kip/bot/blog

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.

I’m starting to look for a piano teacher (my previous teacher has, alas, moved to the west coast. A moment’s homage to her: she was awesome, played my piano beautifully when she walked me through Mozart sonatas and had a fun mix of stern teacher (reflexively pushing my elbows up and straightening my back) and music lover (listening to any vague musical connection I made between a theory assignment and something I was listening to.

So, a teacher I’m looking at has all sorts of things to love, chief among them his professional/academic work around Mahler. But he has a section on his site called Why study music? which highlights some of the benefits of taking a craft seriously and going deep into something. His key reasons, paraphrased below:

Dealing with pressure — the site refers to children learning to deal with pressure, but there’s something impressive for adults to, on a weekly basis, confront a piece of music that doesn’t come easily to them. Knowing that a lesson is coming up is just enough pressure to force you to take a longer view, break the piece down and work on it. It’s also long enough to be rewarding when, by the end of the week, you being to master it.

Responding to Criticism — I’m surprised how many design focused places don’t ‘workshop’ things and how many times we hold back from really working over a piece of work. One of the key, but most frequently overlooked, tenets of design thinking should be/is iteration and revision. While anyone’s first rev should be excellent, it should be understood that further revs will only improve the final product. Even if you come back to the original design, you’ll have a stronger, more confident understanding of it.

Persistence — in my world of marketing and interactive, there’s a borderline obsessive interest in the next thing, newness, novelty and never seen before. Sitting with someone for a while, working on something for longer than a quarter, doing a truly better v2.0 that is continuous with the previous version is not only hard to do, but often scorned. That said, however, there are a lot of creative types in the field who know when to dig in and fight the good fight or keep on pushing to validate an idea.

Multi-leveled focus - inset Steve Jobs quote about zooming in and zooming out and the design trope of ‘rinse and repeat’.

Project management - taking a long view of mastering a craft or something within the craft requires some PM like thinking. For a piano piece, my instructors regularly tell me how to break it down: “start with the left hand until it feels smooth and you find some melody in it, then focus on the melody right hand only, and work on the middle section until it feels clean, then you can add the intro, do dynamics last.”

The bolded names of the benefit are his, the interpretation mine. His page about why we should study music is pretty nice read, highlighting brain age as well as craft/life lesson benefits . . . and, oh yeah, the joy of playing music you love!

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.

Sociology visits the science “lab” and discovers: 1) science is often social; 2) expertise is a tricky balance.

An interview in American Scientist about the nature of expertise by way of a sociologist (Harry Collins) who spends serious time with physicists. Some of it is very old ground, like what we read in the 19086Laboratory Life

The idea of analyzing expertise grew out of my long study of the sociology of gravitational wave detection. I’ve slowly become a quasi-member of the gravitational wave community. This means I chat with my new colleagues in restaurants, cafeterias and coffee bars. I began to find I was talking physics—just the normal to-and-fro of science chat. Sometimes I would recommend that they try something different in the experiments and my remarks weren’t just shrugged off; for instance, I might be putting a case that had been considered and rejected for physics reasons that I could follow, or, rarely, I might even get something right.

This began to strike me as interesting: Here was someone, all of whose university degrees were in sociology, talking physics with physicists. I could not do the math, design the circuits or solder wires, and I would never contribute to a physics paper. Yet I could still talk gravitational wave physics.

Then it struck me that the managers of the big gravitational wave experiments … were also not doing much in the way of maths, or designing and building experiments, or co-authoring research papers in the field. Most of what they did was mediated by the same kind of talk that I was doing. And I also realized that talk of this kind was what I heard when I sat in on review committees—it was talk that happened in these places, not calculating or experimenting. I could follow most of this talk, and, every now and again, I felt that I could even have offered something. This made me think about the nature of expertise: how my expertise differed from that of the scientists and the managers.

But then there is a counterbalance:

Nowadays any parent of a young child, or anyone who can access the Internet, thinks their opinions on technical matters are sound. Many of my colleagues in the social sciences seem to think the same thing … I found I wanted to work out how to value expertise without going back to the bad old days where anyone in a white coat was treated as an authority on anything scientific or technological. We have to solve the very hard problem of reconstructing the value of science when we know it can’t deliver the certainty that people want. Studying expertise may do the trick.

One of the services of this discussion is to unpack different moments and types of expertise. The book, Rethinking Expertise contains a periodic table of expertise types, which includes “interactional expertise” (being able to interact with experts in the field) and “referred expertise” (leveraging expertise in other fields in a field which is not your own). It also discusses types of knowledge, such as “tacit knowledge” (”things you can do but can’t describe how”, might be a better phrase than ‘thin slice’).

The interview doesn’t go into much detail, sadly. I’m hoping the book catches on and others review and dissect so I can talk about it without having to read it. In the meantime, it does contain some interesting ideas for management or areas of expertise by non-experts, collaboration, and the eternally fascinating topic of T-shaped people.

In the midst of many many posts and talks about generalism, it was interesting to see this post about feature creep reminding us of the UNIX credo “to do one thing and do it well.”

I seem to spend a lot of time reveling in craft, worrying about the loss of expertise and specialty, and wondering if we’re not going too far in our talk about generalism. I came across the feature creep post above, by way of this sparse post by Jon Howard:

I found both these posts bafflingly intriguing. The one above was so fast and minimal as to be koan-like, and who writes about feature creep anymore? That seemed so old school. But some pattern recognition module in the brain kept me focused on these two posts, struggling for meaning. And then!: feature creep is a way of describing how generalists and agencies accrete skills! And maybe it works . . .

Feature creep, traditionally understood, is problematic to the maker and the user of the product. The maker, by being spread thin, misses deadlines, goes over budget, dilutes the initial impact of the final product, and makes that final product hard to maintain, service, or evolve. To the user, feature creep results in confusion: the subtle differences between choices waste users’ time parsing meanings; the number of choices can be paralyzing and unsatisfying; finding things is difficult; and the cruft underneath somehow rises to become the experience of the product.

At its core, feature creep is worrisome, because it spreads out talent across a wide number of things, at the expense of doing any one thing well or in an elegantly integrated fashion.  The accretion of skills when one becomes a generalist runs that same risk:  “I’ll learn to do this and then this and then this.” We mistake conversancy in a skill with competency as we move from skill to skill, discipline to discipline and then what do we have?
When I look at resumes or talk to designers in the generalist vein, I find myself struggling with the long list or big concept. Long lists of skills and competencies have my pattern recognition module seeking what’s missing so I can understand what unique value that person could bring to the work. The big concept (”it’s all design” “it’s all advertising in the end”) leaves me suspicious.
Perhaps the tools we have for managing feature creep (does it add inherent value to the product/person, does it add noticeable increased value to the perception of the product/person (will it help me sell myself) could help with the balance.

A nice contrast to Clifford Stoll’s aversion to going deep, is a Freakonomics blog piece about, god help me, sports. The piece is about “expert performance” (no Wikipedia entry!) and the related concept of “deliberate practice” (still no Wikipedia entry!). From the blog post:

When Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in the “expert performance�? movement — we’ve written about them before, and we’ll write about them again — try to explain what it is that makes someone very good at what he or she does, they focus on “deliberate practice.�? This means that, your level of natural talent notwithstanding, excellence is accomplished mainly through the tenets of deliberate practice, which are roughly:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

The piece goes on to cite an article about an early trainer who saw the young A-Rod practice, and practice hard, at his hitting and fielding, focusing on weaknesses and mixing things up.

This looks like a bottom-of-the-T approach (technique, incremental goals, incremental feedback, iteration) but it has resulted in a complete player (top-of-the-T?). It’s hard to generalize too much about anything applied to A-Rod, given the universal recognition of his inherent talent. (Reggie Jackson, in the second article cited comments on A-Rod’s seeming enjoyment of the training routines, said, “A lot of things are fun when you’re great.”) But Stoll’s rapid move to boredom with anything done more than two times, in contrast to this look at the development of greatness seemed too close together to not document.

Clifford Stoll’s TED talk may not work for everyone. There’s a hippy daftness that may sometimes feel forced and a self-dismissive “what I do so is so boring” that may feel condescending, but about six minutes in he is charming, oddly moving, human, and clever. There’s also some cool stuff in there, like klein bottles, a grade school experiment to measure the speed of sound, a tribute to Moog, and a pervasive Richard Feynman tinkerer-thinker mode. He constantly grounds himself in tinkering that leads to bigger ideas.

He also has a line that sits in nice contrast to my current reading of The Craftsman and pre-occupation with expertise:

The first time you do something it’s science.

The second time it’s engineering.

The third time, you’re a technician.

He was saying this in reference to his boredom with hacking and computer security. (He first came to prominence with a fun, witty, popular computer science of his detection and catching of East German hackers in Cuckoo’s Nest, a book I still remember with a smile 15 years after reading it.)

On the other hand, he seems to have been making Klein bottles for many years and is still getting something out of it.

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I’m a little disappointed in myself for not knowing Klein bottles. Wikipedia has several pop culture references listed that make me think I should have known it: Futurama has Klein beer sold in Klein bottles, and Magic has an Elkin bottle card.

Maybe it’s not my fault It’s just something damn hippies seem to do: