kip/bot/blog

McKinsey ran some interview snippets from Eric Schmidt and there’s a great line early on in the first video. (Videos here, but note you need to be registered (free) and then click on the “Launch the Interactive” button at the bottom, then it’s in the first segment.)

He describes some basic Google decisions about hiring and recruitment, identifies a key faultline (hiring only people who are nice (one school) vs hiring people who might make you uncomfortable for a little bit but do brilliant work (Google’s school). Then he gets animated and says there’s nothing new here, it’s just that Google does it, followed with: “what bothers me about management books is they all say the same stuff generically, but nobody does it.”

Interesting thought for people looking to make changes — stop focusing on the last HBR of Fast Company article and see if the new metaphor for the old thing helps you this time around, and start having discussions about why something doesn’t work, just how much you want it to work (if you want it to work at all), and maybe see why people aren’t adopting it. Go deep, stick with it, maybe even stop reading business books after you’ve made a decision and focus on that decision.

’nuff said.

After my TEDx Kent talk — a delightful romp though kipbot’s pissiness at how kids today don’t respect the amount of craft and expertise needed to do digital — someone recommended I read Rethinking Expertise, by Harry Collins and Robert Evans. Collins and Evans are sociologists at Cardiff University who specialize in the acquisition and social understanding of knowledge and expertise. The book is

meant to increase the chance that the process of coming to be called an expert will have more to do with the possession of real and substantive expertise … to treat it as something other than relational

It’s quite a good read, though the introduction, and the purpose is kind of sad: “First we need to work out what it means to know what you are talking about.” What a sad task to have to take on.

There is a lot in this book to blog about, and I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I had an aha! on the subway (the realization and insight kind, not the marketing kind). The book is based on a ‘periodic table of expertises’, which contains a spectrum of knowledge levels around which we build our expertise. The spectrum reads:

beer mat knowledge – little trivia fun facts that are technically right, but doesn’t get you beyond definitions
popular understanding – such as a pop science book that gives you enough to talk about it at parties, but not enough to answer questions
primary source knowledge – reading books in the field
interactional expertise – doing it
contributory expertise – originating ideas in the field, serving as part of the peer community that defines and propels it

The last two are the areas of true expertise – people who study a field by immersing themselves in the primary literature (often in university) and then do the field, where they gain deeper knowledge and understanding, eventually moving into a kind of mastery where they shape the field with their contributions. The book is focused on science, so the idea can be understood, by majoring in biology, going to grad school where you study more primary literature, but are in a lab and teaching (interactional), and then doing some research that can be published as a contribution to the field (the dissertation).

Anyway, I love the beer mat analogy, and it’s actually real — they found a beer mat for Babycham company that tells you what a hologram is (with exclamation points too!). But the real insight for me was the faultline between primary source and interactional expertise. How many times have we made ourselves conversant in (and considered ourselves capable of managing) a field after reading a couple books in the field? Without doing the work, without reading something by or talking to someone who actually has done the work to see what the difference between dynamic interactional and static written knowledge would be. The degree of immersion is important here. In his reportage and non-fiction writing, Martin Amis regularly refers to reading a couple yards of books to get a handle on the field (specifically he was talking about nuclear disarmament policy and Stalin research). This was a huge insight for me as a manager and as an observer of other managerial cultures.

The other piece I really liked was the distinction around popular literature on a field. Somewhere between beer mats and text books are popularizations — the Stephen Hawking pop science stuff. I used to make fun of the Business Week cover dynamic in the internet industry — the day something gets covered in BW, the client or your boss calls and says “OMG we need to have this!!!!” But now, looking at the broader spectrum of expertise — going from beer mats out to doing and originating — I’m wondering if things like our beloved HBR, the sacred text to many of us (including me), is actually popular or primary.

PS Jeff Parks, in his talk, “Being Human is not Quantifiable” has a funny riff about expertise. While looking at Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours quote, he gently mocks the notion of a social media expert arguing that this stuff hasn’t been around long enough for some to put 10,000 hours into it!

Mastering the use of jargon increasingly seems to be a key to building strong, creative teams and collaborative environments. In the past, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to stamp jargon out of the language of teams I’ve led. Improperly deployed jargon can often be confusing, obfuscating the real meanings under the word or creating more conversation about the jargony bit than the actual topic at hand. George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language convinced me that using jargon has an ethical and power relationship dimension. When you use words that only specialists know, you (potentially) (deliberately) leave non-specialists out of a conversation and disempower them.

Most importantly, my skepticism of jargon also stems from a belief that jargon tends to make things static and close off avenues of exploration. In an earlier post, I wrote:

What I noticed, though, was a rush to put labels on ideas and capture the dynamic within an existing, perhaps widely known concept (value chain, purchase cycle, influencer strategy). The words were all useful, but they seemed to dampen the energy of the conversation – they didn’t tell us who was doing what to whom (or, more importantly for marketers with whom) or offer theories of why.

I suggested that we should avoid putting conceptual labels on dynamics during a brainstorm. That we should stick to people dynamics — getting inside people’s heads would get us to better ideas. Being inside people’s heads would give us a better handle on whether the idea was good or not.

If you have a very specific, precise word for something, you’re pretty much gating it off from the critical, heretical scrutiny that leads to invention and creativity.

My reaction against jargon is not quite a reflex, but it is a going-in assumption that I operate under. Stephen Fry, however, has me moving towards more balanced and more explicitly proactive approach to jargon with teams I work with.

Fry’s influence comes by way of The Ode Less Travelled, a quirky, nifty volume in which Fry encourages people to join him in a long-held hobby of his: writing poetry (for purely personal purposes). I picked up the book at Keats House while visiting London, all intoxicated by words and speaking and always interested in Stephen Fry. In the book, Fry makes compelling arguments for re-engaging in poetry (“verse is one of our last stands against the instant and the infantile”) but insists that there is no royal road. In distinct contrast to Allen Ginsberg’s horse-shit comment that anyone can play jazz, you “just pick up your horn and blow”, Fry is quite adamant that you don’t just put pen to paper and anything goes. You need to learn some rules — rules which have funny names like scansion, spondee, and trochee — but they’re worth learning.

In the process of encouraging people to learn difficult things, Fry also makes some interesting statements about jargon. First, he starts by rather harshly dismissing the reflexive dismissal of jargon (which clearly I took a little personally):

Only an embarassed adolescent or deranged coward thinks jargon and reserved languages are pretentious and that detail and structure are boring. Sensible people are above simpering at references to colour in music, structure in wine or rhythm in architecture. When you learn to sail, you are literally shown the ropes and taught that they are called sheets or painters and that knots are hitches and forward is aft and right is starboard. That is not pseudery or exclusivity, it is precision, it is part of initiating the newcomer into the guild.

I still believe that jargon is often misused as a way of being showy or keeping people out of the guild. However, I have been on a long series of jags about the importance of getting seriously good at a discipline, getting down on serial neophytism posing as generalism, and in general, going deep. So the above passage stopped me cold. Later, Fry softens the line but hardens the thinking:

most activities worth pursuing come with their own jargon, their private language and technical vocabulary. In music you would be learning about fifths and relative majors . . . I could attempt to ‘translate’ words like iamb and caesura into everyday English, but frankly that would be patronising and silly. It would also be very confusing when, as may well happen, you turn to other books on poetry for further elucidation.

Even tighter, he later adds, “no art worth the striving after is without its complexities.”

So, now I’m expanding one of my rules as a meeting or team leader from stamping out jargon to creating the right level of jargon. Bad jargon obfuscates meanings, establishes bogus power structures within a group, and often stamps out the nuance and possibility of exploration that can lead to creative thinking. On the other hand, jargon can provide the common language that every group, especially those in which people are collaborating across, between and within disciplines, needs.

One place to find the balance is in Nabokov’s characterization of jargon as “convenient and innocuous nomenclaturial handles.” Convenience and innocuousness are key: does the jargon speed the conversation? is it innocuous or does it call undue attention to itself? Most important, does it function as a handle and not a thing unto itself?

I continue to be crotchety about generalism and the speed with which people think they can learn to be something (see crotchety posts here, here, and here. Here too. Oh, and here. God, do I ever stop? Well, no, but this one here isn’t grumpy.). Listening to Studio 360′s podcast about Moby-Dick today (while I was engaged in the years-long journey of becoming a better cook — in this moment by trying to improve my chicken stock and mushroom barley soup), there was a surprisingly great interview with Ray Bradbury. Why surprising? First, because, despite my love of SF and other genre fiction, I tend not to expect profundity from SF writers. Second, having never read Bradbury, I assumed whatever acclaim he gets is because of the ideas behind and the clever titling of Fahrenheit 451, not for any skill as a writer. (I need to make that right and at least buy, if not actually read, something of his on my Kindle.) Third, it’s just such a nice way of putting something I and the voices in my head are often on about that my head snapped up and I almost cut off the tip of my left index finger when he said it.

Anyway, I spend lots of time trying to convince people to respect craft and the time it takes and the value behind going deep in subject areas. But I see lots of people assuming they’re experts in things after they’ve done something once, or read a couple articles and books about it, or memorized a couple catchy phrases. Malcolm Gladwell recently helped highlight the fallacy that conversancy == expertise or that once is enough to be a guru when he highlighted the thinking that indicates you need 10,000 hours to get really good at something. But that factoid alone doesn’t quite get it across, because it’s not 10,000 accretive hours only that get you there. It’s 10,000 accretive and repetitive hours, with an emphasis on repetitive — you don’t learn new things so much as you learn more about the richness of the things you know. Describing this process and helping people understand it is challenging.

So, Bradbury wrote the screenplay/adaptation for the Gregory Peck film version of Moby Dick. (I didn’t know that, so already I’m happily smarter as I chop my leeks — working on getting more rhythm and precision and speed with my 8″ knife.) He apparently rather famously talked about being Herman Melville for a day during the writing of the screenplay and the Studio 360 host asked him to explain the why and the how of that:

what you try to do is get it into your bloodstream, get it into your unconscious. You can’t intellectualize it, that won’t work. But if you read a book 80 or 90 times, which I did, some sections I read 120 times, and you put that all into your bloodstream . . . and then you ignore it and let it come to the surface, emotionally, passionately . . . then you become the chaser and chased.

I like the image of getting it into you bloodstream and waiting for it to surface. Even more, though, I like the idea of ignoring the material and letting it sit in your unconscious.

Perhaps is because I’m getting old. Perhaps it’s because, having gone through 2.5 career changes and paid my dues/been schooled 2.5 times. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I found this Zen Habits article about
how to become amazingly great at something refreshing. I’ve been to so many places where people are going to “get digital” in 3 months, or pick up a new competency through a couple hires, or “spend a weekend” with something to plumb its depth and master its rhythms. I loved the setup to this article:

Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.

I’ve even seen tutorials claiming to teach a skill in just a few hours. Pretty soon we’ll be demanding to know how to do something in seconds.

Instant mastery of skills and knowledge! Hey presto!

Unfortunately, the reality is something a little less magical. Or maybe that’s a fortunate thing.

Many of the times when I’m writing about craft, I’m talking about being close to the work and its intricacies and materials. Last week, I started re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I last read, appropriately, in 1984 while I was in college. It was a perfect undergrad read: a salad of philosophy (complete with interwoven Platonic dialogues), personal wellness, a post-hippy balanced suspicion and enjoyment of technology, and a focus on the word/idea quality. (It was also my introduction to Chautauqua, a tradition which filled my mind for many years and was the name of a school paper I started my senior year.) The perfect summer after freshman year book.

This weekend, the NYTimes has a magazine piece about working with one’s hands, doing physical labor in an age of info-workers. The writer, Matthew Crawford, is a PhD, who once struggled to find work after rejecting the nomadic life of seeking tenure. When he got a gig, heading up a DC policy shop, he stayed long enough to buy tools and start his own, admittedly under-priced, one-man motorcycle repair business.

Both the book and the article seem to say things about craft, and they definitely both reference motorcycles, so a blog post that strings together quotes from each.

In Zen…, there is an early salvo about quality as the area of focus:

‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively results in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned to be concerned with the question “What is best?”, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answer tend to move the silt downstream.

I’m only 60 pages into the re-read, but I remember and feel that the rest of the book, which the author Robert Pirsig describes charmingly (and goofily) as a Chautauqua, is about how we comprehend and pursue quality in our lives. This gets into values, personal quirks and tastes, and most of all a cognitive approach to one’s life and its problems. This is where the Crawford article resonates.

[Motorcycle repair] frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.

This passage seems romantic in its sense-based level of work and deeply satisfying. Crawford has a body of knowledge and experience that has translated into a finely tuned engagement of his senses. I picture him looking at the engine and considering one possibility with his mind, while reaching a hard to get to place and considering another possibility with his fingers while he samples the oil’s viscosity and a third possibility by the smell. In some cases, I imagine he can smell or hear the problem as a customer rides his motorcycle into the shop. If the problem lies deeper than his immediate senses, I picture him puzzling over the data, House-like, and testing theories in his head before testing them on the machine.

Earlier in the piece, Crawford talks about the intangibility of achievement in office life. Back in the 90s I split my time between database programming and writing union and political propaganda and position papers. The latter activity was where my heart was, while the former paid the bills and supported the first. But there were times when programming was the more, and more deeply, satisfying pursuit. Sure, I’d get excited when a speech I wrote came to a great crescendo or when I found just the right way to tee up an issue. But the computer work was oddly gratifying — figuring out a thorny bug, finding a better, more elegant way to work through a routine, handing someone a disk with compiled code that ran cleanly, running a program overnight and seeing that it had run flawlessly in the morning (this was in the x86 days). It felt great. I didn’t do it for too many years, but I did develop that extra-sense where I could just smell what the problem was. It felt great.

Not only was the work satisfying, it was mine. When I had written good code, I knew I had and there was no doubt. I could settle back and know the job was well done. When I was explaining my double lives of different satisfactions to friends, I remember being quite passionate about it. “When I finish a program, I know it works and I know it’s as fast as possible and can’t be written any tighter. So much better, sometimes, than writing a speech any idiot can say they don’t like. So much easier to prove that one line of code works better than the other whereas with a speech, someone, or I, will always be able to run the work down.” That last bit is part of the personal psychology in Zen… — finding the confidence to say this is good, this is quality and be content and move on. But the other satisfaction, of absolutely knowing seems connected to better sleep and better mornings and better breathing.

Crawford highlights an interesting dynamic around the intangibles of office work:

A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain . . . It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling.

When I was writing speeches, I was self-employed, so I took pleasure in putting out my own work to my clients. I might fail, lose the gig, have to go back for a costly re-write that robbed me of a weekend, but I remember liking the fact that it was my making and doing. But the self-protective double-think Crawford mentions seems like a loss to a person.

This is getting long and connected to more life-stuff than craft-stuff, but I sent this article to a former boss of mine, a man who’s very wealthy and had just started reading the article when I sent him the link. He wrote back:

I just spent the day on Saturday installing the lighting on our roof and when the day was done sat back in the waning daylight hours savoring the work sipping wine with a friend discussing that exact topic of “working with hands”.

From his Nobel talk slides:

The meaning of the first one was not immediately apparent to me, so I found a longer version of the rules, where Krugman explains: “Pay attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language.”

Applies to many, many things.

Kevin Kelly has an invigorating post about our the inevitable increase in our ignorance. When I saw the title “The Expansion of Ignorance”, I had a curmudgeonly joy at reading about how stupid we’re allowing ourselves to become. Yesterday, I listened to a series of Open Source interviews with Harold Bloom (while playing my Rogue alt on WoW, no less). He railed against the ‘school of resentment’, lamented the celebration of crap books, condemned the loss of memorization, etc. Cocktail Party Physics had a post about how Sarah Palin represents a celebration of dumb and connecting it to bigger, scarier trends:

Despite the Palin-centric focus, this is not meant to be a political post; rather, her candidacy epitomizes one of our most fundamental failings as a nation. I’m talking about the triumph of mediocrity, of settling for “good enough,” in America. No wonder our country is in a shambles, teetering on the edge of economic ruin and losing our historical edge in technological innovation. No wonder we’re lagging so far behind other developed countries in educational testing scores, when we demand so little of even the highest offices of our land.

In a recent post here about how fivethirtyeight.com was uncovering basic 101 weaknesses in long-standing polls, I was surprised to find out how pissy I was about the media’s and larger public’s inability to figure out this problem for themselves.

So I was looking forward to a bilious post from Kevin Kelly, which, now that I think of it, is silly. He’s not the bilious type. What the post is about is how, despite all of the knowledge we’ve acquired, we’re not really getting close to knowing it all or being done with science. He points out that, if every answer raises to more questions, our pursuit of truth is creating more ignorance than knowledge. Chart:

As one who was depressed that Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov was turning things I once saw as art and as having mystery into simple riddles, this was a big pick me up. There’s something very Jean-Luc Picard’s love of discovery and surprise in all this.

I just put together a series of pretty successful brainstorms — good work, happy designers, lots of deep thinking that is continuing even after the pitch it was for. One of the keys to the success, at least in my mind, was that the brief was (brief and was) presented a day in advance of the actual brainstorm. The second key was that there were subsequent brainstorm sessions. Grokking new ideas takes time, re-aligning thinking requires unconscious and conscious work, and concepts take hold at deeper levels and in parts before bubbling up in an expressable form.

My piano teacher gave me a student assignment book (I could never keep track of what I was supposed to do) and the little note in the front seemed in line with my recent ‘no silver bullets’, ‘no acts of divine inspiration’ ‘creativity is a habit’ screeding:

I blogged this before, emphasizing 1) break it down; 2) master the components and add it together; 3) clean it up & go deeper; 4) make it sing.