2022
What the heck is strategy work?
I am realizing that I’ve been gabbing on and on about strategy and strategy work, and I have never actually defined what strategy work entails. The word “strategy” evokes a variety of images, and when I say “what is strategy…
Being Strategic
What does it mean to be strategic? It is a sort of practice, a thinking hygiene.
Dandelion/Elephant Strategy Rubric
I discussed the nature of conditions that encourage dandelion or elephant strategies, but I only skimmed a little bit the topic of why one would choose these strategies. Here’s a sketch of digging a bit more in depth of this…
Generating ideas and strategy coherence
I’ve been talking about dandelions and elephants for a while now, and yes, it may seem like I’ve gone a bit nuts. Oh well. It’s just that it’s such a good framing and I keep finding uses for it nearly…
Convergent innovation
As a sort of thought appetizer, here’s a vignette attempting to intersect the divergent/convergent thinking frame and … you guessed it, dandelions and elephants.
Dandelion or Elephant?
The discovery of the dandelion/elephant framing was exciting and my fellow FLUX colleagues and I engaged in a rather fun “hacky sack of ideas” game, tossing the framing back and forth and looking at it from this side and that.…
Embrace the suck
The titular phrase is well-known in the military, though this might be a different take on the adage. This one came out of a morning conversation with fellow FLUX-ers, where we briefly chatted about life experiences that we didn’t look…
Shadows and Curses
In this Halloween-themed episode, I wanted to share a story that might be useful to API engineers, both aspiring and experienced. This is the story of four curses of API development and the shadows that conjure them. So grab that…
Caring for elephants
Now that we have a guiding compass for growing dandelions, what of the elephants? What are the conditions that might be effective for our APIs to nurture ideas that are like elephants?
Growing dandelions
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about r/K-selection and mentioned two kinds of ideas: the mutate-through-replication dandelions and capacity-preserving elephants.
A crutch
Thinking some more about organizational pathologies, I realized that there is another way to spot and potentially face the challenges presented by them: a crutch.
Organizational pathology
I was reading the latest book by Richard Rumelt, The Crux, and something clicked that I just had to write down.
The Perspective Ladder
I’ve been trying to come up with a better way to illustrate the concept of mental model flattening, and realized that one way to do this is by describing it as I experience it.
r/K selection and innovation
I’ve been thinking about the different conditions under which innovation emerges, and how the environment influences the kind of innovation that happens.
e-LOC
I’d like to introduce a metric for developer APIs that I call “e-LOC”. I am not great with names, so it’ll just have to wait until someone gives it a better one. Meanwhile, let’s explore it.
Making Fifty
This one will be a bit unusual. Instead of my typical sermons on strategy, ecosystems, and development, I want to talk about another hobby of mine: making music. I recently published a new track called Fifty, and figured that it…
The Plumber Age
This framing jumped out of a conversation with the fellow FLUX-ers and I just gotta write it down. It appears that every software project, upon hitting its stride of success, eventually arrives at what I call the “plumber age”. Here…
The Starship of Theseus
This framing of the Starship of Theseus has been on my mind for a little while, and I finally decided to write it down. Basically, in a marketplace with any sort of selection pressure, organizations vie to both retain their…
Strategy and FOMO
There’s this really fun neologism that the cool kids use: FOMO, or fear of missing out. It’s a useful snapshot of feelings we experience when our friends are doing something awesome and we are somehow left behind, literally or figuratively.…
Vision-oriented and impact-oriented mindsets
I had this really interesting framing pop out during a chat with colleagues. It’s a bit contrived, but I found it useful. Imagine that there are two distinct ways to look at the work in front of us: vision-oriented and…
Nudging Embodied Strategy
The whole concept of the cone of embodied strategy is a bit depressing, to be honest. What’s a mature organization to do? Curl up and cry? Surrender to obsolescence? Maybe. But any statement of complete inevitability gives me pause. Though…
Embodied Strategy
I was having a great conversation with a colleague about organizational learning and at one point, I kind of just blurted out that strategies are embodied. Here’s my attempt to expand a bit on this idea.
Practices to break out of the cycle of not-learning
At each step in the vicious cycle of not-learning, there is a choice I can make. I can follow the familiar habit or I can practice a different path – and eventually free myself from the trap. “Eventually” is an…
The cycle of not-learning
Now that I’ve mentioned mental traps, here’s one particular pattern that I’ve observed in myself and others. It seems like a very powerful device. Once constructed, it can hold in its grip not just one person, but entire polities –…
How to get trapped
So you want to add more suffering to your life and build a mental trap for yourself? Well then, look no further. This recipe is for you.
Loops: dead or alive
There are two important shifts to consider when examining a setting. The first is the shift in my needs. Over time, as my customer-vendor loop develops, I will find that the choices I made early on are no longer as…
Builder and Gardener Mindsets
My dear friend Alex Komoroske did a podcast episode recently on all of my favorite topics. I highly recommend watching it and studying the excellent deck that the majority of the discussion rotated around. I also wanted to riff on…
Becoming a setting
I’ve been geeking out about this fascinating phenomenon when parts of one customer-vendor loop become a setting for others. By virtue of connecting the dots to find a functioning setting, we necessarily make this setting more accessible and legible to…
Finding the setting
In the previous story, I talked at length about finding the setting, and I thought it might be useful to try and write down a pattern I’ve seen when looking to complete that puzzle of a functional setting for a…
Customer-vendor loops and their setting
The notion of a setting for a customer-vendor loop is fairly intuitive. A loop doesn’t exist in its own, insulated bubble. Taking that ice cream shop I use as my go-to example, where do its customers come from? They don’t…
Product and ecosystem loop perspectives
There is a useful distinction that arises from examining our position in relation to the customer-vendor loop: product and ecosystem. These are not two different kinds of loops, but rather a matter of our involvement in them. For example, the…
Stages of the customer-vendor loop
One other thing that seems useful is the idea that the feedback loops go through what appears like stages of development – I know! I am sorry! I see developmental patterns everywhere. Here’s a quick framing that captures the idea.
Asymptote analysis using customer-vendor loop
Another potentially useful source of insights is using the customer-vendor loop for asymptote analysis. If we indeed desire for our loop to compound, we likely need to consider the upper limits of the compounding. Every growth has a limit, and…
Making sense of SWOT with customer-vendor loops
When brainstorming entries for a SWOT analysis, it might be useful to have a bit more structure. Let’s see if we can use the customer-vendor loop for that purpose.
Customer-Vendor Loop
I’ve been sketching a bunch of compounding loops this week, and wondering if I am seeing a pattern. I am calling this figment of my imagination the Customer-Vendor Loop. I am not great at clever names. I briefly named it…
Continuously Integrated Strategy
Here’s a possibly useful analogy when talking about strategy work with engineering leads.
Midjourney
I recently got an invite to play with Midjourney, one of the AI-generated art tools out there. It has been a fun adventure, and I am learning a lot. Here are some insights that goofing around with Midjourney produced.
Blueprint, Compass, and Remodeling
Reflecting on some vision work that I’ve been doing recently, I am realizing that I can inhabit two different perspectives, two different mindsets to approach a vision: vision as a blueprint and vision as a compass.
Stakes
This is not as well-formed as it could be, but felt worth capturing. I’ve been struggling to describe the limit of attachment in various ways, and the concept of “stakes” seems like such a good topic to explore.
Organizational cartography
I’ve been thinking about how to represent the important bits of the current state of an organization, and here are some preliminary musings.
Intentionality and meaning
So far, I’ve been talking about intention as a fairly straightforward, singular thing. I have an intention, you have an intention, the bunny has the intention, and so on. As you probably suspected all along, this is at best a…
A vision and a hallucination
Talking with one of my colleagues, we found this simple lens. We both arrived independently at the idea that one of the strongest ways to instill coherence within an organization is aligning on some more or less unified intention. After…
Limits
This story builds on the one I wrote a while ago, and adds one more leg for this stool. This third leg came as a result of examining the solution loop with the question of “What are the limits to…
Archers, Captains, and Strategists
Talking with a colleague, I was trying to draw a distinction between the different kinds of questions people ask when looking for direction. A simple lens materialized. I hope it will be as useful for you as it has been…
The problem understanding framework
With my apologies for taking a scenic route and sincere thanks for following along, I am happy to declare that we now have all the parts to return to that framework I started with. To give you a quick recap,…
Framing
When encountering an infinity-problem, we may have enough wherewithal to resist the urge to act on our caveman firmware. In such cases, we tend to employ a more sophisticated process to exit the “struggle” cycle. The typical name it goes…
Touching infinity
As we explore the process of understanding, it may not be immediately obvious why change isn’t conquerable, and why isn’t knowledge a finite resource as the siren of modernism sweetly suggests. As far as infinity goes, there are infinite stories…
Model compression and us
Often, it almost seems like if we run the process of understanding long enough, we could just stay in the applying cycle and not have to worry about learning ever again. Sure, there’s change. But if we study the nature…
Model compression
At the end of each journey in our process of understanding, we have an effective solution to the problem we were presented with. Here’s an interesting thing I am noticing. We still have a diverse, deeply nuanced mental model of…
Change
So far, I carefully avoided the topic of change, presenting my problem-solving realm in a delightfully modernist manner. “See phenomenon? Make a model of it! Bam! Now we’re cooking with gas.”
Life of a solution
Looking at the framework in the previous piece, I am noticing that the components of the tripartite loop (aka the solution loop, apologies for naming it earlier) form an interesting causal relationship. Check it out. Imagine that for every problem,…
A Solution
If we are looking at a problem, and as we learned earlier, our understanding of a problem is a model that includes us, our intention, and the phenomenon that is a subject of it, then a solution is the problem…
Rubber duck meetings
When I am looking for new insights, a generative conversation with colleagues is hard to beat in terms of quality of output. When I look back at what I do, a large chunk of my total effort is invested into…
Minimum viable legibility
Having seen folks struggle through another Google perf season and supporting them through it, I figured I’d write down some of the new things I learned. Specifically, I wanted to focus on the quadrant of performance management blind spot I…
Cheesecake and Baklava
I have been reading Alex Komoroske’s Compendium cards on platforms, and there’s just so much generative thinking in there. There’s one concept that I kept having difficulty articulating for a while, and here’s my Nth attempt at defining it. It’s…
Understanding
Once the notion of a problem is sufficiently semantically disambiguated, we can proceed toward the next marker on our map: the concept of “understanding”. Ambitious, right?! There will be two definitions in this piece, one building on another. I’ll start…
A problem
To get a more solid grounding of the newly born decision-making framework, we need to understand what a problem is. Let’s begin with a definition. A problem is an imposition of our intention on a phenomenon.
Mental models
I use the term “mental models” a lot, and so I figured – hey, maybe it’s time to do some semantic disambiguation and write down everything I learned so far about them?
The platform two-step
When we last saw Uncle Steve on his ladder, I left him a set of instructions about a less-risky way to adjust the ladder. Interestingly, these instructions roughly translate into a fairly useful technique for platform developers. I call it…
Solved, solvable, unsolvable
I have been noodling on a decision-making framework, and I am hoping to start writing things down in a sequence, Jank-in-teams style. You’ve probably seen glimpses of this thinking process in my posts over the last year or so, but…
Moving the ladder
Riffing on the cost of opinion piece, I realized that there’s a neat framing around opinion mutability and the underlying systems dynamic that’s worth mentioning.
Racing toward or running away
In this moment of flux that I heard being called the Great Resignation, it almost became normal to regularly receive emails from my colleagues and friends about changes in their work. People leave one company to join another, some start…
Awareness of interoception
Recently, I have been fascinated by the wonderful and mysterious part of being human – our interoceptive system. It’s this thing that we all have, but to which I didn’t pay any special attention. The interoceptive system is how we…
Choosing kale
Chatting with my friends about choosing developer frameworks, we accidentally arrived at this kale metaphor. It sounded witty and fun, so I’ll try to unpack it as best as I can. To begin, I will apply the value triangle lens…
Polarity of intention, structure, and capacity
I keep coming back to the post from last year, where I tried to write down my understanding of the distinction between organizational states of consistency, cohesion, and coherence. It’s been a generative framing for many conversations. The thing that…
The cost of opinion
It appears that I’ve been writing this essay since 2012, never quite finding the right framing. One of my brilliant colleagues asked me this question back then: “How do you evaluate whether a Javascript framework is good for the Web?…
Tension in Shared Mental Model Space
This just occurred to me today, so I am writing this down while it’s fresh. When I talk about the shared mental model space (SMMS), I usually picture it as something like a bunch of circles, one for each individual…
Radical Candor as fallback notch locator
Have you ever experienced this really fun moment when a few of concepts you already knew suddenly came together as something new and completely different when revisited? This just happened when I was looking at Kim Scott’s Radical Candor framework.…
Adult development and coaching expectations
A couple of us were chatting about coaching. It was such an amazing generative conversation that I kept walking around, thinking about it over the weekend. As a result, this somewhat late insight materialized, a remix of the Adult Development…
Short-term divergent, long-term convergent
A conversation with colleagues brought this insight to the surface. We were talking about cultivating generative spaces, where a diversity of perspectives is cherished and celebrated, the stakes are low to examine all of them, and enough room for everyone…
Tension between graphs and trees
Not sure how, last week I stumbled onto my Shadow DOM diaries from 2014 and realized how few of my learnings I captured there. Designing the beast as complex as adding a whole new type of composition to the Web…
The structure of a tilt
While I roughly understand how boosts and bumpers work, and I’ve seen/made plenty of those, tilts felt a bit more tricky. Coincidentally, a colleague recently asked me why anyone would open-source a library that is a part of another, larger…
Objects in vision are farther than they appear
Trying to describe my intuition about a project to a colleague, I found myself using this tongue-in-cheek inversion of a well-known catchphrase to describe a sequence that sometimes plays out on software engineering projects.
A user-situated trustworthiness model
Picking up where I left off in the previous essay, I want to reflect on the causal arrows that turned up in the exploration. It seems that maybe we have a seedling of a simple framework for evaluating user-situated trustworthiness.…
Tracing the boundary
Early last year, I invested a bunch of time into exploring the idea of trustworthiness as it pertains to engineering products and people who use them. I found this to be an incredibly complex and nuanced topic, and I have…
Behavior over time graphing tool
As I was writing last week’s bit on behavior over time graphs, I realized that I kind of want to have a simple tool that enables me to quickly draw and share a behavior over time graph. It seemed like…
Behavior over time graphs and ways to influence
I was geeking out over behavior-over-time graphs (BOTG) this week and found this neat connection to bumpers, boosts, and tilts. My colleague Donald Martin first introduced me to BOTG and they fit right in, given my fondness for silly graphs.
Normative, Informative and Generative Voices
I’ve been thinking about how to convey the style of writing that I’ve learned while writing here, and this lens materialized. And yes, once again, the distinctions come in threes. As Nicklas Berild Lundblad suggested, I might be suffering from…
The value triangle
My colleagues and I were chatting about the idea of a “good change,” and a lens popped into my head, along with the name: the value triangle. I swear it was an accident.
Lenses, framings, and models
At a meeting this week, I realized that I use the terms “lens,” “framing,” and “model” in ways that hold deep meaning to me, but I am not certain that this meaning is clear to others. So here’s my attempt…
Bumpers, Boosts, and Tilts
A discussion late last year about different ways to influence organizations led to this framing. The pinball machine metaphor was purely accidental – I don’t actually know that much about them, aside from that one time when we went to…
Silly math
In Jank in Teams, I employed a method of sharing mental models that I call “silly math.” Especially in surroundings that include peeps who love (or at least don’t hate) math, these can serve as a simple and effective way…
How to make a breakthrough
The title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, because I am not actually providing a recipe. It is more of an inkling, a dinner-napkin doodle. But there’s something interesting here, still half-submerged, so I am writing it down. Perhaps future me –…