Archives for October 2014

There are two types of HDD that I intend to discuss, and today I will start with Rich Hickey’s Hammock Driven Development. I was reminded of his talk, and the lack of discussion that we have around being creative in our pursuit of software solutions when watching another lecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8XHtvHZn4A

The great John Cleese gave a comical rendition on How To Be Creative many moons ago. It brought together his observations on watching creative people (e.g. Pythons) with research on the field of creativity.

UPDATE #1: ARGH! BOO! The video has been taken down for copyright infringement purposes which is a royal shame. I was excited to see another talk from John with a similar title, yet although it is also interesting it is not the same [and it is a few decades later!]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAwDWe7OIF8

UPDATE #2: For now at least, the video is available on Vimeo

Open vs. Closed

Are you open minded? What does that mean? John talks about the yin and yang of open vs. closed mindedness with a different slant (e.g. not related to political thinking). He talks about how we tend to live most of our lives in a closed state, void of creative thinking. We have systems that keep us in that state, and it reminded me of our nervous system. If you are under stress, you are forced into closed.

I have done some study on how to use nutrition and breathing exercises to “shift the autonomic nervous system away from its sympathetic dominance”. Breathing and meditation can do wonders here, and getting out of metabolic syndrome meant that my body wasn’t attacking itself all day long too. There must be a link between eating well, getting good sleep, and exercise to give yourself the best chance for creative thinking.

This also lead me to wonder about meditation first thing in the morning and at night before bed. In the morning it gives you time to get your mind into the open state as you start your day, and right before you go to bed it does the same, allowing your subconscious to tackle problems while you sleep.

We have all had those “a ha!” moments when we wake up with the answer. I remember waking up with a full math proof at my finger-tips, which felt quite magical.

Closed-mindedness isn’t all bad though. We love black and white; good vs. evil. Surely open == good and closed == bad, right? No. Open is your path to have the chance to be creative, but closed has power too. Once you have decided on a course of action, getting into a closed focused state will enable you to execute and not second guess. I am now trying to think about this and prescribe to myself “ok, I need to solve this problem, lets try this open mindedly” and then “ok, I am going to do option b, so now close up shot and execute”.

Open Play

I am fortunate enough to send my kids to a Reggio Emelia style pre-school. One that favors the children learning via play, and connecting to the environment. When I drop off the kids I enjoy it so much I don’t want to leave! I often compare that thought to walking into the grey buildings of my youth. Yikes. I definitely think that more teachers and education administrators should shadow the kids!

John explains how play is another great gateway to an open mindset, and I wonder if it is partially because it helps make new connections in a variety of ways. You try different approaches, without a guarded repetitive environment and BOOM. Connection complete. You don’t have the backdrop of “am I on task!” or “am I getting done what I need too!”

If you think about the advantages of play and smile, take a look at your day and contemplate how much play you had.

Fun

Humor is obviously a serious business for Mr. Cleese, but he also makes the case for it also being a creative open-er. We all know how a good laugh can calm you down, and some even believe that fake laughing (in groups) can cause positive effects, tying again to the nervous system, breathing, etc.

Fun comes in all shapes and sizes at the work place, and you often here “we need more fun”, yet it isn’t something you can schedule. With distributed teams, it has been fascinating to see how important animated gifs are to the culture. I am sure some people would look at some of our group chat channels and think “these people are immature pests! they need to get back to work!” It is good to know that not only does this feel good, to get the camaraderie etc, but now when I see an animated cat I will think “this is making us more creative!” 😉

Stifling Corporate Life

The finale to John’s lecture mocks the world of the corporate warrior. He puts on the persona of “a corporate boss that you don’t want” and comes up with the following points on how to stop your subordinates becoming creative:

• 1) allow subordinates no humor (threatens your self importance), humor is subversive
• 2) cut everyone down to size to keep you irreplaceable. use authority to zero in on all the things you can find wrong, and never balance the negatives with positives. Praise makes people uppity
• 3) demand that people are actively doing things. if you catch someone pondering call them lazy. demand urgancy and fighting talk and war analogies.

Text can’t do this all justice, so I recommend jumping to minute 33 on the video to hear it in his best pompous English accent.

Getting back to the Hammock

As the talk sinks in, I am thinking about the open/closed principle at hand here, and how we can all make sure that we aren’t always running at a breakneck speed to fight the company fight, but instead have the right balance.

Before rushing to type out some code to implement that issue, have I taken some time to get in the right frame of mind, and then have I come up with the right solution for the job? Sometimes I find that it helps to change medium. If it isn’t flowing I will ditch the keyboard and grab some pen and paper and draw out a design or take a more freehand view of things. Maybe I will go for a walk to get the blood moving and the air coming in and out of my lungs.

I find it fascinating that one cure for the yips in golf is to sing in your head while you play your shot. All these tricks to let your subconscious take over.

ASIDE: If you have any interest in the conscious and subconscious mind, give Thinking Fast and Slow a read!

And then, once I have gotten there, have I fully turned to closed so I can execute without distraction?

The yin and the yang. I am really enjoying the journey these days, even though I have a long ways to go. There are others around me who are further along than I.

One that strongly comes to mind is Stuart Argue, one of the best engineers who I have the pleasure to work with. As I reflected on these items he came straight to mind as he has both sides of the coin. He can be immensely focused and will attack with a solution with force (closed) but he will also have a beer or two, lay in a hammock, and spend quality time to make sure that when he attacks, it is in a good direction. He is able to use that time to get to first principles on a problem, and his solutions transcend “coding” solutions. He is an example of the smart creative that Google talks about.

Well, my focused closed time of writting and posting this is over, so it is time to get creative again…

How often have you heard someone recant the moment when their child first saw an iPad. I remember my own story, with my 4 year old son. I placed a new iPad on the coffee table in the living room at night, and when morning came and he bounded out, he went straight for it. He had no idea what it was or that it existed, but he unlocked it and started to use it. That is the high water mark of great user experience. The iPhone had trained him well enough that he could then use something different, yet similar. I pictured giving him another tablet and laughed at how he could never even get close to using it.

That high mark seems to be cracking with Apple though as you can see from tales such as:

“Fast forward to today, 2014. Zoom in to me. I’m typing this on a Macbook Pro. In my pocket is the iPhone 6. Three metres away sits a Mac Mini. On the surface, nothing has changed. The problem is, it feels like everything has changed. In short while Apple’s hardware continues to impress me, their software has gone downhill at a rapid pace. iPhoto is an unusable mess with the volume of photos I now have. Aperture has been discontinued and is badly lagging behind in terms of both performance and features. iTunes takes forever to launch, and is bloated mess of way too many features and functions. iCloud is still a mess that I wouldn’t dream of storing my important data in. iOS 7 crashed so often that I became intimately familiar with the Apple logo that appeared every time it did. iOS 8 fixed the crashing, but introduced thousands of little paper cut like bugs. I used to install updates from Apple the second they came out, now I wait a few days to see if they are actually any good.”

The effort that went into iOS 8 is astounding, and the quality is high, but you can see how it can be argued that it has dipped.

You Kids Can’t Use Family Sharing

Back to children as a measure. One of the great features in iOS 8 is Family Sharing. Managing and sharing the media (apps, photos, (my) videos, movies, tv shows) has been a thorn in my side. There was never a clean way to do this across the family, so I was jazzed to hear about the feature in theory.

Then I went to set it up, giving each of the kids their accounts (forced to use icloud.com vs. their actual email domains now, huh). I then go to the “Videos” app on my sons iPad (ASIDE: interesting that it is called “Videos” even though it doesn’t have your videos?) and see nothing. Wait a minute….. let’s take a step back and think about what I would love to see / be able to do:

• As the parent, I would love to be able to go through the family collection and grant access to the various pieces (or maybe flip it and give access to all, but black list certain items…. which would work better for me since most of the content is for the kids ☺
• As the parent, I don’t want to worry about what is in “my” account vs. my wife’s etc. The family has content, and the family owners can grant and revoke access. If one of my sons wants to buy “Minecraft Widgety Cool App”, my wife and I get the “cool?” and if we agree it starts downloading for him. Ideally I would then be able to say “oh and cool for the other kids too”.

Instead, I look to my 5 year old and his experience for watching a show on his iPad goes from:

BEFORE: Go to “Videos”, find show I want, tap to play

AFTER: Get to iTunes (via Videos / Store or directly), tap on the top left ‘button’ which is now just words in iOS 8 “My Purchases”, and choose “Dion” from the drop down. Find the content, try to download it, and get back to Videos to watch it.

Errrrrrrr, that don’t just work, instead it just feels like a LOT of work.

The concept of family sharing is SO needed, but the implementation drives me up the wall.

I blame that one Apple Maps guy…

I was talking with a friend who mentioned that people often think of him as arrogant. I was surprised to hear this, because he is someone who has always seemed humble (although not without confidence) and keen to better himself and get feedback as part of the process.

Then it dawned on me. Maybe the “arrogance” was a perception of how he drives clarity in a conversation!

Immediately I saw the same pattern with some other friends and acquaintances. They share some common traits and perceptions:

They are polarizing

People tended to either love or dislike the manner of how they worked and interacted. It was rarely grey, which is actually probably not all bad in that Elie Wiesel wisely said “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

Black and white

They have a super power to take a complex problem and hunt for a clear black and white view. Being able to find the poles and quickly choose paths keeps the ball moving quickly (with the side effect of making some wrong calls).

Taking over a meeting

Have you ever had meetings that don’t go well? (I have written about this from time to time). Half the time you wonder why you are having the meeting (am I right!).

One of the Laws Of Meetings is that their length expands to fill the meeting time allocated (if not beyond, just as a gas will expand to fill its container)

Have you ever had someone jump in to a meeting and take charge?

“Guys, we are here to answer the question ‘X’. If we posit that Y and Z are true, can’t we make the decision to go ahead right away?”

When that happens (as long as they are making sense) it makes you think “THANK YOU”. Well, that isn’t always shared…. some seem to take that as a sign of arrogance.

Feedback

Interestingly, the people I see with these tendencies also crave feedback and are looking to continually push themselves forward. They read veraciously, love the checklist manifesto, are full of a growth mindset. When I normally think of arrogant people, I don’t think of them as pushing themselves in this way, although I guess this notion is very orthogonal.

In fact, what is arrogance again:

“An insulting way of thinking or behaving that comes from believing that you are better, smarter, or more important than other people”

When you think “man, Bob is arrogant” is you looking at actions and mapping them to “because of these actions, I think this person thinks that they are ….”.

Clarity

It all comes down to clarity. In Corporate America we are taught to be “nice”. Not to delve info conflict. Be TEAM PLAYERS. However, being superficially nice doesn’t make you a team player, it makes you somewhat of a liar.

There are different ways to behave and communicate. There is no reason to be overly harsh and behave badly.

I crave clarity though. When I read about Jony Ive and his design team, and how many of them stayed together for so many years which allowed them to get past ego, I am jealous.

I get to work with amazing people, some of which across multiple companies at this point, and I love getting to the point where title doesn’t matter, ideas and data matter. We respect each other and know that the respect is mutual, and this trust means that we can focus on breaking through issues.

Now, when I think that someone is arrogant, I am going to take a look into why I think that, look inside myself to see if there are reasons why I am being self conscious, and then go from there ☺

One of my problems though is that I often live in the grey, which is why I work well with those that can balance and push me.

Aside

As I was searching around on the topic I found that Richard Dawkins had a quote:

‘Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.’

So, I feel like I am good company.