Inventing Elephants

Semi-legible loopy long-handed photocopied writing made me blink in surprise the first time my husband brought extra paperwork home from daycare.  This isn’t a home daycare either, but an independant center with probably 30 kids full-time plus an after-school program.

Only when I tried to interpret it did I realize how awful the writing really was.  Some important words were left out of sentences and had to be inferred.  Multiple words were spelled wrong.  The grammar was confusing and the ideas were mixed up instead of organized into groups.

I actually had to go talk to the owner to make sure I understod what she wrote.  She knew exactly what was needed, for vaccination documentation to the state in this case, and it took only a couple go rounds verbally before I understood as well.  She proudly displays her certifications and the continual education information for her staff and has successfully run this business for at least a decade.

How well she writes doesn’t matter.

This blew me away.

I live in a world where writing matters, whether it is conversations on the internet, documentation and collaboration at work, or in my personal realm of interests as a reader and a blogger.

But she gets everything done and communicated without the level of skill I would have thought necessary.  Most likely her business and image could benefit by improving her skills or using someone else’s, but how much of a difference would it really make?

It’s a disconnect for me that spawned a whole host of questions.

For how many people in the US who consider themselves successful does writing really not matter?  How far is my view skewed by personal prejudices, past education, and constant exposure to the internet, where ”content is king?”  Do I undervalue my ability to communicate clearly since I am ever conscious of how I could improve? 

Another letter came home last week, this one about making sure all the children are present by 9am for roll call in case of fire.  It was just as convulated and drove me just as nuts, but the message came across.  Eventually the frustration may be a factor in my finding another daycare, but in the meantime my daughter is receiving great care, and that’s the real point.

Next time I will confirm easily checked-on qualitative impressions.

If I have a discussion with someone about a qualitative term, such as “stringy”, and the item we’re discussing is only two rooms away, then I will have them come look at it with me, to make certain that we are both seeing the same thing, instead of agreeing that it sounds like we’ve been seeing the same thing based on the words we’re using. Maybe then I won’t have to redo a couple days worth of batches because one of the raw materials was going bad.

Next time I will write down the desired end condition.

If I put in two different sets of aging samples and they are marked exactly the same and I ask someone to remove one set, I will not assume this makes sense. Instead I will mark clearly when I expect each sample to come out of the oven.  After all, my memory fails too.

Next time I will ask why something blah-sounding excited someone.

I may not understand the context. My parents mentioned that they’d been to a butterfly exhibit that was cool. My husband chose not to go and see the pinned insects and kicked himself when he found out he could have been photographing live butterflies in a special room. If I’d expressed a little more interest in why the event was exciting the information would have come out naturally.

This is the first in what I expect to be an ongoing series of posts about those little things that happen that you wish you’d thought about differently at the time.

“I can’t draw, but…” echoed in my head and I realized I needed to experiment with incorporating visual thinking into my life and blog outside of the “art box” that I unconsciously had it in.

It began when Rob commented a few weeks back with a suggestion that my blog could use a few photos for a bit of flavor.  I liked the idea, but didn’t want to spend time looking through photo archives for appropriate images.  I thought - I am an artist, so maybe I could generate my own images.  My usual medium is too slow and I can’t draw representationally very well, but I could try to cartoon.

As I was mulling that idea over another part of my brain realized I’d heard part of that phrase recently.  “I can’t draw, but…” is at the center of Dan Roam’s visual problem-solving philosophy in The Back of the Napkin and I’d been playing around on his web site before I decided to go ahead and buy the book.

And it clicked.

To meet my goals, I need to expand my thinking ability by adding visual tools and methods.  I’m so close to the idea already.  Although I do most of my thinking verbally, I do it by writing out in long-hand, adding in the visual and the tactile.  This should be a small step for me.

So - drawings.

Today’s is actually a slice of a sketchbook page from my art blog done as part of an exercise from a book called Keys to Drawing with Imagination by Bert Dodson.  The exercise involves applying deliberate variations to improvisational forms.  Sounds like problem-solving to me.

I read the case.  I came up with a possible solution, essentially the obvious one that the writing and discussion within the case had been leading to.  And then I read the experts’ opinions - and found a much better version of the obvious solution, a couple very interesting twists, and an equally important opposing viewpoint.

The temptation to spend $149/year for a magazine subscription and access to online archives of past issues just increased dramatically.

In March and April the Harvard Business Review made the entire content of their current issue available for free online.  Previously, only a select few articles were available each month, and not the cases, so I didn’t know how useful they were in this format

We’ve only done a little bit of case work in my MBA program, at least through the first five classes.  The action of working through the case in groups is supposed to be at the heart of the experience, and it definitely was an effective learning tool. 

But as a team, we didn’t come up with the wide variety of answers that are shown in the Harvard Business Review.  And the “best responses” that the teacher shared with the entire class tended to all take very similar approaches to the problem, ones which matched what we had already come up with.  That may change as we move forward into the second year.

I hope so.

Examining the potential solutions offered by executives and leaders in the areas discussed in the case was very illuminating, showing me points that I missed, and how reasonable the different options could all sound.  Some solutions required industry knowledge I didn’t have, but I could have asked questions that pointed in those directions, if I had thought of them.  Having the answers helped me understand new ways to approach the question.

I just met these words, even though I’ve been keeping company with the concept my entire career.

The Words

Systemic, or systems, thinking focuses on the connected nature of any problem, concept, or situation.

Interconnecting elements are the reason I chose to go into materials science.  My undergraduate education at Virginia Tech emphasized how a material’s measurable properties, its internal structure, and the process by which it was made were all dependant on each other.

Realizing that a corporation is composed of interconnecting elements on a larger scale is what drew me to become interested in business, an outcome I didn’t expect a decade ago. 

If I look back at the goals I set myself, which were the trigger point for this blog, then I see that they could be combined into a simple statement of “think more systemically.”

The Meeting 

I started following Steve Roessler’s blog All Things Workplace a couple months ago and he’s currently in the middle of a series about systemic thinking.  It didn’t register at first, not until I wanted to comment on one of his posts.  When I went back over the recent material, to make sure I was answering intelligently, the term clicked in my head.  A quick google search revealed how much material was out there.

I’m a firm believer that the way we are able to describe things, whether verbally, visually, or otherwise, changes the way we perceive them.  I’m looking forward to seeing where this discovery of a new term - and the paths that it opens up for me - leads.

This surprised me, yet now that I go to discuss it, it seems so obvious.

When I first followed a link to www.e-strategies.co.uk from the Squarespace developer boards I blinked in surprise at the first page.

We build beautiful, modern websites that you can edit yourself and which have advanced features that enable you to market your business without having to rely on anyone else.

Or - we set up and design a Squarespace website for you. 

Throughout the site there was similar language.  Two examples are “We have partnered with Paypal”  and changes for updating the website “are instantaneous and completely free of charge.”  The first is something anyone can do and the second is a standard part of the Squarespace package.  In many places they restated Squarespace’s benefits as ones that E-Strategies provided.

And they do.

They just use Squarespace as the tool to get there.

And the average customer isn’t interested in that.  They just want to see what the benefits are to THEM. 

The writing on the website does a fantastic job of presenting the benefits to the potential customer, blending together those provided by the tool and the extra value added by the designer, which includes being a coach to teach the customers to maintain the website on their own.  The company even offers classes on various aspects of web usage.

It seems such an obvious approach now that I see it.  Yet my first reaction was something along the lines of “that’s sneaky” and “why?!”.  As I looked more closely the value of the services and how reasonable it is to make the path to the final tools transparent made a lot more sense.  The approach didn’t seem sneaky at all, but instead helpful to both the customer and the company.

It made me wonder which other services are presented this way, so that the store front I interact with isn’t necessarily the direct provider of some of the benefits, but instead uses them and adds to them to reach me. 

Freon was a wonder chemical before it was found to be a bane of the ozone layer.  Automobile drivers are more reckless around bicyclists wearing helmets.  Renewable biofuels may actually be less environmentally friendly than fossil fuels due to hidden costs.  These are three well chosen examples in the article by Ivan Amato published in the March 24, 2008 Newscripts of Chemical and Engineering News.

The idea is very familiar as the law of unintended consequences.  Some of the more interesting examples that turned up at the top of a basic search for the term include:

• An entry in the Encyclopedia of Economics
• Thoughts on the government regulating obesity
• An opinion piece on Megan’s Law
• A note on game graphics and password security

But Ivan’s wording is striking.  The thought process of looking at a solution and asking “How could this become a problem?” triggers a different chain of thought, at least for me, than looking at an action and saying “What might be the consequences?”  The solution/problem wording of the question seems to be a more useful tool for strategizing and planning ahead.

Although that could be just negative and short-term thinking on my part.  After all, not all unintended consequences are bad.  Some are innovative, as Cory Doctorow points out, and those are the ones that will probably make the greatest difference in the long run.

When the shape and size of the box changes, the mind starts coming up with new ideas on how to change what goes in the box.

I was reminded of this while checking out the new developer forums for Squarespace, the service I use to host and design my art website.  Between a note in one conversation about certain changes that were already coded into upcoming version 5 of the site building software and a link to an “examples” page that had changed since the last time I saw it, my options for presenting my content expanded considerably.

Ever since I got over the first blush of excitement at having a website I had been bumping into constraints in the site building software.  No matter how much I could do, and did, there was always something I thought to try and it didn’t work.  I accepted this because I only wanted to spend so much time learning web development skills, either to build my own from something closer to scratch or to more fully customize Squarespace’s platform.

So I wasn’t surprised that looking at others work and learning of upcoming options gave me new ideas on how to present my art and information about it.

I was surprised that it helped me to define what content I wanted to have.

It was as if I’d mentally gone from a document sleeve with a couple pockets to a briefcase with sections and pen holders and such.  I kept trying to stuff more into the document sleeve, but couldn’t figure out how to use what I have because I couldn’t easily reach all of it.  When I started looking at the briefcase I realized how this could go there and that could go here, but I also was able to say that this calculator I’ll use all the time, now that I can find it, and this cheat sheet, which was more accessible before, doesn’t even need to be here, because other tools serve the same purpose better. 

Now I have some project ideas to file away for later and some adjustments to start playing with…

Sometimes moments of comprehension pass by unnoticed.

I had never seen a demand curve before I began taking Managerial Economics for my MBA.  I realized at the end of the first week that I was a bit confused, but thought it wasn’t a big deal until I received a disappointing grade on the Week 1 quiz.  Yet I’m now at the very beginning of the Week 4 and almost have trouble remembering why I was having difficulty.

I used only very basic study skills to make the change, such as redrawing graphs and jotting down key points from the module instead of just reading the information as presented.  There were no aha! moments or times that everything clicked into place, just me looking back and realizing that now I understood.

The topics being covered looked just enough like information I already knew that it threw me off.  I only had to take a slight mental step sideways for it to make sense.  Yet at the time it seemed a much bigger problem.

And those are my two take away points.

- Just because a situation seems familiar doesn’t mean it is.  If it matters, then it may need the same level of attention of something difficult.

- Two people with different backgrounds looking at the exact same thing don’t necessarily SEE the exact same thing.

Yes, I knew these, but my classwork was not a situation I expected to find them illustrated in!

For those of you so inclined, a little more detail….

One example is that I’m used to looking at graphs in which the x-axis is the independant variable, the one which you can control such as percentage or time or distance.  The y-axis is the dependant variable, the one that changes as a result of the value you control, such as strength or viscosity.

Not in economics.  Quantity is on the x-axis and price is on the y-axis.  And they are dependant on each other.  If you change one you change the other.  You move along the line.

Technically speaking, this is true in a graph of strength versus percentage of a filler.  You can pick a strength and say you need this much filler to reach that strength.  And I feel like I should have been able to relate that instantly.  But I didn’t.  Instead I kept trying to use my typical view where y is dependant on x.

Then there was the issue of vocabulary and how that graph was described.  If I say that price varies with quantity, or the other way around, it’s an abstract concept.  But if I say to myself that if there’s a lot of something available I’m willing to pay less for it than if there’s just one left, then I can start comprehending what the demand curve on that graph means. 

The story I was using to describe the data changed how I was able to relate to it, even though it shouldn’t have mattered because the formulas themselves didn’t change.  And this was another common concept - perception is reality - that I just wasn’t expecting to find illustrated in class.

Although now I have to wonder why not…  Why wasn’t I expecting these complexities to apply to course material just like they apply to other real-world situations?

Developing a habit of reading critically seems to be an important component of improving the way I think, but I’ve run into some snags.

When I first decided to try questioning the words on the paper I though I’d start after I completed reading a small stack of relevant magazines.  But when I went back to the first one to begin asking questions I came up with a complete blank.  It was as if the elapsed time let the original information sink into my brain as accepted truth and it was much harder to react to it.

Then I tried to read with a notepad next to me for jottings down.  That was marginally more successful, but I kept getting caught up in what I was reading.  I’ve always been able to get lost in books, and not just fiction ones, either.  It’s difficult to slow down enough to really think about it.

I’m finding more success by reading at my normal pace with a pad of small post-it notes next to me.  When a thought comes to mind I jot it down and stick it in the book or magazine.  Then, when I go back a second time, it serves as a reminder of the questioning state I was in the first time through and I’m able to elaborate more easily.

Now there’s another problem.  I have a backlog of magazines that are directly work related coming across my desk.  I have a list of books I want to get from the library.  I find myself ignoring the post-it notes and just reading, because thinking about what I’m reading is more difficult and more time-consuming.

I’m considering deliberately slowing down for only certain materials, picking just the best to read with critical intent.  The entire process of deciding what I want out of myself and my reading material is evolving.