidt, however, scientifically isolates the phenomenon, and promotes it from a very probable suspicion to a demonstrated fact: our own explanations of why we do things are often pure speculation. I can testify as a usability tester that we also confabulate how we do things.

Basically, any tacit mental process — any activity of the mind that cannot speak for itself — will be spoken for by the part of the mind that verbalizes, knows only verbalization and refuses to consider real anything that is not verbalized.

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All this is fascinating enough, but I’m interested in something far more practical.

I’m interested in that next step we take when we accomplish something really admirable.

We ask: “How was that accomplished?”

And we confabulate an answer: “I followed my method.”

The confabulated method becomes a norm — a best practice — and is then imposed on others.

After all, hasn’t this method been shown to be effective? It is a reliable route to success.

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Sometimes this imposition of method is resisted on the grounds that the full context is not being considered. It is not applicable to certain types of problems (this method will not be effective in this situation), or, less commonly, to certain temperaments of practitioners (this method might work great for you, given your cognitive style and background, but it might not be as helpful to this other person who is different from you in many ways.)

But confabulation opens up a whole other can of worms. Maybe the method didn’t cause the success. Maybe the method enabled some other tacit process to unfold in its own mysterious way. Maybe the method simply didn’t harm the tacit process, but gave it some cover of respectability. Or maybe the tacit processes happened despite the method. OR — maybe the method actually diminished the result, but not so completely that it ended in failure.

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Think about how decisions are made in most organizations. A group of people sit around in a room and try to verbalize what ought to be done. The group wants to verbally understand what is about to happen. The groups wants to know what will be done, how it will be done and why it can be expected to work.

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I’ve been reading literature from the field of Science and Technology Studies. Practitioners of STS use ethnographic research methods to watch how science is actually done. What they see confirms what Thomas Kuhn also saw: Science tends to suppress much of the experience and behavior of scientists, and to emphasize the discoveries — not only in scientific writing, but also in accounts of how science is done. The histories of science are rewritten in such a way that progress to the present appears straight and steady.

Kuhn:

Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. (Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions)

Latour:

On June 2, 1881, in the little village of Pouilly-le-Fort in Beauce, Louis Pasteur defeated a terrible disease of sheep and cows, called anthrax. A friend of Pasteur’s gives this account: “Pouilly-leFort is as famous today as any other battlefield. Monsieur Pasteur, a new Apollo, was not afraid to deliver oracles, more certain of success than that child of poetry would be. In a program laid out in advance, everything that was to happen was announced with a confidence that simply looked like audacity, for here the oracle was pronounced by science itself, that is to say, it was the expression of a long series of experiments, of which the unvarying constancy of the results proved with absolute certainty the truth of the law discovered” (Bouley: 1 883, p. 439). The strategy was conceived entirely in advance; Pasteur concocted it and had every detail figured out; it went according to plan, following a strict order of command from Pasteur to the sheep by way of his assistants and the caretakers. (Latour, The Pasteurization of France)

The cash value of this idea?

What we understand to be scientific is not actually how science is accomplished.

My position is that the same is true in nearly every sphere of human activity, and doubly so wherever creativity happens. This includes education, management, design, social research — basically area of life where people are especially maniacal about method and most aggressively impose processes, standards, protocols and norms of every kind on one another.

Here’s how it goes:

  1. New ideas are conceived in intuitive leaps.
  2. The leaped-to ideas are tested in some way or another, artificially or in actuality.
  3. The leaps that pass the test are considered leaps forward to a goal.
  4. The leap forward is then traced backwards and rationalized. Reason creeps bit by bit from the goal to the origin, and attempts to account for the distance traversed in an unbroken chain of explanations.
  5. Then cause and effect are reversed. The story of the leap is confabulated. It is retold as a story of a steady and rational creeping forward toward a goal.
  6. The story makes perfect sense, and is accepted as the true account of the success.
  7. The creeping story is then formalized into a method, and imposed as a norm.
  8. Further attempts at progress are evaluated against their similarity to the proven method.
  9. Those who have strong belief in the method and who follow it faithfully produce respectable but unspectacular results. Those who ignore the method and flaunt that fact win little institutional support. Those who play the method game, but who leave themselves intuitive freedom win the most success.

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I’ve had the unnerving experience of being forced to improvise when method failed, and succeeding — but discovering after that methods were attributed to my success, and that nothing I could say would persuade those who saw method where there was none that my success was fortunate (and easily could have been otherwise) and that none of it had a thing to do with following method. Had my improvisation failed, there is no doubt in my mind it would have been blamed on my deviation from method.

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I think most methods are sheer chickenshit (in the technical sense).

I think most successes are accomplished by what most people would call bullshit. “Eureka” moments. Apples hitting the head. Ideas in the shower.

The key is entirely in testing — to establish that the leap is a good one — and then in the rational creep backwards to account for why the idea makes sense — but NOT as the method for how it was accomplished!

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People who refuse to leap out of methodological conscience are depriving themselves of the pleasure of creativity. They limit themselves to incremental innovation.

People who leap without testing the leap deprive their sponsors of reasonable assurance. There’s nothing wrong with jumping to conclusions. All creative conclusions — good and bad — are jumped to. The key is to test them before acting on them. Whether they turn out for the better or for the worse, any untested leap is reckless.

If you rationalize the successful  leaps, figure out what made the leap work, you might discover principles that can fuel future leaps, and you can also integrate the accomplishment into the organizations body of knowledge. There’s value in the creep backwards.

BUT: do not reverse cause and effect and require everyone to demonstrate how they will creep to success before they are permitted to move.

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If you hate dumb puns stop reading now.

Continue reading Confabulated norms →