Dandelions and Elephants
No ship ums
I’ve been thinking about the path that software dandelions take toward becoming elephants, and this really interesting framing developed in a conversation with my friends.
Dandelions and Elephants, Illustrated
Over the holiday break, I made a thing for you to enjoy. It’s an illustrated deck, similar to the one I’d done for Adult Development Theory. It’s about Dandelions and Elephants:
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.…
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.
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.