Month: September 2022

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.

A crutch is a kind of organizational myth that had served this organization well in the past, and as a result of its own success, became so overused and over-relied upon that it’s actually doing more harm than good.

Crutches come in various forms and shapes. They could be processes, like the “Success Score Cards” and “strategic commitments” in the “Royalfield” story from Rumelt’s book. They could be strong cultural beliefs that, as they age, become effigy husks of their former selves, yet still capture enough imagination of the team to stick around. They could also be individuals. If a team can not make any significant decisions or forward progress without their leader in the room, this leader might be their crutch.

Crutches are rarely seen as crutches. They are typically viewed as foundational, immovable parts of the organization. How could we possibly do something other than Success Score Cards? That’s preposterous! Even when challenged with the mounting evidence of the pathological processes burning through the organization’s body, crutches are often viewed as the cure – sometimes leaving to weird instances of iatrogenesis, where the use of the crutch becomes the source of the problem (“Let’s do Success Score Cards harder!”)

If we are suspecting that our organization had developed a pathology, we could start looking at the bits of norms, culture, org charts, and processes that we hold in the highest regard and/or haven’t examined in a while. To know that we’ve found a crutch candidate, listen to how people react to our gentle poking at it. If the response is along the lines of: “What do you mean?!” or “Sure, it has flaws, but what else is there? I don’t know of anything better!” – we might have found a crutch. If closely examining a potential crutch suddenly feels like a career-limiting move, we are likely getting very close to the source. When spelunking for crutches, we are better off wearing a helmet and protective gear.

It is not hard to infer from this description that pathologies have a strong staying power precisely because spotting and pointing at a crutch is so deeply uncomfortable for the organization. Almost by definition, crutches are part of an organization’s embodied strategy. While spotting one is a significant breakthrough in itself, it is rarely sufficient to cure the pathology. Just pointing at it and loudly yelling “Look! I found it! Here it is!” is more likely to get us shunned than celebrated. Even if we are the leaders of this organization, our decisive attempts at surgery are likely to backfire.

Instead, my guess is that our approach might be the same as in any change of embodied strategy: nudging. Pathologies inflict suffering, and with suffering comes the innate desire for change. And that might just be the potential energy that our nudges need to succeed.

I was reading the latest book by Richard Rumelt, The Crux, and something clicked that I just had to write down. 

One of the reasons I enjoy Rumelt’s books, aside from that fiery, witty style, is that they are always packed with a wide variety of examples. This book is no exception, and, after a little while, a pattern emerged in my mind in all of the examples of failed applications of strategic thinking – and action. It’s a special case of “solving the wrong problem”, which I am giving a somewhat clinical term of a “pathology”. Here’s what I mean by it.

We all make mistakes. Making mistakes is an essential part of being human, and part of every organization. If we don’t make mistakes, we don’t learn, as I illustrated in the learning loop bits of the problem understanding framework. However, making mistakes in itself is a neutral activity: it can be either used to learn and create a better mental model of our environment, and it can also be used to lead astray, reinforcing a mental model that doesn’t generate accurate predictions. 

It is the latter case that piqued my interest, because in my experience, this is the one that most organizations – and people – struggle with. A pathology is a kind of unproductive mistake-making process that emerges under the following conditions:

• There’s an obstacle that we believe we will encounter in the future. 
• The expectation of this encounter makes our current situation discomforting.
• There are two discernible classes of actions available to us: a) one that alleviates the discomfort of the current situation, and b) one that reduces the size or the likelihood of encountering the obstacle
• The obstacle-reducing actions do not alleviate the discomfort.
• The discomfort-alleviating actions grow the size of the obstacle or create an entirely new one.
• Finally, – and this is key – under pressure to act, created by our discomfort, we consistently choose actions that alleviate that discomfort.

Whoa, that’s a lot of bullets. Let’s unpack them. 

I called this process a pathology because it often feels like a sort of thinking disease: it’s a thing that takes hold of us. Even when we are fully aware of what is happening, we still struggle to make it stop. Usually, an external intervention is necessary to make a change.

As I mentioned before, pathologies are part of the larger corpus of “solving the wrong problem” situations. It is not fun when we end up in a place where our diagnosis points us at something that we later realize is just an effect, not the cause of the problem. 

Borrowing a story from my past as a software engineer, I might assume that the rise in the latency metric in my code is due to some new regression. I would then spend a bunch of time – like a week! – trying to unsuccessfully hunt down this regression, only to notice that the metric suddenly moves back within acceptable threshold without any action on my part. It’s a heisenbug! After much more searching, I realize that my colleagues on the infrastructure team have been moving their code around and accidentally shifted how the metric is computed. Oops. Well, at least they put it back! Sure, I did get to “about to pull my hair out” state in the fruitless debugging session. But ultimately, once the culprit was found, I learned about yet another where problems can arise, and moved on. “Solving the wrong problem” of this kind tends to be frustrating, but highly educational.

Where pathologies differ is that they add an extra twist: solving the “wrong” problem both exacerbates the actual problem over time and provides a false sense of doing the opposite. These two factors often interlock. 

The exacerbation bit can come in many different forms, but here are the most common LEGO bricks they’re made of:

• Backsliding, when the action taken as part of solving literally takes you in the opposite direction.
• Entrenching, when the action reinforces some existing process or practice that needs to change to solve the actual problem.
• Delaying, when the action is that of putting off dealing with the actual problem.

The false sense of moving forward often builds on these. For example, an entrenched habit can be rather comfortable. Sometimes the mere fact of doing something is, too – as the Politician’s syllogism goes: “we must do something – this is something – therefore, we must do this”. The key attribute to look for here is pain relief: something that reduces the discomfort of being presented with the problem.

The “Royalfield” case study, one of many in Rumelt’s book, particularly stood out for me as an example of a pathology. The author describes a multi-day strategic planning exercise that he attended. At this exercise, he observes folks following a well-entrenched process that involves “Success Score Cards” and “strategic commitments”. 

As the author interviews the executives, he starts realizing that none of the actual strategic challenges are being discussed. Instead, the rote motions of the process are driving the event. When he tries to raise the issue with the CEO, he’s chastised for distracting the participants from their Success Score Cards. The author notes that since that event, the company’s fortunes continued to dwindle in an unfortunate, but predictable way.

Here, we have all the elements of a pathology. There’s definitely an obstacle that the executives perceive and the discomfort they experience – aka “the problem”. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be holding this exercise in the first place. There are two kinds of actions they can take: start examining actual strategic challenges of the company, or follow the existing planning process. The process is already here and everyone already knows it, so the executives choose to follow it. So far, this looks like a “solving the wrong problem” scenario.

The pathology locks in when we add two final ingredients: first, the “Success Score Cards” and “strategic commitments” act as a powerful analgesic, giving executives the permission to stop worrying about the obstacle for a little while. “We did this planning thing, didn’t we?”

Second, we can clearly see how entrenching and delaying are in full force. The CEO’s nearly allergic reaction to even an idea of considering something different indicates that change will be exceptionally difficult for this company – and each such planning session delays the moment when the team must come to terms with the reality of the situation.

I imagined how even now, the executive team is still trying harder to make better, more effective Success Score Cards, and going to great lengths to ensure that the strategic commitments slide deck is breathtakingly dramatic – stuck in the pathological case of solving the wrong problem.

Now that I have this pattern outlined, when (or if) you read the book, I am guessing that it will be nearly impossible not to spot it, over and over again. And it is also my sincere hope that when you look around your team and organization, you will have a fresh way to notice this pattern around you. I even have this simple template for you:

• What is the obstacle that is in front of your organization that perhaps evokes some discomfort?
• What are some of the actions that your organization commonly takes to relieve this discomfort?
• Are they the same actions that will also help overcome the discomfort?
• If not, which ones seem to increase the size or the likelihood of encountering the obstacle (backslide, entrench, delay) or maybe creating a new one?

If there are items in the last list, it’s worth giving them a careful look. They might be one of those bad habits that subvert your team’s process of learning from its mistakes.

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.

Imagine a scale that reflects our relationship to a perspective: a self-coherent worldview. This worldview is possible because of the network of mental models we possess, helping us orient ourselves, see choices and possibilities, and act on them. 

This scale is arranged as a ladder of sorts, with the mental model complexity is at its highest at the top, becoming progressively simplified with every rung down. As the model gets simpler, our capacity to relate to a perspective diminishes. As we proceed through our day, we climb up and down this ladder multiple times a day, sometimes moment to moment. Even though all rungs of the ladder may be accessible to us, we aren’t sitting still. We run up and down, sometimes intentionally, but most often not.

Just like real-life ladders, ours is subject to gravity. Climbing to the upper rungs seems to require effort. Conversely, all it takes is a little stress, fatigue, or a particular triggering experience, and down the rungs we go. Picture the process of mental model flattening as this sliding down the ladder.

Understanding which rung we are at any given moment is, in itself, a form of acquiring a perspective. It serves as an extra boost upward: pausing to understand where we are might serve a useful trick to start climbing.

So, the ladder. I’ll start at the bottom and we’ll clamber up together. I’ll describe each rung as my own experiences – I hope they resonate and help you reconstruct the picture that I am seeing in your own mind.

🌪 Detached from a perspective

The ladder’s lowest rung is what I call “just stayin’ alive”. Here, I am thoroughly disoriented and lost, mostly just reacting as best as I can. My impulses are in charge. Whether positive or negative, my experiences at this rung are intense.  If you’ve ever felt that panicky feeling of just trying to find bearings – or perhaps get that insatiable craving, then you know what I am talking about. At this rung, when the notion of a perspective is suggested to me, I will typically react with bewilderment, struggling to remember what it might mean. It may feel like a lifeline when a perspective – any perspective! – is offered. The particular strength of this rung is in the rush of adrenaline it provides, the extra kick for powering through a particularly tough situation. At the same time, these hormone baths are taxing for our bodies and aren’t great for our health in the long term. And well, there’s this whole “lost” thing.

When detached from a perspective, it’s not that I don’t have any of my mental models. It’s that they all appear to have this squeaky, slippery rubber feel to them: grasping at them just makes them pop out of my hands and float farther away. The only ones that feel accessible are primitive and atavistically simple: “they bad, I good”, etc. This is the extreme of mental model flattening.

🩹 Sticking to a perspective

Just above is “sticking to a perspective” rung. I am firmly attached to a particular way of looking at what’s around me. I am no longer as disoriented, but I ain’t seeing much outside of the very specific window of the perspective. I can feel pretty comfortable in this state, aside from the occasional nagging feeling that something is missing. When someone suggests that they have different perspectives, I may look at them like they are messing with me – or trying to deceive me. While stuck to a perspective, irritation and anger are common reactions to the evidence that doesn’t fit into that perspective: I am part of the perspective and a threat to it is a threat to me. The gift of this rung is followership: I will happily roll up my sleeves and chip in to help with a problem when asked – as long as it fits into my perspective window.

While sticking to a perspective, the mental models tend to appear as crisp and simple causal chains that are unburdened by any fuzzy notions. If this, then that. Even when well-familiar with loops in a network of causal relationships, any notion of them will be neatly elided from my thinking. Mental models of others are either “exactly like me” or some overly primitive caricatures. 

At least for me, this rung serves as sort of a defensive crouch. When I am distracted or tired, this is where you are most likely to find me. I’ve been looking for a sample of my writing at this rung of the latter and the Agony of a Thousand Puppies comes pretty close:

Hiding Javascript behind another language’s layer of abstraction is like killing puppies.

Yep, it’s the grumpy-pants Dimitri.

🔨 Holding a perspective

Another rung up is “holding a perspective”. My attachment to the perspective becomes more or less intentional. I hold the perspective, as opposed to it holding me. It is the only perspective I know, but I know it well. This perspective is particularly helpful when I am asked for loyalty or need to commit to a certain course of action.

When I hold a perspective, I can wield it like a sword and find clever ways to destroy perspectives of others. Even when I am clearly shown blind spots of the perspective I hold, I remain unfazed, retreating into the realm of magical thinking and conspiracies if necessary. I may not even be upset with people who have different perspectives. I just would have this calm sense of boundless confidence that they’re wrong.

This rung is populated by mental models that we’re experts in. The sheer depth of experience does the heavy lifting. These models may be fairly intricate, but tend to have this mechanical quality. When holding a perspective, we view all things around us in terms of precisely, pain-stakingly crafted mental models. Unlike at the previous rung, our mental models of others expand quite a bit in their sophistication. They have gears and springs that move them — and we feel like we know exactly how they tick.

It pains me to admit how familiar this rung is to me. Some of my biggest blunders were rooted in this mechanized world – yet it remains to be somewhat of a default notch for me. If you want to hear how I sound at this rung, here’s a post from 2007, written in “holding a perspective” voice, where I propose an alternative to Apple’s iPhone SDK.

🌳 Having a perspective

The next rung up is “having a perspective.” It is characterized by this sense that I do indeed have a particular perspective, and I know why I have this perspective. I can look around and see ample evidence that the way I am seeing is self-consistent and coherent. I can discern my own work of constructing this perspective. When someone talks to me about it, I can describe my perspective (and the reasoning behind it) in detail. I can take the perspectives of others, understand them, compare them, show flaws and benefits in them, and even adjust mine to make it more robust. 

When at this rung, I am not trying to answer the question of “why is this perspective true/false?” but rather “why is it so?” The growing depth of understanding of my perspective helps me maintain the clarity of direction, which frames the main strength of this rung: the capacity to lead others. 

It is my experience that leadership and commitment are at the different rungs of the ladder. Especially in fluid environments, these are two different activities. One is patiently staying a decided course of action, and the other is looking to navigate a changing terrain. The latter requires flexibility and rapid changing of the mind, which can appear like lack of conviction at the “holding a perspective” rung.

The sense of organic flexibility, like weeds, permeates our models at this rung. The models open up, no longer precise and mechanistic, allowing for ambiguity and tolerating clusters of unknowable. When we have a perspective, we recognize that it’s just a snapshot of some much more complex thing that we aren’t yet seeing, and are able to be okay with our model’s inherent incompleteness. The source of groundness at this rung emerges not from the confidence of “knowing the world”, but rather from the sense of awe of the complexity of the world and the deep desire to glimpse the whole picture. 

A post from 2014 about Web platform deprecation might be a sample of how I sound at this rung. There’s a patient and thorough analysis of the situation, admission of its gravity and high ambiguity, and an optimistic call to action. It is the voice of most of my writing at work. 

🌀 Visiting perspectives

The “visiting perspectives” rung is at the top of our ladder. In addition to seeing perspectives of others, I can shift to inhabit them. I can step out of what I believe to be true and temporarily adopt someone else’s ontological realm. I do this without judgment and temptation to evaluate it against my perspective, accepting that this someone else also has a rich life experience and a lot to teach me. I am a traveler who’s visiting perspectives, and the less I hold on to mine, the more depth of other perspectives is revealed to me.

This ladder might actually be one of those spiral staircases. In a weird circular fashion, the last rung resembles the first one: in both, I appear to have no attachment to any given perspective, and may even seem lost. The big distinction is that in the first rung, I can see very little. In the last one, I have the full capacity to see perspectives of others around me. This process of perspective examination is deeply enriching, and offers the gift of being able to see blind spots that nobody else can. When I am able to stay at this rung at the ladder, it almost feels like I can see around corners. When I say “systems thinking”, I usually mean not a particular discipline or methodology, but rather the experience of gaining access to the complexity of mental models at this rung of the ladder.

For me, writing rarely happens at this rung, because the moment is so fleeting. I could try and plead the case that most of my recent posts are written in that voice, but I suspect it’s just skill. I have learned to emulate the gentle, curious voice of this rung, even though I am not actually inhabiting it.

However, I do have a few posts that I remember writing immediately after touching that top rung. They have this nearly delirious delight of briefly seeing something much larger than what I can typically afford. My Decoherence post from 2020 post is one of those. The first sentence reaches for a galactic horizon: “There is no past or future”.

Perspective ladder mini-case study

To give you a sense of how traveling up and down the ladder feels, I’ll describe my experience at a meeting I’ve been at just last week – here it goes, with commentary.

We were discussing a subject that I knew a lot about, and I was pretty sure about that. I was also pretty sure that we were all on the same page. I started getting a little bit distracted, checking my email, and thinking about something else. Only a bit of attention remained on the conversation. 

At this point, it is unclear if I am sticking to a perspective, holding it or having one. All three feel the same. However, the “partial attention” bit points at the sticking to perspective: letting it hold me.

Then, one of the participants spoke up, revealing a different perspective that was incongruent with mine. My first internal reaction: “Wait, what? What’s happening here?” 

Aha! Indeed, it looks like I was at “sticking to a perspective,” rung, and my colleague’s confident voice triggered a dip into the “just stayin’ alive” rung. The disorientation is a telltale sign in such cases.

Then I immediately had this sense of irritation come over me. I was feeling disheartened and disappointed.

It sounds like I quickly escaped out of the lowest rung and climbed to “sticking to a perspective.” There could have been two alternatives here: one of me sticking to my colleague’s perspective, immediately adopting it, and the other is of me remembering that I have a lot of expertise in this area, and sticking to that. It looks like I picked the latter.

One interesting marker for “sticking to a perspective” rung is Should-ness. If I feel strongly that I should be doing something or acting in a certain way, and/or others around me should be doing the same, or something I expect them to do – that’s a sign that I am at this rung of the ladder.

After fuming for a little bit, but not saying anything, I noticed that I was feeling irritated. I tried to reorient and did a breathing exercise to release the tension. Once I settled down, I started noticing that my colleague was just wrong: they clearly didn’t understand the problem as well as I did.

This indicates that I am currently climbing upward, likely at the “holding a perspective” rung. There’s usually a sense of relief that accompanies reaching this rung, when I realize that all is well and it is the others who are lost, not me.

I started asking questions trying to better sense where their misunderstanding originated. To my surprise, I realized that my colleague had good insights that I could build on to improve my knowledge.

I am now at the “having a perspective” run. There is a subtle shift when climbing up here: other people’s “wrongness” becomes a parts bin for ideas. Instead of being a protector of my perspective, I become a savvy gardener who eagerly improves it once novel insights are uncovered.

The meeting ended on a good note, and I felt pretty excited about learning new things, though I wasn’t quite sure what to do about the difference of perspectives between my colleague and I that we encountered.

It was only next morning that I realized how neatly our perspectives cover a larger problem space that I haven’t seen before, and how their view is not only valid, but also overlays a blind spot that I suspected was there, but couldn’t quite see (because that’s how our blind spots typically behave). The idea of how we could collaborate immediately became obvious and got me excited and fired up for the day.

This flash of insight is a result of briefly reaching the top rung of the ladder. I could swear it feels like it’s accompanied by the angelic choir sound: that’s how clarifying and revealing the insight that arrives. I wish I’d spend more time at this rung, but I only seem to reach it ephemerally and in certain conditions. Things like having enough rest and sleep, for example, are a large part of the equation.

The excitement that followed is a drop to “having a perspective” rung: learning and incorporating the new gems into my garden of mental models. It is followed by the commitment and determination (“I am fired up!”) that tells me I clicked into the “holding a perspective” rung.

What I learned so far

I hope this illustration has been helpful. I have been using a less kempt rendition of this framework for a while. Here are a couple of things I’ve learned along the way. 

• Fake it till you make it. When at the bottom rungs, it seems that the key is to remember that there’s a ladder at all. At these rungs, it’s just trying to cling to the framework itself as a perspective (there’s literally a stickie with the words “Remember the Ladder” on it), and being patient with myself. Have faith that the model flattening is a temporary effect, and the disorientation and the limited sight being experienced will pass.

• Different gifts at different rungs. Each rung is useful for unlocking its particular gifts, though these gifts tend to be mutually exclusive. There is no rung where I can both follow and lead. To do both, I have to be consciously switching between the two, and that is an effortful process. If I want to see around corners, but am also looking to commit to one particular perspective, I need to anticipate a lot of climbing up and down. Similarly, if I am “just stayin’ alive” at “detached from a perspective” rung, any attempts to lead or even follow will be highly unproductive.

• No free pass. Going down can happen quickly (gravity makes things fall), but going up, the rungs of the ladder don’t appear to be bypassable. Even if very quickly, it looks like I have to travel through the rungs to reach the ones I need. Be it reading a book or watching an interview, the travel from “well, that’s just preposterous!” to “ah, yes – I see how they’re wrong” to “huh, these bits are insightful” is something I am learning to anticipate. At this point, I’ve gotten to the point where I can sometimes feel the clicking of the rungs happening – which helps to orient.

• Bottom rungs are trappy. The “sticking to a perspective” rung is, well, sticky. I have to be fairly vigilant about not getting trapped in the not-learning cycle that lives just between it and the “holding a perspective” rung. Both rungs have a very satisfying feel of not having to change anything about myself. On too many occasions, I would recognize that I’d spent a chunk of my time just going up and down between these two rungs, trapped in the cycle.

The story above might sound familiar, because it is a loose, more flexible re-telling of the adult development theory. I’ve been unsatisfied with how, in conversations about ADT, the stage-like progression aspect of the theory takes center stage, displacing another useful aspect of it – the fluidity of how we show up in our daily lives. It is tempting to imagine that once a person reaches a certain stage, they just kind of stay at it.  Since my experience is a bit different, viewing it as a one-way stair step progression felt too static. However, when combined with the concept of model flattening, it seems to gain this dynamic flavor.

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.

The definition of e-LOC is as follows: e-LOC of a technology is the order of magnitude of lines of code that one needs to write to get to a working product prototype using this technology. Applying the usual metric prefixes, we get ourselves a nice scale: 0-LOC, deca-LOC, hecto-LOC, kilo-LOC, mega-LOC, and so on. 

Various APIs reside on different parts of this scale. A finished, functioning product is 0-LOC. On the other side of the scale is a developer surface that requires gazillon of lines of code to produce something that we can reasonably offer to our friends and colleagues to try out. Want to build a web-based product prototype? It’s probably going to be hecta-LOC. A brand new Web rendering engine? You’re likely looking at a mega-LOC.

The order of magnitude serves as a decent measure of developer barrier to entry. For a deca-LOC, it’s just a handful of lines of code, so the barrier is very low. For Web rendering engines, only a skilled, determined, and well-funded team of developers can overcome it.

Because of this barrier to entry property, the e-LOC can serve as a leading indicator for the amount of innovation that will happen around a given technology. Put differently, e-LOC can be used to measure innovation potential of a technology. 

New OSes and rendering engines are one-shot, lonely affairs. They undoubtedly innovate, but the fruits of this innovation are singular and rare. On the other side of the scale, if it takes 60 lines to make a working Discord bot that generates pictures using Stable Diffusion, nearly anyone can do it. Expect a lot of people to be messing around with these APIs and trying to build something interesting with them.

Another useful property of e-LOC is that it also indicates how much opinion is contained within the API or technology. More opinionated APIs will tend to have lower e-LOC, while the less opinionated ones will trend higher in numbers. Of course, lower e-LOC doesn’t make the API good. That’s not what this metric measures. Some of the most troublesome, gnarly APIs are deca-LOCs.

The opposing directions of opinion and developer barrier to entry present an interesting tension in innovation potential. A 0-LOC technology is fully opinionated and requires zero lines to use. Because of that, it also has zero innovation potential. The innovation potential increases proportionally to the amount of opinion that could still be added, yet the barrier to development tapers it off as the e-LOC scale increases.

Advancing the state of my earlier developer funnel framing, we can draw this as a curve to illustrate the relationship of technology innovation potential and e-LOC. The curve starts at near-zero at the beginning of the scale, then rapidly expands to its maximum value at around deca- and hecto-LOC, then drops off in a power law fashion as the magnitude of lines of code keeps increasing. The near-zero at the start is significant: in my experience, even finished products end up growing APIs, whether they want it or not.

This metric gives us a nice way to orient our thinking around the purpose of the technology we might be building. How much innovation do we want it to spur? If we want to minimize it, we ship only finished products. If we want to maximize it, we must relentlessly drive our APIs to be in deca-LOC range.

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 might be fun to write about how I went about creating it.

My experience is that electronic music-making is a lot like software development. There’s tinkering involved. There’s always a new technique to be discovered, some new trick that I didn’t know about. There’s skillful practice that feels very much like flow — at least after one has done this for a while.

At least for me, it is also different in that I start with a very generic intention of “let’s make music”. I don’t have an idea of what this next track will sound like. Unlike with software, I don’t have any concerns about whether the final product will be useful or interesting to someone or whether there’s going to be a market for it.  There are no timelines or cost concerns to worry about. I make music for the sake of making music. And just like with any sort of craft, I settled into a fairly stable process.

My process seems to follow a double-diamond diverge-converge structure, bookended by the finishing step. The first diverge-converge diamond is about finding the sound, and the next one – about finding the track. They can sometimes stagger, but they rarely go out of sequence.

First phase: sound-making 

In the first phase of the music project, I seek the sound. I want to understand what the feel of the track will be. I love starting with some raw material to shape and muck about. For example, I may take a friend’s excellent karaoke performance as my starting point, or the sounds of a city, or perhaps a favorite event. This is the maximum serendipity phase. I float around between ideas, and it can take quite a while. Since there’s no time pressure, I can spend several months in this state. In some cases, I get close to the point where I feel like I have something, but I can’t make any more progress on it. Sometimes, nothing interesting happens for a while. Until serendipity finds its way.

For Fifty, this moment came with the discovery of the sound you first hear at about 2:02 and it’s this epic chord/clang that is kind of hard to describe. The long reverb and shimmer effects make it go seemingly forever, evolving and shape-shifting. This sound is the defining terrain for the track, permeating it and giving it this trance-like floating quality. 

The sound started rather prosaically. I was experimenting with layering slightly discordant tones, intentionally putting them out of tune. It wasn’t going anywhere. Here’s one early bit:

And here’s another iteration, with a bit more reverb. It was all kind of meh:  

I was about to give up when, on a whim, I decided to stick it into a cabinet. The Guitar Rig has this amazing collection of authentically sounding matched cabinets that emulate those massive Marshall rigs that we all remember from the rocking stage performances. They are the ones that give electric guitars that massive sound. And I thought: I need me some massive sound. And – BAM! – the track was born. 

The guitar amp couldn’t get enough of the extra harmonics created by the disagreeing oscillators. It was that magic moment of convergence: finding the sound that digs deep into my imagination that spurs the progress of the track. One moment it’s just a random four bars and the next, it starts to feel like a track. I now can hear the final thing before it’s even created. All I need to do is recreate it in real life.

What I heard was this epic, almost outlandishly bombastic track. I quickly threw together this classic slightly-detuned saw to go on top of the keystone sound.

When I played it to my wife, she said: “sounds like one of those sports broadcast intros.” I was like, “YESS!!” – that’s exactly the vibe I was going for. 

Second phase: putting together a stem

In the second phase, the sounds start to come together into something like a stem, and I start literally hearing the final track, even before it’s done. Usually, at this point, I only have eight bars of various instruments loosely strewn together, but it comes alive in my imagination. This is the convergent phase of the process and it is characterized by the original eight bars rapidly accruing additional instruments and sounds. Drums and percussion usually come around here, as well as various pads and plucks. At the end of this phase, I have this massively overloaded sonic nightmare of all instruments playing at the same time across the same eight bars. Here’s one for “Fifty”:

Third phase: making track fodder

The third phase is another divergent phase. I pull the instruments apart into stems and start working on them separately, creating more and more distinct patterns out of the original eight bar cacophony. 

Here, it is a matter of improvising over the repeating eight bars. I just keep playing and listening to what feels in tune with what I am looking for. Here’s a small part of the “just playing melodies” session that didn’t make into the final track:

Not uncommonly, the new stems want to become their own tracks and run away from me. I may start thinking: “hey, that’s a neat little side riff” and a month later this riff becomes the main theme of the track. 

For Fifty, what sounds like a main theme was actually a late addition. It started from a random riff and grew into the piano-like melody you hear in the track:

I call this phase “making fodder”, because it creates the sonic space that I can then mix into a sequence that becomes the track. At the end of this process, I usually have a large grid of patterns that can be played in various combinations:

Fourth phase: stitching together

The fourth phase of the process is finding the track within that grid. I can go about it in different ways. Often, I hit “Record” and just trigger these patterns to see if a sequence comes up. This is the moment when a “chorus” or a “verse” cadence emerges. One of the combinations jumps out as the main theme, and others line up to support it. This usually takes a while, but I’ve learned that rushing this process results in boring music. I try to let combinations surprise me and not hold too firmly to my original preconceptions of the track. 

Finishing step

The final, finishing step is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s about sprinkling additional movement: extra drum breaks or variations, tweaking the filter knob on a synth or effects, adding a rise here and there. Often, a new instrument can come in to echo and support others. The intro and outro crystallize and become real. And of course, mixing. Mixing is hard. Mixing is the most interesting part of the finishing process. Trying to balance the overall energy across frequencies, ducking the volume on some instruments to clear the way for others, gluing sounds in groups to create distinct lanes of sound. Panning. Trimming echoes that are too long. It’s ridiculously enjoyable.

This step may sound like mostly spit and polish, but I find that most of the exciting moments of the track originate here. 

Let’s take for example the intro in Fifty. It starts with a weird buzzing sound that might be familiar to you.  A while back, on a whim, I recorded the sound of an Apple watch desperately trying to alert me of the expiration of some timer. The device was sitting on a glass surface, and its tiny vibration motor was making a noise that seemed like a beat.

Later, when starting this track, I thought I’d incorporate it as percussion, but that didn’t go anywhere. The inspiration struck at the finishing step. I wanted to somehow capture the joy of messing with sounds. So I decided – what if I start this track with play-acting the process of building a sound? I say “play-acting”, because a lot of trial and error goes into the actual process, and that would be too tedious to listen to.

So I took the recorded sound, cleaned it up a bit, and stuck it into the ingenious instrument by Ableton called “Simpler”. At C0 (the low octave), the Simpler produced just the watch buzz repeating. With each next note, the buzz will repeat faster, and faster, and faster – until at C8 (that’s eight octaves upward), the buzzes are so close together that they form their own sound wave:

Then, I dialed up the portamento and played C octave-to-octave, which is more or less what you hear in the first 38 seconds of the track:

Along this upward slide, the sound hit a few harsh (2.6K-ish kHz) patches, so I put in a bit of EQ work to smooth the noise out. Automation lanes are amazing. Back in 1993, I turned the filter knobs by hand as we were recording! It was fun, but oh boy it is so much nicer to be able to just draw the values on a timeline:

The next 40 seconds or so of the track sound very similar to what I typically do when hunting for an interesting sound: I set some pattern of notes to on repeat and twist synth knobs until something surprising pops out. 

You get the “build” version of events: I began with all dials at zeron and gradually added them up. This is a very common layering/additive synth approach, and I love listening to how the layers of sound interact and enrich each other. Within this seemingly simple bass drone is a choir of sounds, and the build reveals the multitude of voices.

At the end of the finishing step, I have a finished track. Here’s Fifty at that moment:

In the past, I had this temptation to keep tweaking the track and improving upon it, but nowadays, I just publish it on SoundCloud and close the file. It is time for the music-making process to repeat itself.

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 in this story, I use “plumbing” to refer to the work of improving the quality of the code – as opposed to “feature work” that adds new functionality.

The Plumber Age is the period of time when making further progress depends primarily on the quality/velocity of refactoring and cleaning up the code base.

I like to think of it as a season in the lifecycle of a software engineering adventure. This season is characterized by the rapid rise in importance of refactoring and rewriting existing code. At some point, a software project encounters this interesting moment, where the number of new features and capabilities slows down to a trickle, because adding them takes longer and longer. Everyone on the team wants to keep going, and there’s a lot of frustration and tension, but the code seemingly begins to actively resist being changed. Every new bit of code breaks some existing behavior, blows up performance metrics, or other shenanigans.

Most useful software is born out of a bunch of hacks. Sometimes they are really solid hacks, and sometimes they are nearly literally scotch tape and popsicle sticks. And it makes sense. We want to go fast, get something in the users’ hands, and iterate like crazy, listening to what our users tell us. In the process, we accumulate hacks – also colloquially known as “accruing technical debt”. Sometimes, the hacks aren’t born as hacks. We might conceive of a rather elegant design at the start, but the contact with reality unveils our modernist naivete, and what seemed like a paragon of software engineering turns rapidly into an annoying vestige – now covered in hacks.

At some point, the hacks congeal into a solid mass that becomes nearly impossible to reason about. Veteran engineers will stare carefully at the code and move with artful precision, only for the code to laugh back at them. Often, crossing into the Plumber Age happens rather suddenly, almost like being locked out of the house. It feels like just yesterday we were able to land new bits and then – bam! – a Cthulhu is staring back at us through our code editors. The pile of hacks filigreed into a tangled network and now, this network transitioned into its next phase.

Enter the Plumber Age. When embraced, this season is marked by the emergence of the demand for, well, plumbers. People who enjoy (or at least tolerate) moving the code around become more and more common – and sometimes prominent – within the organization. The nature of the project changes. That crazy idea of tests and test infrastructure, previously mostly ignored, is considered a critical investment. Talk of build and development metrics crop ups everywhere. Words like “services” and “layering” start showing up in everyday work conversations. Plumbing becomes a full-time job, and there may even pop up a team whose job it is to maintain and modernize some stable “core” of the software. They allow other teams to continue to move forth with feature and capability development.

Most interesting to the leaders of an organization that needs to embrace the Plumber Age is the change in how the teams are structured. The loose and free-spirited flat setup that works so well to get our enterprise going becomes a hindrance. In the Plumber Age, code ownership and clear delineation of roles and responsibilities becomes a necessity. Hierarchies and RACI matrices start popping up all over the place. This may give us a queasy feeling – are we becoming a rigid bureaucracy?! Not necessarily. If we are to continue on this path and keep increasing the user value of our software, a more structured organization is needed. How carefully and thoughtfully we structure it is up to us. My intuition is that it is the fear of becoming bureaucratic that actually turns engineering organizations into bureaucracies. Adding more structure intentionally is not bad. However, pretending to not be bureaucratic will guarantee the feared outcome.

Some organizations try to reject the Plumber Age, and attempt to skirt around it in various ways. Few build second systems, and are rarely heard from again. It’s hard to see all the miracles that led our horrifying pile of hacks to become a successful first system. Others push brashly forward, chewing through talent and becoming more and more challenging to move – until they keel over and die. There are probably other paths and combinations, each leading to similar outcomes.

My guess is that the Plumber Age is inevitable. It is something that every team will encounter in due course. And just like the seasons, it is best experienced when prepared. This does not mean that each new team must start with a thoroughly designed infrastructure or hire a cadre of plumbers. That’s a whole other trap that I will save for later discussion. However, as the team starts to feel the lift of successful engagement with its users, it needs to anticipate the transition. Start having regular conversations about architecture and layering. Draw sketches of where the core of the system begins and feature work ends. Consider how features and capabilities can be added without affecting the core. Think about how the team might be structured. Are there tech leads emerging who could lead the sub-teams? Oh yeah – almost forgot: teach your code to be testable. All of these will come handy, kind of like those coats and hats you’re storing for winter.