Is Decision-Making Skill Trainable?

November 11, 2013 By

I shared an article a while back on decision fatigue. The article came up again in a recent discussion, and another idea was raised, this time from the fitness/training world: Acute Training Load vs. Chronic Training Load. 

“ATL – Acute Training Load represents your current degree of freshness, being an exponentially weighted average of your training over a period of 5-10 days…

CTL – Chronic Training Load represents your current degree of fitness as an exponentially weighted average of you training over a 42 day period. Building your CTL is a bit like putting money in your savings account. If you don’t put much in you won’t be able to draw much out at a later date.”

This seems like a very fertile idea to me.  The language here is very control-theoretic, and the idea seems to be basically about separating time scales of training in a useful way. It also seems to relate to what I think of as the raise the floor/raise the ceiling ways of increasing performance, which I talked about in the context of mindful learning curves.

The interesting question, as a friend of mine put it, is whether decision-making skill (and therefore decision-fatigue limits) responds to training the way our bodies do. I don’t mean this in the sense of gaining experience. That of course happens. I mean, being able to go for longer before performance degrades.

I think the jury is still out on that one.

UX and the Civilizing Process

November 7, 2013 By

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt.

To scandalize a member of the educated West, open any book on European table manners from the middle of the second millennium:

“Some people gnaw a bone and then put it back in the dish. This is a serious offense.” — Tannhäuser, 13th century.

“Don’t blow your nose with the same hand that you use to hold the meat.” — S’ensuivent les contenances de la table, 15th century.

“If you can’t swallow a piece of food, turn around discreetly and throw it somewhere.” — Erasmus of Rotterdam, De civilitate morum puerilium, 1530.

To the modern ear (and stomach), the behaviors discussed here are crude. We’re disgusted not only by what these authors advocate, but also by what they feel compelled to advocate against. The advice not to blow one’s nose with the meat-holding hand, for example, implies a culture where hands do serve both of these purposes. Just not the same hand. Ideally.

These were instructions aimed at the rich nobility. Among serfs out in the villages, standards were even less refined.

To get from medieval barbarism to today’s standard was an exercise in civilization — the slow settling of our species into domesticated patterns of behavior. It’s a progression meticulously documented by Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process. Owing in large part to the centripetal forces of absolutism (culminating at the court of Louis XIV), manners, and the sensibilities to go with them, were first cultivated, then standardized and distributed throughout Europe.

But the civilizing process isn’t just for people.

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On Staying Grounded

October 31, 2013 By

Walks are my main grounding ritual. I used to prefer easy nature hikes, but these days, I prefer semi-urban walks through landscapes that are a blend of the natural and artificial. The Seattle shoreline is a perfect example. Five minutes from my home, there is a waterfront park from where I can watch trains, ships, airplanes, cars and of course, lots of containers. On a recent walk, I took this picture of four ships waiting to dock. A rare sight, since the port of Seattle does not seem to experience many traffic jams.

ships

The interesting thing about walking the same route over and over is that you notice little changes and seasonal patterns. For example, variations in shipping activity. The variations are what create a sense of direct, living connection to the human drama playing out on Planet Earth.

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On Lifestyle Rigidity

October 24, 2013 By

I’ve been wondering about why lifestyle design, outside of a few special cases like young, single Western men moving to Thailand, is proving to be so hard for everybody trying to adapt to the Internet era. I think the key is what I call lifestyle rigidity, which can be understood in terms of the (informal and speculative) heavy-tail distribution below. 

lifestyleDarkEnergy1

The central feature of lifestyle rigidity (my informal sociological generalization of the idea of wage rigidity) is what we might call dark energy: the lifestyle energy absorbed by parts of your lifestyle that are illegible to you. My claim is that this energy has increased radically in the last century, making  the leap from Industrial Age to Internet Age much harder than the leap from Agrarian Age to Industrial Age. As a species, we’re carrying a lot more baggage this time around.

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Frictional and Structural Unknowns

October 18, 2013 By

In labor economics, frictional unemployment is when people are in between jobs, looking, and will most likely find one.  They are unemployed for a time because search and matching are not efficient in the labor market. Structural unemployment by contrast, occurs when there is an oversupply of people looking for a certain kind of work, because of some disruptive factor such as technology change.

I do meeting observation work on occasion for clients, and it recently struck me that something similar happens when a group of people are debating a topic, attempting to reach some sort of rough consensus and decision.

Frictional unknowns are things that should be said, and could have been said by one or more participants, but remain unsaid because meetings are loosely coordinated collective intelligence mechanisms rather than systematically coordinated ones like courtroom proceedings.

Structural unknowns are things that should have been said, but could not have been by any participant because the necessary viewpoint is systematically absent in the conversation. This need not be restricted to obvious things like the female viewpoint being missing in an all-male meeting. Anything from a particular language being used, to a dominant vocabulary, to the shape of the room, can create structural unknowns.

So frictional unknowns are ideas that remain unemployed in a discussion due to inefficiency, while structural unknowns are ideas that remain unemployed because there are no employers for them.

Understanding this distinction is very useful for fixing ineffective meetings. In practice, the frictional/structural distinction matters a lot more than Rumsfeld’s known, known-unknown and unknown-unknown three-way distinction.  The latter is conceptually useful. The former is useful in live situations.

Frictional unknowns can be addressed by modifying processes, but structural unknowns can only be fixed by either bringing new people into the discussion or via creative breakthrough in a participant’s private thought process.

The Government Within

October 18, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

Are ordinary people really populations of interests rather than something more solid? It’s disturbing to think of yourself as so fluid, so potentially unstable, held together only by the shifting influence of available rewards. It’s like being told that atoms are mostly empty and wondering how they can bear weight. Yet the bargaining of interests in a society can produce highly stable institutions; perhaps that’s also true of the internal interests created by a person’s rewards…these patterns look like familiar properties of personality. – George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will, p 44

Productivity methods and self-help advice that promises to improve one’s effectiveness at achieving goals (Getting Things Done, Lifehackers, etc) are all the rage these days, but I have mixed feelings about them. On the one hand, who can argue with people trying to improve themselves and become more effective? But something about this form of discourse makes me suspicious, something doesn’t quite add up. How can one will oneself to be more willful? Becoming more dedicated to your goals sounds good, but that is true only if those goals are the right ones to have; where did they come from, how did they get chosen out of all the available goods in the world? And how do you know when it is time to let go of your goals and revise or replace them? People occasionally have to pivot just like startups do; and a narrowly-focused dedication to one goal can mean missing out on better ones. In short, the management of goals and the willpower that they direct is a fundamental mystery of human action, and the productivity experts seem to blithely ignore all the theoretically interesting aspects of it.

This literature reads as if Freud never existed. If there is one valuable insight to be gleaned from his problematic legacy, it is that our conscious intentions are at best the tip of a very large hidden iceberg of unconscious motivations. Our true purposes are obscure; the mind is a disorderly riot of conflicting drives, we are constantly tripped up by desires we are not even aware we have.

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The Mother of All Disruptions

October 11, 2013 By

I like thinking about technological disruptions that take place over really long periods of time. This is because the older a technology being disrupted, the more profound the social impact. In my disruption of bronze post, I speculated about one that probably took a few thousand years (iron disrupting bronze) and made spaghetti of the prevailing world order.

I just thought of a potential example that spans 10,000+ years: as a technology, computing disrupts natural language in the thinking and communications market.  That would make computing the mother of all disruptions in terms of time scales involved.  Well, maybe electricity disrupting fire in the heat and light markets is a contender too. Here is the disruption, speculatively mapped out in the form of the familiar intersecting-S-curves visualization used in disruption analysis.

 

computingDisruptsLanguage

Here’s my reasoning. I am convinced it hangs together.

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Truth in Consulting

October 2, 2013 By

The game of consulting frequently dumps me in situations where I am reminded of this joke from the Cold War era. A worker at a Soviet baby carriage factory, soon to be a father, decided to steal parts from work and assemble a baby carriage at home. But no matter how he tried assembling the parts, he always ended up with an AK 47.

Every functioning business has some level of disconnect between declared and actual mission. In a large organization, many might even sincerely believe that they are manufacturing baby carriages when they are in fact manufacturing guns. This is necessary for the business to work, just as suspending disbelief is necessary to enjoy movies. When the dissonance is managed right, every participant can get fully invested in work. There is no hedging. No creative energy held in reserve. No cynical second-guessing or unproductive skepticism. No mercenary effort-reward calculations. There is an all-around willingness to backstop any mission-critical activity to the individual limit and beyond. It is the state of full engagement sometimes referred to as head in the game.

Consulting in its simplest philosophical form is about doing the exact opposite of getting your head in the game: you must get the game in your head. This does not mean what you might think it means.

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Rough Books for Roughening School

September 25, 2013 By

After months of procrastination, I’ve finally managed to put together the promised ebooks of the Gervais Principle series ($3.99 on Kindle in the US) and the archives of the Be Slightly Evil email list ($2.99 on Kindle in the US), which I’ve officially retired as of last week.

I will also be conducting the Gervais Principle online workshop for the first time in the coming months. You have two opportunities to attend, on Tuesday Oct 22 or Tuesday Nov 5, between 7:00 – 8:30 US Pacific Time. It will be a small-group (limited to 8) workshop based on the Gervais Principle. Since I am test-driving the idea of this workshop, the price is basically beta-testing cheap: $95. If the thing is successful, I’ll figure out the actual sustainable price I’ll need to charge.

  1. The Gervais Principle ebook has a bonus essay on the movie Office Space, as well as an extended preface outlining a philosophy of organizational literacy, and a TV/movie watching guide for your continuing education.
  2. The Be Slightly Evil ebook has a bonus 5000-word essay called Inside the Tempo, which pulls together a broader philosophy of adversarial decision-making.
  3. The workshop will be a mix of presented and interactive material that I’ve been working on for quite a while now.

These ebooks (which are the first two in a series I am calling “Ribbonfarm Roughs”) and seminars are part of this idea I’ve been slowly developing for a sort of “roughening school” approach to business education, as opposed to the “finishing school” approach that most business training adopts. The general idea is that the transition from theory to practice requires adding an element of roughness and barbarian thinking to abstract ideas, rather than refinement and finishing touches. If these ebooks and trial seminars work out, I’ll develop and offer more such material.

So check out the ebooks and sign up for the workshop. If you’d like to help promote them, here are some tweetables and shareables for you to use. I hope you will add some enthusiastic and flattering superlatives.

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Freedom in Smooth Space

September 18, 2013 By

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory.”

-Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Up in the Air, the 2009 George Clooney movie, remains pop culture’s best effort to portray the placeless, jet-setting professional class that 21st century conditions have enabled and incubated. For commentators on the film and the phenomenon, “nomadic” seems an irresistible descriptor: Like the tribes that pitch camp after impermanent camp across deserts and steppes, the contemporary nomads are defined by their constant motion, lack of permanent settlements, and the lightness of their material possessions. Technology—particularly high-speed transportation and the internet—makes such contemporary rootlessness possible as it tethers its subjects to a world-encompassing network that lessens the gravity of leaving and arriving at specific locations. Like the desert tribes, the new nomads are shielded from the emotional drain of perpetual goodbyes and hellos. Their culture allows them to keep most of what they deem important within reach, at least superficially, as they move around.

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